Heritage’s new natsec boss wants ‘everything’ to be about China
Well, not “everything,” as it must be added, Israel’s annihilation of the Palestinians, and US wars against Iran and Russia are also high on the list”List,” right underneath China, as can be seen in the attached file:
This is a “Radical-Right Rogues Gallery” if there ever was one, which, with their “Incitement of Aggressive War," might even be comparable to a list of some of the War Crime indictees, at Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal’s, if they should achieve their objective of “U.S. waging aggressive war (in my opinion).
Of course, you won’t read criticism of Trump’s “Common Plan,” by any of the Oligarch funded, right-leaning, “think tanks” or websites ostensibly opposed to US “Interventionism, and for a “Realism and Restraint Foreign Policy,” as the Heritage Foundation is 🤣
And The Washington Post discredited itself long ago, so that when they do report the truth, who will believe them (unless one has the capacity to put 2 and 2 together)? And they won’t even “name, names.”
Advisers have also discussed deploying the military to quell potential unrest on Inauguration Day. Critics have called the ideas under consideration dangerous and unconstitutional.
When VICTORIA COATES takes over the Heritage Foundation’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy on Tuesday, she will push her team to consider the China angle to, well, “everything.”
“My charge to the rest of Davis is that everything has to be filtered through the lens of what we’re dealing with, with the People’s Republic of China, and it’s going to be generational,” she told NatSec Daily in an interview.
For Coates, a former Trump administration official and adviser to Sen. TED CRUZ (R-Texas), nearly every issue has a China component. Whether it’s technology investments, military improvements or border enforcement, there’s a vulnerability she fears Beijing can and will exploit.
Coates is particularly interested in how to get the Department of Energy to play a more active role in the competition with China. “Given what’s in it –– the high technology, the national labs –– getting it onto a much more aggressive, forward-leaning posture, will require changes to its governing statute. That’s some very worthy work we can get done over the next year,” she said.
But the question that lingers over Coates’ upcoming tenure, and Heritage in general, is will she push her team into the RONALD REAGAN or DONALD TRUMP lane? The conservative think tank historically has leaned toward the Reagan-esque, “peace through strength” side on national security policy. But of late, especially under President KEVIN ROBERTS, Heritage is turning into a Trump administration-in-waiting.
Coates said the legacy of Reagan at the foundation remains “very, very strong,” but “a lot of conservatives looked at what they were seeing as a problem with Republican establishment foreign policy approaches, maybe best personified by JOHN McCAIN –– and that that was not necessarily where we wanted to go.”
The new director wants to forge a “third way,” as Roberts has termed it. “I’m not a dove. I’m not a hawk. I’m an owl,” Coates told us. “We are in no way isolationist. We believe in having a very strong America –– projecting power abroad –– that is maybe the best thing we can do for the world. We just, I think, are going to be very conservative about how we deploy it.”
(Coates has a personal challenge coin of an owl fitted with the Heritage Foundation’s logo of a bell that reads: “Wise. Deadly. Can See In The Dark.”)
A person Coates hired to help her in the new job is ROBERT GREENWAY, who was her deputy in the Trump NSC and current executive director of the Abraham Accords Peace Institute. (“Trump’s NSC comes to Heritage!” Coates joked.) As her senior adviser, Greenway will essentially be Coates’ No. 2 and focus on Pentagon, intelligence community and Middle East issues.
Coates aims to build a policy and intellectual framework for any Republican candidate who emerges victorious in next year’s presidential election. She noted how few expected Trump to win in 2016, and so “we were not prepared to properly support him.”
This time around, she said, “we want to right that wrong and make sure we can play the sort of role we played in the Reagan years as an institution that can start to produce these things.”