Obama Allies Start "Non-Think Tank" to Target Trump Foreign Policy

Here is more from Politico:

Former Obama administration officials unveiled a new advocacy group Tuesday aimed at pushing back on President Donald Trump's foreign policy initiatives.

The push is led by former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and former White House deputy assistant Jake Sullivan, who both served under President Barack Obama. Rhodes and Sullivan, who also worked as senior policy adviser to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, will co-chair the new National Security Action organization.

“We’re committed to organizing an effective, strategic, relentless, and national response to this administration’s dangerous approach to national security," Sullivan said in a news release. "This is not a new think tank or policy shop. Our role is to help shape the public debate on foreign policy and national security, holding Trump accountable and lifting up an alternative, affirmative vision."

Mr. Sullivan already works at a well-known think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he is a Senior Fellow in the Geoeconomics and Strategy Program.

Mr. Rhodes said that around 500 former officials and campaign veterans have agreed to help National Security Action "act as speakers, writers, or on-call experts for candidates, think tanks, or advocacy organizations."

In other words, a number of think tanks will continue to be influenced by advocacy and lobbying organizations.

USIP Hosts "Passing the Baton" Event with Trump, Obama Teams

On January 9 and 10 the US Institute of Peace (USIP) hosted a "Passing the Baton" conference to facilitate Donald Trump's transition into the presidency.

Here is more about the event from USIP:

Ten days before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, members of his national security team will join Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior foreign policy officials from current and former administrations to discuss immediate and long-term challenges facing the United States. The president-elect’s designated National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, current National Security Advisor Ambassador Susan Rice, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other officials and experts join in a day of on-the- record discussion on January 10.

The meetings will form the third Passing the Baton conference hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace as part of the transfer of power between U.S. presidents since 2001. USIP, an independent and nonpartisan national institution founded by Congress, hosts the event in accordance with its congressional mandate to advance informed, problem-solving on threats to U.S. national interests and to promote international peace without violence. The conference will bring together current, future and former officials as well as hundreds of foreign policy and national security experts to cover topics such as America’s role in the world, and how the country can prepare to deal with unanticipated strategic surprises.

USIP’s partners for the conference include the American Enterprise Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Center for American Progress and the Heritage Foundation. Politico and SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 are USIP’s media partners for this event.

Here is a full list of speakers and panelists, which included various think tank leaders and scholars such as Arthur Brooks (AEI), Fred Kempe (Atlantic Council), and James Carafano (Heritage).

An event program can be found here. Partners of the event included American Enterprise Institute, Atlantic Council, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Center for American Progress (CAP), and the Heritage Foundation.  Media partners included Politico and SiriusXM

Sponsors of the event included LMI, Boeing, Chevron, and J. Robinson West & Eileen Shields-West.  [J. Robinson West is the Founder and Chairman of PFC Energy.]

So, did the event accomplish anything?  Indeed it did according to the New York Times, which says that the Obama team and the Trump team engaged in a "public display of harmony" when incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn shook hands with outgoing National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

Here is how The Economist describes the think tank event.

In 2009 USIP held a "Passing the Baton" event 50 high-level speakers and 1,900 attendees.

Vanity Fair recently wrote a piece about USIP entitled "Is the US Institute of Peace Really Making the World a Better Place?"

Think Tanks Suckered Into White House Talking Points on Iran?

Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Adviser to President Obama, recently admitted that the White House spoon-fed talking points about the Iran nuclear deal to think tanks and others in order to sell it to the US Congress, the US public, and others.

He made the comments in a profile in the New York Times Magazine.  Here is an excerpt:

Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Interestingly, he defended his approach at a Washington think tank - the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).  Well, more precisely, at an event sponsored by CNAS at the swanky Willard Hotel.

The media, members of Congress, and others seem to be shocked, but the White House frequently passes along its talking points to numerous think tanks around town.  [Whether that information was meant to deceive is another question.]

And Rhodes is quite familiar with think tanks, having worked for one himself.  Here is more from the NYT piece about how Rhodes snagged his think tank job:

The editor at Foreign Policy...suggested that he apply for a job with Lee Hamilton, the onetime congressman from Indiana, who was looking for a speechwriter.

“I was surprised,” Hamilton remembered. “What the hell does a guy who wanted to write fiction come to me for?” But he had always found writers useful, and Rhodes’s writing sample was the best in the pile. So he hired him on at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank. Though Rhodes never said a word in meetings, Hamilton says, he had a keen understanding of what was going on and a talent for putting the positions of distinguished participants down on paper.

In response to the whole flare-up with Rhodes, Brookings Middle East scholar Suzanne Maloney came out in defense of Rhodes, saying that claims of deception were never substantiated.

Here is what Peter Apps, Founder and Executive Director of the think tank Project for the Study of the 21st Century (PS21), had to say.

In related news, it was recently reported that the arms control non-profit Ploughshares Fund worked alongside the White House to sell the Iran deal.  Ploughshares, which is financed by billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute, the Buffett Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Foundation, and others, funds a number of think tanks, including Brookings and Atlantic Council.

Also, here is an interesting Slate article, entitled "The Little Think Tank That Could," about Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the pro-Israel think tank that led the attack on President Obama's Iran deal.

Obama Disses Think Tanks

Now that President Barack Obama is less than a year away from leaving office, he can start to speak his mind and let off some steam.  And what is on his mind about think tanks is not pretty.  The truth: He really doesn't like many of them.

In a lengthy piece about President Obama, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg reports this:

By 2013, Obama’s resentments were well developed. He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.”

Foreign Policy highlighted this quote in a piece entitled "Obama, Uncensored: National Security Edition."  Under the subtitle "Rage Against Think Tanks," FP notes that a common theme throughout The Atlantic article is President Obama's "frustration with Washington's pundit class, which Obama said seeks to enforce a 'playbook' to world events that often involves 'militarized responses.'"

Think Tank Watch finds it a bit ironic that President Obama dislikes a number of think tanks while many of his top foreign policy aides were hand-picked directly from think tank land, including the Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and Center for American Progress (CAP).

Here is a Think Tank Watch list of Obama Administration officials who have taken the "revolving door" from government work into the think tank world.

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch piece on President Obama's "favorite" think tank.

Now that President Obama will be staying in Washington, DC for at least a couple of years, will he be joining a think tank or starting his own?  Here is a previous Think Tank Watch post on that very question.

Our guess is that he won't be living anywhere near think tank row...