American Enterprise Institute

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The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ( AEI ) is a conservative American think tank based in Washington, DC

The AEI is financed through donations from private individuals, corporations and foundations. It has fifty so-called Fellows who work permanently at the AEI. These fellows include: a. around economists, legal scholars and political scientists, including numerous pioneers of neoconservatism in the USA, such as Richard Perle , Lynne Cheney and Irving Kristol . These neoconservative strategists have close ties to the US government. They are therefore said to have a formative influence on US politics, especially on foreign policy issues. That was true not only of Presidents Nixon and Reagan , but also of George W. Bush .

The AEI's publications cover a wide range of topics, particularly those relating to the economy, social security and foreign policy. The institute publishes numerous books, articles and reports every year, it organizes conferences and events and publishes its own political journal ( The American Enterprise ).

The AEI is concerned with a lean state , free enterprise, deregulation , national defense, strong foreign policy and the defense of cultural values. In the mid-2000s, observers saw the AEI as the most important think tank of the neo-conservative intellectuals around George W. Bush.

history

The AEI was founded in 1943 by entrepreneurs around Lewis H. Brown. The main goal was to prevent government interference in the economy during the Second World War. The New Deal program prevailing at the time was to be countered by a market-liberal idea. This was combined with a pronounced anti-communism of the founding fathers and their support for a military conflict regulation.

The political breakthrough came with a strategic alliance that the institute entered into under Nixon and Ford with the so-called neoconservative movement. During this time, the AEI developed into one of the leading think tanks in the USA. Since the mid-1970s, the institute won over important representatives of neoconservatism, especially Irving Kristol and Richard Perle . Personal ties with the government were also expressed through the Institute presidency of Christopher deMuth, a former personal assistant to Republican President Nixon and adviser to Ronald Reagan.

Under George W. Bush, members of the AEI were regarded as the "architects" of US military foreign policy, particularly the Iraq war . The neoconservative hawks from the AEI, the strategists of unilateralism and military unilateralism under George W. Bush, include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.

The Dutch critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali took up a position at the AEI after she left the Netherlands in 2006 and is a resident fellow there .

The American Enterprise Institute is also one of those think tanks that are actively involved in the denial of man-made global warming . At the same time, the AEI received at least 86.7 million US dollars in the period from 2003 to around 2013 from conservative foundations that campaign against climate protection measures ; and ExxonMobil donated millions of dollars to the AEI. Among other things, the AEI offered researchers US $ 10,000 for articles that question the findings of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report .

In July 2007, Paul Wolfowitz got a job at the AEI after he had to resign as head of the World Bank due to allegations of corruption .

After the global economic crisis from 2007 onwards , the AEI played a key role in the revisionist attempts by many conservative think tanks to reinterpret that the global financial crisis was in fact caused not by too little state regulation but by too much state influence.

people

See also

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  1. ↑ Kubilay Yado Arin: "The Role of Think Tanks in US Foreign Policy. From Clinton to Bush Jr." VS Springer Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2013, ISBN 978-3-658-01043-0 .
  2. ^ Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright: Organized Climate Change Denial. In: John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, David Schlosberg (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 144-160, p. 149; See also Michael E. Mann , The Hockey-Stick and the Climate Wars . Columbia University Press, 2012, p. 64.
  3. ↑ Naomi Klein : The Decision: Capitalism vs. Climate . Frankfurt am Main 2015, p. 343. (Original edition This Changes Everything. Capitalism vs. Climate. New York 2014)
  4. ^ Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study , The Guardian , February 2, 2007
  5. Jump up ↑ Grace Angry America , Die Zeit , July 4, 2007
  6. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money . Scribe Verlag 2016, p. 292f.

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