The Neoconservatives Have Declared War On The Realists

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

In recent years, I"ve increasingly suspected that when it comes to foreign policy, the realists offer some of the most sane observations. 

These suspicions were confirmed earlier this year when after the election of Donald Trump, John Mearsheimer, one of modern realism"s current standard bearers, wrote in The National Interest that Trump should "adopt a realist foreign policy" and outlines a far better foreign policy agenda that what we"ve seen coming from Washington. 

And what is this realist foreign policy? For Mearsheimer, some main tenets include:

• Accepting that the US attempt at nation building in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen "has been an abject failure."


• "Washington [should] respect the sovereignty of other states even when it disagrees with their internal policies."


• "Spreading democracy, especially by force, almost always fails."


• Understanding that "America’s terrorism problem ... is fueled in part by the U.S. military presence on Arab territory as well as the endless wars the United States has waged in the greater Middle East."


• "The Trump administration should let local powers deal with ISIS."


• Recognizing that Russia poses no real threat to the United States: "Even if Russia modernizes its economy and its population grows in the years ahead — big ifs — it will still be unable to project significant military power beyond eastern Europe."


• "A Syria run by Assad poses no threat to the United States"


• "The new president should also work to improve relations with Iran. "


• "Encourage the Europeans to take responsibility for their own security, while gradually reducing the remaining U.S. troops there."

Against Liberal Hegemony

There are some specific recommendations, but in a larger context, Mearsheimer is reflecting what has been building for years among realists led by Barry Posen, Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and Harvey Sapolsky, among others: an opposition to so-called "liberal hegemony" 

What is liberal hegemony? It"s ably summed up by William Ruger: 

Liberal hegemony is an activist grand strategy that aims to assertively maintain U.S. dominance and the “unipolar moment” in the service of liberalism and national security. Posen explains that it has been the reigning U.S. grand strategy since the end of the Cold War and remains the consensus view of the foreign-policy establishment of both major parties — of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike. Yet he believes it is “unnecessary, counterproductive, costly, and wasteful,” and ultimately “self-defeating.”

The movement against liberal hegemony was crystallized somewhat in 2014 when Posen published Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, which is a detailed condemnation of liberal hegemony, and instead suggests a policy of "restraint." Restraint, as the name implies, favors far less enthusiasm in using American military force on every political and societal problem in the world, and instead focusing on what constitutes an actual military threat to the US. The ideology of restraint assumes that peace is superior to war, and that constant foreign interventionism is unlikely to bring peace, stability, or justice.)">1

As Ruger notes, this opposition to the current foreign-policy zeitgeist in Washington centers largely around scholars within MIT"s political science program, and has few adherents among the top brass in the military or among politicians on Capitol Hill. 

The Neoconservatives Declare War 

Last week, Commentary magazine, a long-established mouthpiece for hard-line interventionist and neoconservative views issued a denunciation of these realists in a piece titled "Saving Realism from the So-Called Realists." 

For the authors, Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, today"s realists are a disaster: "Today’s most prominent self-identified realists — Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, Barry Posen, and Christopher Layne— advocate a thoroughgoing U.S. retrenchment from global affairs." Abandoning their traditional anti-populism, the authors go on to sneeringly denounce realism and restraint as "academic" and as "some of the most misguided doctrines of the ivory tower."

For interventionists, "retrenchment" is just another word for "isolationism," which of course is the great bogeyman of interventionist foreign policy. Realists have lost their way, we"re told, because they no longer support "forging a stable international order" by which the interventionists mean "non-stop intervention in every region on earth." 

For Brands and Feaver, what is really needed is a return to the good ol" days of "Cold-War realism" in which realists favored far greater level of interventionism in the name of countering the assumed Soviet threat. 

But even in the Cold War, many realists were far better than idealist Wilsonian regime-change advocates like President Lyndon Johnson. Realist George Kennan, for instance, denounced the Vietnam War and objected to viewing the war in terms of "fighting for freedom." 

But even among those realists who were gung ho on military intervention, many were wrong because they were laboring under a mountain of bad information about the Soviets and their economic system. As nearly all the policymakers of their day, the Cold War realists assumed — wrongly — that the communist world was an economic powerhouse, poised to overtake the US in terms of wealth and technology in the near future. They failed to read up on their Ludwig von Mises and understand that the socialist economy was doomed from the start, and would self-destruct from within. Instead, the old realist Cold Warriors accepted the CIA"s "intelligence" on the Soviet economy which vastly overstated the state of the Communist economies. 

At the same time, the Cold War realists were also influenced by hysterical ex-communists like Whittaker Chambers who published jeremiads about how the West was doomed because lazy Westerners could never compete against the communists who were not like ordinary humans. The communists — we were told — ate, slept, and breathed the idea of the communist revolution and would stop at nothing to impose their ideology on the rest of the world, even if it meant certain death for themselves. This then implied that nuclear deterrence would not work, and thus relentless intervention and foreign policy adventurism — such as that in Vietnam — was necessary to overwhelm the Soviet threat. 

Learning from the Past

Today, it may be that modern realists have learned from the mistakes of their grandparents. Contrary to claims that communists would happily throw their lives away in service to the party, it appears communists of old behaved like most everyone else. Many of them were too busy taking bribes and running black markets to busy themselves with taking over the world.  It"s now clear that authoritarian regimes — especially hard-core socialist ones — tend to undermine their own power with their backward economic systems. Experience suggests that nuclear deterrence has worked even with history"s most deranged dictators. It"s now clear that wars such as those in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan have done nothing to enhance the safety of Americans. 

So, it"s hard to fault the realists for learning something from history.

For the advocates of liberal hegemony, on the other hand, there"s nothing to be learned, and it"s heresy to suggest that decades of non-stop American interventionism has not been a success. For them, all this talk of "restraint" is just the ramblings of the "ivory tower."  Instead, we must recover the fervor of the Cold War, listen to the generals, and plan for a third war, a fourth war, and more. No place on earth ought to be considered beyond the reach of American politicians. 

After all, bad things happen in the world, so the US must be forever ready for new invasions, for nation building, and for "humanitarian" efforts, no matter what side effects and opportunity costs these actions may bring. In his essay "Invade the World" Murray Rothbard mocked these ideas — which at the time were gaining currency in the wake of the Cold War. He concluded: 

We must face the fact that there is not a single country in the world that measures up to the lofty moral and social standards that are the hallmark of the U.S.A.: even Canada is delinquent and deserves a whiff of grape. There is not a single country in the world which, like the U.S., reeks of democracy and "human rights," and is free of crime and murder and hate thoughts and undemocratic deeds. Very few other countries are as Politically Correct as the U.S., or have the wit to impose a massively statist program in the name of "freedom," "free trade," "multiculturalism," and "expanding democracy."

And so, since no other countries shape up to U.S. standards in a world of Sole Superpower they must be severely chastised by the U.S., I make a Modest Proposal for the only possible consistent and coherent foreign policy: the U.S. must, very soon, Invade the Entire World! Sanctions are peanuts; we must invade every country in the world, perhaps softening them up beforehand with a wonderful high-tech missile bombing show courtesy of CNN.

Liberal Hegemony: A Program for Global Central Planning 

Fundamentally, the ideology of liberal hegemony is the ideology of total global political centralization. A global system of multiple sovereign states  — a situation far preferable to a single world state — is to be tolerated only in name. For the advocates of liberal hegemony, the de facto world order ought to be one in which a single government — the US government — is entitled to intervene anywhere in the world that it doesn"t like the local regime or doesn"t approve of another state"s internal policies. 

The realists, to their credit, understand that there are limits to this view of the world; that perhaps a single global hegemon is not, in fact, a recipe for an enduring world order. Moreover, the long-term cost of these efforts may prove crippling for US taxpayers both in terms of money and in terms of domestic freedoms.

While far from perfect, the realists have put up some barriers to the US"s non-stop drive to "invade the world." Needless to say, Commentary magazine and its friends in Washington would rather these realists all go away.  

Details Of Steve Bannon's "Closed To The Press" China Speech Leak

Earlier this morning former White House Strategist Steve Bannon spoke at the CLSA investor forum in Hong Kong.  While the event was originally intended to be open to the press via a live stream, CLSA officials later closed the interview to outsiders...presumably Bannon"s flare doesn"t quite fit with China"s desire to control media narratives. That said, luckily one local NEAsia correspondent, Wei Du, was kind enough to live tweet portions of Bannon"s speech for our reading pleasure.

Ironically, what was billed to be an "anti-China" speech turned out to be anything but that with Bannon repeatedly praising U.S.-China relations and saying "there isn"t a world leader he (Trump) respects more than the President of China."  Bannon went on to say that Trump will visit China in November and that the downside of an "economic war" with China is so huge that it has to be worked out.

On domestic issues, Bannon thinks a tax reform deal is pretty unlikely this year and that Paul Ryan"s border tax adjustment has "ZERO chance of passing."  Of course, we can only assume that no tax deal in 2017 is a positive for stocks because it must mean that more time will allow for an even greater tax bill in 2018. 

That said, Bannon would apparently prefer that Trump avoid "working with dems."

On "America First," Bannon said there is a "big misunderstanding" that the term implies isolationism when it was really intended to mean that the Trump administration will pursue bilateral deals as opposed large, multi-nation accords where American sovereignty is sacrificed.

On future plans, Bannon said that he left the White House because Trump needed a "wing man" on the outside and that he has plans to expand Breitbart News internationally. 

Finally, apparently Bannon is not a "yuge" fan of Google and/or Facebook...

Does Kim Jong-Un's Strategy Make Sense?

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

"Looking at the recent North Korean testing of two intercontinental missiles, it may seem that Pyongyang wishes to increase tensions in the region. A more careful analysis, however, shows how the DPRK is implementing a strategy that will likely succeed in averting a disastrous war on the peninsula."

In the last four weeks, North Korea seems to have implemented the second phase of its strategy against South Korea, China and the United States. The North Korean nuclear program seems to have reached an important juncture, with two tests carried out at the beginning and end of July. Both missiles seem capable of hitting the American mainland, although doubts still remain over Pyongyang"s ability to miniaturize a nuclear warhead to mount it on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). However, the direction in which North Korea’s nuclear program is headed ensures an important regional deterrent against Japan and South Korea, and in some respects against the United States, which is the main reason for North Korea’s development of ICBMs. Recent history has repeatedly demonstrated the folly of trusting the West (the fate of Gaddafi remains fresh in our minds) and suggests instead the building up of an arsenal that poses a serious deterrence to US bellicosity.

It is not a mystery that from 2009 to date, North Korea"s nuclear capacity has increased in direct proportion to the level of distrust visited on Pyongyang by the West. Since 2009, the six-party talks concluded, Kim Jong-un has come to realize that the continuing threats, practices, and arms sales of the United States to Japan and South Korea needed to be thwarted in some way in the interests of defending the sovereignty of the DPRK. Faced with infinitely lower spending capacity than the three nations mentioned, Pyongyang chose a twofold strategy: to pursue nuclear weapons as an explicit deterrence measure; and to strengthen its conventional forces, keeping in mind that Seoul is only a stone’s throw away from North Korean artillery.

This twofold strategy has, in little more than eight years, greatly strengthened the ability of the DPRK to resist infringement of its sovereignty. In contrast to the idea commonly promoted in the Western media, Pyongyang has promised not to use nuclear weapons first, reserving their use only in response to aggression against itself. In the same way, a pre-emptive attack on Seoul using traditional artillery would be seen as intolerable aggression, dragging Pyongyang into a devastating war. Kim Jong-un’s determination in developing conventional and nuclear deterrence has succeeded in establishing a balance of power that helps avoid a regional war and, in so doing, contributes to the strengthening of overall security in the region, contrary to what many believe.

The reason the United States continues to raise tensions with Pyongyang and threaten a conflict is not out of a concern for the protection of her Japanese or South Korean allies, as one may initially be led to think. The United States in the region has a central objective that does not concern Kim Jong-un or his nuclear weapons. Rather, it is driven by the perennial necessity to increase forces in the region for the purposes of maintaining a balance of military force (Asian Pivot) and ultimately trying to contain the rise of the People"s Republic of China (PRC). One might even argue that this strategy poses dangers not only to the entire region but, in the case of a confrontation between Washington and Beijing, the entire planet, given the nuclear arsenal possessed by the United States and the People"s Republic of China.

In this respect, the triangular relationship between China, North Korea and South Korea takes on another aspect. As always, every action is accompanied with a reaction. The statement that Beijing would prefer to get rid of the DPRK leadership is without foundation. Central in the minds of Chinese policy makers is the threat of a US containment that could undermine the country"s economic growth. This strategic planning is well known in Pyongyang, and explains in part why the DPRK leadership still proceeds with actions that are not viewed well by Beijing. From the North Korean point of view, Beijing derives an advantage from sharing a border with the DPRK, which offers a friendly leadership not hostile to Beijing. Pyongyang is aware of the economic, political, and military burden of this situation, but tolerates it, receiving the necessary resources from Beijing to survive and develop the country.

This complex relationship leads the DPRK to carry out missile tests in the hope of gaining many benefits. First of all, it hopes to gain a regional, and possibly a global, deterrence against any surprise attacks. Secondly, it forces South Korea to have a symmetrical response to DPRK missile tests, and this strategy, coming from North Korea diplomacy, is far from improvised or incongruous. In recent years, South Korea’s response has come in the form of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, designed to intercept missiles. As repeatedly explained, it is useless against North Korean rockets, but poses a serious threat to the Chinese nuclear arsenal, as its powerful radars are able to scout much of China"s territory, also being ideally positioned to intercept (at least in theory) a responsive nuclear strike from China. In a nutshell, THAAD is a deadly threat to China"s strategic nuclear parity.

From the point of view of the four nations involved in the region, each has different aims.

For the United States, there are many advantages in deploying the THAAD: in increases pressure on China, as well as concludes an arms sale that is always welcomed by the military-industrial complex; it also gives the impression of addressing the DPRK nuclear problem adequately.

South Korea, however, finds itself in a special situation, with the former president now under arrest for corruption. The new president, Moon Jae-in, would prefer dialogue rather than the deployment of new THAAD batteries. In any case, after the latest ICBM test, Moon required an additional THAAD system in the Republic of Korea, in addition to the launchers already there. With no particular options available to conduct a diplomatic negotiation, Seoul is following Washington in a spiral of escalation that certainly does not benefit the peninsula"s economic growth.

Ultimately, the PRC sees an increase in the number of THAAD carriers close to the country, and the DPRK is growing in its determination to pursue a nuclear deterrent.

Indeed, the strategy of the Pyongyang is working: on the one hand, they are developing a nuclear weapon to deter external enemies; on the other, they are obligating the PRC to adopt a particularly hostile attitude towards South Korea’s deployment of THAAD. In this sense, the numerous economic actions of Beijing towards Seoul can be explained as a response to the deployment of the THAAD batteries. China is the main economic partner of South Korea, and this trade and tourism limitation is quite damaging to South Korea’s economy.

This tactic has been used by North Korea for the last several years, and the results, in addition to the recent economic crunch between the PRC and South Korea have indirectly led to the end of the reign of the corrupt leader Park Geun-hye, an ever-present puppet in American hands. The pressure that the DPRK applies to bilateral relations between China and South Korea increases with each launch of an ICBM carrier, which is the logic behind these missile tests. Pyongyang feels justified in urging its main ally, China, to step up actions against Seoul to force it to compromise in a diplomatic negotiation with Pyongyang without the overbearing presence of its American ally pushing for war.

The main problem in the relations between South Korea, China and North Korea is represented by American influence and the need to prevent a rapprochement between these parties. As already stated, the United States needs the DPRK to justify its presence in the region, aiming in reality at Chinese containment. Pyongyang has been isolated and sanctioned for almost 50 years, yet serves to secure China’s southern border in the form of a protected friend rather than an enemy. This situation, more than any United Nations sanction to which the PRC adheres, guarantees a lasting relationship between the countries. Beijing is well aware of the weight of isolationism and economic burden on North Korea, which is why Beijing is symmetrically increasing pressure on South Korea to negotiate.

In this situation, the United States tries to remain relevant in the regional dispute, while not having the capacity to influence the Chinese decisions that clearly rely on other tactics, specifically putting pressure on South Korea. In military terms, as explained above, Washington can not start any military confrontation against the DPRK. The consequences, in addition to millions of deaths, would lead Seoul to break relations with Washington and seek an immediate armistice, cutting off the United States from negotiations and likely expelling US troops from its territory. Ultimately, there is no South Korean ability to influence the political process in the North while they continue to be flanked by the United States in terms of warfare (very aggressive joint exercises). The influence Washington can exert on Pyongyang is zero, having fired all cartridges with over half a century of sanctions.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that the United States cannot afford to attack the DPRK. Pyongyang will continue to develop its own nuclear arsenal, with Beijing"s covert blessing in spite of its officially continuing to condemn these developments. At the same time, South Korea is likely to persevere with a hostile attitude, especially in regard to the deployment of new THAAD batteries. Sooner or later, Seoul will come to a breaking point as a result of further restrictions on trade between China and South Korea. As long as Seoul is able to absorb Chinese sanctions, little will change.

What will lead to a major change in the region will be the economic effect of these restrictions that will eventually oblige Seoul to consider its role in the region and its future. Seoul"s leadership is aware of three situations that will hardly change, namely: Pyongyang will never attack first; Beijing will continue to support North Korea rather than accept the United States on its border; and Washington is not able to bring solutions but only greater chaos and a worsening global economic situation to the region. In the light of this scenario, time is all on the side of Beijing and Pyongyang. Eventually the economic situation for Seoul will become unbearable, bringing it to the negotiating table with a weakened and certainly precarious position. Beijing and Pyongyang have a long-term common goal, which is to break the bond of submission between South Korea and the United States, freeing Seoul from Washington"s neo-conservative programs to contain China (on a Russia containment model).

Indirectly coordinated work between Beijing and Pyongyang is hardly understandable to Western analysts, but examining every aspect, especially with regard to cause-and-effect relationships, these decisions are not so incomprehensible and even more rational in a broader viewing of the region and its balance of power. On the one hand, Seoul sees the DPRK offering peace, stability and prosperity based on a framework agreement between Seoul, Pyongyang and Beijing. This would also particularly benefit South Korean trade with China, eventually returning to normal relationships between countries, with important economic benefits.

The alternative is an alliance with Washington that would completely eliminate the economic benefits of a healthy relationship with Beijing. This could even potentially lead to a war involving millions of deaths, fought on South Korean soil and not in the United States. The United States does not offer any solutions to South Korea, either in the short or long term. The only thing Washington is offering is a fixed presence in the country, together with a stubborn anti-Chinese policy that would have serious economic consequences for Seoul.

As paradoxical as it may seem, Kim Jong-un"s rockets are much less of a threat than is Seoul’s partnership with Washington in the region, and in fact seem to offer Seoul the ultimate solution to the crisis in the peninsula.

Trump: America For The Americans!

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

As the patriotic pageantry of Inauguration Day gave way to the demonstrations of defiance Saturday, our new America came into view. We are two nations now, two peoples.

Though bracing, President Trump’s inaugural address was rooted in cold truths, as he dispensed with the customary idealism of inaugurals that are forgotten within a fortnight of the president being sworn in.

Trump’s inaugural was Jacksonian.

He was speaking to and for the forgotten Americans whose hopes he embodies, pledging to be their champion against those who abandon them in pursuit of higher, grander, nobler causes. Declared Trump:

“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed.”

Is this not true? American wages have stagnated as scores of thousands of factories were shut down or shipped abroad. Five of the six wealthiest counties in the U.S. today, measured by median household income, are the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Inaugurals should lift us up, wailed the media, this was “dark.”

And Trump did paint a grim picture — of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash but which leaves our … students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime and the gangs and the drugs…”

But is this not also a reality of America 2017?

Indeed, it carries echoes of FDR’s second inaugural: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. … The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Some of the recoil to Trump’s speech is surely traceable to an awareness by those covering and commenting upon it — that this was a searing indictment of them and their own ruling class.

With America’s political elite sitting behind him, Trump accused them of enriching “foreign industry,” not ours, of subsidizing other countries’ armies but neglecting our own, of defending other nation’s borders while leaving America’s borders unprotected.

Then, in the line that will give his address its name in history, he declared: “From this day forward it’s going to be only America First.”

Prediction: Trump’s “America First” inaugural will be recalled as the most controversial, but will be among the most remembered.

What did Trump mean by “America First”?

“Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

What does it mean for the world?

“We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of other nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example. We will shine for everyone to follow.”

Denounced as isolationism, this is in an old and great tradition.

Ronald Reagan talked of America being a “shining city on a hill” for other nations to emulate.

John Quincy Adams declared:

“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled there will America’s hearts, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

When the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth came to America seeking aid for the revolution of 1848, Henry Clay told him:

“Far better is it for ourselves, for Hungary, and for the cause of liberty, that … avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on the western shore, as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction among the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe.”

The charge of “isolationist” was thrown in the face of Clay. But he prevailed, and America stayed out of Europe’s wars until 1917 when Woodrow Wilson, fatefully, plunged us in.

In 1936, FDR said, “We shun political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars. … We are not isolationists except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war. … I hate war.”

What Trump was saying in his inaugural is that we will offer our free and independent republic as an example to other nations, but it is not our providential mission to reshape the world in our own image.

“We will reinforce old alliances” that are in our interests, Trump declared. But we are approaching the end of an era where we fought other nations’ wars and paid other nations’ bills.

We will no longer bleed and bankrupt our country for the benefit of others. Henceforth, America will be of, by, and for Americans.

Is that not what the nation voted for?

Professors Pledge To "Use Regular Class Time" To Protest Trump

A national “teach-in” movement is asking professors to set aside class time between Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the presidential inauguration to “protest” oppression and challenge “Trumpism.”

As CampusReform"s Anthony Gockowski reports, so far, 17 American colleges and universities have signed on to participate in the campaign originating out of UCLA, including such prestigious institutions as Princeton and UC-Berkeley.

The movement, known as “Teach, Organize, Resist,” is set to kick-off on January 18, strategically “poised between Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the presidential inauguration” as an explicit means of “challenging Trumpism.”

“Transform your classrooms and commons into spaces of education that protest policies of violence, disenfranchisement, segregation, and isolationism,” the organizers urge educators on the movement’s homepage, clarifying elsewhere on the site that participation “is an opportunity to affirm the role of critical thinking and academic knowledge in challenging Trumpism.”

“On that day, we intend to teach about the agendas and policies of the new administration, be it the proposed dismantling of economic and environmental regulations or the threatened rollback of the hard-won rights that form the fragile scaffolding of American democracy,” a description for the teach-in explains, later accusing Trump of institutionalizing “white supremacy” and allegedly proposing the “expansion of state violence targeting people of color” and other marginalized groups.

“On that day, we intend to organize against the proposed expansion of state violence targeting people of color, undocumented people, queer communities, women, Muslims, and many others,” the description continues.

“On that day, we intend to resist the institutionalization of ideologies of separation and subordination, including white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, and virulent nationalism.”

The movement, which has been spreading on social media under the hashtag “J18,” was started by “departments, centers, and collectives at UCLA,” but has since amassed the support of 18 other institutions, many of them public.

Professors at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for instance, are asking “all UCSB faculty to actively support” the teach-in, even suggesting that they “insert a note” about it in syllabi or “use your regular class time to attend a panel with your students.”

Those professors who elect not to require their students to attend the events, however, are still asked to “not penalize students for a missed class if they intend to attend panels.”

Scripps College, on the other hand, will be hosting a teach-in on “conservatism and right wing movements,” which will discuss Republican “strategies and tactics of mobilizing support, producing consent, and fragmenting opposition” in order to “help fellow students understand our present political moment.”

Other prestigious institutions, including Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, are also among the 17 American institutions participating (two others are foreign, and another is the American Anthropological Association). All told, nine of the participating schools are public, and a total of 46 teach-ins are currently scheduled to take place.

“Let it be known that on #J18 and beyond, universities, colleges, and high schools refused to bear silent witness to the politics of hate and fear; that in these times, these places of teaching and learning not only served as a sanctuary for its students and workers but also stood up to proclaim the power of knowledge on the frontlines of social justice,” the organizers declare optimistically.