How The NED and USAID Are Tools Of Neo-Con Foreign Policy.

Trump is Very Unlikely To End American Regime Change Operations, But USAID and NED should not be defended.

The Current Context.

In my last two articles, I have written about the Trump administration's temporary pause of USAID funding. In my first article, I took a more optimistic view of this development, and in my second article, I pointed out how Macro Rubio’s comments signal that the Trump administration will continue the same regime change policies that the USAID previously did.

Recently, Trump’s close associate Elon Musk has been going on a Twitter tirade against the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) signaling that the Trump administration may cease funding for that agency as well.

I am now of the view that these moves will likely be more symbolic than anything and that American regime change around the world will continue under the Trump administration.

However, there have been a lot of freakouts based on the idea of USAID and NED being shut down. Liberals have come out to protest the temporary pause on USAID and mainstream pundits like the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin lambasted Elon Musk for calling the NED a “scam”.

In this article, I will not be discussing the current political debate over these agencies but instead, go over their history and how they function so readers can know what their actual purpose is.

The History Of The “Cia Sidekick” NED (National Endowment For Democracy)

The National Endowment For Democracy or NED for short was initially set up by Ronald Regan in 1983 in the name of “supporting democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts”.

In reality, as CIA whistleblower and author of “Inside the Company: CIA Diary” Phillip Agee explained, the agency was created as a “sidekick” to the CIA.

In an interview, Agee revealed that after the creation of the NED the CIA now had a “sidekick”.

The idea, he explained, came after a series of “scandalous revelations” that came out in 1967 showing that the CIA was covertly funding “foundations” in order to “channel money into overseas organizations”. The revelations showed that the CIA was giving “money and instructions” to foreign groups in order to advance American foreign policy goals.

After this scandal, Agee explained, Florida congressman Dante Fascell proposed “an open system to finance these overseas organizations” such as “government organizations, political parties, media organizations, youth organizations, and student organizations” that were in reality “taking money and instructions from the CIA”.

This idea eventually materialized into the Ronald Regan-created NED in 1983. Agee exposed that the creation of it was used as a “mega conduit” for the “tens of millions of dollars set aside for the meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries” to go to.

A 1991 report in the Washington Post by David Ignatius confirmed what Agee said about the NED, reporting that the NED:

have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private -- providing money and moral support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist rule.

Allen Weinstein, an NED official, even admitted to the Post that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.

Ignatius argued that this way, regime change operations could be done more successfully if they were done out in the open writing:

The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection

In recent years the NED has been used as a tool of U.S. foreign policy around the world.

Mother Jones reported that the NED-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) helped train “numerous political training sessions in the Dominican Republic and Miami for some 600 Haitian leaders” who were “opponents of (Jean Bertrand) Aristide”.

These forces then went on in 2004 to do a coup against Jean Bertrand Aristide , the then democratically elected leader of Haiti. According to Mother Jones, “Several of the people who had attended IRI training were influential in the toppling of Aristide”.

The article also pointed out that the NED-funded IRI also supported forces behind the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela writing that “In April 2002, a group of military officers launched a coup against Chavez, and leaders of several parties trained by IRI joined the junta.”

Since these coups, the NED has continued its meddling in South America. Jacobin Magazine reported on leaked documents that showed the NED gave $300,000 to an NDI (National Democratic Institute) project which ran a social media propaganda campaign that helped swing “municipal elections in 2013 and legislative elections in 2015” to the more U.S.-friendly opposition.

In 2018 the NED also funded a violent coup attempt in Nicaragua against the government led by former Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. Global Americans reported that the NED had “funded 54 projects in Nicaragua between 2014 and 2017” which “Laid the groundwork for insurrection” and led Nicaragua to be “on the brink of a civic insurrection”.

This funding eventually led to a violent coup attempt against the Nicaraguan government in 2018. John Perry, a reporter on the ground wrote in a letter to the Guardian that these NED-funded protests burned down “Public buildings and the houses of government supporters”.

Even more disturbing, FAIR media found that the protestors were “implicated in 52 deaths” in the issuing violence during the coup.

A graphic video posted online titled “Sandinistas are Tortured Everyday” showed these protestors violently beating and torturing civilians they deemed to be sympathetic to the Ortega government.

The NED has not limited its propaganda operations to foreign enemy countries. It has also funded “Bellingcat” a shady open-source investigative outlet from Britain that reports almost exclusively on official enemy states and often uses pseudoscientific methods and misleading or incomplete information to reinforce narratives used to justify Western foreign policy.

Wikileaks recently noted that the NED paid 65 thousand dollars to journalist Fernando Villavicencio who helped fabricate a fake story published in the Guardian which falsely claimed that Julian Assange met with Donald Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort and unnamed “Russians” in the Ecuadorian embassy.

This story which was planted in the Guardian turned out to be a hoax.

How USAID Also Functions As A CIA Cutout

Along with the NED, USAID has also functioned as an arm of American regime change in South America.

Foreign Policy Magazine wrote in 2014 that “Foreign governments have long accused the U.S. Agency for International Development of being a front for the CIA or other groups dedicated to their collapse. In the case of Cuba, they appear to have been right.”

The Magazine went on to report that USAID:

launched a social media platform in Cuba in 2010, hoping to create a Twitter-like service that would spark a "Cuban Spring" and potentially help bring about the collapse of the island’s Communist government.

Aside from launching what the outlet called “a digital Bay of Pigs” they also reported that USAID had interfered in Venezuela. They reported that USAID “carried out” a “strategy for undermining Chavez’s government by penetrating Chavez’s political base, dividing Chavismo, and isolating Chavez internationally."

USAID also funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to think tanks such as “New Citizen” which spurred the original 2014 protests in Ukraine that eventually led to a coup against the country’s democratically elected leader Viktor Yanukovych.

These USAID-funded protests were eventually taken over by far-right groups such as the Svoboda party and the Right Sector. Right Sector committed a sniper massacre that killed 51 protests which they then blamed on Yanukovych in order to overthrow him in a violent coup.

This allowed the U.S. to install Arseniy Yatseniuk as the interim prime minister of Ukraine who Forbes Magazine described as “Washington's Man” because he was “willing to do the IMF bidding” and implement the “International Monetary Fund's demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency” which “Yanukovych resisted”.

USAID has also given millions of dollars to the Syrian rescue group “the White Helmets”. While at face value giving money to a rescue group may seem innocent a closer look shows something more nefarious.

For one, the group only worked in rebel-controlled areas and had an unconformably close relationship with extremist Syrian rebels who at the time were backed by the CIA. As the UK’s Channel 4 news reported the group is on video “assisting” with a public execution, by taking a man’s body away from the scene straight after he was shot dead” and was “filmed handling mutilated corpses, and helping armed militants to dispose of the dead bodies of pro-Assad fighters.”

Furthermore, given the groups' one -sided loyalty in the Syrian conflict they were a useful tool for American interventionist propaganda. The group was openly supportive of American military intervention in Syria and the implementation of a “no-fly zone” as well as American starvation sanctions that crippled the country’s healthcare system.

USAID intentionally funded a rescue group that was embedded with CIA-backed rebels and pushed for Western intervention in Syria because it was useful to their regime change war. As the New York Times' Rober F. Worth pointed out, USAID never funded neutral rescue groups in Syria such as the “Aleppo People’s Initiative” because they save people “in both regime and rebel areas, unlike the White Helmets”.

Most recently USAID was caught backing a judicial coup in Romania.

For context, Romanian NATO skeptic and opponent of the Ukrainian proxy war Călin Georgescu won the first round of election in Romania.

Romanian courts canceled the results of the election after an evidence-free intelligence document was declassified showing a TikTok campaign was organized in favor of Georgescu which they claimed was “similar to influence operations run by the Kremlin in Ukraine and Moldova”.

The Romanian investigative outlet Snoop uncovered this campaign to be a fraud when they found that the TikTok campaign cited in the intelligence report was actually paid for by the “National Liberal Party” , the party in opposition to Georgescu.

Independent reporter Lee Fang found that USAID (along with the NED) were the primary funders of the think tanks pushing to cancel the results of the election based on this fraudulent intelligence report.

CIA Cutouts

Many seem to believe that USAID and the NED are actually set up to help people and spread democracy around the world. However, a look at their actual record shows that they are primarily used as a tool of neocon foreign policy and meddling around the world. The Trump administration is almost certainly going to continue these operations under a different name but nevertheless, these organizations should not be defended.