Published in partnership with Shadowproof.
The Center For American Progress (CAP), a think tank heavily aligned with the Democratic Party and the Clinton family in particular, has long been under scrutiny for its financing activities. In 2013, an investigation by journalist Ken Silverstein revealed that a CAP program called “The Business Alliance” offered corporate contributors access to people connected to the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress.
Months after Silverstein’s report, CAP disclosed a list of its donors for 2013 which included companies such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Northrop Grumman, Walmart, Visa, Google, Eli Lilly and others that make up the very corporate elite progressives often are at odds with in DC.
John Podesta, who founded CAP and serves as Chair and Counselor, is the current Chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. If former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, there is little doubt that CAP will play a major role in her administration, both providing staff and policy ideas.
All of which makes a recent article by Jim Lobe extremely troubling. Lobe reports that CAP has partnered with the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on foreign policy programs since 2012, using many of the same “scholars” that planned and advocated the 2003 Iraq War, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Danielle Pletka. Lobe writes that the programs appear to be partly designed to rehabilitate their image after the disastrous war in Iraq.
As is well known, Hillary Clinton supported that war and, while secretary of state, fatefully pursued regime change in Libya. Her general foreign policy views align closely with neoconservatism, so much so that Clinton was confronted during an MSNBC town hall for embracing the neoconservative world view of pursuing regime change abroad, regardless of the risks of unintended consequences.
The alignment has not gone unnoticed by the neocons either. Neocon intellectual Robert Kagan openly declared his support for Clinton in 2016, saying in regards to the rise of Donald Trump, “For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.” Kagan’s wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, is currently serving in the Obama Administration and has been continually cited as having exacerbated tensions in Ukraineon the eve of the 2014 coup. Regime change strikes again.
While the Republican Party appears to be increasingly unwelcoming to neoconservatives, they may have found a way back into power through aligning with Hillary Clinton and her related organizations. Former Secretary Clinton is campaigning on nostalgia for the economic prosperity of 1990s, but might not a President Hillary Clinton be more likely to bring us back to the George W. Bush years?