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Trump Ally Sen. Ron Johnson Had a Meltdown on “Meet the Press”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) gave a wild performance on “Meet the Press” Sunday, refusing to answer questions posed by host Chuck Todd, instead peddling unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2016 election. The bizarre interview is a demonstration of how President Donald Trump’s allies have responded to the impeachment inquiry by rallying around debunked theories about […]

The Country’s “Most Polluted Air Basin” Braces for a Trump Plan That Will Make Things Worse

This story was originally published by City Lab and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Kieshaun White says that he doesn’t like to talk politics when it comes to the environment. He prefers to stick to the data. A year ago, as a high school senior, he launched a network of air-pollution […]

A Second Whistleblower Is Coming Forward in Ukraine Scandal, Attorneys Say

The lawyers representing the first whistleblower, whose complaint about Donald Trump’s behavior provoked an impeachment inquiry, said Sunday that they now representing another whistleblower with knowledge of the Ukraine scandal. The second whistleblower poses a threat to the president’s attempts to downplay the scandal because the second person supposedly has first-hand knowledge of Trump’s dealings […]

Why is the Army Still Honoring Confederate Generals?

The Army has faced almost no resistance to bases named for prominent white supremacists.

The post Why is the Army Still Honoring Confederate Generals? appeared first on The Intercept.

Yes, we know you're excited; Yes, you can see the anodized chassis we got into this Aspen batch; Yes, we are asking you to be patient as we incrementally ship through tens of thousands of Librem 5 phones over the next handful of months; Yes, you will get yours. Yes, you will be impressed. @purism #librem5

Trolls Are Sowing Discord Between Sanders and Warren Supporters

As the Democratic primaries approach, relationships between supporters of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the two most viable progressive presidential contenders to ever face off in the Democratic primaries, are beginning to fray. Though, in general, goodwill continues to prevail—Warren’s campaign team sent dinner and cookies to Sanders’ campaign staff following his heart procedure—lately tempers have been heating up, ignited by injudicious comments and outright nasty jibes that take on a life of their own in social media. Consider these recent examples.

On CNN in September, Emily Tisch Sussman, a former vice president at the Center for American Progress, attempted to shame progressives who support Sanders: “If you are still supporting Sanders as opposed to Warren, it’s kind of showing your sexism. Because she has more detailed plans, and her plans have evolved.”

On the Bernie side of the fence, you have political commentator Benjamin Studebaker, who, in a critique of progressive media coverage of the race, had this to say about Warren:

She’s as bad as Hillary. She’s worse, because Hillary made it obvious, and she hides it so well that for months, the left press has gone easy on her. No more. Don’t give her an inch, because she’ll take a mile. Be relentless. She’s Harris. She’s Biden. She’s Booker. Make it so.

Aimee Terese, who cohosts the “What’s Left?” podcast with Studebaker, likewise gives Warren no quarter, tweeting: 

Then there was the brouhaha that erupted when the Working Families Party (WFP), which in 2016 backed Sanders, voted in September to endorse Warren.

WFP polled two groups of people, what it described as “tens of thousands” of supporters (party members and/or subscribers to the party’s online newsletter) and the 56 members of the party’s national committee. The votes of each of the two groups, the supporters and the leadership, were weighted, with each receiving 50% stake in the final outcome. Once the votes were tallied, Warren won 61% of the weighted vote. WFP, however, refused to release the vote tallies from each group as it has in past election cycles, leading Sanders supporters to suspect that their candidate was the preferred choice of the members, and Warren the pick of the party leaders (a group who played a role in the selection process analogous to the Democratic Party’s superdelegates).

Some outraged Sanders supporters lashed out on twitter, attacking Maurice Mitchell, WFP’s national director and Nelini Stamp, WFP’s national organizing director, both of whom are black. This prompted more than 100 black leaders to sign a letter decrying the attacks, that read in part:

[Mitchell and Stamp] are being threatened on a daily basis, by self-identified Sanders supporters, with hateful, violent and racist threats. “Uncle Tom.” “Slave.” “Cunt.” These kinds of threats have no place in our movements, and are reminiscent of the threats Black people would receive when daring to vote …

Indeed, according to screenshots of deleted tweets captured by Time magazine, one Sanders supporter, addressing Mitchell, tweeted: “Why not have the balls to respond you cunt. You half man. You corporatist. You SLAVE!” Another pro-Sanders tweeter said of Warren, “She wants to bring you back to incremental slavery of neoliberalism. @SenSanders is the progressive future, you [sic] choice stinks of corruption.”

This disturbed Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, who has not endorsed any candidate. She wrote on Medium:

When a party issues an endorsement, particularly a party that hones its focus on families that are struggling every day to live with dignity, it is right for those of us who care about the same things to interrogate the process. …

But what we cannot do, what we must not do, is devolve into such nastiness that we wish cancer on their families, call them Uncle Toms who are dancing for slave masters, wish that they would be raped, and the like. I cannot say that we are better than that because I’ve seen the tweets. But what I know is that we who long for freedom and safety and dignity and justice will not win if we cannot be distinguished from the Right

Mitchell says he is pleased that there are “two champions of Medicare for All and a wealth tax in this race.” But he is unapologetic about the party’s endorsement:

Senator Warren has an unmatched ability to explain in everyday terms how our economy and democracy got rigged, who rigged them, and how we can unrig them. She’s a fighter for working families who strikes fear into the hearts of Wall Street and Silicon Valley CEOs. We’re so glad there are two leading structural change candidates in this primary, but we’re thrilled to support Warren.

Later that month, attacks against Warren by Sanders supporters again erupted on Twitter after someone with the name @isamuel, a “Catholic American Socialist” with more than 16,000 followers, reposted a video clip of an interview in which Warren spoke about her mother being part Cherokee and part Delaware (a claim she was unable to prove and no longer makes). That video, which went viral, originated from a person with the name @AlytaDeLeon, an “antiwar Mexican American socialist.” They posted it as if it were a recent video, and not one from 2012 that has long been in circulation. Since joining Twitter in March, @AlytaDeLeon has sent out more than 7,000 tweets. We don’t know why most of the recent ones are devoted to attacking Warren. The person who tweets at @AlytaDeLeon did not respond to multiple inquiries from In These Times.

What we do know is that Russia has already deployed a network of bots and fake social media accounts to sow discord among Democratic voters in 2020, just as it did in the 2016 election. The Wall Street Journal reported that during the June and July Democratic Debates:

Hundreds of social-media accounts with bot-like traits promoted misinformation and content aimed at inflaming racial divisions. … The hashtag #DemDebateSoWhite was tweeted Tuesday [July 30] night by an account from a user with the name Susannah Faulkner and then shared by conservative activist Ali Alexander. The hashtag received thousands of interactions, but … a high number of the accounts using the hashtag had bot-like characteristics. The original tweet appears to have been taken down, but the hashtag continued circulate on Twitter.

It is unclear how many of the attacks on Working Families staff were sent by bots or covert agitators, or where they originated from, but Time reports that many of the attacks were “accompanied with the hashtag #BernieorBust,” which was commonly used in 2016 by Russian trolls to sow division between Sanders and Clinton supporters.

That’s not to say policy differences between the candidates shouldn’t be vigorously debated. Progressives need to make an informed decision. Sticking to smart critiques rather than hyperbole and vitriol, however, could also pay political dividends. Warren and Sanders appear set to go to the 2020 Democratic National Convention with substantial numbers of delegates. Should no candidate win on the first ballot, as seems likely, it is hard to see how either could get the nomination without the other’s delegates.

At the debates, Sanders and Warren have stood shoulder to shoulder, defending Medicare for All from tepid centrists. It’s time for their supporters to do the same, and not get baited into flame wars.

Psychotic Reaction (ffo: MC5, The Sword) announce October tour

An acid-laced blues punk quartet out of Norman, OK, Psychotic Reaction has just announced the final leg of their stacked three month tour. Check out those dates below.  

The post Psychotic Reaction (ffo: MC5, The Sword) announce October tour appeared first on Dying Scene.

DS Exclusive: South Class Veterans (Oi) premiere “Squared Away” off upcoming “Hell to Pay” LP

This week has been stacked. Between playing catch-up on premieres and getting my 40 hrs on some remodel, I somehow managed to gain a local community radio DJs favor, who hooked me up with free Bad Religion tickets – then home for a late night writing session, before waking up early to get the kids […]

The post DS Exclusive: South Class Veterans (Oi) premiere “Squared Away” off upcoming “Hell to Pay” LP appeared first on Dying Scene.

We Had the Quid, Now We Have the Quo

Ukraine has gotten its $400 million in military assistance and its visit to the White House, where President Zelensky dutifully reported that he had felt no pressure from the Trump administration to open an investigation into the Biden family. So this, I suppose, is just an amazing coincidence: Ukraine’s new chief prosecutor said Friday his […]

Supreme Court Will Hear Major Challenge to Abortion Rights

The Supreme Court decided Friday to hear June Medical Services v. Gee, a Louisiana case that could greatly restrict abortion access across the country and overturn a previous ruling on the issue.  The case concerns a 2014 Louisiana law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of […]

Dakota Access Pipeline Activists Face 110 Years in Prison, Two Years After Confessing Sabotage

“You’re talking about somebody who needs to be removed from the gene pool,” said the CEO of pipeline company Energy Transfer.

The post Dakota Access Pipeline Activists Face 110 Years in Prison, Two Years After Confessing Sabotage appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. Border Officials Use Fake Addresses, Dangerous Conditions, and Mass Trials to Discourage Asylum Seekers

U.S. border officials are putting fake addresses on asylum paperwork. When asylum seekers fail to show up for hearings, they are being deported in absentia.

The post U.S. Border Officials Use Fake Addresses, Dangerous Conditions, and Mass Trials to Discourage Asylum Seekers appeared first on The Intercept.

The Son That Broke the Camel’s Back

Have you supported your favorite open source projects with small donations rcently?

Help out, lots of small donations can make a huge difference! You know those devs deserve a little support!

Populations of #UK’s most important #wildlife have plummeted since #1970 | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/03/populations-of-uks-most-important-wildlife-have-plummeted-since-1970

#Ecology #Conservation #EndangeredSpecies

The Open Letter from the Governments of US, UK, and Australia to Facebook is An All-Out Attack on Encryption

Top law enforcement officials in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia told Facebook today that they want backdoor access to all encrypted messages sent on all its platforms. In an open letter, these governments called on Mark Zuckerberg to stop Facebook’s plan to introduce end-to-end encryption on all of the company’s messaging products and instead promise that it will “enable law enforcement to obtain lawful access to content in a readable and usable format.” 

This is a staggering attempt to undermine the security and privacy of communications tools used by billions of people. Facebook should not comply. The letter comes in concert with the signing of a new agreement between the US and UK to provide access to allow law enforcement in one jurisdiction to more easily obtain electronic data stored in the other jurisdiction. But the letter to Facebook goes much further: law enforcement and national security agencies in these three countries are asking for nothing less than access to every conversation that crosses every digital device. 

The letter focuses on the challenges of investigating the most serious crimes committed using digital tools, including child exploitation, but it ignores the severe risks that introducing encryption backdoors would create. Many people—including journalists, human rights activists, and those at risk of abuse by intimate partners—use encryption to stay safe in the physical world as well as the online one. And encryption is central to preventing criminals and even corporations from spying on our private conversations, and to ensure that the communications infrastructure we rely on is truly working as intended. What’s more, the backdoors into encrypted communications sought by these governments would be available not just to governments with a supposedly functional rule of law. Facebook and others would face immense pressure to also provide them to authoritarian regimes, who might seek to spy on dissidents in the name of combatting terrorism or civil unrest, for example. 

The Department of Justice and its partners in the UK and Australia claim to support “strong encryption,” but the unfettered access to encrypted data described in this letter is incompatible with how encryption actually works. 

White Judges and Donald Trump

The Center for American Progress released a report today about the diversity of the federal judiciary, and you will be unsurprised to learn that it continues to be more male and more white than the general population. You can read the whole report here, but I want to highlight just a single chart: As you […]

Meet the Hawkish Liberal Think Tank Powering the Kamala Harris Campaign

If you liked Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy, you can keep it.  

That’s the message many Democratic voters are receiving this election, as they prepare to pick a contender from the gradually winnowing field of candidates to take on Donald Trump in 2020. And the reason is the continuing influence of a think-tank called the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

The influence of CNAS on the 2020 election, at this point, is being channeled through the campaign of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), who has drawn heavily from its ranks to fill her line-up of foreign policy advisors. But given its status as the go-to fountainhead of Democratic foreign policy ideas, there is every chance its alumni could be part of another future Democratic administration.

Founded on the eve of what was thought to almost certainly be a coming Clinton presidency over a decade ago, CNAS has left its fingerprints all over the past ten years of Democratic foreign policy. With its bipartisan make-up and centrist approach, the think tank has served as a crucial wellspring for conventional foreign policy thinking that has shaped the actions and ideas of both the Obama administration and Clinton’s 2016 run.

Even as the American public has slowly turned against endless war, CNAS’ prescriptions have stayed soothingly familiar: Stay the course in ongoing wars, step up efforts to counter Russia, China and other adversaries, and dig deeper into the conflicts the United States has so far only dipped a toe into.

Though Clinton’s loss meant CNAS hasn’t had the influence over the halls of power it expected, a wide-open Democratic contest means a second opportunity. And it seems California Sen. Kamala Harris is its favored candidate, as her foreign policy advisory team is stocked with the think tank’s alumni and its co-founder.

The creation of CNAS

CNAS was born during the Bush years as the foreign policy equivalent to the Center for American Progress (CAP): a liberal-to-centrist think tank that would double as a policy house for an eventual Democratic president. Established in 2007, CNAS came onto the scene as the Bush presidency was coming to a close and the Democrats battled it out to see who would replace him. The timing was symbolic, suggesting the eclipse of neoconservative foreign policy by a new, liberal era.

CNAS had another similarity to CAP: its Clinton connections. It had been founded by two former Pentagon officials under Bill Clinton’s presidency, one of whom was Michèle Flournoy, and its board was stacked with that administration’s alumni: Clinton’s former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, his former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and longtime Clinton confidant and CAP President and CEO John Podesta. Aiming to be “strictly nonpartisan,” as Flournoy put it, CNAS also courted Republicans, and its board also featured Bush’s former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

Hillary Clinton herself delivered the keynote speech at CNAS’s inaugural forum, speaking about the threat of “nuclear terrorism,” highlighting the challenges of a “rising China,” and calling for military intervention in Darfur. As the New York Timesnoted, CNAS looked “an awful lot like a shadow policy apparatus for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

At the time, Flournoy and the CNAS were described as a new batch of “liberal realists,” who crafted foreign policy supposedly based on pragmatism, not ideology—and stood on the opposite side of progressives who wanted to scale back U.S. involvement in the world. The United States, she explained in 2007, is a force for good in the world. Flournoy appeared to hold this view years later, telling the Council on Foreign Relations in 2013 that the United States “still has an indispensable leadership role to play” because “no other country” can “put together international coalitions to solve shared problems the way we can.”

Flournoy has a long history inside the foreign policy establishment. Under Bill Clinton, she cut her teeth as the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction, and as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. While there, Flournoy helped draft the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, which, among other things, “determined that U.S. forces must be capable of fighting and winning two major theater wars nearly simultaneously.” This two-war doctrine, arguably obsolete even during the post-Cold War moment in which the review was drafted, would eventually be jettisoned by the Bush administration. Flournoy came to agree, though only because its focus on ground war was incompatible with an age of more frequent air and sea power.

Despite Clinton’s primary loss in 2008, and her rival Barack Obama’s seemingly divergent approach to foreign policy, CNAS was neatly folded into the Obama general election campaign. The think tank had one of its first big victories when it helped push Obama away from the anti-war position he had campaigned on. While Obama had pledged during the primary race to start withdrawing troops from Iraq immediately upon entering office, with the CNAS having become “something like Obama’s foreign policy think-tank” in the words of the New Yorker’s George Packer, Obama now refined his position. He would instead adopt the Bush administration’s approach of staying the course in Iraq with no timetable for withdrawal. It was a significant early victory for CNAS, whose thinking would increasingly depart from the Obama administration over the following years.

Just as Obama handed his transition on domestic policy over to the Clintonites, allowing Podesta to staff the administration with various neoliberal appointees, he did the same on foreign policy. Obama named Flournoy and another former Clinton official, John White, to head his takeover of the defense department, and a host of others involved in CNAS found themselves on his list of national security personnel. Susan Rice, who would serve as Obama’s UN ambassador, was a CNAS board member, and in February, Flournoy would become the administration’s undersecretary of defense for policy.

Flournoy departed the administration in 2012, but Obama’s foreign policy continued to boast the CNAS’ imprint. Breaking his campaign pledge, Obama stayed the course in Iraq, only withdrawing troops by the end of 2011 because the Iraqi government refused to allow them to remain. He launched the disastrous war on Libya, further destabilizing the Middle East and North Africa, an action favored by Flournoy on humanitarian grounds, and pushed the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, something long endorsed by the think-tank, and which Flournoy called “the most important thing” and “foundational” to the administration’s “rebalance” toward Asia. While such decisions can’t be solely attributed to CNAS, the fact that his administration boasted multiple officials associated with the think-tank points to its influence over Obama’s foreign policy.

Yet Obama also rejected the CNAS line at times, as made clear in a major 2016 report published by the think-tank. Titled “Extending American Power,” the report bore Flournoy’s name on its list of endorsers. With Flournoy rumored to be Clinton’s defense secretary pick, the report was interpreted by news outlets as a peek into a future Clinton foreign policy, one that would be markedly more aggressive than Obama’s.

Among the report’s prescriptions were to “significantly increase U.S. national security and defense spending,” approve the TPP as a counterweight against China, ensure the international campaign against ISIS “is scaled up substantially,” and reserve the military option for Iran. Some of these proposals ran expressly counter to Obama’s approach, calling for the United States to send lethal arms to Ukraine and militarily intervene in Syria, both moves he had been resisting to varying extents. The CNAS report also dabbled in domestic policy, praising the explosion of fossil fuel extraction under Obama for “offer[ing] significant strategic advantage that can help extend American power,” and calling for “balancing taxes and entitlements to put U.S. debt on a more sustainable trajectory.” All of this was at the service of maintaining “the longevity of a rules-based international system favorable to U.S. interests.”

Clinton’s loss to Trump prevented this vision from coming to fruition. But the 2020 campaign has given CNAS another chance to insert its influence into the halls of power.

Advising the Harris campaign

Despite the large 2020 field, Kamala Harris quickly emerged as the heir to Hillary Clinton’s political network. By July, she had locked down the second most big-money former Obama and Clinton donors after Joe Biden, and Clinton’s wealthy donor network in California and Florida, in particular, coalesced around the California Senator. When it comes to staff, Harris’ sister and campaign chair Maya was Clinton’s 2015 senior policy advisor. Harris has also tapped Clinton’s general counsel Marc Elias, among other former Clinton staffers.

Harris has continued this pattern in the realm of foreign policy, stacking her team with CNAS personnel. One is David Cohen, Obama’s former under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence and then deputy director of the CIA, who is now the think-tank’s adjunct senior fellow focusing on technology and national security.  Another is Matt Olsen, the former general counsel for the NSA and former National Counterterrorism Center director, both under Obama, who serves in an identical role at CNAS. Harris’ National Security Advisor Halie Soifer, who had served in that same role for Harris in the Senate, came out of the think tank’s Next Generation National Security Fellow program.

But the most notable name on Harris’ list of foreign policy advisors is Michele Flournoy, who founded CNAS, served as its president for two years, and was once expected to help lead U.S. foreign policy under a prospective President Hillary Clinton.

In 2002, while a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Flournoy endorsed Bush’s emerging doctrine of pre-emptive war.

“In some cases, preemptive strikes against an adversary's [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities may be the best or only option we have to avert a catastrophic attack against the United States,” she said then.

Flournoy laid out her views on the matter more fully in a June 2002 editorial for the Washington Post, co-written with Vince LaFleur, a former member of the National Security Council staff who was then a visiting fellow at the CSIS. Bush was “right to insist on preemption as a viable policy option,” they wrote, but wrong to treat it as the entire strategy, and more effort should be put into prevention, such as non-proliferation treaties. They noted the difficulties of applying a policy of pre-emption: the closer a country comes to developing a weapon of mass destruction, the harder it is to attack, but “the earlier a president wants to launch a first strike, the more difficult it will be politically.”

A year later, as the United States began its foray into Iraq, Flournoy warned the single-minded focus on the war was taking oxygen from other issues. “If we do nothing, North Korea will be a nuclear weapons power,” she said. “We should do everything in our power stop that.”

Under Obama, Flournoy “pushed hard” for military intervention in Libya, according to a 2011 Huffington Post profile of Flournoy. The Libyan adventure became arguably Obama’s greatest foreign policy blunder, the resulting anarchy creating a pipeline of arms to extremists across neighboring countries, and the country descended into ground zero for the migrant crisis while human slavery became a fixture. Even so, two years after former dictator Muammar Gaddafi had been deposed, Flournoy told the Council on Foreign Relations: “I think we were right to do it.”

Such a record helped Flournoy become the neoconservatives’ choice to replace Obama’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2012. At the time, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel was the frontrunner to succeed Gates, a choice hated by the country’s war hawks due to Hagel’s criticism of the Iraq War, his affinity for diplomacy and engagement, and his distaste for economic sanctions. Faced with this choice, Flournoy was endorsed by neocons such as Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Jennifer Rubin, who cast a potential Flournoy appointment as a victory for diversity and feminism, despite the fact that Flournoy’s preferred policies had been destructive to the world’s population of women.

Under Obama, Flournoy had argued strenuously against the administration’s total withdrawal from Iraq, a view shared by the military brass, and she had pushed for a residual force to stay behind to no avail. She would later take a more aggressive line than the administration on several conflicts. She criticized the Obama administration’s ISIS policy for having “under-resourced” its “military dimensions,” called for greater U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war and urged the supplying of weapons to Ukraine. A 2016 report co-authored by Flournoy stated that “Washington and other capitals have not devoted sufficient attention to the threat posed by Russia and its implications for Western security,” and recommended “direct military assistance” to Ukraine “in far larger amounts than provided to date.”

After leaving the Obama administration, Flournoy bided her time, making recommendations from the outside while waiting to re-enter government under the more hawkish Hillary Clinton, whose campaign she was advising. She argued forcefully for passing the TPP, urging observers to “move beyond the usual economic arguments” over the deal and instead “consider the extraordinary geopolitical stakes involved.” She criticized the administration’s deadline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, by then already the longest war in U.S. history, and was one of 23 signatories calling on Obama to reverse course.

With domestic energy production emerging “as a new source of strength,” she urged Obama to rescind the “outdated and counterproductive” ban on domestic oil exports, a measure he took that has helped turn the United States into one of the world’s major fossil fuel exporters and sped up the climate crisis. She also called for a “broader and more intensive effort” against ISIS that involved giving arms to local tribes, ramping up the U.S. air war on the group, greater aid to the Syrian opposition, and even putting “boots on the ground” to fight them.

Almost all of these ideas would make their way into the CNAS’ “Extending American Power” report in 2016.

It’s difficult not to suspect a link between the sources of CNAS’ corporate funding and the foreign policy it pursues. According to its website, from 2017-2018, CNAS received $500,000 or more from defense contractor Northrop Grumman, between $100,000 and $249,000 from firms like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and between $50,000 to $99,999 from BAE Systems. And it’s not just arms manufacturers. Other financial contributors to CNAS include Prudential Financial, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BP, ExxonMobil, Comcast, Facebook and Google.

So perhaps it’s no wonder that its current CEO is Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy advisor to the late Sen. John McCain, whose history of pushing for wars is nearly unparalleled even in Washington. Or that CNAS puts out reports like this 2019 publication, titled “Why America Needs a New Way of War,” that describes U.S. armed forces as “critical to sustaining the US-led global order,” and advocates a peace-through-strength approach to foreign policy. Or that challenging the power of Russia and China continues to dominate the think tank, rather than advocating a foreign policy that centers international co-operation to tackle an intensifying worldwide ecological crisis, as figures such as Bernie Sanders have beenadvocating.

Toward 2020

If personnel is policy, Kamala Harris’ line-up of foreign policy advisors suggests that the Washington consensus on foreign policy will continue unimpeded should Harris secure the nomination and defeat President Trump. More than that, it suggests the so-called military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about nearly 60 years ago will stay untouched, with Harris’ line-up of advisors a walking embodiment of the intersection of interventionist foreign policy and corporate interests.

And if Harris does not win the Democratic nomination, CNAS will likely maintain its influence. As a think-tank with deep ties to the Democratic and national security establishments, CNAS personnel are on deck to be tapped to fill any future Democratic administration’s foreign policy team, the same way CAP personnel are expected to on the domestic side.

For some, this will be a welcome return to “normalcy” after Trump’s erratic and often contradictory foreign policy. Yet it holds significant risks, not just for this coming election, but for the future of the United States. There is evidence that the more interventionist foreign policy touted by Clinton in 2016, thanks in part to her consultation with Flournoy, helped cost her votes in the key blue states that flipped to Trump that year.

It’s also an open question how long the United States can sustain massive military spending and an overstretched overseas presence as it grapples with accumulating domestic crises. And that’s not to mention the stresses on regions like the Middle East and North Africa that have been consistently destabilized by U.S. actions, decade after decade.

For those looking to make a break from decades of Clintonite foreign policy, this will mean more than just not voting for the candidates whose staff are packed with its proponents. It will also mean battling against their inclusion in a future Democratic administration, whoever wins.