Chapter

The Future of Social Science & National Security Project

Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Scholars, Think Tanks, and Influence on Policymaking

This chapter demonstrates how and why scholars and think tanks have had an uneven influence in the policymaking process

If the scholarly world has been criticized for pursuing irrelevant research divorced from policymaking concerns, think tanks are equally at fault having moved from hard-headed social science-infused advice to becoming more ideological and media-focused. Think tanks rarely hit the ball out of the park and when they do, it is only when a lot of other conditions apply. While the growing partisanship of many think tanks has helped to open doors to policymakers affiliated with one party or another, the examples also suggest this can be a hindrance in gaining acceptance for a deeper and more objective analysis of the problem. Once a strategic approach takes off, it is always harder for any administration to self-correct.

Ties between the scholarly world and policymakers have been characterized as “nasty, brutish and short.”¹ Although an exaggeration, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ description of an unfettered world in the 17^th century encapsulates the hardships that scholars face today in seeking to be heard by the policymaking community. Think tanks are thought to be the nexus between academics and policymakers. Although this might have been true in the early decades of their establishment, many think tanks have morphed from being “universit[ies] without students” applying the rigorous standards of academic research to becoming more interested in advocacy, often with an ideological bent that attracts media attention.² Influencing and shaping policy debates is difficult enough even when scholars have an intimate knowledge of the issues and know the key policy actors. But the drift into advocacy and media blitzes by think tanks reduce the chances for them to help bring to bear scholarly expertise on policy problems. If the scholarly world has been criticized for pursuing irrelevant research divorced from policymaking concerns, think tanks are equally at fault for having moved from hardheaded social science-infused advice to becoming more ideological and media-focused.³

The Drift Away from Nonpartisan Scholarly Research

The Brookings Institution, considered the first think tank, was founded in 1916 under the name “Institute for Government Research” and was composed of academics on loan, also operating as a graduate school that offered a few degrees. It was bipartisan: Although known for helping Franklin D. Roosevelt design an early economic agenda, it also housed several scholars who were leading opponents of FDR’s New Deal. The Hoover Institution was established on the campus of Stanford University, taking full advantage of its access to academic experts. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) also vowed when it was founded in 1921 to have “a program of systematic study.”⁴ Criticism in the late 1930s of these new organizations for being left-leaning led a group of New York businessmen to create the American Enterprise Association (AEA), eventually moving it to Washington, D.C. to become the American Enterprise Institute.⁵

The tradition of working closely with the U.S. government continued in the postwar period even as the number of think tanks exploded “from about 45 after the Second World War to about 1,800 today, including nearly 400 in the Washington, D.C., area alone.”⁶ Brookings helped with fleshing out the Marshall Plan, while CFR shaped the United States’ Cold War containment policy, and the AEA helped with dismantling wartime price controls. Until the 1960s, think tanks, while helping both Republican and Democratic administrations to navigate difficult policy challenges, kept a distance — not seeing their role as advocates, but rather as unbiased analysts helping to clarify policy choices.

This was a fine line that was bound to be crossed. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, is considered the think tank that forged a more engaged and ideological approach when it developed a comprehensive conservative agenda for the Reagan presidency. In 1989, the Democratic Leadership Council created the Progressive Policy Institute, which was influential during the Clinton administration.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) was founded in 2003 when the Democrats were out of power. CAP has been seen as forging a new role for think tanks, turning marketing into an art form and making itself a “do-tank.”⁷ Today, many think tanks celebrate their emancipation from just “thinking” to also “doing.” Think tankers are the ideal resource for media outlets such as CNN and Fox News, which are hungry for “quick-and-dirty” commentaries. More than the academic community, think tankers usually have a better fix on the policy debates inside government and can deliver sharp and succinct opinions. As the country has become more divided and partisan, think tanks, along with media outlets, have become more ideological.

The think tankers’ profile has also changed. In the early days, a review by Heritage scholars Tevi Troy and Peter Grabowski done in 2023 found that “among a representative group of think tanks founded before 1960, 53% of scholars [held] Ph.Ds. Among a similarly representative group of think tanks founded between 1960 and 1980, 23% of scholars have advanced degrees. And among those founded after 1980, only 13% of scholars are as highly educated [as their predecessors].”⁸

The kind of advice that is often sought by government officials does not require deep knowledge. Numerous think tankers have noted that “think tanks service policymakers rather than guide them…their work tends to reflect the policy preferences of Washington rather than the scholarly consensus… Analysts who want to have an influence on policy face powerful incentives to conform to Washington’s preferences. Think tanks thrive on maintaining relevance and the appearance of policy influence, and if advocating for the scholarly consensus on an issue goes against the grain and gets analysts uninvited to the next closed-door meeting or high-profile event, organizations are wont to assimilate to the agenda in Washington.”⁹

Although the number of think tanks has proliferated, the number of centrist think tanks is limited. James McGann, who was perhaps the leading historian of think tanks, has stated that because of the growing liberal/conservative dichotomy, “it is increasingly difficult to find objective analysis that looks at a range of ideas, opinions and policy options surrounding an issue.”¹⁰

Despite the growing partisanship and shorter-term policy horizons evident today, academics and think tanks have played consequential roles in designing and debating several overarching tenets of US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, namely democracy promotion, counterterrorism, and climate change. As if to prove the argument made here about the irrelevance of much of academe for policymakers, the professors plying new ideas aimed at Washington decision-makers have been those with one foot outside universities in think tanks or on government boards. Several of those highlighted in the cases below formerly held positions in elite policy schools such as Harvard’s Belfer Center in the John F. Kennedy School of Government, which are naturally geared toward making an impact on policymaking and have a high quotient of former government officials in their faculties. Some think tanks — such as RAND, cited in the examples below — have been better than others in promoting deep research while serving as a transmission belt to the policy world. Below are three cases in which scholars and think tanks have interacted to mold policy to varying degrees. In the first example, the “misuse” of a complex academic theory by partisan think tanks was a factor in the policy failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. The second example illustrates how the slow but widening adoption of the “influential” climate security concept was due more to security think tanks with close links to the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community than academic social scientists. Finally, terrorism experts — sidelined in academia and government — have fought for recognition even as it is clear in hindsight that policymakers could have listened more attentively to their advice rather than relying on their intuition in countering terrorism.

Democratic Peace Theory

Democracy promotion¹¹ is a longstanding theme in U.S. foreign policy dating back to the early decades after the Republic’s founding. John Quincy Adams’ saying about America “not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy” is usually interpreted as a warning against entangling U.S. foreign policy in spreading democracy. But perhaps more significant is the fact that many Americans in those early days of the Republic, such as former Secretary of State Henry Clay, were intent on the U.S. government helping other struggling democracies, such as the then newly independent Latin American countries. Adams doubted that those countries would thrive and was highly skeptical that they would become liberal democracies. Nevertheless, in designing the Monroe Doctrine as a warning to European monarchies not to reassert control in the Western Hemisphere, Adams wanted to give Latin American countries to democratize.

President Woodrow Wilson is usually recognized as the 20^th-century architect of liberal internationalism, seeing the American mission as making the world safe for democracy and not remaining isolated. His dream came crashing down when the Senate refused to ratify U.S. membership in the League of Nations. The Cold War was about protecting the Free World, but the overriding effort was to ensure security and stability. The U.S. aligned itself with authoritarian-led countries as long as they were anti-communist. The test for being part of the Free World was not so much that a government was fully democratic or even on the path to democracy, but how much it was stamping out communism.

Although U.S. policymakers going back to Clay might have looked favorably on the spread of democracy, historians believe that it was the Reagan presidency that started a systematic “pro-democracy diplomacy…that removed close US [authoritarian] allies from power in the Philippines, Chile, and South Korea.”¹² Under Reagan the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was established in 1983; the NED is now seen as a “major step in the operationalization of democracy promotion and the growth of a civil-society democracy promotion community in the United States.”¹³ Since then, civil society and nongovernmental organizations have become powerful exponents for U.S. democracy promotion, even after the Cold War has been won and democracy has spread rapidly in the world.

The scene was set for the emergence of Democratic Peace Theory (DPT) as the intellectual component behind the push for more global democracy. This is where the nexus between scholarly research and think tank backing led to DPT’s acceptance by the policymaking community as a new meta-strategy for the U.S. in the world.

Inderjeet Parmar catalogues the rise of DPT beginning with “the work of Ford (and, later, MacArthur) Foundation-funded Princeton scholar, Michael Doyle, in the 1980s…[that led] to significant theoretical re-orientations among liberal internationalist IR scholars.”¹⁴ Supposedly Doyle’s first fully conceptualized effort was “serendipitous” – having to address a student meeting at short notice.¹⁵ But Doyle had been researching the topic of ideology in international economic relations shortly before Reagan declared the inherently “peaceful” character of “liberal foreign policies” in 1982 in the leadup to founding the NED.¹⁶

The first step toward ensconcing DPT in the policy discourse came in 1996, when a series of articles on the topic was published in Harvard Belfer Center’s International Security, which, as mentioned, straddles the divide between the scholarly world and policy. The Belfer Center, despite its location outside the Beltway, has always been a leading think tank influencing policy. The articles on DPT in International Security and the scholarly debate on it led to the promulgation of a more nuanced Democratic Peace Theory. Scholars pointed out, for example, that some newly democratic states were unlikely to adhere to the dictum that democratic states never go to war against each other. Democratizing states, in fact, “are more likely to go to war than mature democracies, especially in the first decade.”¹⁷

The original idea and surrounding debate began to catch policymakers’ attention during the Clinton administration; Clinton and his advisors were searching for a concept to replace American diplomat George Kennan’s “containment” strategy following the end of the Cold War. The administration initially opted for “democratic enlargement,” which never rivaled containment as a tagline.¹⁸ Nevertheless, “democratic enlargement” soon became a major thrust behind U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, as the Clinton administration supported NATO enlargement even though doing so ruffled Russian feathers.

Tellingly, it was Stanford adjunct scholar (not a regular tenured faculty member) Larry Diamond, who played an important role, in introducing the idea to the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), which Clinton considered the “idea mill” for his administration. He “extended the peace thesis to argue that democracies are more reliable as trading partners, offer more stable “climates for investment…and honor international treaties…”¹⁹ Diamond later crossed over to the Republican Party, acting as an advisor to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in the George W. Bush administration, where he was influential in helping the administration to develop its democracy-promotion policies.

For a scholarly idea to become institutionalized as a governing principle in U.S. foreign policy, it needs to find adherents on both sides of the political aisle. The part played by neoconservative thinkers such as Frank Fukuyama, William Kristol, and Robert Kagan, along with Joshua Muravchik and the American Enterprise Institute were important in expanding the concept and helping it gain credence and support among conservative Republicans.²⁰ Fukuyama’s 1992 bestseller End of History popularized the idea of democracy as the endpoint of civilization with Western liberalism having reached the pinnacle.²¹ For these analysts and their conservative audiences, DPT became a way to secure U.S. power and assert America’s greatness²² in the increasingly multipolar world after the end of the Cold War.

Despite its growing traction on the Right, the George W. Bush administration did not immediately embrace DPT. It was only after 9/11 that Democratic Peace Theory became attractive as both a guidebook and rationale for supporting democracy even if it led to regime change, as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Scholarly originators of the theory, such as Bruce Russett, have bemoaned the misuse of the DPT by George W. Bush in justifying the invasion of Iraq and forcing regime change. Russett wrote in 2005 after the Iraqi invasion that many scholarly advocates like himself “feel rather like many atomic scientists did in 1945. They had created something intended to prevent conquest by Nazi Germany, but only after Germany was defeated was the bomb tested and then used — against Japanese civilians whose government was already near defeat.”²³

A string of failures in bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Libya where the U.S. supported the West’s toppling of the Qaddafi regime, has reduced the salience of democracy promotion as a concept for U.S. action abroad. Nevertheless, the appeal of democratic expansionism remains strong, as shown by the Biden administration’s division of the world into authoritarian and democratic spheres. At the December 2021 virtual Summit for Democracies, the White House announced “a Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal [that] represents a significant, targeted expansion of U.S. Government efforts to defend, sustain, and grow democratic resilience with like-minded governmental and non-governmental partners. In the coming year, the United States is planning to provide up to $424.4 million toward the Presidential Initiative, working with Congress and subject to the availability of appropriations.”²⁴

By itself, Doyle’s scholarly research would never have been influential without the support of former and current policymakers. Think tanks offer both out-of-office policymakers a perch to wait out the political cycle and a place for the scholarly and policymaking community to interact. But the policy failures are linked to the reliance on new think tanks with in-built biases to convey scholarly work rather than the academic experts directly informing policymakers about the caveats pertaining to democratic peace.²⁵ The long-running bipartisan popularity of democracy promotion also stems from something more: a long-established American cultural trait to believe the rest of the world would do well to copy the U.S. model.

Climate Security

The development of the climate security concept in which national security is closely linked to combating climate change is also a product of a close symbiotic relationship between certain types of think tanks and academics who dabble in government. Today it is becoming more commonplace for climate change to be seen as a “risk” for national security, but the concept is relatively recent even though the first climate change model, which has stood the test of time for broad accuracy, was developed in 1967 by two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists at Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. Such federally funded research centers as well as security-focused Washington, DC-based think tanks played a role in validating and publicizing the importance of climate change as a key factor for U.S. national security. Now 70 countries recognize the importance of combating climate change for their national security. Unlike these other countries, climate science as well as the concept of climate security have been and remain highly contested by many conservatives in the United States.

The Birth of the Climate Security Concept

Climate security as a concept can be traced back to a 2007 report from a largely federally funded research organization, the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) Corporation, and the activism of one person, Sherri Goodman.²⁶ Goodman served as the first deputy undersecretary of defense (environmental security) in 1993 to 2001. As the department’s chief environmental, safety, and occupational health officer, she established the first performance metrics for the Department of Defense and led its energy, environmental, and natural resource conservation programs. Goodman left the Pentagon 2001 and joined CNA, which was established during the Second World War to bring together academic scientists (many from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to analyze tactics for finding and sinking German U-boats threatening shipping off the Eastern Seaboard. It is now an independent, nonprofit research and analysis organization using scientific rigor and a real-world approach to data to solve complex national security problems.²⁷ As CNA general counsel, Goodman stimulated work on the emerging concept of climate and security.

The resulting 2007 report, entitled “National Security and the Threat of Climate,” was authored by CNA’s Military Advisory Board, composed of retired generals and admirals.²⁸ The authors wrote in their preface, “Over many months and meetings, we met with some of the world’s leading climate scientists, business leaders, and others studying climate change. We viewed their work through the lens of our military experience as warfighters, planners, and leaders. Our discussions have been lively, informative, and very sobering.”²⁹ Further down on the page was a key idea that continues to shape the climate security concept: “Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security threats.”³⁰ By itself, climate change could be a threat, as is the case for numerous Pacific island-states, but it mostly acts as a “threat multiplier” of other preexisting instability factors, such as poor governance, youth bulges, poverty, and civil conflict. The “threat-multiplier” idea continues to be used regularly to describe climate change risk even as analysts inside and outside government have developed a greater understanding regarding how climate change can fuel instability.

Goodman later explained why the concept grew out of her work at the Pentagon as well as the work of retired military leaders. They all saw firsthand the effects of climate change, affecting U.S. bases at home as well as the countries and regions where U.S. forces have operated.

First, changing conditions in the areas where troops are deployed put their health and readiness at risk if not given proper equipment, be it to protect them from extreme heat or to allow them to operate in cold-weather conditions. Second, military infrastructure and installations around the world are vulnerable to sea-level rise, flooding, and extreme weather events. The resiliency of the 730 U.S. military bases operating in at least 80 countries is, in this regard, crucial to protect the safety of troops and to preserve the efficiency of U.S. operations. Third, the nature and frequency of military operations themselves are shaped by climate change, with troops increasingly deployed to respond to domestic climate-related disasters such as hurricanes. All these climate-induced risks on the military need to be looked at as actor- less threats. They also remind us that “Nature always wins, so we might as well better understand it.”³¹

Shortly after the CNA report was released, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) published a National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) validating the military’s key points. But, despite the Pentagon and CIA coming out strongly to highlight the security challenges for the United States, the concept of climate change remained highly politicized. Democrats in Congress had originally requested the NIC’s more prestigious flagship publication, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), for the climate security study, but the Bush administration was reluctant to allow the NIC to undertake it for fear of ruffling Republican feathers in Congress. The NIA was a compromise. Only recently, in 2022, was a full-scale NIE published by the NIC under the auspices of the Biden administration’s Director of National Intelligence.³²

Even though many Intelligence and other U.S. government officials began to treat climate change as a serious national security concern, Goodman and Holly Kaufman, a colleague at the Center for Climate & Security (C&S), wrote in 2021 that “climate change [has been largely] perceived as a distant threat, both in terms of time scale and geography. Climate change and other forms of environmental disruption, including climate-driven natural disasters, were largely viewed as problems that happened outside of the United States, and the need to secure foreign fossil energy sources was a more dominant security concern.”³³ With the growing incidence of extreme weather events in the last several years in the U.S., the view that climate change impacts occur elsewhere and that the threat is well over the horizon has started to change. Fifty-four percent of Americans consider climate change a “major threat,” although only 23 percent of Republicans share this view, according to an August 2023 Pew survey.³⁴

Throughout the past few decades, the Pew polling suggests, the saliency of the issue has depended on whether the governing administration was Democrat or Republican. The 2006 National Security Strategy (NSS) under the George W. Bush administration “barely mentioned climate change (which was not allowed in that administration) and did not identify it as a national security threat…[although it] acknowledged that extreme weather events could overwhelm local authorities’ and national militaries’ capacity to respond.”³⁵ Hurricane Katrina had occurred in the summer of 2005.

The 2010 Obama-era NSS signaled yet another shift in perspective, again linking climate change and national security and referring to human health and other impacts in the United States itself. Former President Donald Trump hardly acknowledged climate change in his NSS, although the document said the U.S. would remain a leader in reducing traditional pollution as well as greenhouse gases.

The Biden administration is the first to state in its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, published shortly after President Joe Biden took office in early 2021, that climate change is central to U.S. foreign policy: “The United States and the world have to act aggressively, now, to avert the most dire climate change consequences for the health of our people, our economy, our security, and our planet.”³⁶ Given the pattern on this issue to date, a Republican successor might well reverse Biden’s pledge.

Role of Think Tanks

Given the sharp political divisions impeding government policymaking today, think tanks have become a venue for debating the needed policies in addition to many becoming advocates for pushing climate change higher on the national security agenda. In 2007, contemporaneous with the CNA report, two major national security-focused prominent Washington think tanks — the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Center for New American Security (CNAS) — held a joint yearlong conversation with former policymakers from across the political spectrum, as well as several distinguished scientists such as Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s Senior Scientist Terrence Joyce and former Vice President Richard Pittenger. The objective of the effort was to consider the potential foreign policy and national security implications of climate change. The 2007 volume entitled Age of Consequences made the case for climate change as a serious national security threat but made few concrete recommendations except for calling on the U.S. government as well as other countries to take climate change seriously.³⁷

Other security-focused think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Wilson Center also produced reports that made the case but initially made few recommendations to policymakers.³⁸ During the past decades, efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change have thrived. All major think tanks specializing in national security now have climate change or environment programs. Their analysis of the security impacts of climate change has deepened, and there are more fulsome recommendations for government action. Joshua Busby, a professor at the University of Texas’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, wrote the original CFR report in 2007 (cited above) and returned to write a more detailed report for CFR in 2017 on water security with an elaborate recommendations section.³⁹ Like others profiled here in the democratic peace and the terrorism cases, Busby exemplifies the kind of “academic” active in the policymaking process, less a traditional academic than a policy analyst. With two think tank affiliations and holding a position in a policy school, he has also served in the Department of Defense. Busby’s profile illustrates the close connections between policy schools and government.⁴⁰ In contrast, few academics in the political science department of most universities currently study, for example, “climate change adaptation or are even aware that there is a large and growing interdisciplinary field of study devoted not just to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions but to reducing our vulnerability to the now-inevitable impacts of climate change.”⁴¹

The think tank role widened with the founding of specialized advocacy think tanks that are now leaders in advocating new climate change policies. C&S, with which Goodman is associated, was founded in 2010 and has made its mission to underline the importance of climate change as a national security priority despite all the other issues on its agenda. In recent years, it has partnered with George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs to publish biannual reports outlining the shortfalls of government action in addressing climate change; in March 2022, it published A Progress Report on the Climate Security Plan for America and Recommendations for the Way Ahead, gathering a nonpartisan group that included four-star generals and admirals; a former director of national intelligence; a former director of the central intelligence agency; a former national aeronautics and space administration administrator; and many other retired military officers, security officials, and non-governmental experts to assess the progress since the last report.⁴²

The Biden administration offers this group an opportunity to shape the United States government’s agenda, but many analysts still worry that the Ukraine War and other growing security threats will divert attention from climate issues. The overall conclusion as enunciated by Francesco Femia, Climate & Security’s director emeritus, was that “the [Biden] administration gets credit for saying all the right things and for making climate change an essential element of national security and foreign policy, but now it’s time to take the next step. To get full credit, they must move from words to deeds. Otherwise, they’re just admiring the problem.”⁴³

Perhaps cooperation on climate issues provides no better example of the science establishment working with nonstate organizations and think thanks to define and elaborate a major new security threat and getting bureaucratic support even though stymied by the political partisanship. The problem is that many committed policymakers focus on the issue only intermittently. For the U.S. electorate, the economy usually trumps other issues at the ballot box, and many efforts to address climate change are costly. Unlike the case of democracy promotion, the time still does not appear right for climate security to emerge as a top bipartisan concern.

Counterterrorism

The failure of the War on Terror was not just in its execution but also in its conception. The intellectual failure was not because the United States lacked terrorist experts. The academic study of terrorism is decades old, but the scale of the 9/11 attacks and the fear it created sidelined academic and government experts who preferred a more cautious response. Terrorism rose on the political agenda but was exacerbated by the ideological approach that the George W. Bush administration quickly adopted with its view of the threat as existential. And for a decade or more, the media and public embraced the dire messages coming out of the Bush and then Obama administrations. Under such conditions, it was difficult for scholars with alternative views to be heard.

In the early 1970s, government and academe had little use for terrorism experts. Moreover, terrorists and terrorism did not have the evil connotation they acquired after the 1972 Munich hostage crisis. Following that, terrorists were increasingly depicted as pathological evildoers as distinguished from seeing them as ruthless, but rational actors with clearly defined aims. Over time, the image of terrorists as irrational was strengthened by the fact that the terrorist groups that the U.S. and other Western governments were dealing with were increasingly nonstate actors even though state terrorism still existed.

Brian Michael Jenkins belonged to a group of terrorist experts including Martha Crenshaw and Bruce Hoffman who were nicknamed the “terrorist mafia.”⁴⁴ They sought to dissuade the U.S. government from dismissing all terrorists as “evil, mad dogs” to promote a deeper understanding of the terrorism phenomenon.

Like others profiled in these cases, the three straddled universities, think tanks, and government. Jenkins has an impressive military background, having been a captain in the Green Berets and serving in Vietnam. He was chair of the Political Science Department at RAND, where he led a postmortem study on the Government’s handling of 9/11. The two others, unlike Jenkins, spent years attaining Ph.Ds. Hoffman, after concluding his teaching career, became vice-president at RAND when 9/11 struck and has held government posts such as CIA scholar-in-residence. He is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. Crenshaw taught at Wesleyan and Stanford Universities while serving on numerous government boards linked to her deep expertise on terrorism.⁴⁵

These three experts argued that once terrorists are dismissed as mad, “no further inquiry was necessary. The methods of interrogation closed prosecutions by military tribunals, and the rules of classification have kept information out of the public domain. [They made the case that] it would be useful to know the arguments that took place in al-Qaeda—surely there were some—about the intentions and likely consequences of the 9/11 attacks as its leaders discussed their plans.”⁴⁶

Moreover, once they labeled terrorists as “insane” or “unbalanced,” government authorities were pushed in the direction of preemptive intervention, according to Jenkins. The three believe that terrorists are not crazy in the clinical sense, making it difficult to predict who might become a terrorist. “Efforts in the 1970s to understand why terrorists became terrorists produced little that was operationally useful…there were no discernible personality attributes beyond seeing the world in the black-and-white, us-versus-them mindset of all true believers. There are, however, many such people. We know only about those who become terrorists. Predicting dangerousness remains difficult.”⁴⁷ Despite all the studies, neither academe nor think tanks, which became heavily involved in terrorism studies after 9/11, have been able to provide any clear-cut models of how people become radicalized and are recruited or recruit themselves.

Think Tank and Government Panic After 9/11

Prior to the attacks on 9/11, the U.S. government viewed domestic terrorism as a matter for law enforcement and international terrorism as a distant threat. This changed dramatically after 9/11, when political leaders from both parties and like-minded think tanks exaggerated the threat. In looking back, Crenshaw has said that “there’s a great temptation on the part of government policymakers to take a single event and to view it as the beginning of a series of attacks. You could certainly put 9/11 in that category. You can understand why, in the absence of good information, they would think that it’s likely to happen again.” But “that is actually a very dangerous policy to take, to assume that a terrorist attack is the beginning of a sequence…”⁴⁸

In hindsight, it is apparent that 9/11 did not lead to a string of large homeland attacks by al-Qaida. Such major attacks are in fact rare. But it is “hard to say to the public, look, this might or might not happen again, but it probably is a rare event and won’t happen. If something happens, politicians are held to blame for it.”⁴⁹ According to Crenshaw, “fear of failure, fear of making policy mistakes — may lead governments to overreact. If you look at the U.S. reaction to 9/11, a lot of measures were taken in the weeks and months after the attack, before we had time to assimilate or think about it, and we are still stuck with those consequences. It’s very hard to undo policies that are undertaken in a crisis mode.”⁵⁰Foreign Policy ran an article several years ago in which they contrasted how health officials as opposed to the terrorist community deal with crises in their different domains.⁵¹ With severe acute respiratory syndrome, which appeared in 2003, health officials were trained to be cautious, not wishing to overly alarm the public.

In the wake of 9/11, [however], many national security professionals issued assessments claiming that the world had entered a new era of repeated mass casualty attacks. Fears of such attacks—especially those carried out by Islamist revolutionaries—rose dramatically. Many of those fears were not borne out, and the expert community made comparatively little effort to mitigate public anxiety and took little professional responsibility for examining the failures of their predictions.⁵²

Donald Abelson, a Canadian scholar of U.S. think tanks, has recounted how after 9/11, “even before the clouds of debris above ground zero had dissipated, policy experts began staking out positions on what President Bush had to do at home and abroad to defeat terrorism. In countless articles, books, op-eds, and interviews with different media outlets, think tanks immersed themselves in a policy debate that quickly consumed America and the world. The war against terrorism was clearly underway [sic], but so too was the war of ideas.”⁵³ For left-leaning think tanks, “the storyline was clear: Islamic terrorists had made their way to the United States to punish America’s leaders for their foreign policy in the Middle East and in particular their steadfast support for Israel. Once the United States adopted a more evenhanded approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and abandoned its imperialist goals, the threat of terrorism would be significantly reduced.”⁵⁴ For rightwing think tanks, rather than coddling terrorists and the states that support them, what was needed, according to many conservative policy experts, was a forceful demonstration of American resolve.⁵⁵

One conservative think tank, the Project for a New America Century (PNAC), appeared to anticipate the external threats. “When journalists and scholars skimmed through PNAC’s September 2000 study “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” they thought they had discovered the Holy Grail. In its study, PNAC made several policy recommendations that closely resembled initiatives being pursued by the Bush administration. Indeed, the recommendations it made four months before Bush entered the Oval Office, such as ‘defending the homeland and fight[ing] and win[ning] multiple, simultaneous major theater wars,’ may as well have been taken directly from his playbook.”⁵⁶ PNAC also had close ties to many in the Bush administration, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Irve “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff; and Jeb Bush, the then governor of Florida and the President’s younger brother.

Nevertheless, Abelson and other scholars who studied the Bush administration’s War on Terror believe that “the greatest influence on George W. Bush was George W. Bush.” Gary Schmitt, who headed PNAC at the time, acknowledged, “It’s perfectly obvious that Bush’s war on terror was not something we articulated before 9/11…Bush pulled together a strategic vision based on the advice he received from Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld.”⁵⁷

Original Sin

Under enormous pressure to respond to the unprecedented 9/11 attacks on the homeland, the Bush administration compounded its mistakes of mounting an aggressive strategy of military intervention that made the terrorism problem worse. The military invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan helped al-Qaida, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and other terrorist groups recruit more terrorists. The Obama administration, although more circumspect, did not dismantle the large-scale counterterrorism efforts owing to fear of being seen as weak on counterterrorism. For Obama, the nightmare was a repeat of a 9/11 attack for which he would be held accountable.

At the same time, in the academic, think tank, and government terrorist expert communities, many analysts had second thoughts:

As early as 2004, a Defense Science Board report noted that “American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims, identifying both U.S. support of Israel and the American occupation of Iraq as examples.” ⁵⁸
A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concluded that “the American invasion and occupation of Iraq…helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism.” ⁵⁹
A 2011 study of terrorist plots against the United States between 2001 and 2010 by the Los Angeles division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation found the same: “Two central themes galvanized actors: anti-U.S. sentiment based on a perception that the United States was at war with Islam, and the belief that violent jihad was the righteous, and in fact, requisite response.”⁶⁰

In the end, even as there were increasing critiques of the ineffectiveness of the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, it took 15 years for the War on Terror to wind down. Trump and subsequently Biden broke with the idea of pursuing “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. The costs had been staggering, estimated at $5 trillion, not to mention the casualties and heartache for many of the veterans’ families. Perhaps because of the scale, suddenness, and memory of the original 9/11 attacks, government inertia, and fears of a repeat onslaught, no amount of scholarly analysis could radically change the original Bush strategy. In 2008, RAND published a study on how terrorist groups come to an end, which stated: “The evidence since 1968 indicates that most groups have ended because (1) they joined the political process or (2) local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members. Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups, and few groups within this time frame achieved victory . . . ”⁶¹ If only those in charge had listened.

Conclusion

Napoleon once quipped that the trait he looked for most in his generals was luck. Much the same could be said for think tanks and academics seeking to influence US strategy. However difficult it is to influence policymakers — and this point is irrefutable —a few lessons can be drawn from the three case studies that suggest ways to increase the odds:

For the effort to be successful, the desired policy change needs to have bipartisan support.
- Making democracy support into a historic mission for the U.S. has endured beyond the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. In exiting the US from Afghanistan, Biden has made the pursuit of global democracy into a hallmark of his administration. Although former President Bill Clinton was the first to call for democratic enlargement, his endeavor built on Reagan’s initial efforts. The academic “democratic peace” research gave it an intellectual veneer that appealed across a deepening political divide. At the same time, democracy promotion was a victim of its own success. The limitations that original academic proponents had written about were ignored by the policy salesmen in various think tanks who sought to use the theory for their purposes.
- In contrast, climate security, while garnering much governmental and scientific backing, has never been able to gain traction with the Republican Party. Nonetheless, in embracing the need for the U.S. to prepare for massive climate change, Biden has managed to get his climate change package enacted including subsidies for green energy and an accelerated timetable for achievement of net-zero carbon emissions. But its future under a Republican administration is unclear, particularly as the required investments will be costly.⁶²
In addition to the need for bipartisan buy-in, timing is also important. With a sudden and immediate threat, policymakers tend to wing it on their own:
- In ignoring terrorism as a strategic priority until the threat thrust itself with full force on 9/11, Bush administration decision-makers failed to take a “deep breath” and try to understand the phenomenon before launching a war on terrorism and preparing to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Once a strategic approach takes off, it is always harder for any administration to self-correct, but even under the succeeding Obama administration, there was too much continuity and too little deeper analysis. It is unclear whether any scholars, including the terrorist mafia, could have changed policymakers’ minds at the height of the 9/11 scare, but think tanks, which soon took up partisan positions on the war on terror, made it impossible for them to try to correct misconceptions. Even RAND, which stood out with several objective studies, failed to make the needed impact.

Like academics holed up in their ivory towers, think tankers rarely hit the ball out of the park, and when they do, it is only when a lot of other conditions apply. Although the growing partisanship of many think tanks has helped to open doors to policymakers affiliated with one party or another, the examples presented here also suggest this can be a hindrance in gaining acceptance for a deeper and more objective analysis of the problem and a clearer-headed policy to tackle it. For that reason, Hobbes’ description of the state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short” appropriately sums up the challenges for scholars and think tanks even when there is an opening to change policy.

Notes

1
These words have been attributed to sociologist Robert Merton and cited in Lewis Coser, Men of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 140. They were also cited in Inderjeet Parmar, “The ‘knowledge politics’ of democratic peace theory,” International Politics, 50. 10.1057/ip.2013.4, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263327363_The_’knowledge_politics’_of_democratic_peace_theory/citation/download?_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uRGV0YWlsIiwicGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uRGV0YWlsIn19. [access date: 2.12.2024]
2
James G. McGann, The Fifth Estate: Think Tanks, Public Policy, and Governance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press September 13, 2016), 5. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/chapter-one-the-fifth-estate.pdf.
3
Michael C. Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2019), pp. 4-19.
4
Tevi Troy, “Devaluing the Think Tank,” National Affairs, No 56, Summer 2023, pdf. [unnumbered pages] https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/devaluing-the-think-tank.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
John Glaser, “Truth, Power, and the Academy: A Response to Hal Brands,” War on the Rocks, March 26, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/03/truth-power-and-the-academy-a-response-to-hal-brands/.
10
James McGann, Think Tanks and Policy Advice (London: Routledge 2007,) pp 5-8.
11
For a fuller history of democracy promotion, see the article by Nicole Bibbins Sedaca and Nicholas Bouchet, “Holding Steady? US Democracy Promotion in a Changing World,” on the Chatham House website, [access date: 08.02.2022] https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/home/chatham/public_html/sites/default/files/170214DemocracyPromotion.pdf.
12
Ibid., 5.
13
Ibid.
14
Parmar, op. cit., 10.
15
Ibid., 11
16
Ibid., 11.
17
Ibid., 13.
18
Douglas Brinkley, “Democratic Enlargement: The Clinton Doctrine,” Foreign Policy, no. 106 (1997): 111–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/1149177.
19
Parmar, op. cit, 19.
20
Ibid.
21
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), [ pp. 3-55].
22
Parmar, op. cit, 20.
23
Bruce Russett, “Bushwacking the Democratic Peace,” International Studies Perspectives, November 2005, Vol. 6, No. 4, November 2005, p. 396, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1528-3577.2005.00217.x. [access date: 2.12.2024]
24
White House, Press Briefing, Summit for Democracy, December. 2021, [access date: 10.10.2022] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/29/fact-sheet-the-biden-harris-administrations-abiding-commitment-to-democratic-renewal-at-home-and-abroad/#:~:text=At%20the%20first%20Summit%20for%20Democracy%20held%20in,with%20likeminded%20partners%20through%20diplomacy%20and%20foreign%20assistance.
25
Desch, op.cit, 251.
26
Sherri Goodman serves as senior strategist of the Advisory Board of the Center for Climate & Security. See her biography on their website: https://climateandsecurity.org/advisory-board/sherri-goodman/.
27
For more on CNA, see its website, which includes an article on its history: https://www.cna.org/about-us/history.
28
CNA, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, 2007, [access date:5.2.2022] https://www.cna.org/reports/2007/national%20security%20and%20the%20threat%20of%20climate%20change%20%281%29.pdf.
29
Ibid., 3.
30
Ibid.
31
Council on Strategic Risks, “The Legacy of Climate Security Leadership: Sherri Goodman on Heat of the Moment,“ Sherri Goodman, [access date: 5.20.2023], https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/2022/01/31/the-legacy-of-climate-security-leadership-sherri-goodman-on-heat-of-the-moment/.
32
Director of National Intelligence, National Intelligence Estimate: “Climate Change and International Responses Increasing Challenges to US National Security Through 2040, 2021,” [access date: 5.21.2022] https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/NIE_Climate_Change_and_National_Security.pdf.
33
Holly Kaufman and Sherri Goodman, “Climate Change in the U.S. National Security Strategy: History and Recommendations” Climate and Security Organization, 2021, Climate-Change-in-the-U.S.-National-Security-Strategy_BRIEFER-21_2021_6_29.pdf. (climateandsecurity.org).
34
Pew Research Center, “What the data says about Americans’ views of climate change,” Alec Tyson, Cary Funk, and Brian Kennedy, August 9, 2023, [access date: 5.3.2022] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-data-says-about-americans-views-of-climate-change/#:~:text=Nearly%20eight%2Din%2Dten%20Democrats,identical%20to%2010%20years%20ago.
35
Kaufman and Goodman, op.cit.
36
The White House, “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” March 2021,[access date: 5.2.2023] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NSC-1v2.pdf.
37
Kurt M. Campbell, Jay Gulledge, J.R. McNeill, John Podesta, Peter Ogden, Leon Fuerth, R. James Woolsey, Alexander T.J. Lennon, Julianne Smith, Richard Weitz, and Derek Mix, “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,” CSIS, November 2007,
38
Council on Foreign Relations, “Climate Change and National Security: An Agenda for Action,” Joshua Busby, November 2007, access date: 5.2.2023] https://cdn.cfr.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/ClimateChange_CSR32%20%281%29.pdf.
39
Council on Foreign Relations, “Water and U,” Joshua Busby, January 2017,access date: 5.2.2023, https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/media/csis/pubs/071105_ageofconsequences.pdf.
https://www.cfr.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2017/01/Discussion_Paper_Busby_Water_and_US_Security_OR.pdf
40
Busby is a nonresident fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a senior research fellow at the Center for Climate & Security and in 2021-22 served as a senior advisor for climate at the Department of Defense.
41
Debra
Javeline, “The Most Important Topic Political Scientists Are Not Studying: Adapting to Climate Change,” Perspectives on Politics, June 2014, Vol. 12, No. 2 (June 2014), 420-421, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43279918.
42
Available at https://climateandsecurity.org/challenge-accepted-a-progress-report-on-the-climate-security-plan-for-america-and-recommendations-for-the-way-ahead/.
43
Francesco Femia, “RELEASE: The Climate and Security Advisory Group grades Biden administration on climate security,” March 31, 2022, access date: 5.1.2023] https://www.preventionweb.net/news/release-climate-and-security-advisory-group-grades-biden-administration-climate-security.
44
For Jenkins’ bio, see RAND website: https://www.rand.org/about/people/j/jenkins_brian_michael.html. His well-known study examining the fallout from 9/11 which he conducted at RAND was The Long Shadow of 9/11: America’s Response to Terrorism (Brian Michael Jenkins and John Paul Godges, eds., 2011).
45
For a fuller biography on Crenshaw, see the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Crenshaw.
46
Brian Michael Jenkins, Bruce Hoffman, and Martha Crenshaw, “How Much Really Changed About Terrorism on 9/11?” The Atlantic, September 11, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/09/jenkins-hoffman-crenshaw-september-11-al-qaeda/499334/.
47
Ibid.
48
Jonathan Faust, “Martha Crenshaw on Why Counter-Terrorism is So Difficult,” Stanford Politics, February 8, 2016, https://stanfordpolitics.org/2016/02/08/interview-martha-crenshaw/.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.
51
Charles Kurzman, “What Terrorism Experts Can Learn From Public Health Experts,” Foreign Policy, September 28, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/28/what-terror-experts-can-learn-from-public-health-experts/.
52
Ibid.
53
Donald Abelson, “War of Ideas: Think Tanks and Terrorism,” [access date: 6.1.2023] http://irpp.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/po/equalization-and-the-federal-spending-power/abelson.pdf. Excerpt from his book, A Capitol Idea: Think Tanks and US Foreign Policy, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press (MQUP,) Aug 14, 2006
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Cato Institute, “Step Back: Lessons for U.S. Foreign Policy from the Failed War on Terror,” A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner, Policy Analysis No. 814, June 26, 2017, [access date: 6.10.2023] https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/step-back-lessons-us-foreign-policy-failed-war-terror.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
61
RAND Corporation, “How Terrorist Groups End: Implications for Countering al Qa’ida,” Seth G. Jones and Martin C. LibickiPH, 2008. [access date: 6.15.2023] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9351.html.
62
The White House, “FACT SHEET: President Biden Sets 2030 Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Target Aimed at Creating Good-Paying Union Jobs and Securing U.S. Leadership on Clean Energy Technologies,” April 22, 2021 [`access date: 10.4.2023] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/04/22/fact-sheet-president-biden-sets-2030-greenhouse-gas-pollution-reduction-target-aimed-at-creating-good-paying-union-jobs-and-securing-u-s-leadership-on-clean-energy-technologies/.

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