Today, St. Martin’s Press, one of the major American publishers, released an important book by American writer and journalist Casey Michel titled Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World. This book is a remarkable investigation into the emergence and evolution of covert forces known as foreign lobbyists. Their mission involves consolidating dictatorships and spreading networks of plunder. They have also secretly directed U.S. policy, often without the awareness of the broader American public. Now, some of these forces have started to turn their attention to American democracy, posing a threat from within.
According to the author, many of these groups have spent years guiding dictatorships directly to the halls of Washington, where they have whitewashed the reputations of the most atrocious and repressive regimes in the process. This includes an increasing number of Americans in other sectors: in law firms and consulting companies, among public relations specialists and former legislators, and even within think tanks and American universities.
The book is divided into 17 chapters where the author sheds light on these foreign agents. Some of them, after decades of installing dictators and corrupting American politics, are embarking on their next mission: ending the American democratic experiment. In Chapter 14, the author reveals the spread of foreign funding and lobbying groups in both universities and think tanks, and how they have become centers of foreign influence and lobbying campaigns.
American universities and think tanks have spent decades ignoring basic transparency requirements for foreign lobbying, confident that no investigator would come or regulatory body would check their compliance with the law. But all this began to change with the arrival of the Trump administration. Despite the swamp of foreign lobbying investigations surrounding Trump himself, his administration took a particular initiative in investigating how universities and research centers had become preferred destinations for reputation laundering, targeting American policymakers, and steering American policy towards the interests of foreign regimes, particularly foreign dictatorships.
Thanks to the administration’s involvement in foreign lobbying scandals more than ever before, Americans now have a much better understanding of how universities and think tanks have joined the flood of foreign lobbying efforts and opened their doors in ways we are just beginning to recognize. Starting with legislation passed in 1986, all American universities were supposed to disclose all foreign gifts and contracts exceeding $250,000 twice a year.
A bipartisan investigation conducted by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which primarily focused on Chinese influence efforts in higher education in the U.S., found that American universities routinely avoid disclosing funding from sources linked to Beijing. To cite just one data point, a striking majority—nearly three-quarters—of American colleges and universities that received significant funding from the Chinese Ministry of Education “failed to report as required.” Information about these funding flows, amounting to millions of dollars, was effectively a “black hole.” As the report summarized, such Chinese funding came “with restrictions that could endanger academic freedom”—such as censorship and silence about events in Tiananmen Square and Chinese policies in Tibet. The findings were surprising in their scope, with increased concerns across the American political spectrum about Chinese influence operations, which these figures confirmed.
However, the Senate investigation ignited a broader second investigation revealing more about undisclosed foreign funding in American universities, and how China was not the only culprit. This follow-up investigation, overseen by the U.S. Department of Education, discovered not only the additional amount of Chinese funding but also how one dictatorship after another followed a similar model, funding some of the most prominent American universities—transforming them into centers for pro-regime lobbying efforts in the process.
In a survey of twelve major American universities, investigators found that these institutions failed to report an astonishing $6.5 billion of “unreported foreign funds.” It appeared that each major American university was involved in concealing these financial flows and ignoring federal transparency regulations. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Georgetown: one major university after another failed to meet basic due diligence requirements. The Department of Education report found that “the largest, richest, and most developed American higher education institutions received… billions of dollars in assets through a variety of relevant intermediaries, including functional captive institutions, foreign operating units, and other structures.” As the report concluded, “the evidence shows that the industry significantly reduced reporting while also working to conceal the identity of much of the money it disclosed, all to obscure foreign sources.” In total, these anonymous donations from places like China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Qatar amounted to over a billion dollars—just in the twelve schools surveyed.
Thanks to these investigations, at least a little has been revealed about the kinds of relationships prominent American universities have developed with repressive dictatorial regimes. Initial reports indicate that foreign regimes are particularly interested in using these donations to improve their reputation and silence criticism of their policies.
As shown by the report, American academics and universities are not the only ones who have become conduits for foreign lobbying and influence efforts. In recent years, another industry, colloquially known as think tanks, has emerged as a favored destination for dictatorial funding—to turn American politics upside down, all without the rest of us having any idea about it.
Think tanks, like universities and institutions before them, are non-profit entities ostensibly dedicated to studying a range of policy issues. Some think tanks are devoted to domestic affairs, from housing policy to wealth inequality. However, many, particularly in Washington, also focus on foreign policy—crafting studies, conducting research, and hosting meetings on how America can pursue certain policies in the face of specific foreign governments. A few think tanks, such as the Atlantic Council or the Council on Foreign Relations, focus exclusively on foreign policy. But many of the largest American think tanks, including institutions like the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress, have wings dedicated to this topic. Often, when lawmakers—who are rarely experts in foreign policy to begin with—are constrained by time and resources, they effectively turn to think tanks for their policy prescriptions, relying on them to provide the most effective recommendations along the way.
Unlike universities or other foreign lobbying centers, think tanks have never been required to disclose foreign funding sources. Given their close connections with the U.S. foreign policymaking apparatus—American officials not only rely on think tank recommendations but also routinely move between these institutions—think tanks have become key tools for foreign funding and lobbying efforts that can operate without any disclosure requirements.
As researchers have discovered, the volume of foreign funding flowing into American research centers, particularly from foreign dictatorial regimes, has positively exploded in recent years. The most prominent research centers in America have received hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly more, from foreign regimes in recent years, with none of it disclosed in matters like the Foreign Agents Registration Act. As seen with universities, much of this funding comes from corrupt dictatorial regimes.
For example, a foreign state with one of the highest donation rates to American think tanks is the United Arab Emirates. According to recent findings, the UAE has provided millions of dollars to leading American think tanks—all without being required to disclose any of this funding to American regulatory bodies, the American public, or American lawmakers who are affected by these centers.
Thanks to these donations, the UAE has become the largest foreign donor to several major American think tanks. Not only did the UAE provide most of the foreign funding to think tanks like the Aspen Institute—which claims to be “committed to building a free, just, and equitable society”—but the UAE is also the largest foreign donor to places like the Atlantic Council, which accepted no less than $4 million from the UAE. It appears that this money came with conditions.
As one researcher found, “The Atlantic Council’s relationships with the UAE gave the UAE the opportunity to shape the think tank’s reports before publication”—effectively allowing it to craft the Atlantic Council’s supposedly independent analysis before it was published. As leaked emails showed, Atlantic Council officials directly communicated with their UAE patrons to offer to edit their texts, including materials “scheduled to be published under the name” of David Petraeus, one of America’s most famous former military officers.
The UAE is not the only foreign government to which the Atlantic Council—arguably the leading American research institution in the field of foreign policy—has turned for funds. Up to 20% of the organization’s budget comes from these types of foreign donations. Despite its apparent dedication to creating a “more free world,” much of the Atlantic Council’s activities still need funding.
“It seems that the Atlantic Council doesn’t care, and they seem to be working by taking huge amounts from foreign sovereigns, then setting up programs for foreign sovereigns.”
To be fair to the Atlantic Council, other think tanks have also happily fed on UAE funding. The UAE has also become one of the largest donors to the Center for American Progress—a nominally liberal think tank closely linked to the Democratic Party. Following the UAE’s donation, which also reached millions, a member of the think tank’s staff began assisting UAE officials in “organizing UAE-sponsored trips” to the country and started offering direct advice to UAE officials on how to influence their American counterparts.
In reality, it is hard to find a prominent think tank that has not fed on these foreign funds.
The author asserts that after nearly a century since its initial imposition, a White House administration has begun to use the Foreign Agents Registration Act to pursue foreign lobbying groups operating in the shadows. But these moves did not occur in a vacuum. They did not come because American officials realized that unregulated foreign lobbying efforts were some sort of theoretical threat, or that the written laws were indeed worth enforcing. Rather, these actions came largely because the president whom these officials served surrounded himself with a much larger number of foreign lobbyists and a much larger number of foreign agents compared to any previous American president.
All these covert foreign lobbyists competed for the president’s attention, who, despite everything the State, Justice, and Education Departments did to highlight new paths for foreign lobbying, succeeded in bringing more foreign lobbying efforts directly into the White House than any American president in history.
