Google stopped Pentagon work after its engineers balked, but doesn’t blink when helping Communist China (a country that has killed tens of millions of its own citizens) censor or track dissidents.
McKinsey & Company, meanwhile, ceased its work with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in anger over ICE’s role in countering illegal immigration, explaining that it “will not, under any circumstances, engage in any work, anywhere in the world, that advances or assists policies that are at odds with our values.” Perhaps McKinsey might then explain which values attracted it to work in Saudi Arabia or to assist Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s dictatorial regime in Turkey. The imprisonment of more journalists than any other country on earth? Ethnic cleansing of Kurds in Afrin? Support for Islamist terrorist groups? The mercurial Erdogan ultimately turned on McKinsey in a fit of pique at Washington, but the consulting firm still walked away with the Turkish cash.
U.S. administrations come and go. While domestic and foreign policy remains broadly consistent across administrations, both pundits and press amplify differences and demonize opponents. Too often, the political base believes the rhetoric. Progressives believed George W. Bush or Mitt Romney were extremists or devils incarnate. Journalists labeled mainstream Republicans as “ultra-conservatives,” if not racists. To be fair, the same phenomenon manifested itself on the political right with regard to anti-Obama conspiracy theories.
Beyond political mudslinging, however, there is a crisis of confidence within America about what it means to be American. Revisionist historians seek to transform the United States from a beacon of freedom and democracy to a country responsible for all the world’s ills. Keith Ellison, the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, for example, last year told progressive activists that North Korean communist leader Kim Jong Un was a more responsible leader than President Trump.
Alas, young engineers and consultants living sheltered, insulated lives secure in prominent U.S. companies may believe such rhetoric. Not all have traveled outside Western liberal democracies and, when they do, it is usually in luxury. While it is easy to throw around terms like fascism, few have a visceral understanding of just what that means. When financially secure and free to opine, socialism may seem cool, never mind that it is an ideology which has contributed to the murder of almost 100 million people in the last century. Intersectionality is epistemological nonsense; in reality, it is just an excuse to embrace without consequence or thought the most illiberal ideas and causes.
Despite what partisan web outlets suggest, for example, there is no moral equivalence between the United States and Iran. Anyone never threatened by Iran’s purges, death squads, and mass repression may not realize that the progressive rhetoric and human rights rhetoric employed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif are simply cynical efforts to shape perceptions that contradict reality.
But what should policymakers do when moral and cultural equivalence has run amok and the employees of tech firms and consultancies would rather, whether because of naivete or ignorance, aid autocratic and murderous regimes than accept contracts from the U.S. government? What is the proper recourse?
Here, perhaps the 1996 Solomon Amendment can provide some direction: During the Vietnam War, many universities kicked ROTC chapters off campus and prohibited U.S. military and intelligence community recruitment on campus. Decades after the Vietnam War ended, such bans continued. Universities might rhetorically embrace a competition of ideas but, too often the progressivism at top universities like Yale, Harvard, and Stanford is an intolerant strain meant more to shield dominant campus narratives from challenge. The 1996 Solomon Amendment sought to compel an end to discrimination against the ROTC by enabling the Defense Department to deny grants to universities which engaged in such anti-military discrimination. This woke up even the most partisan university administrator, as they recognized what could happen if their universities lost tens of millions of grant dollars upon which so many departments had become dependent.
The parallels aren’t identical, but if American tech firms and consultancies would rather bolster dictatorships like China, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia while they simultaneously impose a political litmus test upon their U.S. work, then perhaps it is time for Congress and the federal government to create a new Solomon Amendment for the 21st century: To discriminate against the United States should mean an end to federal contracts and other government or taxpayer-funded revenue streams. Simply put, U.S. funds should never enable anti-Americanism at home or abroad, nor should there be no accountability when U.S. companies play politics with national security.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
