Europeans Claim a Cato Scalp, and the Freedom of the Starving Wolf

Ted Galen Carpenter was fired by Cato after 37 years

As some readers likely already know, Ted Galen Carpenter, a very very very longtime Cato Institute foreign policy scholar who has written many books and hundreds upon hundreds of articles during his 37 years there, was recently fired by Cato.

I was blindsided by this, and the entire situation has me in a rather sad/foul mood.

This is what happened, as far as I have been able to piece it together, and then I discuss some reflections on my own career.

Foreign Meddling

Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, European libertarians were gunning for both Carpenter and Doug Bandow, longtime Cato foreign policy scholars who have fought the long and often lonely fight against America’s horrible foreign policy for decades.

At the beginning of February, 2022, an open letter was published that basically called for Cato to muzzle Carpenter and Bandow. The letter, argued that they were wrong about certain things regarding the history of NATO expansion, the state of Ukraine as a liberal democracy, and accused them of basically being Putin’s stooges.

I think the entire letter is garbage, but I am not opposed to people disagreeing over issues. But the point of the letter wasn’t to engage in scholarly debate, it was to silence opponents. This is bad enough when it comes from Americans, but it reaches another degree of obscenity when it is done by foreigners attempting to silence Americans who are discussing _American_ national interest. The only single American who signed that letter was Alexander McCobin, the former head of Students for Liberty. (As an aside, I was sad to see McCobin sign this letter, and also a bit surprised, because when I organized the Charles Koch Institute’s top level sponsorship of the 2016 International Students for Liberty Conference, we brought John Mearsheimer, the father of offensive realism and longtime critic of Western policy towards Ukraine and Russia, to speak, and McCobin rushed into the session before it started to meet Mearsheimer and have him sign one of the copies of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics we had brought to give away.)

I was very annoyed when this letter came out, but I had thought that it must not have had much effect, because Carpenter and Bandow kept writing about the war.

If you work in the libertarian foreign policy space, then it is simply a well known fact that European libertarians are generally not our friends when it comes to this issue area. They may try and sugar coat it in all manner of rationalizations, but the reality is that in general European libertarians shut off the part of the brain that deals with criticizing rent seeking when it comes to America’s role subsidizing the defense of Europe.

The first “real'“ article I ever had published was in The National Interest in 2016, where I argued that allowing Montenegro to join NATO was not in America’s national interest because it (and its 2,000 active military personnel) would in no way contribute to American security. Even back then, some Euro libertarians got big mad that I had dared to argue that American foreign policy should be focused on American national interest.

Among the myriad of reasons why global American empire is a bad deal for Americans, one of the least discussed is how it leads to a multi-million dollar foreign lobbying industry to persuade American politicians and policy makers to sell out our interests for the sake of filthy foreign lucre. (Ben Freeman at Quincy is one of the top people to follow for more on this.)

Carpenter Ousted

I first learned that Carpenter had been fired when David Henderson posted on FB that he would miss his work. I was stunned. At first, it was not clear what had happened, but more information quickly began to emerge. I inquired around about the context of his departure.

This is what Carpenter had said on his FB feed. I was not connected with him on FB at that time. However, we connected and had a very brief chat, where he relayed to me that even before the war both hawkish American and Eastern European donors had been raising trouble about his work, specifically in that he did not refrain from criticizing Ukraine as being hardly an liberal democracy, fledgling or otherwise. It was a very illiberal place even before the war began.

This is not a new area of study for Carpenter, by the way. He coauthored the 2015 book Perilous Partners that looks at numerous examples of the US working with horrible regimes, despite there not being any vital reasons related to American national interest to do so.

So to note here, I am not saying that Cato FP has gone soft on the war in Ukraine. Justin Logan et al have continued to criticize it, but what seems to be the difference is that Carpenter had the temerity to continually argue that the Ukrainian regime is hardly some angelic entity. (More on this self-censorship later)

Anyway, David Boaz, the executive VP of Cato, commented on my FB post and David Henderson’s post the following:

To which on both my and his own post David Henderson replied the following:

As of this writing, I am not aware of any official statement from Cato regarding Carpenter’s departure, so we mostly have one side of the story. But, if true, this is very disappointing behavior on Cato’s part.

Disappointing, but not Surprising

To fire someone who has been at your organization nearly since its founding, who has been fighting the good fight when it was even more lonely and bleak than it is now, in such a horrible way is pretty awful.

I understand Cato’s logic, not that I think it is justified. The people running Cato need to keep the ship afloat, and that requires funds. I am in full agreement with the sentiment that sometimes Paris is worth a Mass. However, for such Machiavellian dealings to remain useful, they must remain fixed on the furtherance of the true objective. What often happens is that the true objective ends up being supplanted by the objective of institutional continuity. It is understandable how this happens, because the thinking goes that the good fight can’t be carried on if there is no institution from which to battle, but if the institution begins to waver in its fight for the true objective, then it would have been better for it to have folded.

When things are going bad, it leads to perversities like this situation, and I suspect this will hurt Cato to some degree. As an institution I have lost further respect for it, and I suspect they will lose some donors as well. Will they have to rely even more on foreign money, and will this lead to further diluting of the FP department over time? That is yet to be seen.

What is the Lesson? Freedom and Tradeoffs

The above is admittedly some high altitude speculation about the institutional reasons that Carpenter was ignominiously tossed out like an old shoe (thankfully he was hired by the Libertarian Institute right away). But it does prompt some further reflection on the dangers and trade offs that come with institutional affiliation.

As readers likely know, I am a freelancer. I work for a number of different clients, and am not an employee of any of them. This has trade offs. Rather than being Zack, the researcher or the fellow at X, I am Zack the guy in his basement. However, I have ultimately accepted that I have to let my work speak for itself. I don’t have a title, but I have hundreds of thousands of words written over the past 7 or so years that provide the proof in the pudding, as it were. Ultimately, titles do not honor men, rather men honor titles.

This approach comes with trade offs. I have to pay the full payroll tax, I don’t have institutional resources backing me up (anyone want to be my unpaid intern?), I have to pay full freight for my health insurance etc. etc. There is also a bit of uncertainty and insecurity that comes with being a freelancer.

However, I think that to some degree, this insecurity is overstated in relation to having an actual W-2 job. If you can be tossed out like yesterday’s newspaper, are you really that secure? People are laid off from “regular” jobs all the time.

(That is not even to say that I would never accept W-2 employment, just that I would not hold any illusions about the situation.)

So, you really aren’t as secure as you might think, and I suspect there is some degree of mental blocking going on to make you think you are. And such an illusion of security is not without costs.

For a very long time I have read tweets and what not from various restraint-oriented people and have found myself wondering to what degree they are self-censoring. For one person I flat out know that is the case. Sometimes it is for strategic and prudential reasons, and other times simply because they have to bend the knee, or face Carpenter’s fate. I do not need to do that, at least for the latter reason.

I think back to a time when I was an actual W2 employee of an organization. When I was hired I was told that I would be free to continue to write under my own name without mentioning my organizational affiliation. Well, one day the ukase was issued that I had to have anything I was trying to get published, even though it was written on my own time outside of work, approved by the institution.

In hindsight, I should have quit on the spot, but I couldn’t because I needed to pay rent and eat. But it was a useful experience, because since then I have engineered my life so that I am never in that situation again.

I am now in a place where it would take multiple disasters of a Bronze Age Collapse proportion to deprive me of all my sources of income. But to get there, you have to be willing to walk away from things.

At one point I quit my job in DC and moved back to Pittsburgh and worked at a grocery store where customers left needles laying around after they shot up in the bathroom and crooks threatened to shoot the loss prevention officer. Someone using an alias to send a money order to prison screwed it up and stated that “Yost is going to get what’s coming to him” because he couldn’t get a refund due to not having an ID for the fake name he used. Staff were not allowed to conceal carry in the store, so the one girl who worked with me at the customer service desk kept a hammer under the counter. Fun times.

Quite a step down compared to schmoozing with foreign ambassadors at swanky annual dinners and talking with John Mearsheimer.

I won’t ever miss an opportunity to share these pics. One of the happiest nights of my life. Despite me being a dumb 22 year old, Mearsheimer talked to me like a peer. The most humble academic of high status I have ever met.

But in the end, through perseverance, serendipity, and no shortage of the intervention of divine providence I am now in a much better position.

Ultimately, as put by one of the greatest poets of the age, one can either have the peace of cattle and the prosperity of deception, or the freedom of the starving wolf.

But, the only way you can continue to have that freedom is a willingness to toss it all away and start flipping burgers, bagging groceries, or mowing lawns if need be. Though, hopefully with enough planning ahead of time, that won’t be necessary.

Your workplace is not loyal to you. They won’t hesitate to toss you aside when it suits them, whether you have been there 37 years or not. The ways in which so many people I personally know have been ill-used by “liberty-movement” orgs in DC just sickens me. You have to be on the look out for your own interests, because they certainly won’t be, no matter how much they talk about work being a family or community or any other such garbage.

Needless to say, such thinking has larger implications for society at large. No need to use the jackboot when everyone is blackmailed into silence due to a lack of independence. Self-sufficiency and tightly knit social groups, such as the extended family, are a great threat to the powers that be.

Freedom and Responsibility

With freedom comes responsibility. Anyone who knows me knows that I do not engage in performative feuding, doom mongering, click baiting, and inflammatory rhetoric just to gin up outrage and increase my profile, even though I suppose I could do so with few consequences given the nature of my work.

In a somewhat ironic twist, on the Big 5 personality scale I am on the very high end of agreeableness. I don’t like fights and confrontations, especially when they are pointless. I keep a lot of thoughts to myself, not out of a desire to self-censor, but out of a desire to avoid pointless fights and virtue signaling. I generally refrain from saying I think many people are full of $%^&, especially if we know each other to some degree, because it would be rude to do so. (The one major exception was when I worked at the grocery store and eventually turned into a bit of an angry goose, as one might say.)

As I said above, sometimes Paris is worth a Mass, and sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. I don’t like when people just turn into squawking talking heads lacking in all subtlety who accomplish nothing other than alienating people.

However, I have been increasingly thinking that the flip side of the duty to be responsible with this freedom in terms of not being a rhetorical bomb thrower and agitator, is the duty to also say things that are true that many other people also think is true, but are unable to say so.

I have not reached any definitive thoughts on what this means going forward, but will continue to think on it.

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