ANALYSIS/OPINION:

We’ve written a great deal about the long and unhappy history of U.S. Ambassador David Lu’s tenure in Albania, where he proved to be a major champion of the George Soros/Open Society Foundations agenda of liberal immigration policies, weak borders, gay rights, legalization of drugs, and all the other left-wing, nanny-state policies — with disastrous results for the rule of law.

If you enjoy the lack of a functioning constitutional court and the prospect of oligarchs running wild with the country’s budget, then you will love what is happening in Tirana. The latest crisis, where critics charge the Rama government is about to demolish hundreds of citizen’s homes with no compensation, is just one more example of the kind of coercive socialism that such an agenda breeds.

Mr. Soros and his acolytes have also long been active in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan. The recent confirmation of Mr. Lu as U.S. ambassador to Bishkek, fresh from his tour in Tirana, raises fears that yet another country struggling to recover from the hangover of Soviet misrule is about to be prescribed precisely the wrong policy medicine.

With the closure of the Soros-backed Central European University’s programs in Budapest, Open Society adherents now seem poised to turn to a similar institution, the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek, as a replacement. There has long been concern over the agenda behind this institution and whether it would become another factory for liberal NGO employees, looking to install a misguided, “globalist” regime. Now it seems that that fear is becoming a reality.

We recently met with a senior U.S. government source who confirmed that Mr. Lu has privately said that is precisely the plan. Mr. Lu apparently intends to redirect U.S. aid money in Kyrgyzstan away from counterterrorism and toward building civil society, free media, democratic mobilization, and rule-of-law projects — code words for the kind of government and NGO network Mr. Soros has long promoted.

The Kyrgyz university will be an in-country bastion of political correctness, bent on bringing down any government it doesn’t like and installing one it can control. If you want to understand the headache that brings, just ask Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The long-term goal is to turn Kyrgyzstan into another nirvana where Western liberal armies can run amok, undermining both Kyrgyz culture and Kyrgyz security, as happened across Western Europe, by promoting open borders, increasing government control and a silencing of any voices that challenge politically correct causes.

AUCA has closely hewed to the CEU model. The Soros organization donates the seed money to establish and finance the school, then the U.S. government picks up the rest of the tab through USAID funding. Since the State Department and other government bureaucracies are heavily invested in the same agenda — and deeply skeptical of President Trump’s “America first” foreign policy — it is no problem for the funding to be pushed through. The university then produces legions of “right-thinking” graduates, who get jobs in private aid and advocacy groups or in key U.S. government posts. The cycle repeats itself over and over again.

U.S. aid dollars are supposed to be spent in support of American foreign policy. But particularly since the American people elected Donald Trump, that has definitely not been the case.

Why is this happening? Conservatives and just plain interested Americans would love to know. The co-opting of American government agencies by private citizens and organizations with their own (liberal) agenda is a massive problem that the administration and Congress need to address.

The appointment of a George Soros acolyte like Mr. Lu to a vulnerable Central Asian nation is simply hard to understand. The people charged with implementing our foreign policy should not be cheerleaders for one of the most destructive forces in the world today — the Soros brand and agenda.

It’s time for the Trump administration to step up its game in getting its own people — and its own policies — in place in critical embassies around the world.

⦁ L. Todd Wood is a former special operations helicopter pilot and Wall Street debt trader, and has contributed to Fox Business, The Moscow Times, National Review, the New York Post and many other publications. He can be reached through his website, LToddWood.com.

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