Eager to ram through another $95 billion Ukraine spending bill last week, and angry at the base of conservatives who objected, Republican Sens. Thom Tillis and Mitch McConnell went out of their way to trash those “dim” and “short-sighted” Americans.
“Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” Tillis said last Monday, according to Punchbowl News.
The interventionist Washington establishment says geopolitics is complex, foreign affairs is an intricate web of competing interests, and noninterventionists are provincial and should leave these discussions to the entrenched foreign policy and national security elite in D.C., or at least those who embrace the orthodox perspective on global affairs. Noninterventionism is on the rise, and they don’t like it. In fact, for the first time in recent memory, most Republicans say the United States should stay out of world affairs.
As a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and an intelligence contractor within the military-industrial complex, I have seen firsthand some of the intricacies involved in the American foreign policy apparatus. One of my major takeaways is an acknowledgment of a vast gap between the inner workings of Washington’s foreign policy machine and the American public’s perception and understanding of these issues.
Many “experts,” both self-described and industry-designated, frame foreign policy as a domain too complex for the average citizen. This gatekeeping mentality, perpetuated by certain policymakers and many experts, implies that international affairs is a high-stakes game played only
