Pete Buttigieg foreign policy elite
Neoliberalism, US Politics December 17, 2019
The insider: How national security mandarins groomed Pete Buttigieg and
managed his future
Pledging to end endless wars, Pete Buttigieg claims he has never been
part of the Washington establishment. But years before he was known as
Mayor Pete, an influential DC network of military interventionists placed
him on an inside track to power.
By Max Blumenthal
In his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete
Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as a maverick running against a
broken establishment.
On the trail, he has invoked his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a
de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval
reserve intelligence officer who now claims to oppose endless wars. He
insists that theres energy for an outsider like me, promoting himself as
an unconventional candidate.
When former Secretary of State John Kerry endorsed Joe Biden this December,
Buttigieg went full maverick. I have never been part of the Washington
establishment, he proclaimed, and I recognize that there are relationships
among senators who have been together on Capitol Hill as long as Ive been
alive and that is what it is.
But a testy exchange between the South Bend mayor and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard
during a November 20 Democratic primary debate had already complicated
Buttigiegs branding campaign.
Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But
she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint
in Iraq than Mayor Pete. Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with
opposition to destructive regime change wars serving as her leitmotif.
After ticking off her foreign policy credentials, Gabbard turned to
Buttigieg and lit into him for stating his willingness to send US troops to
Mexico to crack down on drug cartels.
A visibly angry Buttigieg responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his
record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has argued for an
indefinite deployment of occupying US troops.
Rehashing well-worn criticism of Gabbard for meeting with Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad during a diplomatic visit she took her trip was devoted to
de-escalating the US-backed proxy war that had ravaged the countrys
population Buttigieg attacked the congresswoman for engaging with a
murderous dictator.
Throughout the exchange, Buttigieg appeared shaken, as though his sense of
inviolability had been punctured. Gabbard had clearly struck a vulnerable
point by painting the self-styled outsider as a conventional DC-style
politician unconsciously spouting interventionist bromides.
How could someone who served in the catastrophically wasteful US wars in the
Middle East, and who had seen their human toll, be reckless enough to
propose sending US troops to fight and possibly die in Mexico? But Assad!
was the best response he could muster.
The remarkable dust-up highlighted a side of the 37-year-old political
upstart that has been scarcely explored in mainstream US media accounts of
his rise to prominence. It revealed the real Buttigieg as a neoliberal cadre
whose future was carefully managed by the mandarins of the national security
state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard University.
After college, the Democratic presidential hopeful took a gig with a
strategic communications firm founded by a former Secretary of Defense who
raked in contracts with the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an
influential DC think tank described by its founder as a counterpart to the
neoconservatives of the 1970s. Today, Buttigieg sits on that think tanks
board of advisors alongside some of the countrys most accomplished military
interventionists.
Buttigieg has reaped the rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook.
He recently became the top recipient of donations from staff members of the
Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the Justice
Department key cogs in the national security states permanent
bureaucracy.
His Harvard social network has been a critical factor in his rise as well,
with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisors
and strategists. Among his closest friends from school is today the senior
advisor of a specialized unit of the State Department focused on fomenting
regime change abroad.
That friend, Nathaniel Nat Myers, was Buttigiegs traveling partner on a
trip to Somaliland, where the two buddies claimed to have been tourists in a
July 2008 article they wrote for The New York Times.
Their contribution to the paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a
whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed the
Somaliland governments call for recognition from the US government. It was
Buttigiegs first foreign policy audition before a national audience.
A short, strange trip to Somaliland
Under public pressure for more transparency about his work at the
notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting firm, the Buttigieg campaign
released some background details this December. The disclosures included a
timeline of his work for various clients that stated he stepped away from
the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a
Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana.
How Buttigiegs full-time role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on
a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland remains unclear.
Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region
of Somaliland. In that short time, they interviewed unnamed government
officials and faithfully relayed their pro-independence line back to the
American public in a July 2008 op-ed in the New York Times.
Pete Buttigieg New York Times Somaliland
The column read like it could have been crafted by a public relations firm
on behalf of a government client. In one section, the two travelers wrote
that the people we met in Somaliland were welcoming, hopeful and bewildered
by the absence of recognition from the West. They were frustrated to still
be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty of the failed state to
their south.
Since declaring its independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has
campaigned for recognition from the US, EU, and African Union. It even
offered to hand its deep water port over to AFRICOM, the US military command
structure on the African continent, in exchange for US acceptance of its
sovereignty.
Several months after Buttigieg traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera
reported, The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global
recognition.
And just a few weeks before Buttigiegs visit, the would-be republic inked a
contract with an international lobbying firm called Independent Diplomat,
presumably to help oversee that charm offensive.
Founded by a self-described anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat
represents an array of non and para-state entities seeking recognition on
the international stage. Rosss client list has included the Syrian
Opposition Coalition, which tried and failed to secure power through a
Western-backed war against the Syrian government.
Independent Diplomat did not respond to questions from The Grayzone about
whether it had any role in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and Myers took to
Somaliland.
According to John Kiriakou, a former CIA case officer, ex-senior
investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated
whistleblower, Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism.
There really is nothing going on in Somaliland, Kiriakou told The
Grayzone. To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. Its
not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist.
Kiriakou visited Somaliland in 2009 as part of an investigation for the
Senate Intelligence Committee on what he described as the phenomenon of
blue-eyed American citizens converting to Islam, traveling to Somalia and
Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist groups, then returning home on their
US passports.
To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou said he took an arduous seven-hour journey
from the neighboring state of Djibouti. His junket was coordinated by the US
ambassador to Djibouti, a regional security officer of the US Diplomatic
Security Service, and an embassy attaché.
It is not the easiest place to reach and theres no business to do there,
Kiriakou said.
Whether or not Buttigiegs trip was coordinated without the assistance of
lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on
international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record and
on an absolutely non-controversial issue.
In his bio, Nathaniel Myers identified himself simply as a financial
analyst based in Ethiopia. According to his resume, which is available
online at Linkedin, he was working at the time as a World Bank consultant on
governance and corruption.
By 2011, Myers had moved on from that neoliberal international financial
institution to a specialized government at the center of US regime change
operations abroad.
Pete Buttigieg Nathaniel Myers
Pete Buttigieg on a pre-graduation trip with his Harvard buddies. Nathaniel
Nat Myers is to his immediate left.
The imperial social network
Nathaniel Myers relationship with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard
University. There, they formed two parts of The Order of Kong, a
close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly for the Chinese
restaurant they frequented after intensive discussion sessions at the
schools Institute of Politics.
Like most members of the college-era Order, Myers and Buttigieg have
remained close. When the mayor married his longtime partner in 2018,
Buttigieg chose him as his best man.
Myers currently works as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for
International Developments Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in
Washington DC. The OTI is a specialized division of USAID that routinely
works through contractors and local proxies to orchestrate destabilization
operations inside countries considered insufficiently compliant to the
dictates of Washington.
Wherever the US seeks regime change, it seems that USAIDs OTI is involved.
Nathaniel Myers USAID Pete Buttigieg
The Linkedin page of close Pete Buttigieg friend Nathaniel Myers
In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a loosening of bureaucratic restraints on
USAIDs participation in counter-terror operations, Myers revealed that he
had specialized in programming in places like Yemen and Libya two
conflict zones destabilized by US-led regime-change wars. (Myers was working
as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, but would
return to USAIDs OTI the following year.)
USAIDs OTI has also fueled Syrias brutal proxy war, coordinating US
government assistance to supposed civil society groups like the White
Helmets that were attached to the armed extremists who ruled over portions
of the country for several years.
In Venezuela, the OTI has spent tens of millions of dollars cultivating and
training opponents of the late President Hugo Chavez and his successor,
Nicolas Maduro. It has done the same in Nicaragua, serving as the linchpin
of a US effort to lay the groundwork for insurrection.
In Cuba, meanwhile, the OTI attempted to stir up civil unrest through a
fake, Twitter-style social media site called ZunZuneo, hoping to turn the
public against the countrys leftist government through coordinated flash
mobs. To populate the phony social media platform, the OTI contracted a
DC-based firm called Creative Associates that had illicitly obtained half a
million Cuban cellphone numbers.
USAID and Creative Associates attempted to place ZunZuneo into private hands
through a Miami foundation called Roots of Hope, which was founded by
students at Harvard University. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was even
solicited by the State Department to operate the platform. (Roots of Hope
board member Raul Moas, who personally trained ZunZuneo employees, is today
the director of the Knight Foundation.)
The devious operation and its eventual exposure revealed the extent to which
covert operations historically associated with the CIA had been outsourced
to private contractors and NGOs.
And the role of the Harvard-founded Roots of Hope in the scheme
demonstrated how much USAID and its contractors depended on the same Ivy
League talent pool that produced Buttigieg and Myers.
A lengthy paper Myers authored for the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in 2015 indicated that he had special knowledge of the ZunZuneo scheme
and had been invested in its success.
Myers took the journalists who exposed the USAID-OTI program to task,
claiming that individual grants were pulled out of context and described as
failures without heed to their actual goals, provoking an unfair Capitol
Hill pillorying.
He lamented that the exposure of covert programs like these had forced USAID
officials to pursue the opposite of the programming most likely to produce
real impact in a hard aid environment. In other words, fear of public
scrutiny had complicated efforts to subvert societies targeted by the US for
regime change and he didnt like it one bit.
To Syracuse University professor of African American studies Horace
Campbell, youthful cadres like Myers were a symptom of the American
universitys transformation into a neoliberal training ground.
Many idealistic graduates from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of
Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs at Princeton University among others had been seduced into careers
with USAID contractors like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey,
Campbell lamented in a lengthy 2014 survey of the OTIs sordid record.
It has been painful, the professor wrote, to see the ways in which the so
called NGO initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to
support neoliberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students.
Campbells comments painted a clear portrait of Myers, who earned his
masters degree at Princetons Woodrow Wilson School on his way towards
becoming a hard aid specialist at USAID.
They also captured the psychology of Buttigieg, who celebrated Bernie
Sanders as a hero when he was a high school senior, and spoke out against
the Iraq war as a Harvard junior before being absorbed into the culture of
McKinsey and DC institutions like the Truman Center.
The Truman show
When Pete Buttigieg made his journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just
earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that
provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to
leadership positions in the Democratic Party.
Buttigieg likely earned the fellowship after answering an ad like the one
the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student
Government in 2010. Soliciting applicants for its security fellowship, the
center declared that it was seeking exceptionally accomplished and
dedicated men and women who share President Trumans belief in muscular
internationalism, and who believe that strong national security and strong
liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin.
This was not the first time Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washingtons
national security swamp. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at the
Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense
William Cohen that maintained an extensive client list within the arms
industry. (As The Grayzone reported, the Cohen Group has been intimately
involved in the Trump administrations bungling regime change attempt in
Venezuela).
But it was Buttigiegs fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on
the casting couch before the Democratic Partys foreign policy mandarins.
Pete Buttigieg Truman Center
A Tablet Magazine profile of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld
described her as a gatekeeper and ringleader whose network of former
fellows spanned Congress and the Obama administrations National Security
Council. Her career trajectory mirrored Buttigiegs.
After last night, more proud than ever to support @PeteButtigieg for those
who missed it, a few reasons why: https://t.co/1XreWO5x15
Rachel Kleinfeld (@RachelKleinfeld) October 16, 2019
She had earned degrees at elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where
Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes scholarship) before accepting a job at a
private contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that performed an array of services
for the US military and private spying for intelligence agencies.
Kleinfelds boss at the company was James Woolsey, the neoconservative
former CIA director who has lobbied aggressively for US military assaults on
Iraq and Iran.
According to Tablet, Woolsey positioned Kleinfeld to work on sensitive
government projects the company was pursuing in the wake of the Sept. 11
attacks, including one that involved working as a researcher for the
militarys Defense Science Board, investigating information-sharing between
intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.
When Kleinfeld founded her think tank in 2005, she named it for the
president who oversaw the detonation of nuclear bombs on two Japanese
cities, threats of another nuclear assault on North Korea and the killing of
20 percent of that countrys population. The Truman doctrine, which called
for containing the Soviet Union through internal destabilization and
relentless pressure on its periphery, was the basis of Washingtons Cold War
policy. (Following Kleinfelds lead, Buttigieg named one of his two pet dogs
Truman).
We decided there really was a need to create a movement of Democrats to
stand up for these ideas and to really start to think about it, very much as
a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s, she told the Forward at
the time.
To fill the centers board of advisors, Kleinfeld assembled a cast of
Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose accomplishments included the
devastation of entire countries through regime change wars.
Among the most notable Truman advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author
of NATOs destruction of Yugoslavia and president of an influence-peddling
operation known as the Albright Stonebridge Group; the late Council on
Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once proposed dividing Iraq into
three federal districts along sectarian lines; former Department of Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversaw record levels of migrant
deportations; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department Policy
Planning Director who conceived the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine
deployed by the Obama administration to justify NATOs disastrous
intervention in Libya and drum up another one against Syria.
The Truman Project mobilizes Democrats who serve the conventional
interventionist agenda, journalist Kelly Vlahos wrote. Beyond that, they
are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on the other
side of the aisle.
Buttigieg listed his fellowship at the Truman Center as one of the
credentials that qualified him for Indiana State Treasurer when he ran for
the position in 2010.
Though he lost in a landslide, Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend
the following year. Mayor Pete had not only secured his future in the
Democratic Party, he had won a place in its foreign policy pantheon with a
seat on the Truman Centers advisory board.
Balancing opposition to endless wars with support for new ones?
This July 11, Buttigieg rolled out his foreign policy platform in a
carefully scripted appearance at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee
Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture on the House
Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to
end endless wars with Cold War bluster directed at designated enemies.
Before an auditorium packed with the national press, he rattled off one of
the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era, blaming President
Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the US. He then attacked Trump for
facilitating peace talks in Korea, slamming the president for exchanging
love letters with a brutal dictator, referring to North Korean leader
Kim Jong-Un.
You will not see me exchanging love letters on White House letterhead with a
brutal dictator who starves and murders his own people @PeteButtigieg
Rachel Kleinfeld (@RachelKleinfeld) June 11, 2019
More recently, Buttigiegs campaign pledged to balance our commitment to
end endless wars with the recognition that total isolationism is
self-defeating in the long run. This was the sort of Beltway doublespeak
that defined the legacy of Barack Obama, another youthful, self-styled
outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq war,
only to sign off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he entered
the White House.
On the presidential campaign trail, Mayor Pete has done his best to paper
over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national
security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies
are increasingly exposed. Having padded his resume in Americas longest and
most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to
fight.
