While many believe that under the Trump administration the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED*) was defunded, dismantled, or otherwise dissolved, the reality is far less dramatic and far more dangerous.

On its official website, the NED* recently revealed what it calls a “duty to care” policy – an internal shift that effectively ends the organization’s long-standing practice of openly listing most of the foreign organizations and movements it finances. This change, framed as a protective measure for recipients in “high-risk environments,” marks a complete reversal of one of the few things that previously distinguished NED* operations from covert CIA influence campaigns – the veneer of transparency.

A “Pro-Democracy” Front With Covert DNA

Founded in 1983, the NED* was created to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, according to former NED* co-founder Allen Weinstein. For decades, it served as the US arm of so-called “soft power,” funneling money to foreign political groups, media outlets, labor unions, and activist organizations deemed favorable to US interests – usually under the banner of “promoting democracy.” 

But “democracy” in this context is indistinguishable from regime change. From Venezuela to Belarus, from Hong Kong to Myanmar, NED*-funded groups have played central roles in political destabilization and even precipitating war, many of them advocating positions explicitly aligned with US foreign policy and done entirely at the cost of their own nation’s stability and best interests.

The obvious purpose of creating the NED* wasn’t to end covert interference around the globe, but rather to continue the CIA’s work Americans and people worldwide were increasingly aware of and opposed to, by whitewashing it and repackaging it as transparently “promoting democracy.”  

Since the NED’s founding, the Western media has intermittently admitted the NED* has been involved in global-spanning regime change. In 2004, the London Guardian admitted the US government through the NED* overthrew governments in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003, while unsuccessfully attempting to do so in Belarus and Ukraine.

The article described unrest taking place in Ukraine at the time as:

…an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.  

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies,........

© New Eastern Outlook