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Posts Tagged ‘AEI’

The Terrible Truth about U.S. Foreign Policy

Posted by M. C. on May 2, 2023

Does China police the world?

The Terrible Truth about U.S. Foreign Policy

by Laurence M. Vance

Many conservatives just don’t get it when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.U.S. foreign policy is arrogant, aggressive, reckless, immoral, belligerent, interventionist, and meddling.
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After Lu Shaye, China’s outspoken ambassador to France, stated during a televised interview last month that the former Soviet republics “have no effective status in international law because there is no international agreement to recognize their status as sovereign countries,” American Enterprise Institute (AEI) “senior fellow” Dalibor Rohac used the occasion to rail against China’s foreign policy.

At the AEI— a right-leaning, inside-the-Beltway think tank — Rohac “studies European political and economic trends, specifically Central and Eastern Europe, the European Union (EU) and the eurozone, US-EU relations, and the post-Communist transitions and backsliding of countries in the former Soviet bloc.” He is also “a research associate at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in Brussels and a fellow at Anglo-American University in Prague.”

In a recent article in the Spectator magazine, “A Chinese Diplomat Has Let Slip the Truth about Beijing’s Foreign Policy,” Rohac characterized the Chinese ambassador’s remarks as “a telling admission of Beijing’s real thinking about international relations, which is far cruder and Hobbesian than most Europeans are willing to admit.”

We should take Lu Shaye at his word, Rohac writes, because he is “a veteran of both Chinese communist politics and foreign service” who “epitomises China’s aggressive approach to diplomacy, exemplified by his warning, in the context of a visit by former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s to Taiwan, that the Taiwanese would have to be ‘re-educated,’ bringing back eerie echoes of Maoist and Stalinist terror.”

The Chinese embassy in Paris issued a statement in response to another of Lu Shaye’s gaffes that Rohac should have paid attention to: “China respects the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all nations and supports the objectives and principles of the UN Charter. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, China was one of the first countries to establish diplomatic relations with the countries concerned.”

I am not making an apology for the Chinese government. There is no question that China is ruled by a lying, oppressive, totalitarian, authoritarian regime that forbids its citizens from enjoying political and religious liberty and seeks to control every facet of their lives. But what is the truth about Beijing’s foreign policy that Rohac takes issue with?

Does China have tens of thousands of troops stationed in over a hundred countries?

Does China go abroad seeking monsters to destroy?

Does China have hundreds of military bases on foreign soil?

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Big mouths for weapons spending are mum on industry backers – Responsible Statecraft

Posted by M. C. on April 4, 2023

Even with appropriations and requests needlessly sky high, think tank experts underwritten by defense firms are calling for more.

AEI does not publicly provide a list of its funders and did not respond to multiple requests for comment about its funding. But the moderator of a public AEI event last year noted that “both Lockheed and Northrop provide philanthropic support to AEI. We are grateful for that support.”

The American Enterprising Institute

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/03/29/think-tanks-pushing-for-bigger-dod-budget-dont-disclose-industry-funding/

Written by
Ben Freeman and Yameen Huq

Earlier this month, President Biden requested the largest defense budget in U.S. history. Even adjusting for inflation, this $842 billion budget — which will likely increase with congressional add-ons and additional spending for the war in Ukraine — could ultimately give the Pentagon more taxpayer money than when the U.S. had more than 100,000 troops on the ground at the height of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts. 

But you’d have no idea that was the case if you read Pentagon contractor funded think tanks’ commentary about the budget, which have been clamoring for even more Pentagon spending, often without disclosing that the beneficiaries of it fund their organizations. 

“For defense, this is a pretty substantial step backwards,” a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) told The Hill. This amounts to a “$28 billion cut to programs and activities” after you account for a troop pay raise and inflation, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) expert told Defense News, which added that the AEI expert was pushing for a DOD budget of at least $882 billion. That $882 billion figure is, perhaps coincidentally, the exact amount of Pentagon funding another AEI scholar promoted in a recent op-ed for Breaking Defense.

Unsurprisingly, think tank arguments for increasing Pentagon funding have also found their way into mainstream media outlets. The day before the Biden administration released its fiscal year 2024 budget, the Washington Post published an article bemoaning the defense industry’s limited capacity to “build things to kill people,” as the head of a munitions facility told the Post. The piece cited CSIS research on the defense industry’s struggles to replace stockpiles of the tens of billions of dollars in munitions the U.S. has given Ukraine.

Earlier that same week, the Wall Street Journal ran an article proclaiming “The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready for the Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict.” As evidence, the author cited a CSIS wargame that simulated a Chinese attack on Taiwan in which “the U.S. side ran out of long-range anti-ship cruise missiles in a week.” That same CSIS study was cited in a New York Times article published last week titled “From Rockets to Ball Bearings, Pentagon Struggles To Feed War Machine.”

What goes unmentioned in any of these articles is that these think tanks clamoring for more defense funding are funded by the defense industry.

CSIS is commendably transparent about its funding and provides a publicly available list of donors on its website. And, that list is filled with defense contractors. In total, 20 different defense contractors provided the organization with a total of at least $2.2 million last year. The top defense sector donor to CSIS was Northrop Grumman, which gave the organization more than $500,000. The firm builds many of the military’s weapons, most notably munitions, the organization’s scholars have been pushing.

A spokesperson for CSIS explained that, “CSIS is an independent non-profit with a diverse funding base and the conclusions of our scholars are theirs alone,” and, “CSIS discloses our donors on our website. We also disclose funders of our research reports in the reports themselves. We do this because we believe our audience should know who supports our work.” Yet, this only applies to research reports with dedicated external funding, the spokesperson explained, not work done through general support funding like the CSIS report on the need for investing in U.S. munitions that has been widely cited in media outlets with no disclosure in the report that the munitions in question are made by the organization’s funders. 

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What Jeb Should Have Said – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 25, 2020

Education in a Free Society is a collection of essays written over the past ten years for the Future of Freedom Foundation and LewRockwell.com. Throughout these essays, there are ten things relating to education that resonate:

School Choice for Whom? is a collection of essays written over the past 15 years for the Future of Freedom Foundation and LewRockwell.com. Throughout these essays, there are seven things relating to educational vouchers and school choice that resonate:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/laurence-m-vance/what-jeb-bush-should-have-said/

By

Former Florida governor and failed Republican presidential candidate, Jeb Bush, was recently interviewed for Education Week by Frederick “Rick” Hess, a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Here is how Hess introduced Bush:

Gov. Jeb Bush has been a leader on efforts to improve schooling for more than two decades. He has mentored a generation of governors, carried the banner for reforms including school choice and accountaility, and launched ExcelinEd, a hugely influential voice in the world of K-12 schooling. During his tenure in office and in the many years since, Gov. Bush has wrestled with the practical challenges of how elected leaders can help make schools work for kids. I reached out to see how he is thinking about coronavirus and education.

I have read the interview so you don’t have to.

I want to focus on the fourth question that Hess asked Bush and Bush’s response:

Rick: As a former governor, what else do you think Washington and the Department of Education should be doing right now?

Bush: We are a bottom-up country, and that’s one of our greatest and most enduring strengths. We’re 50 unique and individual states, growing and thriving in different ways. The states are “incubators of democracy,” because that’s where great ideas are developed and tried—and where citizens have a strong voice in shaping their future.

To be candid, Washington’s role is to support innovation. Let the states and communities lead and determine what is best for their families. Governors and state legislatures can, and often do, act quickly to solve problems. I encourage them to jump in with bold ideas that can get their education systems moving forward, even better than before.

Wrong, Jeb, so wrong. Washington’s role is not to support innovation. Washington’s role is to do absolutely nothing. No Pell Grants, no student loans, no school breakfast and lunch programs, no Head Start funding, no educational vouchers, no research grants to colleges, no Higher Education Act, no Elementary and Secondary Education Act, no bilingual-education mandates, no math and science initiatives, no Title IX mandates, no school accreditation, no anti-discrimination policies, no standardized-testing requirements, no Common Core standards, no Race to the Top funds, no No No Child Left Behind Act, no desegregation orders, no special-education mandates, no oversight, no Department of Education, and not one dime of the taxpayers’ money spent on education.

Every state has provisions in its constitution for the operation of K-12 schools, colleges, and universities. The federal government has been given no such authority by its Constitution. If there are to be any public schools; that is, government schools, they should be limited to state-government schools, fully supported and supervised by state governments.

Jeb Bush should have recommended my two new books on education.

Education in a Free Society is a collection of essays written over the past ten years for the Future of Freedom Foundation and LewRockwell.com. Throughout these essays, there are ten things relating to education that resonate:

  1. The problem with public schools is that they are government schools.
  2. Public education is socialistic.
  3. Charter schools are still public schools.
  4. Education is a service just like car repair and hair styling.
  5. All schools should be privately operated and privately funded.
  6. It is the responsibility of parents to education their children.
  7. The Constitution nowhere authorizes the federal government to have anything to do with education or even mentions education.
  8. It is an illegitimate purpose of government to educate anyone or pay for anyone’s education.
  9. Republicans are just as responsible as Democrats for the mess that is public education.
  10. No government at any level should have any control whatsoever over any school or the education of any child.

School Choice for Whom? is a collection of essays written over the past 15 years for the Future of Freedom Foundation and LewRockwell.com. Throughout these essays, there are seven things relating to educational vouchers and school choice that resonate:

  1. If it is not the business of government to fund public schools, then it is certainly not the business of government to fund private schools.
  2. Education is a service just like car repair or hair styling.
  3. Giving some Americans the choice of where to spend other American’s money to educate their children is wealth redistribution.
  4. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
  5. Vouchers are not an intermediate step toward a free market in education.
  6. Conservatives and libertarians who oppose government housing vouchers (Section 8) and food vouchers (food stamps) are terribly inconsistent when they support government education vouchers.
  7. In a free society, all education vouchers for “school choice” would be privately funded.

Republicans used to talk about abolishing the federal Department of Education. Now they just want to reform it. Jeb Bush is clueless.

Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom; War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism; War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy; King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, and many other books. His newest books are Free Trade or Protectionism? and The Free Society.

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