Center for International Policy

• 1. Introduction

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  The Center for International Policy was born in 1975 from a moment of national crisis. The Vietnam War had fractured American confidence in its own foreign policy apparatus, and a group of activists decided the country needed an independent watchdog. Among them was Donald Ranard, a recently retired U.S. foreign service official who became the center's first executive director. Bill Goodfellow was also among the founders. Together, under the fiscal sponsorship of the Fund for Peace, they set out to scrutinize how Washington exercised its power abroad.

  What began as a response to one war in Southeast Asia grew into something far larger. Over the following decades, CIP would send congressional delegations into rebel-held territory in Latin America, push for human rights conditions on foreign aid, track billions of dollars in U.S. arms sales, and investigate the hidden influence of foreign lobbyists on American democracy. The think tank that emerged from the wreckage of Vietnam now operates nine programs and counts a former Costa Rican president among its senior fellows.

• 2. Early Focus on Asia

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  Donald Ranard's background shaped the center's first decade. As a former foreign service official, he understood the machinery of U.S. diplomacy toward Asia, and he used that knowledge to hold it accountable. In 1976, just one year into CIP's existence, Ranard testified before Congress about human rights violations in South Korea and the role South Korean lobbyists were playing in Washington.

  The target of much of this early scrutiny was the government of Park Chung Hee, whose relationship with the United States CIP monitored closely. Two sitting U.S. Representatives, Donald Fraser and Tom Harkin, served as co-chairs of the center's board during this period. In the mid-1970s, they introduced legislation that required foreign countries' human rights records to be weighed before granting them security or economic aid. That linkage between aid and rights became a defining feature of CIP's early advocacy.

  In 1978, the center created an Indochina Program to push for the normalization of diplomatic relations with Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The program ran for eleven years before closing in 1989, but its founding represented a direct challenge to the Cold War consensus that treated engagement with former adversaries as weakness.

• 3. Latin America and the Peace Process

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  The 1980s brought CIP's attention southward. When Central America became a theater for Cold War proxy conflicts, the center threw its weight behind diplomatic solutions. CIP campaigned in support of the Contadora Group and the subsequent Esquipulas Peace Agreement, regional initiatives that sought to resolve conflicts in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala through negotiation rather than military force.

  The Latin American work deepened in the 1990s. Adam Isacson established the Latin American Security program in the mid-1990s, and the program became one of CIP's most active. It campaigned against the militarization of Plan Colombia, arguing that funds should flow instead toward judicial reform and economic development. In June 1999, the program led what it described as the first-ever congressional delegation to meet directly with insurgent leaders inside territory they controlled. That kind of direct engagement with actors Washington preferred to ignore became a CIP signature.

  In 1990, the center formalized a joint program with the Costa Rica-based Arias Foundation, founded by Óscar Arias, who would later serve as a senior fellow with CIP. Wayne Smith joined in 1991 to launch a Cuba program focused on normalizing U.S.-Cuba relations. Sarah Stephens continued that Cuba work after joining in 2001 with the Freedom to Travel project, before leaving in 2006 to found the Center for Democracy in the Americas.

• 4. Apartheid, Corruption, and Financial Accountability

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  After South Africa received a loan from the International Monetary Fund in 1983, CIP mounted a campaign with a precise target: the U.S. representative to the IMF. The center pushed for provisions that would prohibit that representative from supporting loans to countries that practice apartheid. The campaign went beyond the loan itself and extended into research on labor practices and the economic impacts of apartheid.

  Two decades later, a CIP senior fellow named Raymond Baker published a book titled Capitalism's Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System, released by Wiley and Sons in 2005. The book led directly to Baker founding Global Financial Integrity, a non-profit research and advocacy organization focused on illicit financial flows. The pattern was consistent across the center's history: research feeding advocacy feeding institutional change.

  In 2003, then-president Robert White launched a program aimed at governmental corruption in Central America, with a specific focus on illegal logging in Honduras. That same year, Selig Harrison joined CIP to lead its Asia program. Harrison had previously been a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, and his program concentrated on North Korea and the Indian subcontinent.

• 5. Tracking the Arms Trade

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  The Security Assistance Monitor, led by director Christina Arabia, operates one of the most detailed public databases on U.S. military aid in existence. It compiles all publicly available data on U.S. foreign security assistance programs from the year 2000 to the present, drawing from a wide range of government documents. Users can search the numbers by country, region, program, and assistance type, covering arms sales, military and police aid, and training programs.

  The Arms and Security Project takes a more explicitly advocacy-oriented stance. Program director William D. Hartung has argued that military force is, in his words, "largely irrelevant in addressing the greatest dangers we face, from terrorism, to nuclear proliferation, to epidemics of disease, to climate change, to inequities of wealth and income." The project pushes for reforms in U.S. nuclear weapons policy, military spending, and the arms trade, and Hartung's research appears regularly in outlets including Defense News, The Hill, and The Washington Post.

  CIP launched the Sustainable Defense Task Force in November 2018, bringing together academics, think tank scholars, government figures, and retired military officers. In June 2019, the task force published a report concluding that the Pentagon could save $1.2 trillion in projected spending over the following decade while still, in the report's own framing, providing a greater measure of security.

• 6. Foreign Influence and Transparency

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  The Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, directed by Ben Freeman, operates from a specific premise: that sunlight is the most effective check on foreign money in American politics. The program works to increase incentives for agents to register and publicly report the work they perform on behalf of foreign governments, and to make the details of those contracts available to the public.

  In recent years, FITI has focused its scrutiny on two particular targets: the Pentagon budget and the Saudi Arabian lobby in Washington. The initiative's position is that the impact of foreign influence on American democracy can be both beneficial and harmful, and that transparency is the tool for telling the difference. That framing places FITI in an unusual position, neither reflexively hostile to foreign engagement nor naive about its risks.

  The center's 2007 absorption of the Americas Program, which joined CIP after the dissolution of the International Relations Center, extended CIP's reach further into hemispheric affairs. That program continues today in two forms: the TransBorder Project and the Americas Project. CIP also fiscally sponsors Mighty Earth, an environmental protection organization, and Freedom Forward, giving those groups organizational infrastructure without absorbing them as full programs.