The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created by Congress in 1983 to promote democracy and democratic institutions abroad. It performed valuable ideological and propaganda services during the last decade of the Cold War as part of the Reagan administration’s effort to conduct political-subversive warfare against the Soviet empire. With the prolonged collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989-91, NED’s real mission was achieved. But like any organization, NED, which receives government funds as a non-governmental organization, wanted to continue its work and to continue to feed off the taxpayers, so it looked to broaden its mandate. As James Pierson notes in a piece in The New Criterion, the NED has become a highly partisan, anti-Trump organization that promotes endless wars, censors opposing views, and conceals its work in what Pierson characterizes as “opaque reports” that render it something less than “open and transparent.” An “America First” foreign policy approach should include the defunding of NED. NED is a Cold War relic, like its predecessor the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded enterprise that used Western intellectuals to wage a cultural Cold War against the Soviet empire. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Congress for Cultural Freedom attracted the likes of Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Arthur Schlessinger Jr., John Dewey, Melvin Lasky, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, Arthur Koestler, and many others — all committed anti-communists. The focus of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, like the original focus of the NED, was to wage political-subversive warfare against the Soviet empire. It was in America’s national security interest to do so. But, unfortunately, the Wilsonian strain of American foreign policy often results in our government leaders phrasing foreign policy missions in broad, idealistic terms (like “making the world safe for democracy”). So it is with the NED. In the post-Cold War world, NED broadened its real mission to encompass the promotion of democracy around the world. The intellectuals associated with NED are neoconservative and neo-liberal interventionists like Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan, Ann Applebaum, Larry Diamond, and others who have embraced an ideological agenda that views the world as a never-ending struggle between democracy and autocracy. That worldview was also embraced by the Bush 43 administration after the attacks on 9/11, which resulted in a “Global War on Terror” and endless, futile wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that sought to spread democracy in those countries and elsewhere. The Obama administration added to this foreign policy failure with its promotion of the so-called “Arab Spring.” For these ideologues, Russia’s failure to transform into a democracy in the 1990s was reason enough to expand NATO to the Russian border and treat Russia as an enemy. It was also a justification for fomenting so-called “color revolutions,” including in Ukraine, that helped to revive the worst aspects of Russian nationalism and aggressive behavior. NED’s Victorian Nuland is one of the most vociferous supporters of “color revolutions” and U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. Even worse, some of the intellectuals associated with NED joined the Democrat and media campaign to characterize Donald Trump as an autocrat — in some instances comparing Trump to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. So NED-affiliated intellectuals effectively meddled in U.S. domestic politics in the name of “democracy.” Pierson points to Larry Diamond’s claim that Trump’s recent electoral victory means that the United States is now a “backsliding democracy” due to his “autocratic tendencies,” and to Rachel Kleinfeld’s statement that “Trumpism” and “Christian nationalism” are being used to build a “wink-and-nod ” base in the Republican Party, and to Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s assertion that the GOP under Trump is an “antidemocratic force that imperils the U.S. Constitutional order.” In August 2024, the Heritage Foundation released a revealing report about the funding and domestic political partisanship of the NED. It shows that NED staff and associates contribute significantly more to Democratic candidates for office than to Republican candidates. The NED board is dominated by Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans, and the organization as a whole “acts in the service of the Democratic Party, promotes its politicized memes concerning conservatives as threats to democracy, and poisons conservative reputations overseas.” The ideologues associated with NED want to remake the world in America’s image, except if that America has Donald Trump as President. Democratic elections, it seems, only count as promoting democracy when the NED’s favored candidates win those elections. NED is infested with Wilsonians who are willing to send the sons and daughters of Trump supporters to fight in endless wars abroad. Congress has spent over $1 billion funding this partisan and dangerous organization since 2020. We won the Cold War. The Soviet empire collapsed. The NED’s work was done in 1991. It’s time to defund it. READ MORE from Francis Sempa: Trump Needs ‘Bismarcks’ to Steer Our Foreign Policy James Burnham: the Sage of Kent, Connecticut Rejuvenating the Monroe Doctrine The post The National Endowment for Democracy Should be Defunded on Principle appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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