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.

Think Tanks to Build Case for Iran Nuclear Deal

This from Greg Sargent of the Washington Post:

“There will be a multi-million-dollar effort from progressives to defend this deal,” Stephen Miles, the advocacy director for Win Without War, adds.

In addition to J-Street and Win Without War, these groups include Americans United for Change, MoveOn, Credo, and others, and group leaders have been meeting in recent weeks to discuss preparations for the battle to come. Foreign policy think tanks like the Truman Project will also be working behind the scenes and publicly to build the substantive case for the deal.

Here is what Truman National Security Project, which has close ties to a variety of prominent Democrats, says about the Iran deal that was just reached.

Of course, there are a number of conservative think tanks who are already looking to fight the Iran deal in Congress.

Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint has weighed in, saying that the deal will make the world a much more dangerous place.  He says that the deal completely fails to cut off Iran's path to nuclear weaponry.  James Phillips, a senior research fellow at the think tank, just wrote about the major flaws in the deal.

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) writes about how the Iran deal misses the point.  And AEI's Michael Rubin writes about "the Iran deal's Qassem Soleimani problem."  AEI's J. Matthew McInnis writes about "five big issues" after the Iran deal.

Heritage has put together a piece on what 2016 presidential candidates are saying about the Iran deal.