President Donald J. Trump came into office with the promise to “Drain the swamp”, referring to the corrupting influence of unelected bureaucrats and lobbyists in Washington DC.
The revolving door between veiled donor-funded think tank lobby firms and advisors to congress and the White House have long raised concerns about the sway of the pay to play system on policymakers.
When General Michael Flynn, U.S. National Security Advisor to President Trump was exposed for secretive lobbying for Turkey in the first 22 days of the Trump Administration, and was required to retroactively register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent, inquiries arose about the covert foreign allegiances of high ranking U.S. officials and its overall compromising influence on the formation of international policy and U.S. National Security as a whole.
After the scandal, General Michael Flynn was soon replaced by retired United States Army lieutenant general H.R. McMaster, a current Chair for the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank who also conducts lobbying efforts of behalf of Turkish interests in The United States.
Michael Doran, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East for the Hudson Institute, is an ardent supporter of Turkey and their satellite state of Azerbaijan on Twitter, praising their autocratic governments and frequently espousing anti-Armenian sentiments. Another Hudson Institute senior fellow Luke Coffey, is similarly infamous on twitter for his pro-Turkey and Azerbaijan rhetoric, regularly embracing anti-Armenian talking points.
A cohesive theme of repetitive pro-Turkish and anti-Armenian public messaging coming out of the Washington think tank’s most senior members reveals the policy position of the Hudson Institute, one that coincides with the interests and attitudes of the Turkish and Azerbaijani governments, who have a history of violence against the Armenian Republics of Armenia and Artsakh, and their own Armenian populations, including massacres, genocides, and acts of invasion and aggression.
Think tanks are much like echo chambers, tasked with reverberating a singular resounding ideology to persuade policymakers to adopt their formulated agenda. The pattern of promotion of pro-Turkish and anti-Armenian sentiments of the senior fellows and directors of the Hudson Institute discloses their lobbying strategy, one that advances the Turkish stance on U.S. foreign policy.
The 2020 invasion of the Independent Republic of Artsakh, populated by ethnic Armenians by Azerbaijan and Turkey, during the reign of the Trump Administration was met with a media blackout by American media and suspicious silence and inaction by top officials in Washington. Including Mike Pompeo, who served as Secretary of State at the time. Secretary Pompeo engaged in both-sideism rhetoric, offering no support, while the Armenian population was out-manned and out-gunned, ethnically cleansed from their homeland by Azerbaijani and Turkish forces. The years before the war, the Trump administration had substantially increased military aid to Azerbaijan amounting to more than $100 million in fiscal years 2018-19.
The pro-Turkish policies by the Trump Administration make even more sense when you discover that most of the top appointees for the Trump Administration are also members of the Hudson Institute, including Attorney General William Barr, Director of the Central intelligence Agency(CIA) and subsequent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing Marshall Billingslea, United States Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Tim Morrison, and Senior Director for Strategy to the President Robert Spalding.
The Institute also includes a senior member with deep ties to the Turkish military, non-resident Senior Fellow Can Kasapoğlu who works as a defense analyst at the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies. Can Kasapoğlu received his Ph.D. from the Turkish War College and his MSci from the Turkish Military Academy and advises the Hudson Institute on political-military affairs in the Middle East, North Africa, and former Soviet regions like Armenia, as well as defense intelligence and weapons technologies all the way from Turkey.
Notably, a majority of the executive leadership of the Hudson Institute are also former staff and appointees of former President George W. Bush, including its President & CEO John P. Walters, who served as director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and was a cabinet member of the Bush administration. As well as Director Michael Doran, who worked as senior director in the National Security Council for Middle-East issues, senior advisor in the State Department, and a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Pentagon during the Bush/Cheney White House. Therefore, it is no surprise to learn that The Bush Administration famously fired United States Ambassador to Armenia John Marshall Evans in 2006 for using using the words “Armenian Genocide” to describe the campaign of race extermination by the Turks against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 as a move to appease the authoritarian Government of Turkey who denies the Armenian Genocide ever happened.
With the leadership of America’s top intelligence agency (CIA), National Security Agency, State Department, Justice Department, Treasury Department and Transportation Department seemingly selected from the roster of the Hudson Institute, an organization with a history of vehement support for the interests of the Government of Turkey, it is no wonder that the invasion of Artsakh by Azerbaijan with the help of Turkey and its recruited Jihadist mercenaries fell on deaf ears during the Trump Administration. Instead of draining the swamp, compromised individuals like General Michael Flynn and the management of the Turkey-linked lobby firm of the Hudson Institute had instead infiltrated the top levels of the White House to gain a foothold on American foreign policy decisions, which allowed the ethnic cleansing of democratic Armenian Artsakh by dictatorial forces to take place without intervention from the west.
by Arcadia Washington submitted to Armvault for publishing.