Imagining a Right Institution

“We should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need a de-Ba’athification program... my strategy is, de-institutionalize the left, re-institutionalize the right.” - J.D. Vance

MEA CULPA

In the auspicious year of 1984, the United States Congress established the United States Institute of Peace. President Ronald Reagan approved the establishment of the USIP, sponsored in Congress by Senators Mark Hatfield and Spark Matsunaga. Hatfield and Matsunaga, both veterans of World War II, envisioned an institution that would reduce the risk of general war and violence through the study of peacemaking methods and respond to the American public’s interest in a peace-focused American institution. As the USIP Act explains,

Section 1702. (a) The Congress finds and declares that— (1) a living institution embodying the heritage, ideals, and concerns of the American people for peace would be a significant response to the deep public need for the Nation to develop fully a range of effective options, in addition to armed capacity, that can leash international violence and manage international conflict; (2) people throughout the world are fearful of nuclear war, are divided by war and threats of war, are experiencing social and cultural hostilities from rapid international change and real and perceived conflicts over interests, and are diverted from peace by the lack of problem-solving skills for dealing with such conflicts; (3) many potentially destructive conflicts among nations and peoples have been resolved constructively and with cost efficiency at the international, national, and community levels through proper use of such techniques as negotiation, conciliation, mediation, and arbitration; (4) there is a national need to examine the disciplines in the social, behavioral, and physical sciences and the arts and humanities with regard to the history, nature, elements, and future of peace processes, and to bring together and develop new and tested techniques to promote peaceful economic, political, social, and cultural relations in the world; (5) existing institutions providing programs in international affairs, diplomacy, conflict resolution, and peace studies are essential to further development of techniques to promote peaceful resolution of international conflict, and the peacemaking activities of people in such institutions, government, private enterprise, and voluntary associations can be strengthened by a national institution devoted to international peace research, education and training, and information services;

There is much to agree with here. This is convincing. That is part of the reason USIP was created. The idea is beautiful.

Yet, USIP’s real origin lies in realpolitik. USIP allowed the Reagan administration to deflect from accusations of warmongering. For liberals, under Carter and in “civil society,” USIP offered an opportunity to create a permanent, influential NGO that could engage with the Departments of War and State, Congress, and the White House on war and peace, while shaping domestic opinion on foreign policy. In USIP, Reagan’s electoral interest in being a peace president and the hippies’ interest in institutional power coincided. The noble veterans of World War II, unlike Reagan and the Hippies, were true believers. One can imagine the scent of burnt flesh on Iwo Jima scarring the heart of Hatfield for decades. At the same time, for Matsunaga, the honor and terror of the brutal combat of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, formed entirely of Americans of Japanese ancestry, inspired his genuine love of peace. Their good faith was a mask for the politics of USIP’s creation.

Since USIP’s founding, the institution evolved from a small office on K Street to a multi-million-dollar, marble-and-glass cathedral on the National Mall, situated across from the Department of State and near the Lincoln Memorial, funded 50-50 by USAID and Congress, with generous contributions from the Pentagon and Departmnet of State, stretching the Institute's supposed 52 million dollar budget to well over 120 million dollars, not even counting private donations or the millions in the endowment. Throughout USIP’s forty years, the Institute received criticism from both the left and the right. Leftist critics argued that the institution advanced U.S. counter-terrorism aims, journalists attacked USIP for never establishing a museum of peace, and right-wingers argued that USIP was a worse than useless retirement home for ambassadors and diplomats. And all these criticisms are, to some extent, valid. The Institute, of course, considered itself successful, citing its interventions in peace negotiations in Bosnia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as its twelve teams in country offices worldwide. As well, of course, its track record of service to the Pentagon, DOS, and USAID.

Over the years, critics would note that it was always unclear where the Department of State and USAID ended and USIP began. University money greased the wheels, and dollars from Qatar, Singapore, and the UN were almost always floating in. Often, salaries were paid from 3-4 sources simultaneously, stirring the institutional pot and mixing money and interests as if there was a single interest, rather than the disparate interests of 4-5 organizations across three continents. “Experts” typically had contracts with all three simultaneously, making their titles ten lines long. These ambiguous sages had speaking roles, professorships, and book deals, from Jakarta to George Mason, and they were in charge. Then DOGE came and emptied the building. For a time, Darren Beattie was the President. And as of today, USIP is now the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.

A Right Institution

What should this new USIP do?

Let’s imagine the opposite of USIP. A USIP that uses its strange institutional position and power for good and useful ends rather than bad and useless ends. A USIP that is aligned with the populist right, rather than the liberal left. The authorizing congressional statute that created USIP is a beautiful document that essentially allows for USIP to be used for almost anything, as long as it is related to “peace.” And “peace” can mean many things. An unintelligent and vindictive right-wing would destroy USIP. But this would be a pyrrhic victory. Because liberals are great at building institutions. They will retreat, and as soon as we get a few too many D’s checked at the ballot box, USIP will be back, more sure of itself than ever. Even if Congress destroys USIP, the people will move to all the other nodes of the cathedral. They already are. Browse Georgetown’s list of newly hired faculty, and you’ll find DOS, USAID, and USIP employees, bruised, afraid, and in retreat, but ready to salt your earth when presidential power is in their hands again. Destroying USIP creates a short-term absence of power that others will inhabit like shadows and return to as soon as they can. You are in an institutional war with shadows. And the only thing that destroys shadows is light.

A smart and competent right-wing would instead inhabit the building itself, doing things that are good and useful, and would work to ensure that it can endure. We would build a dark cathedral that is less a cathedral and more a fortress in an otherwise vast and hostile ocean. We would quickly build a new USIP from the ground up. We would take this node and inhabit it. And what might our Dark Cathedral, our little glass Vauban fort of lux et patrie, do?

• Similarly, for many years, we, like USIP, could identify allied intellectuals and pay them $30,000 a year for one day of work a week, negotiating a contract with a university to fund them as professors of international affairs. We could place certain individuals we like, who are ideological allies, in educational institutions around the country, especially in foreign affairs. Since universities appear to be sticking around, this might be a good method for checking liberal ideological hegemony. This may be attractive to universities seeking to prove that they really can hire conservative and hard-right professors and intellectuals.

• President Donald Trump will appoint himself to the board of USIP.

• We could call the people we hire “Senior Experts” and give them titles, mimicking liberal power. But a wiser choice would be to invent a new category or title. Perhaps we simply call them a “verified” expert in foreign affairs and create a team at USIP that awards “verification” to experts and have our dear secretary direct DOS employees at every level to privilege the analysis of “verified” experts and prohibit them from citing experts that are not “verified,” thus making the foreign policy elite dependent on the verification system for credibility with the federal government for the next several years.

• Soon, with time, if we award verification to actually competent people, both our friends and some of our enemies, and those few people who are neither (but simply intelligent and competent people), the system will take on a life of its own, and our novelty credential will become a permanent prerequisite of being taken seriously in Washington.

  • Think of it like the bar exam. To work in foreign affairs in D.C., you need to pass the verification process, which does not award verification to people with anti-American, globalist, or war-monger sentiments. We will say in five years’ time, “Of course, the federal government shouldn’t take advice from anyone that hates America!” And we will be astounded to remember we let the federal government, especially DOS, take advice from people who hate America.

  • We can even limit foreign influence on the American government if we make citizenship a requirement of verification. We can establish a separate tier for non-citizens, who will face a much higher bar for entry. We will log their interactions with the government to precisely measure and understand who is influencing our government, why, and from where.

  • What gives the Cathedral enduring power is that experts supposedly private relationships with government officials, in practice, make experts’ access to government permanent, regardless of whether this relationship is sanctioned by public power or if power changes hands via elections. If we make having a relationship a matter of public government by forcing the government to only consult verified experts (we can give them a little checkmark or seal of approval), we will destroy a critical, anti-democratic, oligarchic tool of the Cathedral.

  • Even better, we can begin to “verify” certain programs. If we conduct a first round of verifications and 80% of the students from the Elliot School of International Affairs pass, that would be wonderful! Let’s place them on a list with their pass rate. Let’s say Georgetown grads only pass verification at a rate of 50%. Great, let’s rank them, too. Law schools are ranked in part relative to each other based on how well their grads pass the bar: let us create a similar system for foreign policy, thereby bringing accountability to foreign affairs.

• We could establish a Remigration working group, with two subgroups: one for NATO states and one for American agencies. We could request that every NATO member state nominate a representative and require all federal agencies to do the same, ensuring they are all aware of this agenda item and shifting the Overton window towards a key goal. This would be identified as a prestigious and attractive role, rapidly advancing the dialogue on migration. To truly make it prestigious, have the Secretary of State attend a quarterly meeting and clarify that NATO members can consider funds for “remigration” as contributing towards NATO spending.

  • Does every federal agency need to have a point person on remigration? Consider Executive Order 14202—Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias. Why not have one: Executive Order — Prioritizing Return Migration and direct all agencies within sixty days to provide reports to the President on how they can contribute. They will find a way. This is less a “USIP” specific proposal, but USIP could be the place everyone meets.

• We could host significant, right-wing cultural events at the large, beautiful building, inviting allied states like El Salvador to meet on combating crime and inviting embassy staff from around DC to share the Bukele model. Do you want to export the Bukele model? Host a meeting at USIP, funded by DOS, called “Exporting the Bukele Model,” and invite Embassy officers from all over DC If you throw it, they will party. And they will learn. And their governments will listen. Serve alcohol.

  • This is what liberals do all the time. Doing this sort of thing actually matters. These sorts of “society" functions actually do shape international and national politics. So let’s do this too. Combating crime can make the world a more peaceful place.

  • Or, very fun, we could give all the right-wing publishers and magazines in D.C. a nice, fancy place to host talks and public events. Hell, they held weddings at USIP, so let’s host some lectures. Let’s give TPUSA the building for a week or two, and simply see what they can do with it.

• We could hire veterans and public affairs officers and send them to every single school in the country to lecture American children on President Trump’s peace agenda and threats to our country and culture. The liberals did this. They tried not to be partisan. But you know how that goes.

• We could use USIP’s outreach capabilities to fund domestic allies and incentivize right-wing beliefs via offering lucrative career paths and internships. This is very easy and practical.

• Perhaps we can start a new institution, a center, which we are going to call the “Advanced Studies Institute,” that will look at the growth of Islamo-leftism in the Western world, which is behind the normalization of antisemitic violence and the surge in black bloc tactics and antifa shootings. That’s surely a barrier to peace. After all, they are the reason Hamas won’t accept a peace deal: they’re winning the propaganda war with the aid of Western allies.

• Let’s establish a “Digital Democracy” team, whose mission will be to promote a more peaceful world. How are we going to do this? Two ways. First, they will review our government’s past operations to identify ways we inadvertently promoted war over peace. They plan to publish on this topic and write about it regularly. Their goal is to jump from agency to agency, archive to archive, and start-up-like investigate ways in which pro-war agendas have undemocratically infiltrated American foreign policy. Iraq was a mistake. Let this team produce the authoritative government report on why. Or, for example, how do ethnic cartels try to influence American government decision-making, exercising antidemocratic power for unpopular ends? How do organizations like Mujahideen-e Khalq work to advance regime change in Iran? Or how do Somalis and Ethiopians in the United States try to advance their respective goals? They can maintain and establish the foreign influence monitoring system.

  • The second thing this team will do is whatever they think we have to do for the Republic. The Cathedral’s tremendous power comes from everyone understanding the goals and working personally to advance them. We must adopt this approach, giving our people time to think about ways to advance our goals with no limits or expectations. We must institutionally nurture an implicit worldview with a range of actions. Who knows what they will come up with?

• We could even utilize USIP for its intended purpose of hiring diplomats and ambassadors trusted by the President and Secretaries of State and War. These individuals would advise them on war and peace issues, manage low-level conflicts on their behalf, and produce research and information as needed to inform their decisions.

• Given the enormous risk of civil war and violence associated with mass migration, we will establish a Center for Remigration Studies to produce regular, realistic policy reports on large-scale remigration, aiming to avert civil war.

• We could simply hire right-wing thinkers in foreign affairs, pay them to write articles and essays, and then publish them. USIP did that. DOS did that. USAID did that. And all that lovely literature was taught to generations of people in the United States and around the world. One reason why Cthulu swims left is that the right simply does not swim that well. The right doggy paddles. The right writes, but not enough, and not enough things that can be taught in colleges and universities as elements of today’s curriculum. So produce curriculum, articles, and research reports on every single foreign affairs subject imaginable. That is what the left does, and what USIP did, so produce. The goal is not to produce work at scale, but to create high-quality content on a wide range of subjects that can be used to teach foreign affairs.

• Building on this, hire Mike Benz and provide him with a team and funding to conduct research on government waste and the destabilizing effects of foreign aid. To secure the AID reforms, we need to publish a book to ensure a comprehensive record and win over academia and the public. Here is the current issue with Mike Benz: He is on X, so he has to spend his time posting there, which means chasing the algorithm. Chasing the algorithm sometimes means lying. And Mike Benz lied about USIP, and so did DOGE. USIP did not traffic drugs or fund the Taliban. But USIP did work against American interests. And USIP did have a partisan lean. And USIP did waste taxpayer dollars.

  • This is a very important and precise problem: instead of offering the intellectual, correct, and cogent articulation of USIP’s problems, a conspiratorial alternative was offered to the public. And conspiracies make both right-wing influencers and right-wing voters and people less intelligent. Our goal, as intellectuals, should be to uplift and educate the public. This is, in fact, a patriotic duty of a nation’s intellectuals. And that means not lying. But not lying is hard if you are chasing the algorithm. So what do we do? We chalk up DOGE and Benz’s little inaccuracies as spur-of-the-moment missteps arising from the excitement of the overall situation, and hire Benz and DOGE personnel to author a work on USIP and how the institution drifted from its mission over the years, and provide an account of what has gone wrong in the broader foreign aid sector. We aim to produce an initial 120-page report in 2026 and a full book in 2027. The goal is to create a record that can be taught and read. No one in 2045 will watch the Mike Benz twelve-hour lecture on USIP’s drug trafficking. But they might read a book. A university may also require a student to read a specific text as part of a foreign policy program. If we do not produce accurate, focused, intelligent literature, we lose because the left will. On the current path, Mike Benz will be remembered like the John Birch Society, and the brief demise of USIP and USAID will be considered an unfortunate but necessary misstep along the path to neo-USIP and neo-USAID 2.0.
    

    So let’s do something productive, for our legacy, for our perennial appeal, and actually produce an expert report on how USAID undermined American democracy, freedom of speech, and contributed to mass migration.

    
    

    Do you want to know something? I pinky promise that there is, somewhere in D.C., a white paper circulating on USAID 2.0. And unless we work to prevent it, with a serious argument and serious literature, they will unmake the work of your hands and salt the earth beneath your feet.

• There is an opportunity to consolidate the victory on AID. A huge number of people in D.C. and even at AID felt that AID needed major reform. They will, if we convince them, not undo the work Secretary Rubio has done to fix AID in three years or seven years’ time. Consolidating reform means producing authoritative and trusted literature. This is also a way to secure Rubio’s legacy.

• Utilize the lower level of the building to create a museum for the public to showcase the achievements of the Trump administration and America’s contributions to peace. Call it the Pat Buchanan Hall of Peace and get foot traffic from the National Mall. There really is room for a peace museum in Washington, and we could build one. Our own, from the ground up. I imagine a populist museum to be somewhat European, offering cheap beer for people to drink on the terrace. USIP has a beautiful terrace facing the Lincoln Memorial. Imagine lovely chud fathers stopping by the Pat Buchanan Hall of Peace to crush a Busch before they go see Lincoln. They can see the pen Trump used to sign the Abraham Accords, and hell, why not put the Abraham Accords on display?

• There is no America First foreign policy institution in Washington, D.C. This is because of three important reasons:

  • America First animates against attention on foreign affairs.

  • America First is new.

  • America First is a movement that believes in realpolitik. Consider this: the fundamental problem with USIP’s congressional statute is that “studying peace” is impossible, from a realpolitik perspective. If peace is truly a balance of power that forces negotiation, then we need to study power and how to acquire and retain it in foreign affairs, as well as how to deploy the power attained to maximum effect. This, therefore, means studying abstract ideas like “peace” or excelling in discrete professions such as “area studies” misses the fundamentals of actual foreign affairs: power and its management.

    • This is mostly true, but not entirely, as there is such a thing as the statecraft of skilled diplomacy and wise negotiation, which can compensate for a lack of power or buttress power attained. Studying this is a worthwhile pursuit, but the best teacher is a competent statesman, of whom we have a shortage. So, we should hire the few we have to teach young people how to be competent statesmen. No, the Foreign Service Institute is not going to teach them this. That is because FSI is very silly. And because FSI is very liberal. Sometimes things aren’t “woke,” they’re just fundamentally unserious.

    • And anway, if “peace” is simply a balance of powers, of forces arrayed, we can nonetheless study the array of forces, and power itself. We can establish the James Burnham scholarship specifically to hire individuals to work on this project, including teaching, writing, and producing work.

      • As part of this scholarship, we can investigate areas that need attention. What will happen to NATO if the British people become a minority in their own country? What does Transatlantic security look like in 20 years if mass migration continues? What are the odds of an Islamist party winning power in Britain, when might that happen, and how might we denuclearize Britain if that happens?
        

USIP should be under DOS control, but, unlike AID, which should have a narrow and specific mission, USIP should have a broad and flexible mission. And that mission can be to mitigate America First’s tendency to ignore foreign affairs (thus maintaining left-liberal intellectual dominance), to establish an enduring home for intellectuals in foreign affairs, and to advance the legitimate study of realpolitik and statecraft. The mission can be to deliver a museum to the public, provide excellent foreign affairs expertise, and, above all, secure the gains made so far. USIP is a hermit crab shell that is currently empty. We must crawl our little naked mollusc body, our crooked tail bent but strong, into the burdensome fortress. Each day the shell is empty is a day of power going unused. Doing all of this would be .01% of turning Cthulhu around. And it’s not happening. Currently, the building is empty. Perhaps it is because a lawsuit is ongoing. Perhaps it is because the management is so full of hate and disgust for liberals that they can’t imagine using a lib building for populist ends. Perhaps it’s because they’re busy. I don’t know. Perhaps because they simply haven’t had time to think about this. Or maybe they lack the imagination and ambition to actually implement de-Ba’athification. The right struggles to build institutions. And so Cthulu swims left. But like decline, it has always been a choice.