In yesterday's Evening Blues (Evening Blues 5/19/16), Joe Shickspak brought up and inked to an article from the intercept (Koch Institute Article) that discusses a possible alteration in the foreign policy stance of our friends the neocons. The Charles Koch Institute held an all day event called "Advancing American Security: The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy". The speakers generally trashed the whole neocon schtick, wars in general and Iraq in particular, regime change and the like, and instead supported spending that money at home on infrastructure and such. Whoa! The lone hawk even supported restraint, like being very selective about when to use military force, and using economic sanctions instead. Now remember, we're talking about the Koch brothers, major supporters of the GOP and its neocon weltanschauung.
One speaker, Stephen Walt, the Foreign Policy columnist, opined that the in-process primary campaigns show that those opposing military adventurism are starting to have an impact. The article quotes him as saying:
On the campaign trail, both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have gotten receptive audiences when they questioned certain aspects of foreign policy. Really, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate defending the status quo, ... I think those public doubts are not surprising because ... our current policy has been a costly failure.
William Ruger, vice president for research and policy at the institute told the intercept:
"I certainly think we're uneasy with the status quo. It doesn't seem like the status quo is making us safer, especially given the cost of this to our soldiers, especially given the high expense in terms of our fiscal situation. Also in terms of some of the ways it affects our civil liberties as well as our standing in the world. We want to make sure that we're not missing opportunities for ideas to be added to this conversation."
Who knows what, if anything, this portends, but it might lead to the GOP and the right wing of the Democratic party eventually being willing to start reining in the military, insisting that they alone declare wars, and trimming our obscene military budgets in favor of some job creating infrastructure projects. The entire article is worth a read, and isn't overly long.