ProMarket Managing Editor Andy Shi interviews Virginia Tech Professor Chad Levinson about his forthcoming book, The President’s Echo System: How Foreign Policy Is Sold to Americans, out June 2 at Harvard University Press.
In The President’s Echo System: How Foreign Policy Is Sold to Americans, Professor Chad Levinson of Virginia Tech University explores how United States presidents since World War II have used extragovernmental organizations (EGOs)—grassroots organizations, think tanks, and other civil society actors—to spread propaganda among the U.S. public in order to build support for their foreign policy programs. In an interview with ProMarket Managing Editor Andy Shi, Levinson discusses the nuances of this relationship between presidents and EGOs, how this relationship forces us to scrutinize media and the marketplace of ideas, and how this relationship has changed, or not, under the Trump administrations and with the advent of social media and public influencers.
Andy Shi: Your book argues that rather than exert influence on the American president, extra-governmental organizations, also known as EGOs, are tools that the state utilizes to influence public opinion on foreign policy issues. Your case studies include the most significant foreign interventions since World War II. But what about the less monumental foreign policy episodes? Does this one-way relationship start to break down? Do we see instances where think tanks leverage their connections to push the president into smaller, and not necessarily military, interventions?
Chad Levinson: I argue that EGOs can be symbiotic partners to ambitious presidents by collaborating in persuasion campaigns to overcome public resistance and congressional opposition. And yes, when a policy represents a core piece of an administration’s grand strategy, and it needs buy-in from Congress, and if they need to enlist outside groups to mobilize public support, presidents take the initiative in these partnerships. But I don’t think it’s a one-way relationship. Both sides benefit, and the EGO partners continue to exert influence long after presidents retire.
As for smaller policies, sure, outside organizations can influence decision making, not just marketing. There may be hundreds of instances in any presidential term in which outside groups are able to slip something into the policy process.
But unless they’re aimed in the same direction, to me, it’s mostly background noise. And that’s why I focus on the most significant interventions. They tend to aim all those hundreds of instances in the same direction, because that’s what the Marshall Plan was, or the Lend-Lease Act, or the Vietnam War, or the Global War on Terror. Hundreds or thousands of small policy actions oriented and organized to serve the administration’s broader strategic goals.
AS: Foreign policy is an area where the executive branch enjoys more discretion, but that is not to say Congress has no role. Do you see EGOs engage with members of Congress in your research, either as agents of the president or to help members of Congress promote their own, perhaps contrarian, foreign policy agendas? If so, has this changed over time as Congress has conceded more discretion over foreign policy to the president?
CL: Congress absolutely has a role to play if they want. I’m not sure they want to anymore. Without congressional opposition, there’s no domestic political reason to mount a PR campaign in the first place.
It’s a two-step process. First, win public support, and then use that support as leverage to secure congressional consent. EGOs are active in both of those steps. So, you’ll often see an EGO send out messaging to the public to write their senator, have a list of senators to follow up with, and make sure that that public mobilization lands where the member of Congress lives.
In my own research, I do see members of Congress engaging with EGOs, their own EGOs, to oppose the president. So going back to the 1940s, before Pearl Harbor, legislators who opposed giving aid to the Allies participated in the activities of the America First Committee. Senator Burton Wheeler was an unofficial leader for the group, was photographed giving the Nazi salute, along with Charles Lindbergh, at an America First rally in Madison Square Garden.
Senator Gerald Nye was about to go on stage to speak to an America First rally in Pittsburgh when the news about Pearl Harbor broke. He dismissed that as a hoax and started his speech anyway and paused when he was handed a note on stage, announced to the crowd that Japan had declared war on the United States, and that was pretty much the end of the America First Committee’s campaign to keep the U.S. out of the war.
But presidents have several advantages in dealing with outside groups. First, they’re better informed than members of Congress on international affairs, so it’s harder for private organizations to join, to enjoy informational advantages over them. Second, presidents can take action or make agreements on behalf of the United States and coordinate a public relations campaign to reinforce it. FDR and Churchill were already planning the post-war international order before Pearl Harbor, and Roosevelt brought his extra-governmental partners into the loop early on so they had a mature plan for ratification ready when the UN Charter was completed. Members of Congress can’t make the same kinds of commitments to international allies.
Third, presidents can wield the executive branch as a weapon against their opponents, as the Nixon administration did when the president ordered the IRS to look into whether the Amendment to End the War Committee, the EGO set up by [Senators] George McGovern and Mark Hatfield to end the [Vietnam War] in 1970, to see whether they had violated federal anti-lobbying laws.
And finally, presidents can use the White House as a central venue for coalition building. Members of Congress have to coordinate with one another to accomplish the same thing.
So yes, Congress does work with EGOs as well, but the outcome isn’t as coherent.
AS: If think tanks often serve as the PR arms of ideologically compatible presidents, how do you advise Americans, media, and other scholars to view the work of think tanks and their experts? How do you approach the work of think tanks with an eye on maintaining the integrity of the marketplace of ideas?
CL: It really starts with the media. I think the media are far too cooperative with think tanks when it comes to obscuring their relationships with the government. You know, I find the public is actually pretty savvy when I do survey experiments and refer to the “independent, nonpartisan organization” that I probably made up. A lot of the open responses I get say, “think tanks are all Republican or Democrat. They’re all aligned with the parties, and that nonpartisan stuff is nonsense.”
It’s the specific relationship with the president that [the media] often don’t reveal. So, I’m going to pick on the American Enterprise Institute for a moment, but it’s really not just about them. One of the stories I tell in the book is about how AEI became a powerhouse in U.S. politics. Now, they’d been around since the late ‘40s, but they were second tier until the 1970s.
The Nixon administration was looking for a conservative counterweight to the Brookings Institution and for EGOs to help them defeat the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment to end the [Vietnam War] in 1970.
Chuck Colson, who went to prison for Watergate, chose AEI for the second task, mobilizing to defeat the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment. When that succeeded, he used that success to justify selecting them for the first task, the conservative counterweight to Brookings. He coordinated a major fundraising campaign for AEI from within the White House. When that reached its goal of $25 million for an endowment, AEI went public and the press reported the story without acknowledging Colson’s role. Instead, they gave credit to William J. Baroody Jr., who, by the way, was the son of the president of AEI. Baroody Jr. went on to replace Colson as White House liaison to outside organizations, and then after the Ford administration became AEI president himself.
So [the media] obscured Colson’s role, and then as AEI essentially gets installed within the White House, they don’t really make that big of a deal about it. I read a lot of reporting about that appointment, and none of it really talks about his father. His brother’s also in the mix, but…anyway, I think the press needs to treat these relationships as newsworthy in and of themselves. Administrations have certainly taken pains to keep them hidden. The perceived independence of EGOs is part of what gives them credibility with the public. And they engage in activities on behalf of the government. That needs to be reported. The government is actually doing things through these cutouts.
This information laundering distorts the marketplace of ideas in the same way that subsidies and insider trading distort the commercial marketplace. Now, I’m not suggesting that the government should never get involved in commerce or that the White House shouldn’t communicate with extra governmental partners. But if someone is a surrogate for the administration, the public should know that in real time. And scholars certainly should know that in hindsight. Otherwise, we’re going to continue to make the mistake of treating collaboration as if it were coercion.
AS: It’s really interesting what you mentioned about how ordinary Americans are a lot more suspicious and may be more perceptive of the possible influence or relationships between think tank experts and the administration. Do you think this might be something that has changed over the last decade or so where partisanship has blossomed and there’s been this growing suspicion of experts in general?
CL: Yeah, yeah, I definitely think it’s related to a growing mistrust in experts in institutions, but that’s a much more complicated phenomenon involving a lot of political actors and elites who have manipulated and exploited [mistrust in institutions] for their own gain. So, it’s not just, oh, great, the public is becoming more skeptical. In fact, one of the classes I’m developing is about this topic, and there’s not one conclusion to draw.
But I think in this specific relationship, the press has the obligation to say, listen—I’m going to pick on AEI again for a second. Michael Rubin, one of the senior fellows at AEI, in 2002 published a New York Times op-ed piece in support of the Iraq war. Now, the only biographical information included in that piece was that he was a school teacher in Iraqi Kurdistan. Now it didn’t say that—I don’t know exactly what month he started—but he was an advisor to the office of the secretary of defense in 2002. I don’t know if that happened before August when the op-ed ran, but he certainly had deep connections to the Bush administration. He was also a senior fellow for, I think they called it, “Foreign and Defense Studies” with AEI at the time. But the reader, who doesn’t know this, just thinks he was a school teacher in Iraqi Kurdistan. To me, the Times is basically just allowing themselves to be used as a tool for propaganda at that point.
AS: I’m not familiar with the MO of these newspapers, but why don’t they have full disclosures? It seems to be such salient information. Do they just trust the contributors to reveal what they think is important?
CL: I don’t know. And I’d like to actually ask editors what the process is for negotiating the terms of exposing credentials and listing credentials. I mean, The Daily Show used to do this all the time to great effect. They would have the “Senior Muslim Correspondent,” which is a ridiculous title, but it’s making fun of the way that the chyron lists the credentials of their panelists.
I assume it’s negotiated, right? How do you want to be listed? Every time scholars appear someplace, they ask us for biographical information. And when the stakes are a lot higher, when it’s a matter of advocating for war in the paper of record, I think those details need to be revealed.
AS: The institutionalization of EGOs and think tanks since the 1970s has also changed their funding needs and practices. This has included receiving funding from foreign entities. There was the issue of the Brookings Institution receiving money from Qatar a decade ago, for example. Is there evidence that changes in funding practices have systematically changed the relationship between think tanks or other EGOs and the administration? Or, as you mentioned in the case of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Iraq War, do any foreign policy positions favorable to foreign entities generally reflect the predisposed positions of the administration?
CL: I haven’t made a systematic study of contemporary think tank financing, but it’s an interesting question. I’m not sure foreign involvement in think tank operations is entirely new. In fact, the Council on Foreign Relations started during the interwar period as part of an international effort to establish institutions that would study the problem of major war and international order. Chatham House is the British equivalent of that. Actually, the Committee on International Relations, where I was a preceptor in graduate school at the University of Chicago, was also part of that. That was long before it became a degree-granting master’s program. But some think tanks, like universities, have become sort of umbrella organizations for a variety of special and specially funded projects.
And with that, you see the opportunity for donors to gain influence within them. You add to that the fact that the Foreign Agents Registration Act allows for the participation of foreign governments in various political activities in the United States, and you’re going to get some of this money going from foreign governments to national security experts to fund their research. It does seem to have a systematic effect.
According to Jon Pevehouse and Felicity Vabulas, lobbying by representatives of foreign agents has a significant effect on human rights ratings. These are ratings issued by both the State Department and Amnesty International. So, it does seem to buy some goodwill in that case. And to the extent that the president is a blank slate on a particular issue, this can have a meaningful impact on policy. Since he or she will be influenced by the national security establishment within government and on Massachusetts Avenue.
But assuming presidents have their own beliefs about foreign affairs, and mostly they do, just imagine what happens to those lobbying effects when the White House chooses to weigh in. Just look at how the image of Russia has improved among Republican voters over the last 10 years. That’s not the effect of lobbying or a shift in think tank consensus. That’s the president leading his loyal voters.
AS: I’ll ask a similar question, which may have a similar answer, but has the financial influence of corporations in think tanks had a demonstrable influence on administration’s foreign policy priorities and practices?
CL: I’m sure it’s had some influence, but my experience with the historical record tells me to be cautious about assigning too much weight to outside pressure in foreign policy decision-making, especially when it comes to major interventions. I almost think it’s a comforting lie that we tell ourselves that it’s not the president that’s doing this, it’s some nefarious outside actor, right? It’s comforting to tell ourselves that we voted for the right guy and they were steered wrong.
But to get back to the meat of the question, so these recent developments in think tank financing, this umbrella over multiple projects, this is sort of the RAND model, where you bring your own research money and plug in. So perhaps [corporate donations have] fundamentally altered the structure of influence. Perhaps think tanks have become more central to the policy process and more penetrable by corporate interests. But even then, it’s hard to imagine experts at well-established institutions fundamentally changing their way of looking at the world because of a donation. It might change the composition of the think tank by bringing in experts who agree with this perspective, who want to conduct this research and fund them.
So not long ago, the Koch Foundation pulled its money out of the Cato Institute’s foreign policy program and moved it to the Atlantic Council, along with several senior foreign policy analysts. Now, this was a pretty bold move, I thought, because Cato’s foreign policy team was much less favorable toward the type of robust internationalism—some would call it liberal hegemony—that represented the status quo at the Council. It was maybe two years before there was a serious enough rupture within the Council that the project pretty much stalled and the old Cato team moved on to a more compatible situation. So, money doesn’t always win out. And that’s before you ask, again, how much think tanks can guide an administration’s agenda.
AS: In your book, the last case study ends during the Reagan administration, and then you bring in a few more relatively recent cases, including the Iraq War, in your conclusion. These last two questions I have for you, I want to bring the conversation to the last five, six, seven years. First, I want to discuss the role of social media and how the rise of social media and individual influencers, and perhaps small grassroots organizations as well, has possibly diluted the ability of more established think tanks and EGOs to influence the marketplace of ideas regarding foreign policy? And how, if at all, has a decentralized information environment troubled laws preventing the president and his administration from paying entities to spread propaganda among Americans? Do the laws need an update?
CL: I think it has a serious potential to dilute think tank influence. And it’s really a continuation of a process that started with the internet itself becoming so central to the way we get information and communicate with each other. We used to have a fairly robust anti-propaganda regime in this country. I don’t know if any of the laws restricting the federal executive are even operative at this point. I mean, [the Department of Homeland Security] is running propaganda videos on its own account. But that’s a digression. When we created public diplomacy capabilities to wage the soft power war against the Soviet Union, we included prohibitions against the domestic distribution of the materials produced by those agencies. That was feasible when it was printed matter or radio and television transmissions, but the open architecture of the internet makes it much more difficult to restrict content with any precision. So, we started to dismantle those prohibitions around 2012.
These constraints on the government that existed in the past are one reason why presidents have chosen to collaborate with EGOs, because private organizations are not bound by those anti-propaganda laws. But laws against propaganda are not the only reason for extra-governmental collaboration. People are generally suspicious of overt government propaganda. And EGOs, I mean, we have the [Department of Defense] consulting on Hollywood films and actually giving them financial subsidies to paint the military in certain ways. And the [National Football League] has, you know, military pregame shows. But overt propaganda, you’re never going to see a television commercial for the Iraq War sponsored by the government, but you do see those kinds of ads and those kinds of editorials produced by extra-governmental organizations. So not being bound by propaganda laws was one of the reasons [for EGO collaborations].
But they’re not the only reason. That suspicion of overt government propaganda, EGOs are one way to mask the origins of the persuasion campaigns. They provide a facade of independence, but also certain skills in producing effective content. These skills used to have a higher barrier to entry than they do now, but we all carry around a recording studio on our smartphones. And we have the means to distribute the content in a coherent fashion. Some of us do, right? Influencers. Social media platforms are civil society platforms, and they mimic a lot of the functions to which citizen committees, think tanks, and interest groups once had privileged access, but don’t anymore.
With the obvious caveat that I’m not a lawyer or a legal scholar of any kind, I think we need to consider reinvigorating our anti-propaganda regime. That requires a shift in focus with respect to the discourse on content moderation on social media. Instead of asking whether social media platforms should accommodate government requests or demands to remove or restrict content, the legislature should bar executive branch officials from using social media outside of specific public affairs accounts subject to oversight.
There’s a precedent for this. The Boland Amendment restricted the use of State Department funds to advocate on behalf of aiding the Contras. People were actually indicted for this, or the comptroller recommended an indictment of Otto Reich. I’m not sure if it actually went through in that particular case, as everyone sort of ended up getting off without severe punishment.
Now, I have little-to-no hope that this would constrain the current administration for obvious reasons. But if we ever return to a system of government in which Congress actually stands up for its constitutional prerogatives, that’s one area I would focus on: restricting the government’s freedom to use social media.
AS: How have we seen EGOs mobilized to promote Trump’s recent foreign policies, particularly his interventions in Iran and Venezuela?
CL: Venezuela was over and done with before anyone could pay much attention to it. So, I’ll talk more about Iran. One of the really conspicuous things about Iran had been the lack of any kind of debate about whether we should do it before going in. The second Bush administration spent six months with a full court, full spectrum persuasion campaign that had the president out there, the vice president, all sorts of official surrogates. The whole network, what I call the president’s echo system, was firing with all speakers blaring, just to make the case for war, with groups aligned with both parties saying we should go in. They just disagreed on why.
We didn’t have that with Iran. If you go to AEI’s website, if you go to the website of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, you will see arguments in favor of the war in Iran. The Democratic side has been a little quieter.
But what I think this reveals to me is that without coordination from within the White House, EGOs can pop off on their own. But it doesn’t amount to a campaign. I wouldn’t expect the president to mount a campaign for several reasons. One is that Congress isn’t going to stop him. And that’s why the president mounts a campaign in the first place. If Congress is going to stand in the way, the president either has to scale back the mission or find a way to get Congress on board. And Congress currently is rolling over for just about everything the president is doing, including this. Now, If Congress were to oppose him and the public were on [Trump’s] side, I would expect the president to make a big public statement about the war beforehand to show Congress that the public is on his side.
It’s when those two things come together, congressional opposition and public resistance, [that we see the president engage in an information campaign]. We do basically have a public that is opposed to this war and has been from the start. If Congress were to change hands, for example, in January, and the war is still going on, that’s when I would expect to see the collaboration between the president and EGOs.
That’s my theory, that’s what I’ve seen in the past. And that’s what I would expect here. Hopefully, we won’t find out, because hopefully the war, the military operation, whatever you want to call it, will be done by then. So, for now, you have to go looking for EGO support for this war in ways that you wouldn’t if the president were orchestrating a campaign from within the White House.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.
Authors’ Disclosures: Andy Shi is the managing editor of ProMarket, the publication of the Stigler Center, which is particularly interested in regulatory and other forms of capture. Information about the Center’s funding can be found here, and Shi reports no conflicts of interest.
Chad Levinson is an assistant professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech’s National Capital Region campus. He received generous support for the research of his book from The Kluge Center at the Library of Congress as well as The LBJ, Truman, Eisenhower, and Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Libraries. He reports no conflicts of interest.
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Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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