The Heritage Foundation is getting carjacked by Beltway neocons after its political arm, Heritage Action, actually embraced fiscal conservatism and opposed the latest round of endless multi-billion dollar giveaways to Europe’s most corrupt country, Ukraine. With crocodile tears, the Washington Post’s neocon scribbler Josh Rogin is bemoaning how the “once-conservative” (read: neocon) Heritage Foundation is “abandoning the principles” of Ronald Reagan and instead embracing the isolationist nationalism of the MAGA crowd.
Quoting several neocon former Heritage “analysts” who took their toys and went home when Heritage began to veer off the neocon reservation, Rogin notes that:
The Heritage Foundation has been an influential brain trust for GOP administrations since the Reagan years — and still claims to stand for Ronald Reagan’s doctrine of ‘peace through strength.’ But beginning in the Trump era, and even more so now under its new president, Kevin Roberts, Heritage is moving away from that tradition, according to several foreign policy staffers who recently left the foundation.
Rogin quotes a former spook and Heritage analyst with the ridiculous name of “Klon Kitchen,” who said of Heritage’s newfound embrace of actual conservative principles, “This pivot on foreign policy is ignorant, reckless, and it is clearly elevating partisan opportunism over literally decades of principle.”
Yes, as we learned from the first Trump impeachment, any dissent from the blob’s embrace of endless war is not approved by the “inter-agency consensus.”
Mr. Kitchen went on to land a gig at the neocon warmongering American Enterprise Institute after walking away from Heritage, so we needn’t feel sorry for him. As long as Raytheon’s checks are still clearing, Kitchen will keep on cooking at AEI.
The target of Rogin’s attack is new Heritage president, former Texas Public Policy Foundation director and self-described “recovering neocon” Kevin Roberts, who committed the ultimate sin of praising Sen. Rand Paul for his “leadership” in opposing the seemingly-limitless Ukraine aid gravy train.
Roberts is to be commended for his realization that the Cold War is actually over and that were Reagan still with us it is unlikely he would be espousing the same foreign policies as he did in the 1980s when there was this thing called the “Soviet Union.” The world is changing and thanks to Roberts, Heritage is realizing it.
Rogin is no dummy, and in the semi-hit piece on Heritage he accurately captures what the shift is all about:
In the battle for the soul of GOP foreign policy between establishment Republicans and Trump-style national conservatives, the former still hold the levers of official power but the latter are gaining ground. The Heritage Foundation’s turn toward the ‘new right’ is the clearest symbol yet that the MAGA movement’s foreign policy is becoming institutionalized but moving further away from the Republican leadership.
If the Republican Party is to have any future it will continue to move into the camp of the antiwar conservatives and the example set by former Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul (and other trailblazers like Pat Buchanan). The new Republican candidates who embrace this pro-America foreign policy, and there are several of them poised to win in November, will be vilified as merely “MAGA” zombie-bots, but in fact the tired old neocon ideology that has dominated the Republican party is played out. It has no more energy. It is in a wheelchair on life-support.
Washington already has a pro-war, pro-police state, pro-tyranny party and it is called the Democratic Party. Can Republicans read the writing on the wall? Hopefully Roberts at Heritage will stand his ground and lead the way!
Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
Please donate to the Ron Paul Institute
