At the Quincy Institute, Liberals and Conservatives Come Together to Defend Dictators and Bash Israel

Founded in 2019, the Quincy Institute is a Washington-based foreign-policy think tank that brings together scholars, activists, and former officials of both left and right, most of whom have little in common but a belief that the U.S. should be more accommodating of murderous dictators. Among the crimes its fellows and affiliates have attempted to deny or to whitewash are Bashar al-Assad’s gassing of his own subjects, China’s brutal campaign against the Uighurs, and even the Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic’s mass-murder of Muslims. The institute also has its share of committed Israel-haters, such as Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, the professors who believe a malicious “Israel lobby” pulls the strings of U.S. foreign policy; Lawrence Wilkerson, the former adviser to Colin Powell and Bernie Sanders who has exhibited a “dangerous obsession with American policymakers who happened to be Jewish”; and Trita Parsi, a professional apologist for the Islamic Republic of Iran, who frequently blames the Jewish state for the Middle East’s problems.