Uber-liberal billionaire George Soros infused “the bulk of his wealth” — $18 billion — into his activist charity arm Tuesday, making the philanthropic organization second only to Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation in U.S. assets and further extending and strengthening Soros’ tentacles worldwide.

It’s unclear what Soros’ group will use the billions of dollars toward. He recently posted on his Twitter page articles about the Open Society Foundations’ work in countries including Albania and Macedonia.

But the Hungarian-born heavyweight has spent years investing money to support fiercely liberal, partisan causes in the U.S. and throughout the world.

Soros, 87, has used his stash of money to place his stamp and influence on more than 100 organizations in more than 100 countries, spanning five continents. He’s pumped money into Planned Parenthood and the Black Lives Matter movement and contributed $1.4 million to help pass a California law that would make drug possession and minor theft charges misdemeanors. (Read more from “Soros Transfers Most of His Wealth Into Left-Wing Activist Open Society Initiatives” HERE)

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That nature abhors a vacuum is a cliché but also a postulate about the immutable laws of nature. And once again, we’re seeing the unchangeable rules of the physical world being replicated in human action—especially in foreign policy.

Exhibit A is Europe east of the Fulda Gap, where Obama appointees are still dictating American policy and a group of senators have had a testy exchange with the combative leader of Hungary.

To be clear, there is no power vacuum when it comes to hot spots like Afghanistan, North Korea, and Syria, where the Trump Defense Department has acted decisively. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has also personally handled the Russian front.

The world is vast, however, and Tillerson is only one man. The absence of assistant secretaries for Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Western Hemisphere has left these areas with a lack of direction.

The void will be filled by others.

Eleven senators (two Republicans and nine Democrats) on April 19 wrote a letter to Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, expressing their concern about a law they say aims to close Central European University, an accredited U.S. university in Budapest.

“Central European University has become one of the highest-ranked universities in Europe, bringing new opportunities and prestige to Hungarian citizens. … This legislation threatens academic freedom and disregards the longstanding relationship Central European University has with the Hungarian people,” wrote the senators.

What the group of senators—which included such powerful personalities as John McCain, R-Ariz., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.—didn’t mention is the nub of the problem: The university was founded and funded by the U.S. billionaire George Soros, a Hungarian-born hedge funder who uses his vast fortune to advocate progressive causes around the world.

Orban, in his response to the senators, did not mince words about Soros, whom he mentioned six times in a short, one-page letter.

“In our country, laws are passed by elected representatives, based on our constitution,” began the brush-back missive, which I have seen. After reassuring the senators that the Hungarian Constitution guarantees freedom of education and research, the prime minister added, “therefore, any assumption that presumes the breach of these principles by the Hungarian National Assembly is unreasonable.”

“I would like to reassure you that no one wants to close the University of George Soros,” he wrote, adding that “Soros’ network of Central European NGOs are at the heart” of what Orban referred to as an “international disinformation campaign against Hungary.”

“The university is just a pretense,” Orban added. “The real issue,” according to Orban, was Soros’ desire for Hungary to open its borders to immigrants. Hungary, Orban wrote, would soon draw up legislation mirrored on the United States’ Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires agents representing the interests of foreign governments in a “political or quasi-political capacity” disclose this link.

Universities, especially foreign ones, are heavily regulated around the world, and liberals have never shied away from regulating schools, especially religious ones. At the same time, it is true that many U.S. scholars have echoed the senators’ concerns about whether Orban’s moves will have a chilling effect on academic freedom.

Orban himself is hard to pin down. He is rightly trying to salvage Hungarian independence from encroachment by the EU. But he has also flirted with friendship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, an adversary of America and the West.

Backing the left-wing causes advocated by Soros, however, does anger potential U.S. allies. Among other things, Soros supports decriminalizing prostitution and drugs possession and changing Ireland’s constitution to allow abortion.

Being seen on the side of that can and does cannibalize political support from foreign politicians, and cause political parties in these regions to turn increasingly to Putin’s opportunistic diplomacy.

Six GOP senators have written to Tillerson to ask him to investigate whether under President Barack Obama the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development have worked with groups funded by Soros “to push a progressive agenda and invigorate the political left.” Their letter never got to Tillerson and their request for a probe was ignored.

Having an assistant secretary for Europe and Eurasia who can set down the administration’s policies, appoint his own deputy assistants, and transmit information to Tillerson would help all this.

Right now, European policy for this region appears to be run by Hoyt Brian Yee, an Obama-era deputy assistant secretary of state who seems to have gone rogue with regards not just to Hungary but also Macedonia and Albania. He continues to give his support to leftist politicians and causes throughout the region, without the approval or blessing of the White House, the National Security Council or, apparently, even Tillerson.

Appointments appear to be delayed because a reorganization of the State Department is coming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Trump administration told Politico last month that “the president will not name a special envoy for climate change.” So, yes, some of it can be good.

But we need political appointments in top places. Lest we forget, World War I began in the Balkans. (For more from the author of “Fight Over Soros-Founded Hungarian University Shows US’ Power Vacuum in Europe” please click HERE)

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Judicial Watch is suing to obtain government records regarding almost $5 million in U.S. tax dollars flowing to the “Soros infantry” that is disrupting Macedonia’s political system.

What’s more, the government watchdog group says it wants to know why President Donald Trump hasn’t replaced President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Macedonia, Jess L. Baily.

The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is an appendage of the State Department. It has given $4.8 million to the Open Society Foundation-Macedonia, part of liberal billionaire George Soros’ vast network of global nonprofits, between Feb. 27, 2012, and Aug. 31, 2016, according to Judicial Watch.

“The Obama administration seemed to bust taxpayer budgets in an effort to fund the Soros operation,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “The Trump State Department and USAID should get their act together and disclose the details of the Obama-Soros spigot.”

The USAID website links to the Soros website, and said the project trained hundreds of young Macedonians “on topics such as freedom of association, youth policies, citizen initiatives, persuasive argumentation, and use of new media.”

A Judicial Watch press release on Wednesday said:

The Open Society Foundation has established and funded dozens of leftwing, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Macedonia to overthrow the conservative government. One Macedonian government official interviewed by Judicial Watch in Washington D.C. recently, calls it the ‘Soros infantry.’ The groups organize youth movements, create influential media outlets, and organize violent protests to undermine the institutions and policies implemented by the government.

Members of Congress have inquired about the USAID dollars going to Soros.

In a March 23 letter responding to inquiries from Republican senators, Joseph E. Macmanus, executive secretary with the State Department, said the USAID goal in Macedonia is for “democratic reform and civic engagement, for strengthening of the rule of law.” (For more from the author of “Watchdog Sues for Records on Tax Dollars Funding ‘Soros Infantry'” please click HERE)

Watchdog Sues for Records on Tax Dollars Funding ‘Soros Infantry’

Foreign aid can help advance U.S. national interests, for example, by promoting our values globally or by demonstrating to the world the goodwill of the American people. Calls to eliminate funding outright often fail to weigh this important function.

But our lead aid agency has itself been jeopardizing this effort, and risking all-important public support, by irresponsibly funding leftist agitprop around the world—and enlisting the help of billionaire progressive activist George Soros in the process.

Trying to persuade Colombians, Macedonians, Kenyans, and the Irish to accept violations of traditional norms that are still being debated here was surely not what Congress had in mind when it passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and thereby created the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Support for wooly leftist causes around the globe, and teaming up with the vast network of Soros organizations trying to transform the world, isn’t new for USAID.

But for the past eight years, President Barack Obama politicized the agency to such a degree that six Republican senators in mid-March rightly called on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to launch an investigation into how the agency spends billions of taxpayer dollars.

The response from a mid-level career official at the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, Executive Secretary Joseph E. Macmanus, offered a pro-forma defense of USAID with sentences like, “The Department of State’s foreign assistance programs are rigorously designed, implemented, and monitored to ensure that they are based on core American values.”

Soros supporters are naturally pleased. But was the letter reflective of the administration’s political leadership? The slow pace of political appointments at the State Department—and throughout the executive branch—has created a situation where career bureaucrats and caretakers put in place by the previous administration retain an outsized influence.

In this instance, sources tell us that the letter the senators sent Tillerson never reached him. As I explained in the New York Post last Saturday, the Macmanus letter didn’t even acknowledge the senators’ request for a probe. Telling six senators, in essence, to take a hike is not wise at the best of times.

But it is especially unwise when the senators are raising legitimate concerns that resonate with Trump voters. What core American values were served in Colombia when USAID funds a Soros-owned media portal that attacks President Donald Trump, capitalism, and “patriarchal society”?

And what American values are served when USAID and Soros’ Open Society Foundations team up to teach Macedonians Alinskyite tactics, continuing a lamentable trend here in the states to redefine civics as street mobilization and representative democracy as “participative democracy”?

And what core American values, indeed, are served when we support same-sex marriage in countries like Ireland? The Supreme Court only read this right into the Constitution two years ago, in a hotly contested 5-4 decision that is far from settled even here.

Indeed, many of these ideas continue to be hotly debated between one part of the population that wants to retain traditional norms and another that wants to transform society.

As the senators’ letter asked, what do these things have to do with our national interests?

By refusing to heed the senators’ call, the career civil servants who have taken over our agencies were doing exactly what the Open Society Foundations requested. In an op-ed in Foreign Policy magazine two weeks ago, the head of the Open Society Initiative for Europe, Goran Buldioski, wrote that “Tillerson should ignore the letter, because there’s nothing to investigate.”

Buldioski smeared the U.S. senators, saying that their letter was “littered with inaccuracies about the foundations’ work,” and he trotted out the most tired trope in the Soros arsenal, that the “senators echo Kremlin talking points.” As I have argued here and here, it is precisely our promotion of tendentious radical ideas overseas that often drive conservatives who would ordinarily side with us into the arms of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But the most important part of the piece came not in these clichés, but in the argument Buldioski made when he said that the senators were asking Tillerson “to shut down democracy promotion that is ‘disrespecting national sovereignty.’ Such an interpretation assumes that governments are sacrosanct and sovereign, not the voters who elect them.” (Emphasis added).

That is a tempting argument. The individual certainly is ultimately sovereign in that his own conscience is the ultimate arbiter.

This separation between “national sovereignty” and “individual sovereignty” is not new, however, but has been emphasized by those who argue for transnational governance.

In a speech in Stockholm in 2009 in which he expounded on the subject, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, for example: “We are now living in a true global age. We are interconnected as never before. Frontiers are increasingly irrelevant. Nation-states are increasingly powerless to act alone in the face of global forces.”

But as my friends and colleagues David Azerrad and Arthur Milikh reminded me in an email exchange on this subject, classical liberalism views countries as sovereign in the international realm.

The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” and “We the people”—make this amply clear.

When a government stops securing the unalienable rights of people, it is their right “to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.” But individuals form a sovereign “people,” and we can remain sovereign only if we remember the common good and the social contract.

Let’s debate these things some more here at home before we spend billions trying to persuade our friends to buy into them. (For more from the author of “The Troubling Relationship Between Soros and US’ Biggest Foreign Aid Agency” please click HERE)

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