Brookings, Qatar and the corruption of expertise

As a Qatari agent of influence, it’s difficult to be more obvious than former CENTCOM Commander and Brookings President Gen. John Allen.

The Brookings Institution was founded in 1916 as America’s first think tank, an indispensable product of the Progressive Era. The fuel that powers the Progressives’ administrative state is the raw material of social science: reports, data, position papers, and all the things which buttress its claim to expertise.

Brookings, as well as publications like The Atlantic and The New Republic, provided the illusion of that expertise–and, more importantly, narratives and biases that would unify the massive and growing classes of bureaucrats, analysts and policymakers responsible for shaping the workings of the US government.

Over the last century, Brookings’ influence has “contributed to the creation of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and the Congressional Budget Office, as well as to the development of influential policies for deregulation, broad-based tax reform, welfare reform, and foreign aid.”

The work product generated by Brookings’ experts often reflected the foreign policy priorities of the US intelligence community. When the CIA wanted to engage with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, for example, a Brookings report would helpfully conclude–erroniously, of course–that the Ikhwan had abandoned violence and had become a constructive and legitimate force in Egypt’s domestic politics. (My old friend, the late Middle East expert Barry Rubin, was approached to write this very report on behalf of Langley. He declined.)

Of course, the US intelligence community wasn’t the only influential force that saw the importance of think tanks like Brookings. As a non-profit “research” institution, it depended on money from private donors: wealthy individuals, corporations and, increasingly, foreign governments.

Having influence over a think tank like Brookings became a prize, and at least one energy-rich Gulf monarchy wanted it. Qatar donated an estimated $24 million to Brookings, becoming its largest forign donor.

But that wasn’t anywhere near the extent of it. In 2008, the Qatari government essentially licensed Brookings’ name to affix to a new think tank called the Brookings Doha Center, based in the emirate’s capital city. This was advantageous for both parties, as it created a multi-million-dollar influence-peddling slush-fund, with no possibility of oversight or disclosure required by American law.

According to a WikiLeaks cable from 2009, one Doha-based expatriate told a U.S. diplomat that, “their drive for international conferences, their hosting of U.S. military bases, and their relentless engagement with others were all part of a strategy to protect Qatar. ‘We have no military,” one Qatari told him, “so think of the conferences as our aircraft carriers, and the military bases as our nuclear weapons.’”

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