Trump is Very Unlikely To End American Regime Change Operations, But USAID and NED should not be defended.
The Dissident
February 4, 2025
The Dissident
February 4, 2025
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 Marco 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:
"has 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.
Continue reading in Substack.
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 Marco 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:
"has 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.
Continue reading in Substack.