History

How To Sell a War

Presidents use a web of private influence to garner support for foreign invasions.

Brandan P. Buck | 6.2.2026 8:00 AM

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(Photo: Harvard University Press)

The President's Echo System: How Foreign Policy Is Sold to Americans, by Chad Levinson, Harvard University Press, 288 pages, $39.95

The modern presidency frequently sells its foreign policy to the American people via nominally private institutions, thereby bypassing official sanctions against propagandizing the public. So argues Chad Levinson, a political scientist at Virginia Tech, in The President's Echo System.

These political pressure groups have ranged from the Century Group, which operated during the run-up to America's entry into World War II, to the Project for the New American Century, active at the height of American hegemony in the 1990s. Levinson calls them extragovernmental organizations (EGOs): a web of private but government-aligned think tanks, pressure groups, and other players that lobby Congress and the public for foreign policies aligned with the president's agenda. Pushing back against earlier scholars of elite machinations, such as C. Wright Mills, Levinson argues that the relationship between EGOs and the presidency is "symbiotic rather than coercive": The White House serves as the senior partner, with their private counterparts playing a role akin to a "contemporary flash mob," springing into action to amplify the president's agenda.

Levinson opens by describing how EGOs operate in a public space defined by popular apathy toward foreign affairs. ("Left unprovoked," he notes, "the US public pays little attention to foreign affairs.") After America's disastrous experience with the Committee on Public Information during World War I, Congress placed significant roadblocks on the executive's ability to use overt propaganda. Meanwhile, Levinson notes, "Nonofficial propaganda…is protected by the freedoms of association and speech," even when acting in coordination with the White House. He argues that EGOs are heavily slanted toward intervention: Such groups respond to incentives set by the executive........

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