By Sue Greenwald
“We need to use our strengths. That’s intelligence and that’s projecting kinetic force all across the world to accomplish our military objectives.” — Eric Jones
“We should be seeking always to mitigate nuclear risk from Iran. But we can do this with tactical strikes every 3 months, every 6 months.” — Eric Jones
So Eric Jones was supposed to be a progressive, but his website said nothing at all about foreign policy, Gaza or the Iran War, or about universal health care. This was my first impression of Eric Jones. After digging a little, I found that Jones was a wealthy venture capitalist with absolutely no political background. No elected office, no appointed position, no activist history – not even a letter to the editor. He had stepped down from his partnership in Dragoneer Investments only a month before he started to run. His long-term partners and a spouse at Dragoneer had set up a Super PAC five months before Jones left the firm to run for office. That Super PAC now weighs in at $6 million. I learned that this firm, Dragoneer Investments, had been a big investor in Israeli tech, and had recently moved heavily into AI, with massive investments in Anthropic and Open AI, and into defense industries with major investments in SpaceX and Helsing. And Jones had 756 entries on his FEC filings of individual donations of $3,500 or more – mostly from a network of partners and top executives at high tech companies and their venture capital, hedge fund, and private equity financiers from the tech and financial hubs across the country.
As the weeks and months rolled by, the platform on Eric Jones’ website started to shift, twist, and turn. He soon became opposed to “unnecessary wars”. He was in favor of building AI data centers “here and not abroad”, pre-empting states’ rights to regulate AI, and federal subsidies for AI and AI infrastructure. Then he had “always been against data centers”.
I was concerned about Jones’ foreign policy position, given his public reticence and given the interests of his donors, so I looked forward to the first debate between Jones and Mike Thompson. I wanted to see what Jones would have to say in public, where his donors could hear it.
Eric Jones has finally come out with a specific foreign policy statement, and it’s chilling. During the KCRA debate, Eric Jones declared:
“What we need is an end to this war. The goal is to protect Americans and we should be seeking always to mitigate nuclear risk from Iran. But we can do this with tactical strikes every 3 months, every 6 months – we don’t need boots on the ground. We need to use our strengths. That’s intelligence and that’s projecting kinetic force all across the world to accomplish our military objectives.”
Let’s break down this statement:
- We can bomb Iran every 3 months, every 6 months.
- We need to use our military and intelligence strengths.
- We should project kinetic force all across the world to accomplish our military objectives.
Let’s look at point 1): “We can bomb Iran every 3 months, every 6 months”.
This is a neocon position, with major support in the Trump administration. It’s often referred to as “mowing the lawn”. As Gemini summarizes: “ The “mowing the lawn” approach to Iran is a military strategy focused on conducting periodic, limited tactical strikes to degrade Tehran’s military, nuclear, and regional capabilities without seeking a definitive regime change or an outright political solution. Originally an Israeli doctrine developed to manage non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah, the concept has gained significant traction regarding Iran.” Who subscribes to this “mowing the lawn” strategy towards Iran? Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have backed this CENTCOM-developed plan for dealing with Iran, using this “mow the lawn” logic, and “analysts observe that Israel has adapted this exact logic to Iran, prioritizing continuous deterrence and containment via air campaigns over costly or impractical attempts at forced regime change”. (Gemini literature summary).
Eric Jones glosses over the contradiction between his neocon/Trump administration-style policy suggestion and his general stated desire to “end the war”. Does he not understand that Iran would respond to being bombed? Does he not understand how escalatory repeated bombing of Iran would be? Does Jones not understand the weirdness of a purported “progressive” fear-mongering about a supposed direct threat to the United States of an Iranian nuclear program?
Now let’s turn to points 2) and 3): “We need to use our [military] strengths; that’s projecting kinetic force around the globe.” Needless to say, this is a full-out neocon declaration. Out of one side of Jones’ mouth, he declares the need to “say no to endless” war, and out of the other side of his mouth he says we should project “kinetic force all across the world to accomplish our military objectives.”
Let me repeat that. Jones says we should use our military strengths to project “kinetic force” all across the world to accomplish our military objectives. This is about as hawkish as you can get. This is exactly the nightmarish, militaristic, bullying, imperialistic U.S. foreign policy that progressives have been fighting. This is coming from Eric Jones, who has recently been claiming he will balance the budget by cutting defense spending.
Jones prefaced this scary neocon/Trumpian Iran doctrine with a few amateurish suggestions that are delivered with his characteristic supreme confidence but which reveal abysmal ignorance of foreign policy and military strategy.
Jones makes the genius suggestion that we solve the Straits of Hormuz problem by “working with the UAE. We should be working with our allies in the Middle East to develop alternative pathways and pipelines while we secure peace.” Of course, this is already being done to the extent possible, but experts have determined that it is not physically possible to carry enough oil through pipelines to bypass the Straits of Hormuz, and any such pipelines and their supporting infrastructure are static targets that can be destroyed during hostilities. And Jones strings together some words that I guess constitute another “original” policy suggestion: An “Arab peace keeping force”. He says: “We should be working with our allies in the Middle East to develop alternative pathways and pipeline while we secure peace. But it has to be an Arab peacekeeping force. We cannot be responsible solely for the Strait of Hormuz. It’s a total disaster.”
So essentially, Jones is saying that we should engage in repeated “tactical” bombings of Iran, which are guaranteed to escalate the war, but we can’t be solely responsible for the Strait of Hormuz, so somehow or other Arab countries are going to have to solve the mess with their own troops. But of course, no one has suggested this because none of the Arab countries with any incentive to get involved have the ability to stand up to the Iranians without massive involvement of the U.S., and this would be doubly true after the Iranians have been enraged by the repeated bombings that Jones has suggested.
Eric Jones has taken a lot of people “out for a cup of coffee” and given a lot of talks at Davis co-ops and local progressive groups, and has somehow or other convinced some local progressives that he is an anti-war candidate who will “say no to forever wars”, end the war in Iran, and end the genocide in Gaza. But what did he tell the two partners at Lux Capital, which is one of the largest investors in the Israeli defense industry, when they donated $14,000 to his campaign? This is why it didn’t surprise me that, when he was forced to get out in public where the entire electorate and his donors could hear him, we saw a very different side of Eric Jones, and it should scare the pants off of progressive voters.
You can hear Jones say this by going to the following link and scrolling down to the 3rd clip, on the Iran war. It’s at the end of the short clip:
https://www.kcra.com/article/congressional-district-4-debate-recap-mike-thompson-eric-jones/74070817
Sue Greenwald is a former councilmember and Mayor of the City of Davis.
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