The Washington-based American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) has been a leading member of the neoconservative advocacy community for several decades. During Republican presidential administrations, AEI tends to be one of the more prominent U.S. policy institutions, with associated scholars and fellows populating numerous upper echelon policy posts in the administration. Commenting on AEI’s influence in the broader right-wing milieu, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan called the think tank “one of the beachheads of the modern conservative movement.”[1]
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AEI has been less prominent since the election of Donald Trump, attempting to maintain its place among conservatives while being occasionally critical of Trump’s policies, and rarely enthusiastic about them. AEI scholars have expressed concern about Trump’s rhetoric,[3] his stance on immigration,[4] his various scandals,[5] his response to investigations of his conduct,[6] and his trade[7] and tariff[8] policies.
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But just as central to AEI is U.S. policy on Israel and the Middle East, which has shaped its response to the Trump administration. AEI has long positioned itself within the right-wing “pro-Israel” advocacy community. A case in point was its September 2015 announcement that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the winner of that year’s “Irving Kristol Award,” the organization’s top honor which is “given to individuals who have made exceptional practical and intellectual contributions to improve government policy, social welfare, or political understanding.”[11]
This positon in has led AEI to be supportive of many of Trump’s geostrategic policies, particularly with respect to the Middle East. Thus, for example, several[12] prominent AEI figures[13] spoke out in support of the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, with no concomitant attention paid to the Palestinian claim to a capital in the same city. Senior vice president Danielle Pletka echoed Netanyahu’s claim that moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem could actually be a step toward peace, stating, “The truth is that the Israelis have had their capital in Jerusalem for almost 70 years, and Washington has maintained an embassy outside Jerusalem for the same time period, and none of that has led to a resolution between the Arabs and the Jews. There is no reason to believe that acknowledging reality will prejudice that particularly hopeless cause. Perhaps it will have the opposite effect.”[14]
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Among the better known figures with long-standing connections to the institute are several former George W. Bush administration officials and advisers who were key promoters of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” policies, including
John Bolton , Paul Wolfowitz , Richard Perle , and John Yoo. President Bush highlighted the enormous influence the institute had in his administration during a January 2003 speech at an AEI dinner celebrating neoconservative trailblazer Irving Kristol . After commending AEI for having “some of the finest minds in our nation,” the president said, “You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds.”[17]
Although the George W. Bush presidency marked a high-point for AEI’s influence in the White House, the think tank continued to play a role influencing public debate on U.S. foreign and defense policies through the Barack Obama. In 2013, AEI brought on retired Sens. Joe Lieberman(I-CT) and Jon Kyl(R-AZ) as visiting fellows, tasking the two long-time hawks with heading the institute’s new “American Internationalism Project.”
The think tank has long promoted U.S. military entanglements in the Middle East, advocating intervention in Syria’s civil war, a hard line against Iran, and a prolonged U.S. presence in Afghanistan. These positions were often at odds with the policies of the Obama administration and, while they may be a bit closer to Trump’s aggressive style, they are also out of step with Trump’s simultaneous isolationist streak. A 2012 AEI briefing called U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan “a recipe for endless war fought on American soil.”[18]In April 2018, AEI resident scholar Marc Thiessen wrote that Trump’s attacks in Syria, “were just muscular enough not to get mocked. As a result, they did more damage to the United States’ credibility on the world stage than they did to the Assad regime.”[19]
In 2014, as the Obama administration announced a campaign of airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, Frederick Kagan, the director of AEI’s “Critical Threats” Project, came out strongly in favor of escalating the conflict by sending U.S. ground troops, arguing for a strategy that “includes a real American commitment—including some forces on the ground and the vital military and political enablers that only America can provide.”[20]
Writing with his spouse, Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, Kagan suggested that the United States should send as many as 25,000 ground troops to Iraq and Syria. “Two battalion-sized quick reaction forces (QRF) will need to be available at all times, one in Iraq and one in Syria,” the couple wrote in September 2014.[21]
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AEI scholars have long identified Iran as a key Middle East threat, insisting—despite contrary assessments from U.S. and Israeli intelligence services—that Iran was actively engaged in building a nuclear weapon prior to the 2015 nuclear agreement. In a December 2011 report exploring the plausibility of containing a nuclear Iran, authors Danielle Pletka, Thomas Donnelly, and Maseh Zarif cast doubt on the possibility of effectively containing a nuclear Iran, but suggested that such a scenario was inevitable in the absence of
preemptive action.
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Although AEI’s scholars focus on a range of social and domestic policy issues, the institute has long been identified with hawkish U.S. foreign policy advocacy. Many of its scholars were vociferous public promoters of attacking Iraq—even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and pushed for an expansive “war on terror.” AEI was closely associated with the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative letterhead group that served as an important vehicle for forging a broad coalition of conservatives behind an aggressive post-Cold War U.S. agenda.
AEI played an important role in buttressing arguments for the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq and served as a key advocacy organization for the push to approve the 2007 troop “surge.” Following the 2006 November midterm elections—which swept in Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate on a wave of antiwar sentiment—AEI scholar Frederick Kagan, an outspoken proponent of increasing troop levels in Iraq, wrote in the Weekly Standard, “We face a stark choice now. We can either maintain bases and large forces in Iraq, or we can withdraw. If we withdraw, the Iraqi Army will collapse, and we will not be able to help it except by re-entering the country in large numbers and in a much worse situation.”
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Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty
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