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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Is Brookings a 'Liberal' Think Tank or a Big-Money Lobbyist

The case of its abruptly resigned leader highlights its dependence on
big money from the Gulf.

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
.

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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 .

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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