Think Tank Quickies (#200)

• Center for a New American Security (CNAS) announces formation of ISIS Study Group.
• CNAS announces new project on the future of ground forces.
• Canadian Ambassador to US Gary Doer named Co-Chair of Canada Institute Advisory Board at Wilson Center. 
• Wilson Center gets a new website in November.
• Amb. Ryan Crocker named Distinguished Fellow at Wilson Center.
• Wilson Center award honors Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.
• Meet the Wilson Center's Polar Initiative.
• AEI launches new app for iPad. 
• Kirsten Madison, formerly at the White House, State Department, DHS, and US Senate, joins AEI as Resident Fellow and Deputy Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies.
• AEI hires three for its Economic Policy Studies team: Eric Belasco, Benedic Ippolito, and Lawrence Mead.
• Brookings appoints Janice Eberly and James Stock as co-editors of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA).
• Brookings launches Brookings China Council to coincide with state visit of President Xi Jinping.
• Brookings announces the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking.  (Robert Bass is president of Keystone Group.)
• CFR hires two new adjunct senior fellows: Esther Brimmer (formerly at the State Dept.) and Gordon Goldstein (Managing Director at Silver Lake). 
• Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at CFR; Chris Christie to speak at CFR on Nov. 24.
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) appoints Tim Maurer for the think tanks new cyberpolicy initiative.
• CEIP and Chicago Council on Global Affairs launch task force on US policy toward Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia.
• PIIE appoints Pedro Nicolaci da Costa (previously with Reuters & WSJ) to help with social media.
• CSIS hires Jeff Rathke, a former Foreign Service officer, as Deputy Director and Senior Fellow of the Europe Program; also hires Lisa Sawyer Samp (formerly at DoD) for Int'l Security Program.
• CSIS names nine new members to its Board of Trustees, including Erskine Bowles, William Daley, Stanley Druckenmiller, Martin Edelman, Elizabeth Holmes, Ron Kirk, Leon Panetta, Bob Schieffer, and Frances Townshend.
• CSIS announces Marshall Program on Science and National Security.
• Cato Institute names Robert Gelfond, CEO/Founder of Macro Quantitative Strategies, to its Board.
• CAP launches national grassroots effort to raise awareness for nutrition assistance programs.
• Atlantic Council holds Energy & Economic Summit in Istanbul, Turkey Nov. 18-20.
• Atlantic Council, US Embassy Islamabad, and Meridian International Center announce 2015 Emerging Leaders of Pakistan (ELP) Fellows.
• Atlantic Council presented annual Global Citizen Awards on Oct. 1 to Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, and Yu Long; Henry Kissinger accepts Distinguished Service Award, IMF's Christine Lagarde presents award to Draghi.
• Atlantic Council and The Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF) announce partnership.
• Columnist Reihan Salam and Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin join NAF's Board of Directors.
• Secretary of State John Kerry delivers Syria policy speech at USIP.
• USIP lights headquarters blue for UN anniversary.
• Henry Rowen, second president at RAND Corp., passes away.

Think Tank Quickies (#198)

• CEIP: Could 3-D printing make it easier for states to build nuclear weapons?
• Former CAP staffer Zaid Jilani: We had a ban on writing about Jamie Dimon because JPMorgan Chase gave around a quarter of a million dollars to the think tank.
• Brookings President Strobe Talbott: "We are all French now."
• Prime Minister of Georgia hosts dinner for Atlantic Council delegation.
• Bruce Katz of Brookings named first-ever Centennial Scholar; Amy Liu appointed VP and Director of Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings.
• Subir Gokarn of Brookings India appointed as Executive Director at IMF.
• Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ) on the Netanyahu fiasco at CAP (includes staff rebuttal).
• CBPP staffers ("Center on Buckets") playing some hoops (a new think tank basketball league?).
• 30 think tanks attended the 2015 Latin America Think Tank Summit.
• How the Heritage Foundation uses Medium to replace PDF reports.
• New York Times bestselling author Max Brooks joins Atlantic Council.

Korean President to Speak at CSIS

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is once again showing its deep connections to Asian governments.

On October 15, Korean President Park Geun-hye will be speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Julie Bishop, the Foreign Minister of Australia, just gave a speech at CSIS today.

Over the years, CSIS has hosted a variety of major Asian leaders at its think tank, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.  In August, Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnam's Secretary General of the Communist Party, also gave a speech at CSIS.

Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are among the foreign governments that donate to CSIS.

CSIS was ranked as the world's fourth best think tank in the world by the latest University of Pennsylvania think tank rankings.  It was also ranked as the US's third best think tank (after Brookings and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace).  Moreover, it was rated as the world's top defense and national security think tank.

Update: A variety of scholars from think tanks such as CSIS, Brookings, and Heritage, have attended an October 14 Korean-American Friendship Night with Ms. Park

Obama's Iran Victory Through Group That Funds Think Tanks

President Obama's victory in Congress over the nuclear deal with Iran came from a variety of sources, including one little-known action group that funds a variety of think tanks.  Here is more from The Wall Street Journal:

Early in its campaign, the White House partnered with a range of liberal action groups, veterans organizations and Christian affiliates to bolster its efforts to pressure Congress. A key player was the San Francisco-based Ploughshares Fund, according to U.S. officials. Ploughshares has spent more than $7 million in the past four years funding think tanks, media organizations and activist groups focused on championing diplomacy with Iran.

A week before the deal was reached, Ploughshares organized for the White House a conference call for around 100 activist groups to strategize how to promote the Iran deal. Two members of the White House’s Office of Public Engagement took part.

Here are the funding priorities of Ploughshares Fund.  The group has noted that it funds think tanks such as Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), as well as Cato Institute, Center for American Progress (CAP), Atlantic Council, New America Foundation (NAF), Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and EastWest Institute.

Think Tank Quickies (#188)

• Thomas Pritzker appointed Chairman of CSIS's Board of Trustees; succeeds former senator Sam Nunn, who will remain as Chairman Emeritus.
• Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint gives keynote at Jackson Hole summit.
• Professor attacks African think tanks as "tanks that do not think."
• Is Bangalore the next think tank hub?
• Cato "goes off the rails" on health policy?
• Sri Lanka made hundreds of contacts with US think tanks in 2014.
• Emanuel Pastreich: Think tanks suffer from a number of shortcomings.
• Bruce Jones named VP and Director of Foreign Policy at Brookings; Hamilton Project at Brookings appoints Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach as new director.
• Rexon Ryu, former Chief of Staff to former DefSec Chuck Hagel, joins Carnegie as Senior Advisor.
• CSIS hires Olga Oliker from RAND to replace Andy Kuchins who will head Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service; Kuchins will be a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at CSIS.
•  Two leading US think tanks (CEIP and Stimson) say that Pakistan will have 350+ nuclear weapons in a decade.

Carnegie Slammed for Being Too Close to Putin

A well-respected think tank has just been slammed for being too cozy with Russian President Vladimir Putin.  It also stands accused of being a "trojan horse" for Russian Influence.

James Kirchick, a Fellow with the conservative think tank Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), has some pretty harsh words for the Carnegie Moscow Center (a subdivision of the Carnegie Institute for International Peace) and certain scholars there.  Following are some of Think Tank Watch's favorite excerpts from the piece, entitled "How a US Think Tank Fell for Putin."

On the "Secret" Boisto Meeting to Solve the Russia/Ukraine Tensions:

The Boisto Group’s meeting was sponsored by three entities: the Finnish Foreign Ministry, the Institute for World Economy and International Relations (a think tank affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences), and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, one of the largest funders of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which describes itself as “the oldest international affairs think tank in the United States” (Such a long-running pedigree hasn’t been without its hiccups: a former president of Carnegie was Alger Hiss, the State Department official who spied for the Soviets.) Boisto’s first three signatories were Tom Graham, a former associate at the Carnegie Endowment, and a managing director at Kissinger Associates; Andrew Weiss, the Carnegie Endowment’s vice president for studies who also serves as a senior adviser at the Albright Stonebridge Group, and Deana Arsenian, vice president of the international program and director of the Russia program at the Carnegie Corporation. On the Russian side, the delegation included, among others, Alexei Arbatov, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center, and Vyacheslav Trubnikov, a former head of the country’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

Think tank vs. Business Consulting - A Conflict of Interest?

Policy analysts who simultaneously work for major consulting shops founded by former secretaries of state (Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, respectively), Graham and Weiss—who also served as co-chairs of the Boisto initiative—are influential players in the transatlantic conversation about Russia, although it’s unclear where their analytical work stops and their business interests begin.

“I don’t want to be holier than thou,” a Russia analyst at a prominent Washington think tank said when asked about Graham and Weiss’s work as business consultants while also dispensing ostensibly objective analysis. “It seems to be a direct conflict of interest.

On Western Think Tanks in Russia

Carnegie was the first major Western think tank to open a branch in Russia following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and, ironically, it may be the last. 1994, when the Moscow center was founded, was a period of optimism for liberal reform of the post-communist system, and Carnegie Moscow was one of the leading Western outposts providing independent and reliable analysis of Russian domestic politics and foreign policy. After Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and throughout his rise as Russia’s new tsar, the center built a reputation for quality and insight. That reputation was built in part upon the work of three individuals: Lilia Shevtsova, a political scientist and one of the most well-respected analysts of Russian politics; Nikolai Petrov, who headed the center’s Society and Regions Program; and Maria Lipman, a journalist and author who edited the center’s renowned Russian-language Pro et Contra journal. All three have been vocal and prominent critics of Putin and the corrupt and sclerotic system he has imposed.

On Recent Turnover at Carnegie's Moscow Center

The center began to undergo serious change, however, after Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 following a rigged election and violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. In January 2013, Petrov left after his program was canceled, not due to lack of funds, he contends, but a desire not to ruffle Kremlin feathers.

Next to go was Lipman, laid off in the summer of 2014 due to what she was formally informed were “personnel cuts.” This came as a surprise, not least because in 2013 Carnegie Moscow had received a three-year grant of $350,000 from the MacArthur Foundation to fund the publication of Pro et Contra.

Last out the door in October was Shevtsova, who only two months earlier had signed the open letter protesting the Boisto manifesto, pitting her against her superiors, Arsenian and Weiss. Shevtsova, who is now affiliated with the Brookings Institution, told The Daily Beast: “Carnegie has been a wonderful place over the years with a strong a tradition of pluralism of views, including most prominently liberal principled views. Over the past year or two, however, I have sensed that this has changed, with a squeezing out of different points of view.”

On Carnegie's New Hired in Moscow

Three months after Shevtsova’s departure, in January 2015, Carnegie announced the hiring of three new analysts in its Moscow office, ostensibly to replace the veterans who had left. “I’m a great admirer of [Lilia] Shevtsova, Masha Lipman and Nikolai Petrov and their remarkable contributions to the Carnegie Moscow Center over many years,” Weiss said in an email. However, one current Carnegie staffer has referred to Lipman and Shevtsova as “dinosaurs” in this author’s presence.

Carnegie Not a Target of Russia's Campaign Targeting Think Tanks, NGOs

As the Russian government ratchets up a xenophobic campaign targeting Western nongovernmental organizations, accusing them of espionage and attempting to foment a coup, Carnegie’s presence in Moscow continues to be tolerated. Its name is conspicuously missing from the latest list of “undesirable organizations” compiled by the Russian government, which includes many other institutions of similar profile: George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation, the latter of which announced last week that it will leave Russia due to Kremlin pressure.

Adding to the mystery of Carnegie’s absence from the list of “undesirable organizations” is the fact that MacArthur, Mott, and Open Society have all funded the Moscow center. 

Carnegie Moscow Center Doesn't Do Anti-Russia?

A list of events held by the Carnegie Moscow Center on its website provides one clue to why this might be the case: Scarcely any have addressed internal Russian politics or, more amazingly, the ongoing war in Ukraine. “[Carnegie Moscow] used to be a venue where events were held regularly, and, I would say, quite frequently, that discussed current developments in looking at various aspects of Russia. I don’t see such events any more and if they still hold them they are much fewer,” Lipman said.

Carnegie Moscow Center Cozy with Russian Intelligence?

According to Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster, human rights activist, and Daily Beast contributor, Carnegie functions in a role not unfamiliar to students of the Cold War: as a tribune to the West through which Russian intelligence whispers the official Moscow line—or rather, what Moscow wants the West to believe is that line. The Moscow center is the sort of operation that influential actors in the Kremlin, he said, “use at a time when they need to communicate their messages to the West not from official structures but from something that is viewed as independent and even American.”

Has Carnegie Lost Its Independence?

Over half a dozen Russia analysts at prominent Washington-based think tanks consulted for this article chose not to go on the record with their concerns out of professional courtesy. But they joined Kasparov in assessing that Carnegie has decided to place a premium on maintaining its presence in Moscow, sacrificing its intellectual independence and analytical rigor in the process.

Russia Moscow Center Influenced by Putin-Connected Think Tank?

Last December, Graham, Rumer and Weiss attended a conference in Moscow hosted by the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI), a think tank that, until 2009, was connected to Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) and now provides analysis directly to the presidential administration. Under the leadership of Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired SVR general, the institute strongly supported the annexation of Crimea, and, according to former institute researcher Alexander Sytin, has hosted the separatist leader Igor Girkin (aka Igor Strelkov), himself a former operative in Russian intelligence and a purported “friend” of the institute’s director.

The Carnegie Moscow Center, which started its activities in 1994, was recently ranked as the 14th best non-US think tank in the world by the University of Pennsylvania think tank rankings.  It was ranked as the 26th best think tank in the world.  It was also ranked as the best think tank in Central and Eastern Europe.

CEIP was ranked as the world's third best think tank, and the second best think tank in the United States (after Brookings).

Think Tank Quickies (#185)

• USIP hosts Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on July 22.
• VP Joe Biden gives speech at Truman National Security Project and CEIP.
• Will these three new Hong Kong think tanks shake things up in Hong Kong?
• The future of think tanks in Africa, via On Think Tanks.
• Conservative think tank CEI has a new whiskey (!) project.
• A complex web of Chilean think tanks, via Alejandro Chafuen.
• 4th Transatlantic Think Tank Conference held.
• "Darkode" described as "massive think tank for cybercriminals."
• CAP to host special presidential envoy John Allen for discussion on countering ISIS; CAP hires former HHS official Joan Lombardi as Senior Fellow focusing on early childhood issues.
• Republican presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) speaks at Atlantic Council. 
• Henri Barkey named new Director of Wilson Center's Middle East Program; Laura Dawson named new Director of Wilson Center's Canada Institute.

Carnegie Endowment Rescinds Biden Invite

Did anyone else get that think tank dinner invite to hear Vice President Joe Biden speak only to later be disinvited?  Here is the story from Al Kamen, who writes the In The Loop column for The Washington Post:

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sent an invitation Friday for a private dinner Monday night with Vice President Biden, who’ll be giving “remarks” on the “Future of the U.S.-India Partnership.”

It was rather late notice, but folks were doubtless thrilled at the honor. Besides, you don’t want to miss a speech by Biden.

So we hustled to get the suit ready.

But then came this e-mail: “Earlier this evening you may have received an invitation to a private dinner on Monday, July 13 featuring remarks by Vice President Joe Biden. This invitation was sent in error, and the dinner is full.”

Think Tank Watch has seen a number of think tank invitations that have later been rescinded for a variety of reasons.

Think Tank Quickies (#183)

• Atlantic Council pens new donor disclosure policy: $250 is the key number.
• How the world is changing think tanks, by Brad Lips.
• Think tanks move to fore on energy.
• CNAS is the only national security think tank to be co-led by a Democrat and a Republican.
• Even a junior analyst at a think tank can meet virtually anyone.
• Ben Wattenberg, AEI scholar and host of PBS series "Think Tank With Ben Wattenberg," dies.
• Think tanks are "overcrowded by people more concerned with official designations rather than serious policy research..."
• Heritage Foundation honors John Von Kannon with its highest honor: the Luce Award.
• Wang Chaoyong, founding Chairman and CEO of ChinaEquity Group, joins CEIP's Board of Trustees.
• Todd Harrison, formerly with CSBA, joins CSIS as Director of Defense Budget Analysis and Senior Fellow in the International Security Program.
• Robit Chopra, formerly with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, joins CAP as Senior Fellow.
• Nora Bensahel and David Barno named as Nonresident Senior Fellows at Atlantic Council.
• NAF scholars at NATO's CyCon conference; NAF cybersecurity fellows announced; NAF collaborates with community orgs to privacy and poverty in the US.
• USIP's newly-created PeaceTech Lab announces board of directors.
• RAND Corp. announces new Center of Excellence on Health System Performance.

Prospect Mag's 2015 Think Tank Awards Issued

The United Kingdom's Prospect Magazine has just announced the 2015 winners of its annual think tank awards.

Here is who won for the US side:

*Best economic/financial think tank: Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC)
(Reason and Peterson Institute for International Economics were on the shortlist)

*Best social policy think tank: New America Foundation (NAF)
(RAND Corp. and Brookings were on the shortlist)

*Best energy/environment think tank: RAND Corp.
(Brookings and World Resources Institute were on the shortlist)

*Best international affairs think tank: Brookings Institution
(Migration Policy Institute and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace were on the shortlist)

For the UK, the "think tank of the year" award went to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. 

There have been various questions about how the awards, which are underwritten by oil giant Shell, are actually chosen, including some speculation that they may be rigged.

We should also mention that a think tank has to actually enter to win.  Think Tank Watch conclusion: lame.