Washington’s Weirdest Think Tank - Tablet Magazine

When the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft launched in 2019, its founders chose a name that would connect the group to a primordial era of U.S. foreign policy. Although John Quincy Adams was hardly an isolationist—he pursued territorial expansion and argued for America’s direct interests in Latin America as secretary of state and later as president—his 1821 formulation that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy” has become a catchphrase for those who believe Washington has lost all sense of proportion and reality in its dealings with the rest of the world. According to its application for tax exemption filed with the Internal Revenue Service in July 2019, which Tablet has obtained, Quincy’s purpose would be “to educate the public about ‘restraint,’ a foreign policy grand strategy developed by interdisciplinary academic thought-leaders,” and to support scholars who “generally argue that in regions where the US possesses vital interests, it should

When the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft launched in 2019, its founders chose a name that would connect the group to a primordial era of U.S. foreign policy. Although John Quincy Adams was hardly an isolationist—he pursued territorial expansion and argued for America’s direct interests in Latin America as secretary of state and later as president—his 1821 formulation that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy” has become a catchphrase for those who believe Washington has lost all sense of proportion and reality in its dealings with the rest of the wor