Here is more from National Review:
But one longstanding bastion of mainstream conservative thought, the American Enterprise Institute, has been moving in a different direction, according to hawkish foreign-policy hands. Under the think tank’s new foreign-policy director, they say, AEI has distanced itself from the rest of the movement’s approach.
Kori Schake, a former State Department and Pentagon official, took the reins of the think tank’s storied foreign- and defense-policy arm in 2019 amid a period of change. She took the job under then-newly appointed AEI president Robert Doar, a welfare-policy expert without a foreign-policy background, following a successful stint at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Around Washington, she is a generally well-regarded expert on defense issues.
But two years into her tenure, hostility to Schake’s stances is percolating in some conservative circles. The critics take issue with her defenses of the Iran nuclear deal, opposition to sanctions to kill Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and criticism of Republicans for speaking out against critical race theory in the military. “What she’s done is genuinely made the Hill ambivalent about AEI,” a senior congressional Republican staffer told National Review. “No one pays attention to their events, and no one reads their newsletters.” Several other Republican aides echoed that sentiment during interviews about their interactions with AEI, with one senior staffer saying that AEI research gets a “presumption of denial” when it comes across his desk.
AEI was founded in 1938 and had revenues of $43.5 million in 2020.
