The Deep State

One of the difficult things for most Americans to accept is that the people on the ballot every election have little role in public policy. The way the system is supposed to work is that the voters select their elected officials, who then meet and agree on new laws and changes to the law. They also pick the people in charge of the many agencies that carry out the laws passed by the elected officials. In reality, the people in those elected offices play almost no role in legislation and policy.

The easiest place to see this is in foreign policy. In the last election, there was little mention of foreign relations. Trump pledged his unconditional support for Israel, which every candidate is required to do in America, but otherwise he had little to say about what is happening in the world. Those running for House and Senate seats were mostly silent of foreign affairs, aside from pledging their loyalty to Israel. We are in a proxy war with Russia and China, and no one talks about it.

One main reason for those House and Senate candidates not saying much of anything is they have no role in the process. Many of them could not find Ukraine on a map, despite cheering wildly for Zelensky when he spoke to Congress. Only those who have been around for a decade or more understand why Ukraine is an issue. Some of them have been invited to get a taste of the side action, which is the primary benefit to sticking around in Congress for a long time.

Foreign policy is the domain of the executive, but it is obvious that the President has little role in the process. Joe Biden was a vegetable for his term in office. So much so that decisions on most things were delegated to various appointees. Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken ran foreign policy, but even they were only in charge of a small portion of what the world sees as American foreign policy. The reason for that is much of it is now done off the books, outside the official system.

For example, the years long effort to regime change the country of Georgia was not a White House or State Department caper, in the sense that there were high level meetings about the program or decisions made by the senior staffers. This operation was run by the informal network of formal and informal operational nodes that make up the American foreign policy community. It is not really accurate to call it American, as it now includes nodes around the West.

For example, last year the Russians raided a group of call centers operating in Russia, that were organized by something called The Milton Group, by the former Minister of Defense of Georgia, David Kazerashvili. Amusingly, these call centers were intended to operate various frauds in the West, but they also helped organize the pro-Western protests in Georgia. One center was run by an Israeli and Ukrainian citizen and the other by an Israeli and Georgian citizen.

How a normal fraud operation gets repurposed into a mechanism to topple governments is not a big mystery. It turns out that there is more money in regime change than in scamming old people out of their pensions. That money comes from the thicket of NGO's and clandestine government operations that often operate independent from Western governments. It is unlikely that elected officials in the West had any idea who was running the Georgia caper.

One reason why this shadow foreign policy establishment remains unknown to most elected officials is much of it predates their time in politics. For example, one of the main organizers of the Georgia regime change operation was an organization called CANVAS, which operates out of Serbia. It is a spinoff of a group called Otpor, which was founded in the 1990's when the former Yugoslavia was falling apart after the end of the Cold War. Guess where they got their money?

CANVAS now operates all over the world, targeting regimes that are coincidentally on the list of regimes targeted for a color revolution. They were involved in the effort to overthrow the Belarussian government and in the overthrow of the Ukraine government during the Obama administration. Of course, that event haunts us today. It has been made infamous for the scenes of Victoria Nuland waddling around Kiev, handing out cookies to the pro-Western protestors.

Speaking of Toria Nuland, she was not only responsible for the Ukraine catastrophe that continues to rage, but she has been a lifelong advocate for regime change as the official policy of the American government. This is why after she left the Biden administration, she landed a post at the National Endowment for Democracy, one of those semi-formal nodes in the foreign policy community. She will bring years of regime change experience to the organization.

The National Endowment for Democracy is one of those groups that has been around longer than most politicians, so it is background noise to them, but it plays a key role in what manifests as American foreign policy. It was founded in 1983 by Carl Gershman and Allen Weinstein. They worked in the Reagan administration and then formed several NGO's, all with help from government money. Like so many NGO's, it is a clearing house for money and international activism.

There is a good bet that there is not a single Senator involved in foreign policy oversight who has ever heard of the men who founded NED. They have no idea that there are lines in the State Department budget sending money in the form of grants and vendor contracts to groups like NED. They certainly have no idea about how the State Department encourages corporate giving to these groups. It is a world that operates in the shadows, where elected officials rarely tread.

These groups are not just operating abroad. They play a major role in building narratives in which the elected official operates. For example, there are ads on YouTube from a group called Center for Civil Liberties, that claims Vladimir Putin is kidnapping Ukrainian children. This group wants your help to stop him. If you go to their about section, you see they are supported by familiar names, like the National Endowment for Democracy and the American State Department.

What this means is those ads telling American YouTube viewers that Vladimir Putin is kidnapping Ukrainian children are, in some way, sponsored by the American government, operating through a proxy. Much of what elected official believe to be reality is the product of such operations. One point of this network of NGO's is to help shape and control the information space. You can see why Washington is obsessed with creating narratives rather than reality.

This is just in the area of foreign policy. Every day politicians are briefed by groups they think are grassroots organization, but in fact are marionettes operated by one of the formal or informal organizations. The media is peppered with press releases and provided copy for their outlets. Most important, the organizations can introduce the right people to the right people, with "right" being the key word. If you play ball and avoid asking the wrong questions, you can be a right person.

It is why voting seems to make things worse. The people making decisions that matter to you are never on the ballot. The people on the ballot are often less informed about how things work than the voters. The reason for that is the parties select for the compliant and the incurious. Those who get too curious or refuse to play ball will find themselves with a primary opponent and no money. It is why "our democracy" is a rhetorical and literal fig leaf for the Deep State.