WUNRN
THIS IS HARD BALL INTERNATIONAL
POLITICS, MONEY & POWER DRIVEN, BUT LABELED AS USA RESEARCH &
"THINK TANKS." HOW MUCH OF THIS ENORMOUS INFLUENCE BUYING IS DIRECTED
TO WOMEN'S ISSUES, WOMEN"S RIGHTS, WOMEN'S PROJECTS &
PROGRAMS? ELUSIVE PRESSURE COMES WITH BIG FUNDING, BUT FOR GENDER??
Foreign Powers Buy Influence at
Think Tanks
WASHINGTON
— The agreement signed last year by the Norway Ministry of Foreign
Affairs was explicit: For $5 million, Norway’s partner in Washington would push
top officials at the White House, at the Treasury Department and in Congress to
double spending on a United States foreign aid program.
But the recipient of the
cash was not one of the many Beltway lobbying firms that work every year on
behalf of foreign governments.
It was the Center for
Global Development, a nonprofit research organization, or think tank, one
of many such groups in Washington that lawmakers, government officials and the
news media have long relied on to provide independent policy analysis and
scholarship.
More than a dozen prominent
Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from
foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government
officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an
investigation by The New York Times has found.
The money is increasingly
transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign
governments’ lobbying in Washington. And it has set off troubling questions
about intellectual freedom: Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach
conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.
The
think tanks do not disclose the terms of the agreements they have reached with
foreign governments. And they have not registered with the United States
government as representatives of the donor countries, an omission that appears,
in some cases, to be a violation of federal law, according to several legal
specialists who examined the agreements at the request of The Times.
As a result, policy makers who
rely on think tanks are often unaware of the role of foreign governments in
funding the research.
Joseph
Sandler, a lawyer and expert on the statute that governs Americans lobbying
for foreign governments, said the arrangements between the countries and think
tanks “opened a whole new window into an aspect of the influence-buying in
Washington that has not previously been exposed.”
“It is particularly
egregious because with a law firm or lobbying firm, you expect them to be an
advocate,” Mr. Sandler added. “Think tanks have this patina of academic
neutrality and objectivity, and that is being compromised.”
The arrangements involve
Washington’s most influential think tanks, including the Brookings
Institution, the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, and the Atlantic Council. Each is a major
recipient of overseas funds, producing policy papers, hosting forums and
organizing private briefings for senior United States government officials that
typically align with the foreign governments’ agendas.
Most of the money comes
from countries in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia, particularly
the oil-producing nations of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Norway, and takes
many forms. The United Arab Emirates, a major supporter of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, quietly provided a donation of more than
$1 million to help build the center’s gleaming new glass and steel headquarters
not far from the White House. Qatar, the small but wealthy Middle East nation,
agreed last year to make a $14.8 million, four-year donation to Brookings,
which has helped fund a Brookings affiliate in Qatar and a project on United
States relations with the Islamic world.
Some
scholars say the donations have led to implicit agreements that the research
groups would refrain from criticizing the donor governments.
“If a member of Congress is
using the Brookings reports, they should be aware — they are not getting the
full story,” said Saleem Ali, who served as a visiting fellow at the Brookings
Doha Center in Qatar and who said he had been told during his job interview
that he could not take positions critical of the Qatari government in papers.
“They may not be getting a false story, but they are not getting the full
story.”
In interviews, top
executives at the think tanks strongly defended the arrangements, saying the
money never compromised the integrity of their organizations’ research. Where
their scholars’ views overlapped with those of donors, they said, was
coincidence.
“Our business is to
influence policy with scholarly, independent research, based on objective
criteria, and to be policy-relevant, we need to engage policy makers,” said
Martin S. Indyk, vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Program at
Brookings, one of the oldest and most prestigious think tanks in Washington.
“Our currency is our
credibility,” said Frederick Kempe, chief executive of the Atlantic
Council, a fast-growing research center that focuses mainly on
international affairs and has accepted donations from at least 25 countries
since 2008. “Most of the governments that come to us, they understand we are
not lobbyists. We are a different entity, and they work with us for totally
different purposes.”
In their contracts and
internal documents, however, foreign governments are often explicit about what
they expect from the research groups they finance.
“In Washington, it is
difficult for a small country to gain access to powerful politicians,
bureaucrats and experts,” states an internal report commissioned by the Norwegian
Foreign Affairs Ministry assessing its grant making. “Funding powerful think
tanks is one way to gain such access, and some think tanks in Washington are
openly conveying that they can service only those foreign governments that
provide funding.”
The think tanks’ reliance
on funds from overseas is driven, in part, by intensifying competition within
the field: The number of policy groups has multiplied in recent years, while
research grants from the United States government have dwindled.
Foreign officials describe
these relationships as pivotal to winning influence on the cluttered Washington
stage, where hundreds of nations jockey for attention from the United States
government. The arrangements vary: Some countries work directly with think
tanks, drawing contracts that define the scope and direction of research.
Others donate money to the think tanks, and then pay teams of lobbyists and
public relations consultants to push the think tanks to promote the country’s
agenda.
“Japan is not necessarily
the most interesting subject around the world,” said Masato Otaka, a spokesman
for the Japanese Embassy, when asked why Japan donates heavily to American
research groups. “We’ve been experiencing some slower growth in the economy. I
think our presence is less felt than before.”
The
scope of foreign financing for American think tanks is difficult to determine.
But since 2011, at least 64 foreign governments, state-controlled entities or
government officials have contributed to a group of 28 major United
States-based research organizations, according to disclosures by the
institutions and government documents. What little information the
organizations volunteer about their donors, along with public records and
lobbying reports filed with American officials by foreign representatives,
indicates a minimum of $92 million in contributions or commitments from
overseas government interests over the last four years. The total is certainly
more.
After questions from The
Times, some of the research groups agreed to provide limited additional
information about their relationships with countries overseas. Among them was
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, whose research agenda
focuses mostly on foreign policy; it agreed last
month to release a list of 13 foreign government donors, from Germany to
China, though the organization declined to disclose details of its contracts with
those nations or actual donation amounts.
In an interview, John J.
Hamre, president and chief executive of the center, acknowledged that the
organization’s scholars at times advocate causes with the Obama administration
and Congress on the topics that donor governments have funded them to study.
But Mr. Hamre stressed that he did not view it as lobbying — and said his group
is most certainly not a foreign agent.
The Brookings Institution,
which also accepted grants from Norway, has sought to help the country gain
access to American officials, documents show. One Brookings senior fellow,
Bruce Jones, offered in 2010 to reach out to State Department officials to help
arrange a meeting with a senior Norway official, according to a government email. The Norway official
wished to discuss his country’s role as a “middle power” and vital partner of
the United States.
Brookings organized another
event in April 2013, in which one of Norway’s top officials on Arctic
issues was seated next to the State Department’s senior official on the topic
and reiterated the country’s priorities for expanding oil exploration in the
Arctic.
William J. Antholis, the
managing director at Brookings, said that if his scholars help Norway pursue
its foreign policy agenda in Washington, it is only because their rigorous,
independent research led them to this position. “The scholars are their own
agents,” he said. “They are not agents of these foreign governments.”
But three lawyers who
specialize in the law governing Americans’ activities on behalf of foreign
governments said that the Center for Global Development and Brookings, in
particular, appeared to have taken actions that merited registration as foreign
agents of Norway. The activities by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies and the Atlantic Council, they added, at least raised questions.
“The Department of Justice
needs to be looking at this,” said Joshua Rosenstein, a lawyer at Sandler
Reiff.
Ona Dosunmu, Brookings’s
general counsel, examining the same documents, said she remained convinced that
was a misreading of the law.
Norway, at least, is
grateful for the work Brookings has done. During a speech at Brookings in June,
Norway’s foreign minister, Borge Brende, noted that his country’s relationship
with the think tank “has been mutually beneficial for moving a lot of important
topics.” Just before the speech, in fact, Norway signed an agreement to
contribute an additional $4 million to the group.
Limits on Scholars
The tens of millions in
donations from foreign interests come with certain expectations, researchers at
the organizations said in interviews. Sometimes the foreign donors move
aggressively to stifle views contrary to their own.
Michele Dunne served for
nearly two decades as a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs at the State
Department, including stints in Cairo and Jerusalem, and on the White House
National Security Council. In 2011, she was a natural choice to become the
founding director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri
Center for the Middle East, named after the former prime minister of
Lebanon, who was assassinated in 2005.
The center was created with
a generous
donation from Bahaa Hariri, his eldest son, and with the support of the
rest of the Hariri family, which has remained active in politics and business
in the Middle East. Another son of the former prime minister served as
Lebanon’s prime minister from 2009 to 2011.
But
by the summer of 2013, when Egypt’s military forcibly removed the country’s
democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, Ms. Dunne soon realized there
were limits to her independence. After she signed a petition and testified
before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee urging the United States to suspend
military aid to Egypt, calling Mr. Morsi’s ouster a “military coup,” Bahaa
Hariri called the Atlantic Council to complain, executives with direct
knowledge of the events said.
Ms. Dunne declined to
comment on the matter. But four months after the call, Ms. Dunne left the
Atlantic Council.
In an interview, Mr. Kempe
said he had never taken any action on behalf of Mr. Hariri to try to modify
positions that Ms. Dunne or her colleagues took. Ms. Dunne left, he said, in
part because she wanted to focus on research, not managing others, as she was
doing at the Atlantic Council.
“Differences she may have
had with colleagues, management or donors on Middle Eastern issues — inevitable
in such a fraught environment where opinions vary widely — don’t touch our
fierce defense of individual experts’ intellectual independence,” Mr. Kempe
said.
Ms. Dunne was replaced by
Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who served as United States ambassador to Egypt
during the rule of Hosni Mubarak, the longtime Egyptian military and political
leader forced out of power at the beginning of the Arab Spring. Mr.
Ricciardone, a career foreign service officer, had
earlier been criticized by conservatives and human rights activists for being
too deferential to the Mubarak government.
Scholars at other
Washington think tanks, who were granted anonymity to detail confidential
internal discussions, described similar experiences that had a chilling effect
on their research and ability to make public statements that might offend
current or future foreign sponsors. At Brookings, for example, a donor with
apparent ties to the Turkish government suspended its support after a scholar
there made critical statements about the country, sending a message, one
scholar there said.
“It is the self-censorship
that really affects us over time,” the scholar said. “But the fund-raising
environment is very difficult at the moment, and Brookings keeps growing and it
has to support itself.”
The sensitivities are
especially important when it comes to the Qatari government — the single
biggest foreign donor to Brookings.
Brookings executives cited strict internal
policies that they said ensure their scholars’ work is “not influenced by
the views of our funders,” in Qatar or in Washington. They also pointed to
several reports published at the Brookings Doha Center in recent years that,
for example, questioned the Qatari government’s efforts to revamp its education
system or criticized the role it has played in supporting militants in Syria.
But
in 2012, when a revised agreement was signed between Brookings and the Qatari
government, the Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself praised the agreement on its website, announcing that “the
center will assume its role in reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international
media, especially the American ones.” Brookings officials also acknowledged
that they have regular meetings with Qatari government officials about the
center’s activities and budget, and that the former Qatar prime minister sits
on the center’s advisory board.
Mr. Ali, who served as one
of the first visiting fellows at the Brookings Doha Center after it opened in
2009, said such a policy, though unwritten, was clear.
“There was a no-go zone
when it came to criticizing the Qatari government,” said Mr. Ali, who is now a
professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. “It was unsettling for
the academics there. But it was the price we had to pay.”
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