The Silence of the Rational Center; Why American Foreign Policy is Failing

vii, [1], 312 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Ink notes and underlining. Stefan Halper has been accused of being the FBI informant or "mole" communicating with Donald Trump aides. Stefan A. Halper (born June 4, 1944) is an American foreign policy scholar and Senior Fellow at the University of Cambridge where he is a Life Fellow at Magdalene College and directs the Department of Politics and International Studies. He served as a White House official in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, and was reportedly in charge of the CIA spying operation by the 1980 Ronald Reagan presidential campaign that became known as "Debategate". Halper had through his decades of work for the CIA extensive ties to the Bush family. Through his work with Sir Richard Billing Dearlove he had ties to the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6. Halper assisted the FBI with its early investigation into foreign meddling in the 2016 presidential election and Russian contact and alleged collusion with the Trump campaign. n a 2007 book, The Silence of the Rational Center, Halper analyzed "institutional failures" in United States policy-making: "Three times since World War II, Big Ideas have seized the political discourse and driven policy experts to the sidelines: during the Red Scare of the early Cold War; during the entry to the Vietnam War; and at the onset of the Iraq War. Each time, framing concepts rooted in Big Ideas turned complex foreign policy challenges into apocalyptic threats to the nation's very existence. Professionals and experts were excluded from the debate if they diverged from the patriotic consensus, and the mainstream institutions and publications that could have opposed the rush to simplification were either silent or instead provided an echo for the dominant narrative." Russian Berlin-based journalist Leonid Bershidsky wrote in May 2018, that "the Trump-Russia scandal born of this operation [FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign] could be added to The Silence of the Rational Center as a fourth institutional failure.".…