© AP Photo / US Institute of Peace
Most of the US Institute of Peace’s 300 staff got pink slip emails Friday night following the drama earlier this month involving DOGE and FBI agents and police storming the think tank’s extravagant $111M DC headquarters after the White House accused “rogue bureaucrats” of trying to “hold agencies hostage.” Here's what to know about its activities.
Haven for Neocons and Regime Change Operators
Set up in 1984 and lavished with a $55M taxpayer-funded annual budget, USIP has been a haven for neocons since its inception, with figures from War on Terror and Iraq architects Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle to Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan joining its board or actively collaborating with its activities.
After the 2018 death of Gene Sharp, who collaborated with the USIP, senior institute officials praised the veteran regime change operator - whose work helped destabilize entire regions, as “a pioneer of people power.”
Meddling in Russia and Eastern Europe
In the 90s, USIP funded “training and capacity building” for political actors, media, NGOs and ‘civil society leaders’ in Russia, Ukraine and across Eastern Europe, and offered “policy guidance” to US diplomats in these countries.
Forced to curtail its activities in Russia in the 2000s, USIP focused its work and resources on Ukraine in the runup to the 2005 and 2014 coups.
Once the conflict in the Donbass got underway in 2014, then-USIP chief Stephen Hadley urged the US to ramp up arms deliveries to Ukraine and send Russian troops home in “body bags.”
Soft Power Ops Worldwide and Post-Invasion Nationbuilding
Besides Eastern Europe, USIP has run its soft power programs in war-torn countries and regions across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East following the Arab Spring (Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Syria).
In countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, the USIP’s activities have included nationbuilding in the wake of the US invasions, from civil society grants to training of the US-backed puppet governments’ officials, and top-down implementation of US-style electoral and governance systems, which rapidly collapsed once US occupation forces were gone.
In other words, like other soft power agencies recently targeted by Trump (USAID, NED), USIP is yet another example of a taxpayer-funded instrument for co-option and subversion disguised as a tool for “conflict resolution” and “democracy promotion.”
https://sputnikglobe.com/20250330/what-is-the-us-institute-of-peace-the-latest-usaid-style-soft-power-tool-dismantled-by-doge-1121714075.html
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