The Story:
Both George Soros and Charles Koch believe that the foreign policy of the United States has become unhinged from any defensible conception of national interest or human rights, and together they hope to use their vast fortunes to move the US toward diplomacy and peace, away from the endless war to which it now seems committed.
The Background:
Their new partnership is unlikely. Charles Koch is one of the “Koch Brothers,” renowned as the offerers of financial assistance to Republican and conservative candidates for public office over decades now. Soros is the Hungary-born financier who notoriously said in 2003 that removing President George W. Bush from office would be the “central focus of my life” over the following year, as it was “a matter of life and death.”
A headline in the Boston Globe has called it an “astonishing turn” that these two men have teamed up.
The Thing to Know:
Koch and Soros are combining to endow a new foreign-policy think tank, called the “Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.” The name is in homage to the sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams, who said that though the United States is a well-wisher to freedom around the world, “she is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
