And yet, over the weekend, Brookings’s president John Allen resigned after a federal investigation into his alleged unregistered job as a lobbyist in a foreign country was made public. To Washington observers, it was a staggering drop. Allen has long had an air of impartiality and public service. After a career of nearly four decades in the Marines, he retired as a four-star general in 2013 and joined the Brookings Fellowship. In 2014, President Barack Obama appointed him as the State Department’s special envoy for the global coalition against Islamic State. Until 2017, Allen was again a private individual working for Brookings. He also allegedly pressured top officials in the government of President Donald Trump on behalf of Qatar, according to a U.S. District Court statement released last week. He did not register as a foreign lobbyist as required by law for the registration of foreign agents. Spokesman Bo Phillips denied that Allen had ever worked as an agent for the Qatari government. «Γεν. “Allen has been actively and voluntarily involved in all US government investigations into this matter,” Phillips said in a written statement. If the FBI’s claims are true, Allen’s behavior went too far – legal. But it was only possible in a world where similar, though less explicitly transactional, links are normalized. The scandal surrounding Allen’s resignation reveals how foreign and corporate interests play a bigger role in generating policy ideas than we believe, and how relatively little control the capital’s think tanks have despite their enormous influence in policy-making.
What do we know about the investigation into Allen’s alleged unregistered lobby?
Last week, the Associated Press reported a court case that uncovered an incident five years ago: The FBI is investigating Allen for allegedly pressuring the Trump administration and Congress on behalf of Qatar. The testimony in court seems to have been accidentally published on the internet and later the New York Times published it in full. The allegations are explosive. “As requested by Qatari government officials, Allen has been corresponding, meeting and successfully pressuring US Executive Officers in the United States to make public statements requested by Qatar,” according to records. Allen’s potentially illegal job came shortly after Trump’s first trip abroad to Saudi Arabia. Galvanized by Trump, the kingdom united with the United Arab Emirates and other Arab partners in June 2017 to exclude neighboring Qatar. The United States works closely with Gulf states (although none of them are democracies) and the conflict has made it an awkward balancing act for US policymakers. The Qatar embargo has become particularly sensitive as the small, wealthy country hosts a US military base. The court alleges that Allen was intercepted by two unregistered Qatari representatives – a business man named Imaad Zuberi and a former US ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Richard Olson – to advocate for Qatar. (The fact that Olson used the email address [email protected], a reference to the ugly Rick’s Cafe in the movie Casablanca and the airport code for Dubai, may have been information that no one should be shocked that something was wrong .) When Trump’s national security adviser, HR McMaster, spoke at an event in Brookings, according to court records, Allen spoke to McMaster about Qatar in the courtroom and then followed up with Brookings’s email address, apparently without to reveal financial relationship he had with Qatari agents. Allen was flown to Qatar to meet with the country’s emir and senior officials. For the project, Allen received a “speech fee” of $ 20,000, although no speech was delivered, and the prospect of long-term compensation. This apparently happened before he became president of the foundation in November 2017. Court records say Allen deliberately withheld information from federal investigators about the nature of his relationship with Qatar and did not share emails he requested with the FBI, including about the speaker’s remuneration. He also sought to promote the interests of two companies where he served on the board – the Texas-based artificial intelligence company SparkCognition and the Israeli software company Fifth Dimension – by introducing them to potential companies in Qatar. A spokesman for General Allen said in a statement: “General Allen did this because he believed it was in the best interest of the US military and the US government to help prevent a war in an area with thousands of US troops at risk.” “The integrity and objectivity of the Brookings Scholarship are the foundation’s core strengths, and Brookings seeks to maintain high ethical standards in all of its operations,” Glenn Hutchins and Suzanne Nora Johnson, co-chairs of the board, wrote in an email. to the staff. “Our policies on the independence and integrity of research reflect these values.” On Sunday, Allen resigned from the think tank, saying in his resignation letter that it was “the best for all concerned right now.”
Thought tanks are tall – and they deserve more control
There are many dynamics in Allen’s story. Politico highlighted the routine of old generals selling out; Eli Clifton and Ben Freeman of the Quincy Institute highlighted the role of foreign funding in Washington’s think tanks, and journalist Mattathias Schwartz has previously investigated the Zuberi order, which at some point that he worked for the CIA.
A central question is whether this scandal will lead to any broader calculation of how political ideas are created in the nation’s capital.
Washington think tanks have a kind of tacit power. They are scholars without students or classrooms and regularly inform policy makers. An annual report from 2017 states: “Brookings scholars have regular and direct interactions with policy makers and White House staff in regional and operational areas of responsibility.”
Think tank experts refer to TV, radio and news sites, including Vox. There is a good reason for this: At best, think tanks translate complex research into drastic political ideas. They specialize in breaking news or global trends that are accessible to a wide audience.
The reservoirs of thought represent a somewhat unique aspect of the way politics is shaped in Washington, which is done through a market of ideas. It is a market funded by foreign governments, US government agencies, companies, private institutions and individual sponsors – policy advocates and entrepreneurs of all walks of life. But the thought is that when funding sources are sufficiently diversified, research is independent and impartial.
The point, then, is that, despite its influence, the think tank industry has received relatively little consideration. Tufts professor Daniel Drezner has noted in an academic paper that “think tanks are less controlled by the more traditional forms of political spending, such as campaign contributions and pressure on members of Congress.” Drezner noted that “the percentage of cash donations from foreign governments to Brookings almost doubled between 2005 and 2014.” The think tank has hosted a Middle East research center in Doha for 14 years and stopped receiving funding from Qatar in 2019 after reportedly receiving more than $ 14 million from the country.
We know this information because Brookings is doing well in the transparency directory and publishes its donor list every year. But that’s more than Brookings.
All of this is part of the way in which foreign interests are contributing to political ideas in Washington and, in particular, in a battle between Qatar and Saudi Arabia. In 2016, Vox’s Max Fisher captured Saudi Arabia’s huge influence in the capital. And the hacked emails leaked to Intercept showed how the Center for New American Security in 2016 produced private policy reports for the UAE Ambassador to the United States, Yousef Otaiba.
Ever since Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia ordered the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Kasogi, a number of Washington institutions have distanced themselves from the kingdom and from Gulf funding in general. Brookings stopped receiving funding from Saudi Arabia and the Progressive Center for American Progress stopped receiving funding from the Emirates. But as nonprofits seek to diversify their sponsorships, foreign funding remains a cornerstone of some think tanks’ budgets.
One way in which think tanks can tackle the potential for foreign funding is to advocate for radical transparency, as suggested by Eli Clifton of the Quincy Institute. In a recent interview, he said think tankers should disclose their funding with each publication, as academics and researchers are expected to do.
Sarah Leah Whitson, who heads the advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now that Kasogi founded before he was assassinated, says the Allen case is a symptom of a much wider problem of foreign governments influencing US foreign policy, with former intelligence officials policy to be involved in the editing process.
“It’s a direct financial interest in their career prospects when they leave the government,” he told me. “It has undermined the credibility of our senior government officials who are responsible for the most important protection of our country’s national security, who now just suspect that they are estimating where their bread will be buttered when they leave …
