Early this month, progressives were ecstatic to hear that former Bernie Sanders advisor Matt Duss was expected to take a new role at the State Department. The next day, President Joe Biden made his first major foreign policy speech, pledging to end American involvement in the brutal, Saudi-led war in Yemen.
“The war in Yemen must end,” Biden said at the State Department.
Duss’s imminent appointment and Biden’s Yemen declaration signaled the first major victories for the Democratic party’s anti-interventionist foreign policy wing under the new administration. But offsetting both Duss’s position (which has not been formally announced or confirmed) and Biden’s rhetoric is the still-commanding presence of “the Blob,” the derisive nickname of Washington’s hawkish foreign policy establishment.
“Biden’s silences at the State Department the other day spoke more loudly than what he said,” wrote Samuel Moyn, a Yale professor and a fellow at the dove-ish Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “They suggest that his promise to end endless wars means some wars and not others, and one egregiously inhumane proxy campaign rather than the United States’ permanent shadow war.”
If personnel is policy, then Moyn’s arguments have only grown stronger in recent weeks, according to two recent reports on the Biden era foreign policy apparatus.
Biden draws from think tank tied to defense companies, foreign governments
The first report came last week, where the Revolving Door Project, a government watchdog, connected more than a dozen Biden foreign policy appointees and staffers to the Center for a New American Security, a hawkish liberal think tank with uneasy financial ties to defense contractors and foreign governments.
“CNAS receives large contributions directly from defense contractors, foreign governments and the U.S. government; publishes research and press material that frequently supports the interests of its sponsors without proper disclosure; and even gives its financial sponsors an official oversight role in helping to shape the organization’s research,” write Brett Heinz and Erica Jung, the report’s co-authors.
The paper cites 16 current Biden appointees who have a current or former affiliation with CNAS, including new Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, a former member of the CNAS board of directors; Victoria Nuland, Biden’s nominee for undersecretary of state for political affairs and former CEO of CNAS; and Kurt Campbell, who will be Biden’s deputy assistant and coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, and was a CNAS co-founder and former chairman of the board.
While ethical behavior with regard to funding is a widespread problem among Washington think tanks, the report by Revolving Door Project—which is a project of the nonpartisan Center for Economic and Policy Research—found CNAS’ relations to its donors particularly troubling, even by the think tank’s own standards. The report points to previous congressional testimony by Campbell in which the former CNAS chairman told lawmakers that the think tank “kept a very clear line” with regard to weapons manufacturers.
By 2018, this was no longer the case; that year, a CNAS report lauded the Northrop Grumman-produced B-21 Raider stealth bomber and advocated the U.S. military purchase 50 to 75 more of the aircraft in addition to the 100 it had already purchased. Not only had Northrop Grumman donated to CNAS, but the think tank actually received a majority of the company’s total think tank donations throughout the 2010s.
The report cites numerous similar instances of conflict of interest, including CNAS advocating for looser restrictions on weapons proliferation a month after the think tank was paid $250,000 to write a similar, private paper for the embassy of the United Arab Emirates.
Officials profit at weapons companies and recommend longer timeline in Afghanistan
Less than a week after the release of the Revolving Door report on CNAS, more information emerged detailing conflicts of interest between policymakers and weapons companies. An investigation by the Daily Beast and Responsible Statecraft (the latter is a publication of the Quincy Institute) found that a majority of top leaders on a congressionally appointed study group on Afghanistan “have current or recent financial ties to major defense contractors.”
According to the investigation, former Sen. Kelly Ayotte and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Ret. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, two of the Afghanistan Study Group’s three co-chairs, “have also used their expertise not just to advise the Biden administration on the Afghanistan War, but to cash in with major defense contractors.”
Ayotte serves on the board of BAE Systems Inc., while Dunford recently joined Lockheed Martin’s board of directors. Along with Ayotte and Dunford, a total of nine of the group’s 12 “plenary” members “maintained deep ties to the weapons industry,” with some raking in millions of dollars in compensation. Earlier in the month, the study group recommended that Biden extend the current deadline for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, slotted for May 1.
Other conflicts persist for Biden foreign policy team
Along with the conflicts detailed by the Revolving Door Project and Responsible Statecraft/Daily Beast reports, Biden foreign policy appointees have previously come under scrutiny for other private sector work.
Haines and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken faced scrutiny for their work at WestExec Advisors, a consultancy co-founded with other Obama administration alumni. During Blinken’s confirmation process, WestExec disclosed numerous big-name corporate clients, including tech companies like Facebook and Uber, as well as the defense contractor and weapons maker Boeing.
Haines also disclosed six-figure consulting fees from Palantir. The controversial data mining company and government contractor was founded by Peter Thiel, and has worked with local police forces, U.S. Customs and Border Control, and the Army.
