All right, so welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guests on the show today are Steve Horn and Alan Ruff.
Steve Horn is a writer for Truthout.
Alan Ruff is a historian and journalist, and they've got this thing they put together, part one of two, how private warmongers in the U.S. military infiltrated American universities.
Welcome to the show, both of you.
Well, it's good to be on.
Thank you.
Thanks, Scott.
Happy to have you here.
All right.
So this article is so jam-packed full of information.
I think probably, perhaps, I don't know, stab in the dark, one good way to start it might be to run through your cast of characters here.
A big part of this article is who's who and who's buying influence where.
So I guess whichever one of you wants to take that up, first of all, just give us a brief sketch of who some of the people are featured in this piece.
Well, first of all, you know, we have to understand that this, we, we uncovered beginning here, looking at a local story that we thought was interesting at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, we suddenly realized that there was a national network involved, programs network together, tied together through personal ties, institutional ties, and so on.
A network extending across the country from starting out at Yale University, going to Columbia, Duke, Texas at Austin, Temple, and now the, actually the, the defunct program at Wisconsin, all tied together by a number of academics and neoconservative sponsors.
It's not just neoconservatives that are in the programs, of course, but a number of numbers of what we were defining as liberal hawks.
The grand strategy programs is what they're called, began at Yale University under the auspices of the dean of the right-wing or conservative Cold War historians, John Gattis.
Gattis and his associates at Yale University, Paul Kennedy, who some of your listeners may be aware of as a well-known historian of globalism.
And a third character by the name of Charles Hill, Charles Charlie Hill, who's a diplomat in residence at Yale University.
He was, he's now in the academy.
He was a lifelong foreign service operative career diplomatic corps, who was basically retired, cashiered out of the diplomatic service for his involvement in the Reagan administration, Iran Contragate.
He was, at the time, secretary of defense, George Shultz's aide, his assistant, and withheld records, distorted and rewrote records at that time.
He was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Iran Contra affair.
Another figure at Yale that is very essential right now, the fourth party running this grand strategy program at Yale is John Negroponte.
Negroponte, again, some of your listeners with some longer history knowledge might remember, was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the wars against Nicaragua and El Salvador in the eighties, during the Reagan administration.
Well, in the Bush Jr.years, he was ambassador, quote unquote, ambassador to Iraq for a couple of years there, and then I think became the director of national intelligence, right?
Right.
Well, he was also, but he was also the U.S. ambassador to the UN, has worn many different hats.
So from there, there was a conference held in the fall of 2009 at Yale, 2008, 2008, excuse me, 2008, in which primarily young historians and political scientists, all of them coming of age in the post-September 11th decade, were brought together at Yale to meet this neocon, so-called philanthropist, backer of many, many conservative causes, a fellow by the name of Roger Hurtog.
Hurtog offered up to $10 million at the time, as documented in the Wall Street Journal, to launch these grand strategy programs at various institutions across the country, and that was the origin, really, of the program at Duke, the program at Yale, well, Yale was already underway, of course, but at Wisconsin, Temple, Columbia, and so on.
I'll add, many of the people at this thing at Yale were former students of Gaddis, PhD students who went on to careers of academics at these various institutions that were just mentioned, such as Matthew Connolly of Columbia, Jeremy Suri, formerly of Wisconsin, now at UT Austin, and the list goes on.
Many of them were his former students who are now heads of grand strategy programs around the country.
What's important to understand is that these guys are not functioning just as ivory tower intellectuals as academics.
Many of them have served in various capacities, as there's a fellow by the name of, at Duke, for instance, Peter Fever, who's been on the National Security Council and advisor, a bipartisan national strategic planner across administrations, Democrat and Republican alike.
So, in other words, if I can interrupt here for just a second, when you're talking about what you're basically talking about here is a movement inside, widespread across all these universities, beginning at Yale, but where the genesis of this is a bunch of rich people, the same ones behind the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
So these are the kooks within the foreign policy movement, traditionally, as it's been throughout the years.
John Judas wrote a piece about the neoconservatives back in 1995 called From Trotskyism to Anachronism.
These guys are the crazies in the basement.
And yet these guys are the head of an organization, a network, as you called it, which is basically deciding what's the center, what's the norm for the new generation of foreign policy wonks in New York and D.C.
Yeah, I want to be very careful here not to find them as kooks or aberrational.
That is, they're really part of a much broader network.
As I said early on, it's not just neoconservatives and far right wing ideologues, but a number of liberal hawk ideologists and folks who share a consensus about the maintenance of U.S. dominance globally, not just militarily, but as an empire across the planet.
It's shared by, again, corporate liberals and neoconservatives across the board.
And that's been true of U.S. foreign policy for a very long time.
Keep in mind that there's nothing new about...
Well, would you argue that that the neocons have the effect of moving the whole discussion to the right or not?
Well, it's really the same old Kissinger style real politic here.
Yeah, I would say it's the that's real interesting.
I'm glad you brought up Kissinger.
Kissinger is actually his program at Harvard in the, I forgot what it's called, but he had a program when he was an academic back at Harvard in the fifties during the Cold War.
If you read, Gaddis has a paper called What is Grand Strategy?
And it's a talk that he ended up giving at this conference at the Triangle Institute for Strategic Studies, TIS, which is a consortium of North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as well as Duke, those three universities have a consortium.
Another one of these programs that fits within the grand strategy program network, he gave a talk where he said that if you look at the trajectory of where, what is grand strategy, it actually came from Kissinger's program at Harvard, which was inspired the Army War College, where Gaddis, who we mentioned earlier, taught before he came to Yale, although he was also at Ohio University too, before he came to Yale.
Yeah.
They borrowed the curriculum directly from a thing that had been created actually at the Navy War College in Newport, Rhode Island when Gaddis was there as junior faculty and he incorporated, it was called the Thucydides Curriculum.
That is this curriculum on military strategic planning.
Now it's become something much broader because they're not just talking about military strategy, but again, a strategy for U.S. globalism.
All right.
Well, you're going to have to hold it there and go out to this break.
Everybody, it's Steve Horn and Alan Ruff.
They've got this great piece at truthout.org, how private warmongers in the U.S. military infiltrated American universities.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, full archives are at antiwar.com/radio.
Of course, talking with Steve Horn and Alan Ruff, they've got this piece.
It's part one of two so far at truthout.org, how private warmongers and the U.S. military infiltrated American universities.
And I really did oversimplify and overstate there about the neocons because even though they're only part of this particular movement, they're not the crazies in the basement anymore.
And they really haven't been since 2000, 2001.
So, you know, they're the crazies out of the basement anyway.
And I guess basically what it sounds like, guys, is that what you're describing is the forging of a new foreign policy consensus by way of bringing these disparate groups together to train the next generation.
Right.
Right.
You know, that consensus has always been there.
That's been the foreign policy consensus.
There's been debates about the how and what, that is the tactical debate, but the consensus about the role of the U.S. in the world and the preeminence, the predominance, especially of the U.S. military has never been part of that debate.
What's really interesting right now is that these fellows that are on various campuses, and again, we looked at five campuses, but we know of another, easily another dozen campuses, 15 or so, where they have similar or parallel programs going on, various think tanks and institutes embedded at universities.
But what's very important now is that, you know, if your listeners think about it, you don't hear too much conversation about the so-called global war on terror, which mobilized people domestically, certainly for a decade.
And what you're hearing more and more about it, once your ear is tuned to it, is what they're calling the long war, the long war for the 21st century.
And that's where these academics and warrior intellectuals, semi-warriors, as Andrew Bacevich refers to them, that's where they come in.
There was recently, just this November now, November 7th, 8th, at a place called the National Defense University at Fort McNair, Virginia, just outside of DC.
There was a coming together of top military planners and these warrior intellectuals, academics, and they came together and the statement of purpose of this symposium called Forging an American Grand Strategy, Securing a Path Through a Complex Future, the statement of purpose of this thing said that this was not a symposium or get-together, a conclave to discuss warfare or preparation for war, but a discussion, I'm reading from the sheet right now, a discussion about the elements of and prospect for a grand strategy for America.
The statement went on to quote Ann Marie Slaughter, who's a biggie, who's a director of policy plan, formerly the director of policy planning at the Department of State, and Ann Marie Slaughter put it this way, and again, this is the thing that these academics and military planners are getting together on, she said, we need a story with a beginning, a middle, and projected happy ending that will transcend our political divisions, orient us as a nation, and give us both a common direction and the confidence and commitment to get out, to get to our destination, which means what?
They're talking about developing a storyline for public consumption, not internationally necessarily, but domestically, in order to mobilize people, public opinion, behind this coming crusade they see themselves in, this long war for the 21st century.
Yeah, I would add that in addition to that, this is the continuation of counterinsurgency, but it's what you see at home, it's the winning of hearts and minds at home, it's creating these new leaders of the long war in the long war university, and equally as important to hearts and minds abroad as hearts and minds at home in a counterinsurgency campaign.
Yeah, if you plumb some of the literature, they actually talk amongst themselves about how one of the big failures of Vietnam was that while they were busy attempting to win hearts and minds in Vietnam, that the battle for hearts and minds at home was lost, and that's where they're funneling a whole bunch of their energy now.
Well, sure, and in fact, they certainly have learned that lesson too, if you look at, you know, Donald Rumsfeld's corralling of all the generals to be the experts on all the TV shows and all that kind of thing, and just look all the way up until today, you know, but...
Let me jump in there with one quick point, and that is they actively talk amongst themselves, and there's a whole literature that exists now about the relationship of the military to civil society, to democratic society, and there's a debate going on amongst them, but you see it coming out in the fashion that you just alluded to, of more and more military officers speaking publicly sometimes in contradiction to the commander in chief.
Yeah, and I remember where I was going with that lost train of thought there, which was General Petraeus' repeated references both in context to Iraq and Afghanistan, that his mission is to add time to the Washington clock.
It's not that they're actually going to accomplish anything on the ground there, really, it's fighting a war against the American people to make them accept, for example, the slogan, the surge worked, which means we can stay a little longer.
Now, keep in mind that the key, there was a team called the Petraeus guys, that has been written about a team of, at the time, military officers, all of whom are now in various academies around the country.
There's a fellow named Peter Mansour at Ohio State.
There's a fellow by the name of John Noggle.
Noggle was said to be the key writer of the counterinsurgency manual that set the stage for the surge.
Noggle is part of this grand strategy network.
Noggle is part of CNAS.
Yeah, which, speaking of Henry Kissinger, the Wall Street Journal reported that CNAS, which is, I guess, the Democrats' PNAC, the Center for New American Security, was founded with Rockefeller money.
Right.
Which means the centrist, internationalist, realist, Democrat, Hillary Clinton types, as opposed to just the outright Richard Perls.
See, we find it very interesting that at one level, all these guys are, it's not just guys, it's just not men, by the way.
There's a number of very interesting women moving through this whole network.
But at one level, they talk about being realists.
But they're also, there's this blend of liberal and conservative realism and kind of a Wilsonian internationalism.
The rhetoric is loaded with we're bringing democracy, freedom, truth, the American way, American mission to the world.
But they're also hardball players.
Well, Max Boot called, basically defined neoconservatism as hard Wilsonianism, which means he looks at the world like Hillary Clinton.
He just wants to kill it even more than she does.
And another important aspect here, for instance, this fellow, Jeremy Suri, who left Wisconsin and is now in Texas, he's in a subset of these fellows we call empire deniers.
Jeremy Suri spends a lot of time saying that the United States never has been and isn't an empire, in sharp contrast to a guy like Max Boot, who says, yeah, we're an empire, let's get it on.
Right.
Well, and the entire debate shall take place between the two of them agreed on in on all the policies and in disagreement about whether they're going to be honest about what they're doing or not.
OK, right.
And, you know, it's funny because when you describe kind of that spectrum there, you can see how, you know, the realist so-called imperialists are supposedly the moderates in this argument.
And then you have the more evangelical warriors to the left and to the right of them, the Wilsonians and the neocons and the peace movement on the left and say, like the Ron Paulian right.
We're way out on the margins here.
And even though the the polls all have it that the American people would agree with us, we don't participate in this debate at all that you're talking about.
These roundtables, whether part of this network or not, wherever wise men are getting around to talk about foreign policy, there are no peaceniks invited anywhere.
Right.
That's again, that gets back to that consensus and the manufacturing of consent.
There's this consensus about the U.S. role in the world and some debate over how to implement that.
But in reality, that consensus, then they get together at the Council on Foreign Relations.
They get together in these various think tanks, whether it be the Hoover's Hoover Institute or the Council on Foreign Relations or the Brookings Institution, numbers of others that are less known.
And they have these discussions.
What again, getting back to a point I made earlier, what's most interesting now is that there's an increasing number of military and former military officers who are now academics who are involved in this discussion.
And that that raises a whole bottom line question of the role of military in a democratic society.
Yeah.
Hey, violence breeds violence.
You can only do this for so long without having a bunch of former generals who need jobs.
What are they going to do?
But teach and become cops and the rest are going to go.
It's Steve Horn and Alan Ruff.
Truthout.org for part one of two private warmongers infiltrating the U.S.
American universities.
