Susan Walsh/AP Photo
Retired Gen. John Allen testifies on Capitol Hill before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, February 25, 2015.
When the retired four-star general John R. Allen resigned as president of the Brookings Institution this week, he was already subject to a federal criminal probe regarding his alleged lobbying activities for the government of Qatar, a nation with which Brookings has a long and complicated history. U.S. prosecutors cited messages Gen. Allen had sent apparently seeking payments for work to help Qatar win Washington’s backing in a feud with its regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and then lying about it when questioned by the feds, which his lawyer denied on his behalf. Allen’s alleged crimes occurred before his presidency of Brookings began, but owing to its enormously well-funded presence at the time in Doha, he apparently felt this job was the perfect setting for him to continue to milk the Qatar monarchy and manipulate U.S. foreign policy in its direction.
The Times coverage referred to Brookings as “a pillar of Washington’s liberal establishment” and “the prestigious, left-leaning institution.” And it’s true: Brookings boasts some of the great liberal minds of this or any generation—well, at least one of them. But “liberal” or even “left-leaning” are labels that apply only in the alternate universe of punditocracy discourse, in which Trumpism is considered a slightly extreme but otherwise legitimate expression of one side of allegedly objective “both sides” reporting. The mislabeling of what is essentially a conservative (small “c”) establishment organization that, in recent years, has become enormously dependent on the kind of corporate donations that do not allow for much in the way of boat-rocking has two likely sources. One is the fact that Brookings fellows have been dining out for nearly half a century on the fact that G. Gordon Liddy wanted to blow it up on behalf of Richard Nixon. The second is a campaign, under way at least as long, to define anyone who does not embrace the increasingly flat-earth, now neo-fascist precepts of the dangerous lunatics who have seized control of the Republican Party as “liberal.” Brookings is “left-leaning” in the same way the State Department, the FBI, and the entire “deep state” are now considered to be liberal conspirators and the Democratic Party to be Communist pedophiles.
But for the still-sensible among us, take a look at who has been running Brookings for the past half-century. Its president from 1977 to 1995, Bruce MacLaury, spent most of his career in the Federal Reserve, with a stint in the Nixon Treasury Department. He was replaced by Michael Armacost, who was an undersecretary of state for the Reagan administration and ambassador to Japan under the first George Bush. At the same time, Richard Haass, who now runs the Council on Foreign Relations (and therefore employs genocide enabler Elliott Abrams), ran its foreign-policy department, and had been a senior director also in Papa Bush’s National Security Council. Armacost was replaced by the famed Time magazine foreign-policy writer (and published New Yorker poet) Strobe Talbott, who also served as deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration. But I don’t think anyone would have considered Talbott “left-leaning” in the sense of, say, Time’s onetime liberal columnists Barbara Ehrenreich or Peter Beinart, or, when it comes to genuinely liberal foreign-policy mavens, Paul Warnke or Morton Halperin. And Talbott was followed by Allen, who’d spent 40 years in the not-so-left-leaning Marine Corps. (Media Matters, back in 1997, made a lengthy case against applying the “liberal” label to the institute.)
This is one problem with the Times’ (and others’) outdated and inaccurate labeling. The other is a willingness, at least in this case, to focus more intensely on the transformation of the think tank culture itself. I have been an intern at two think tanks and worked as a senior fellow of three more. At each of the latter, I managed to isolate myself from any fundraising responsibilities, but such freedoms have grown increasingly rare and anachronistic, even in the genuinely left-liberal think tank world. Today, most centrist and even some liberal think tanks function as alternative avenues for lobbying by nations that would prefer not to be seen to be lobbying. Daniel Drezner, who wrote a book on a related topic which I discussed here in 2017, notes that “think tanks are less heavily regulated than more traditional forms of political spending, such as campaign contributions and lobbying members of Congress,” and adds, “the percentage of cash donations from foreign governments to Brookings nearly doubled between 2005 and 2014.” The think tank 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. (I read this on Vox.)
This 2016 piece from the Times takes a look at the overall issue of corporate funding of think tanks, and just what those firms are buying with that money. This one from the Post two years earlier focuses specifically on Brookings, which is considered the gold standard of Washington think tanks, but seeks to maintain that standard by collecting and distributing lots of gold, almost always in a manner that is consistent with the values and interests of both its investors and its customers. In that way, it is not so different from any other business, which the people who work there—who, in many if not most cases, have become responsible for raising the money for their own studies—certainly understand. But for the purposes of public consumption—and in many cases, self-respect—they must pretend as if they are not.
For more on the issue of foreign funding of think tanks and who gets what, take a look at this study. And if you wonder why the right wing is so much better at ensuring that their “ideas” are adopted by the political process than liberals are, even though they are, by and large, terrible, you really should read this interesting report.
Altercation readers might remember that I wrote earlier this year of a documentary shown about the life of the great Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua at Lincoln Center. Sadly, he passed away from cancer this week.
Yehoshua was born to a Sephardi family that had lived in Jerusalem for five generations, and this Times obituary does a nice job of walking one through his oeuvre. All of his novels are serious, even demanding, but rewarding undertakings. Yehoshua was almost as famous, however, for his politics. Along with fellow famous Israeli writers Amos Oz, Yehuda Amichai, and Aharon Appelfeld, he formed a mini-peace movement that provided nervous liberal American Jews de facto a way to oppose the machinations of Israel’s government when it mistreated the Palestinians or ignored chances for peace without being called “self-hating Jews” or worse. I visited Yehoshua at his home in Haifa for a piece I wrote in 2008, entitled “Israel Turns 60,” and wrote this:
The great Israeli novelist and Peace Now activist A.B. Yehoshua recently caused a stir when he wrote an op-ed for La Stampa in Turin, Italy—reprinted in Israel but not in the United States—calling on America to recall its ambassador to Israel as long as the practice of expanding the illegal settlements continues … When I visited Yehoshua in his Haifa home, he explained that many longtime friends criticized this position—even Amos Oz disagreed—but Yehoshua replied, “If America loves us so much, they could help us to keep our promises … It’s like a father with a son and the son is taking drugs. I love him and I want to help him. But to help him, we have to break until he stops with the drugs.”
Late in life, Yehoshua took a couple of stances that stirred things up. One was when he declared diaspora life to be basically ridiculous—terming American Jews to be only “partial Jews”—and insisted that all serious Jews should move to Israel. This was deemed to be such a big deal that the American Jewish Committee published a little book about it. And in 2020, he announced he felt forced to give up on the two-state solution and try to create a single state encompassing Arabs and Jews as equal citizens. If you watch the movie noted above, you will see him attempting to promote this idea to West Bank Palestinians, who appear to like and respect the man, but do not have much—any, really—faith in his proposal ever becoming a reality. Anyway, take a look at his books, see which of them appeals most to you, and try it.
The “world” of Jewish Twitter is understandably angry over an apparently anti-trans article that appeared on the right-wing Jewish website Tablet, which is supported by the right-wing, pro-Trump Tikvah Fund. This gives me the opportunity to remind people that Tablet published what I think is a clear winner in the “Worst Holocaust Article Ever Published by a Jewish Publication” category in a walk. You won’t find the article itself anywhere, but here is Jeffrey Goldberg’s appropriately outraged discussion of it. Why nobody was ever fired over its publication I will never understand.
I have been fighting the long tail of COVID for, like, three weeks, and yesterday, tragically, its intensity claimed my ticket to see Paul McCartney in New Jersey, as I was not up to the trip. Please, whatever forces control the important doings of the universe, don’t let me wake up and read that this unconscionably abbreviated performance was somehow picked up and repeated. (And really, Paul, “Seventeen”? “Seventy” would be more age-appropriate when singing it live.) Sometimes, guys, rather than trying to do this, it’s better to do this.
