# Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft The Washington think tank founded in **November 2019** to argue for a less militarized American foreign policy — and the clearest existing proof that **restraint is the one foreign-policy position on which the American donor right and the American donor left converge**. Named for John Quincy Adams and his 1821 line about not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Co-founded by [[Trita Parsi]], [[Stephen Wertheim]], Eli Clifton, Suzanne DiMaggio, and [[Andrew Bacevich]], who served as its first president and is now Emeritus Board Chair. ## The funding story The founding grants were **$500,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation** and **$500,000 from the [[Open Society Foundations]]** — the [[Koch Network]] and [[George Soros]] underwriting the same institution, which almost nothing else in American politics can claim. Later institutional funders include the [[Ford Foundation]], the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. For this vault the funding structure is the finding, not a footnote: it maps where the right's anti-interventionist money actually goes once it stops flowing to [[Neoconservatism]], and it is the reason Quincy gets attacked from both flanks. ## Positions and personnel Quincy publishes *Responsible Statecraft* and works across grand strategy, the Middle East, and East Asia. Affiliated scholars include [[John Mearsheimer]], [[Stephen Walt]], and Neta Crawford. ## Criticism - **January 2020** — Senator [[Tom Cotton]] accused the institute of antisemitism, an attack tied to Parsi's earlier work on Iran diplomacy. - **2022** — two staff resignations protested what the departing staff characterized as an insufficiently critical response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. - **April 2021** — *Tablet* reported that Quincy-affiliated fellows had declined to characterize the persecution of Uyghurs as genocide. ## See Also - [[Andrew Bacevich]] — co-founder and first president - [[Militarism]] · [[Forever Wars]] — what the institute exists to argue against - [[Realism (International Relations)]] — the intellectual tradition - [[Cato Institute]] — the older libertarian home of non-interventionist argument [[Organizations Hub]]