Washington’s 400-plus think tanks often serve as paid image-builders or political-capital generators for politicians, foreign governments and corporations rather than independent sources of policy ideas.

Unmeasured power lust leads experts to overestimate intervention success and reward flattery and optimistic reporting, as seen in ignored Afghanistan warnings and the unread Pentagon Papers.

Paternalism rests on the claim that government knows best, yet produces smug elite attitudes and no-fault policies that concentrate power and erode accountability.

In the same way that medieval kings seized any excuse to invade neighboring countries, today’s politicians perennially seek pretexts to further invade citizens’ lives. And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers long ago, assure their masters that God — or at least social science — blesses their aggression.

Inside the Washington beltway, it is bad taste to recognize how federal policy is often shaped by the love of power. Experts and activists persistently overestimate the likelihood of successful interventions because of their starry-eyed assumptions about the political class.  Because political scientists cannot measure power lust, they leave it out of their equations. This makes everything neat and tidy garbage.

The more power that government amasses, the more intellectual homage it receives. Washington experts constitute a Greek chorus that bestows accolades on the Powers That Be. There are now more than 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which offer little more than an intellectual version of “rent-a-mobs” of political protestors.

Oppressive regimes buy good reputations as think tanks become “a  muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington,” the New York Times reported in 2015. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar, which has a dismal human-rights record, to set up a research institute that, according to the Qatari government, would devote itself to “reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones.”

After an especially tawdry fixed election in 2011, the Kazakhstan government’s image was burnished by two think tanks on its payroll — the Center for Security and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies. The Atlantic Council, another prominent D.C. think tank, pockets cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and NATO. The Times noted in 2015 that “since 2011, at least 64 foreign governments, state-controlled entities or government officials have contributed to a group of 28 major United States-based research organizations.”

Washington think tanks proliferated at the same time that federal policies became more hare-brained. Some think tanks are little more than “cash machines for power” for politicians. Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005: “It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it.” May’s think tank extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations.

The profusion of think tanks and policy wonks spawn the illusion that ideas drive policy in Washington. But in many cases, ideas are simply pretenses to sanctify the pursuit of power. A president or prominent politician knows he can recite bosh and a bevy of commentators will race to praise his courage and vision. For........

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