Atlantic Council

• 1. Introduction

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  The Atlantic Council began with a handshake between two former American statesmen. Christian Herter, once Secretary of State, and William L. Clayton, a trade diplomat who had helped shape the postwar economic order, co-founded the organization in 1961 with a single animating conviction: that the friendship between North America and Europe, forged in the rubble of World War II, was too important to be left to chance.

  What followed was something unusual in Washington. Not a lobbying firm, not a government agency, but a place where political leaders, military commanders, and financiers from opposite shores of the Atlantic could sit across a table from one another without the formality of official diplomacy. Melvin Small of Wayne State University put it plainly: the Council's real strength, especially in those early years, was its connections to influential policymakers. It was, in his words, a "center for informal get-togethers."

  Today the Atlantic Council manages sixteen regional centers and functional programs. It has hosted NATO secretaries-general, sitting heads of state, four-star generals, and central bank presidents. Adrienne Arsht gave it five million dollars to open a Latin America center. Facebook became a top donor. Burisma Holdings sent checks. And the governments of at least twenty-five foreign nations have contributed since 2008.

  How does a think tank become indispensable to the most powerful people on earth? And what does its funding reveal about who, exactly, it serves?

• 2. A Niche for Informal Power

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  In its earliest years, the Council's staff published policy papers and conducted surveys of European and American attitudes toward transatlantic cooperation. The primary interest was economic: reducing trade barriers between the two continents and, to a lesser extent, the wider world. Political and environmental questions received secondary attention.

  But the publications were never really the point. What the Council offered that no government ministry could was neutrality of setting. Leaders who might balk at a formal bilateral meeting could attend a dinner organized by a nonprofit in Washington, DC, and say things off the record that no treaty framework permitted. Members worked deliberately to build what the Council itself described as "networks of continuing communication" across the Atlantic.

  The organization also positioned itself early as a champion of an expanded Japanese presence in international institutions, a stance that was ahead of most Washington policy circles at the time. After the September 2001 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan, the Council's Asian footprint grew substantially. It opened a South Asia Center and a Program on Asia. Climate diplomacy with India and China became part of its mandate as well, extending its reach well beyond its original transatlantic brief.

• 3. A Pipeline to Power

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  February 2009 was a remarkable month for the Council's alumni. James L. Jones, then its chairman, stepped down to become President Obama's National Security Advisor. In quick succession, Susan Rice left for the United Nations as ambassador, Richard Holbrooke took the role of Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Eric K. Shinseki became Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and Anne-Marie Slaughter moved to the State Department as Director of Policy Planning.

  Four years after Jones's departure, Chuck Hagel, who had succeeded him as Council chairman, stepped down to serve as US Secretary of Defense. General Brent Scowcroft then took over as interim chairman of the Board of Directors. In January 2014, former ambassador to China and governor of Utah Jon Huntsman Jr. was appointed to lead the organization.

  In 2017, Tom Bossert, who had been a Nonresident Zurich Cyber Risk Fellow at the Council's Cyber Security Initiative, was appointed Homeland Security Advisor to the Trump administration. The pattern was consistent across administrations of both parties: the Council functioned as a holding ground for the foreign-policy establishment between government postings, and its alumni moved easily back into government when administrations changed.

• 4. Who Pays the Bills

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  In September 2014, Eric Lipton reported in The New York Times that since 2008 the Council had received donations from more than twenty-five foreign governments. His reporting observed that the Atlantic Council was among a set of think tanks that received substantial overseas funds and conducted activities that typically aligned with those governments' own agendas.

  The Council's charter describes it as nonpartisan and independent of both the US government and NATO. It is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. But its donor list has generated sustained scrutiny. In 2015 and 2016, the three largest donors, each giving over one million dollars, were Adrienne Arsht, Lebanese billionaire Bahaa Hariri (the estranged brother of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri), and the United Arab Emirates. Starting in 2016, the Ukrainian oligarch-controlled Burisma Holdings contributed one hundred thousand dollars per year for three consecutive years.

  In 2018, the leading donors were Facebook and the British government. By 2021, the donors giving more than one million dollars included American Securities Foundation, Bahaa Hariri, the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

  Of the Council's 2019 revenue, fourteen percent, approximately five and a half million dollars, came from government donors outside the United States. A 2025 report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft found that between 2019 and 2023, the Atlantic Council received nearly twenty-one million dollars from foreign governments, the highest recorded total of any US-based think tank over that period.

• 5. Controversies and Canceled Partnerships

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  Donor relationships have produced recurring friction. Michele Dunne led the Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, a center established with a donation from Bahaa Hariri. When Egypt's military removed President Mohamed Morsi in 2013, Dunne publicly urged the United States to suspend military aid and called the removal a "military coup." Hariri complained to the Council about her position. Four months later, Dunne resigned.

  In 2014, the Council published a report backing the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a trade deal between the European Union and the US, with financial support from FedEx, a company simultaneously lobbying Congress to cut transatlantic tariffs.

  A partnership with the Hungary Foundation, a group funded by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's government, was announced in 2019. At a meeting in Budapest that year, Atlantic Council members criticized Hungarian Foreign Ministry officials for limiting discussion of the state of democracy in Hungary. The Hungary Foundation then canceled the project. In 2020, the Council returned the foundation's grant and ended the relationship entirely.

  In November 2022, the Council co-hosted the Global Food Security Forum with the Gaurav and Sharon Srivastava Family Foundation. Reporting later revealed what became known as the Guarav Srivastava Fake Spy Scam. The Council terminated its relationship with Srivastava in May 2023 after it could not verify key details of his background, including the claim that the foundation was a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which it was not as of April 2023. Funds received for future collaboration were returned.

  Diplomatic cables made public through the United States diplomatic cables leak revealed that the Council had worked with Chevron Corporation and ExxonMobil representatives to oppose a Brazilian legislative proposal that would have given Petrobras chief-operator status over pre-salt oil deposits. After that legislative effort failed, the Council supported the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and publicly backed efforts to challenge the institutions that had passed the legislation. Following a legislative outcome favorable to international energy companies, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP were awarded pre-salt exploration contracts; the success of the first auctions was announced at an event organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

• 6. The Events That Shape Policy

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  In 2009, the Council hosted Anders Fogh Rasmussen's first major US speech after he became NATO Secretary General. Rasmussen used the occasion to address NATO's mission in Afghanistan, cooperation with Russia, and the transatlantic relationship broadly. Senator Richard Lugar and then-Senator John Kerry have both appeared at Council events.

  Since January 2007, the Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security has run what it calls the Commanders Series, bringing American and European military leaders to Washington to speak on active conflicts and regional threats. Participants have included former General George Casey, former Admiral Timothy Keating, former French Chief of Defense General Jean-Louis Georgelin, and Dutch Lieutenant General Ton van Loon, addressing topics from the Iraq War to security conditions in Asia and Africa.

  The Council's roster of annual gatherings includes the Distinguished Leadership Awards in Washington, DC; the Future Leaders Summit; the Wroclaw Global Forum in Wroclaw, Poland; the Atlantic Council Energy and Economic Summit in Istanbul, Turkey; and the Global Citizen Awards in New York City. On the 22nd of February 2019, at the Munich Security Conference, the Council released its Declaration of Principles. President and CEO Frederick Kempe described it as an effort to rally and reinvigorate what he called "free peoples" around the world.

  In August 2023, a senior Council delegation led by former Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė visited Taiwan and met with President Tsai Ing-wen, with logistical support from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office.

• 7. New Frontiers and Critics

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  The Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, founded in 2016, tracks disinformation in open-source environments and monitors democratic processes around the world. Facebook donated a significant but undisclosed sum to the project in 2018, placing itself among the Council's top funders, alongside the British government.

  In December 2020, the Council launched its GeoEconomics Center at a keynote event with European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde. The center organizes its work around three areas it calls the Future of Capitalism, the Future of Money, and the Economic Statecraft Initiative. It has hosted major policy speeches from figures including Janet Yellen, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Brian Deese, Gina Raimondo, Kristalina Georgieva, and David Malpass.

  In September 2021, the Global China Hub was established to examine three specific challenges: China's growing influence over countries and international institutions, the domestic political and economic shifts under Xi Jinping, and China's pursuit of dominance in emerging technologies. As of June 2023, its senior director is David O. Shullman.

  Criticism has come from several directions. In 2016, the founder of the Human Rights Foundation objected publicly to the Council's decision to give a Global Citizen Award to Ali Bongo Ondimba; Bongo declined the award amid controversy over the Gabonese presidential election that year. In July 2019, Russia declared the Council's activities a threat to its constitutional order and security, placing it on a list of undesirable organizations barred from operating inside Russia. Russian scholars Andrei Tsygankov, Pavel Tsygankov, and Haley Gonzalez documented pro-NATO and anti-Russian bias in the Council's publications in 2023.

  During the Russo-Ukrainian war, the Atlantic Council became the think tank most frequently cited by the three leading US newspapers on the subject of that conflict, a prominence that reflects both its Washington access and the ongoing questions about where the line runs between policy advocacy and the interests of its funders.