By Jeremy Kuzmarov – Aug 26, 2026
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a CIA off-shoot that was founded in 1983 with the purpose of advancing political propaganda and U.S. regime-change operations.
The NED routinely supports dissidents and highlights human rights abuses occurring in countries that are geopolitical rivals of the U.S., like China, Iran and Russia, or socialist countries that have tried to assert control over their natural resources, like Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.
Meanwhile, the NED is silent about the human rights abuses that occur in countries like Ukraine, Israel, Bangladesh, Kenya, Rwanda, Syria or others whose governments are supported or have been installed by the U.S.
Many of the dissidents that the NED honors advocate for sanctions, bombing and war on their own countries. Some were even indicted for inciting insurrection or terrorist acts.
The NED’s function as a front for CIA covert operations was apparent in February when NED President Damon Wilson—who was invited to give the 2026 commencement address at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy—bragged to a House committee about the NED’s aggressive efforts to spark unrest in Iran, including by smuggling Starlink terminals (a satellite technology to ensure secure communication) and fashioning anti-Iran narratives for the media.
Before he could finish the sentence, Wilson was cut off by the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, Lois Frankel (D-FL), who told Wilson: “You know what, I’m going to interrupt you—we’d better not talk about it.”
In the same congressional hearing, Wilson appeared to take credit for the election of a right-wing government in Bolivia to “prevent lithium from falling under Moscow’s control” and revealed that NED is funding and training media in Nicaragua with an eye toward undermining the country’s socialist-oriented Sandinista government.[1]
NED President Damon Wilson speaking before Congress in February 2026 when he bragged about NED’s role in sparking unrest in Iran that set the groundwork for an illegal U.S.-Israeli invasion that killed thousands of people. [Source: thegrayzone.com]
Continuing the long history of intimate ties between the CIA and academia[2], many students at prestigious universities, sadly, will be taught by professors this academic year who are affiliated with the NED.
Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) has on its faculty, for example, Larry Diamond, the editor of the NED’s in-houseJournal of Democracy, who was also a former senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq, and Francis Fukuyama, a neo-conservative ideologue and former State Department staffer who was on the NED’s Board, edited and frequently contributed to the NED journal and received the NED’s 2010 Democracy Service Medal.
Larry Diamond [Source: fsi.stanford.edu]
Francis Fukuyama. [Source: fsi.stanford.edu]
At least seven additional faculty who teach at FSI are, or have been, affiliated with the NED,[3] including Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State during the Iraq War who served on the Journal of Democracy’s editorial board,[4] and Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia who currently sits on the Journal of Democracy’s editorial board. Like Rice, McFaul is known for his hard-line positions towards Russia and has advocated for the censorship of anyone who questions U.S. military and economic aid to Ukraine.[5]
Michael McFaul [Source: fsi.stanford.edu]
Condoleezza Rice [Source: hoover.org]
In 2025, Stanford’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center gave an award to NED-backed media outlet Netra News, a media outlet that helped advance a regime-change operation in Bangladesh that ousted a leader who had established strong relations with China and resisted U.S. efforts to establish a military base on a strategic island off its coast.
[Source: aparc.fsi.stanford.edu]
Stanford’s ties to the NED, unfortunately, are no anomaly in higher education today. A review of the NED’s current Board of Directors finds that three are deans at elite universities:
a) Amaney Jamal of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs; b) Alyssa Ayres, Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington (one of her predecessors in that position, Harry Harding, was on the editorial board of theJournal of Democracy in the 1990s); and c) Scott Taylor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, which has a history of employing CIA agents as professors.[6]
Amaney Jamal [Source: princeton.edu]
Alyssa Ayres [Source: elliott.gwu.edu]
Scott Taylor [Source: bu.edu]
Minxin Pei [Source: cmc.edu]
Two NED Board members are also professors: Victor Cha, Georgetown University, and Minxin Pei, the Pritzker Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.
Additionally, Elizabeth Economy is a senior fellow and co-chair of the Program on the U.S., China, and the World at the Hoover Institution at Stanford[7] and, until May 2026, was on the Board of Managers at Swarthmore College.[8]
Victor Cha [Source: uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu]
Elizabeth Economy [Source: freshedpodcast.com]
Victoria Nuland [Source: harriman.columbia.edu]
NED Board member Victoria Nuland, a key figure in the 2014 U.S. backed Maidan coup in Ukraine that empowered far-right extremists and led to a deadly war with Russia, was appointed in March 2024 as a Professor of Practice of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute of Russian, Eastern Eurasian and Eastern European Studies.[9] Covert Geopolitics called Nuland the “Lady Macbeth of perpetual war,” who “promoted a foreign policy of intervention, coups, proxy wars, aggression, and occupation…in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.”
A review of the scholarship of past and present NED Board member faculty shows that it dovetails with the worldview and agenda of the NED, presenting biased analysis that demonizes American geopolitical adversaries and offers support for capitalist and imperialist policies.
Nicaragua Banned US-Sponsored Coup Leaders From Elections, Sparking Corporate Media Meltdown
Minxin Pei,[10] for example, spotlights crony capitalism, political autocracy and alleged totalitarianism in China, while Scott Taylor emphasizes the importance of big business and private sector investment in Africa.[11]
Director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC) under George W. Bush, Victor Cha is a hawk on North Korea whom the former Foreign Minister of South Korea accused of advancing a “simplistic history” of the Korean conflict that demonized North Korea.[12]
Alyssa Ayres worked for the CIA-linked Asia Foundation and McLarty & Associates and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs; while Amaney Jamal is a protégé of CIA-linked Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, an arch-conservative and imperialist targeted by student protesters during the Vietnam era who lectured frequently under the NED’s aegis in the 1990s and wrote for The Journal of Democracy.[13]
Samuel Huntington [Source: thecrimson.com]
Elizabeth Economy fits in well with the NED professors in advancing anti-China themes in her writings, and in supporting a U.S. military buildup in the Asia Pacific and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a corporate-friendly free trade agreement introduced as a pillar of Obama’s “pivot to Asia” policy that excluded China and intended to isolate it economically.
[Source: nytimes.com]
Andrew J. Nathan is a former NED Board member and member of the editorial board of the NED’s journal, who is the Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.
He is the former chair and current board member of Human Rights in China, an NED funded group that uses human rights as a political weapon against China (causing China to sanction it), and, with Larry Diamond, a member of the board of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, which supported a U.S.-backed color revolution against China in Hong Kong.
An article that Nathan wrote for theJournal of Democracy characteristically examined China’s supposedly deleterious effect on democracy around the world and manipulative nature of its global propaganda effort.
Andrew J. Nathan [Source: polisci.columbia.edu]
Founded in 1990, the NED’s *Journal of Democracy[14]*generally advances the NED/State Department line on global affairs.
Obscuring the aggressive U.S. drive to control natural resources and expand its network of military bases, its articles routinely vilify left-wing governments and celebrate U.S. regime-change operations for their democratizing potential and governments that were empowered by them.
A February 2026 article, “Venezuela’s Best Chance for Democracy” characteristically made it seem like the Trump administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—in a brazenly illegal act that killed more than 100 people—brought new hope for Venezuela’s democratization.[15] A previous Journal of Democracy article written by Javier Corrales, Dwight W. Morrow 1895 Professor of Political Science at Amherst College,[16] and Dorothy Kronick, assistant professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley,[17] aims to affirm CIA/NED/State Department talking points that Maduro stole Venezuela’s 2024 election and that Edmundo González, whose CIA links and extreme right-wing background is not discussed in the article, won in a landslide, which does not appear to be true.[18]
Javier Corrales [Source: amherst.edu]
Dorothy Kronick [Source: gspp.berkeley.edu]
Advancing a cartoonish view of world affairs, theJournal of Democracy makes it seem like the world is divided between good U.S. backed democrats and bad authoritarians—as American Cold Warriors saw things in the 1950s McCarthy era. The sanctions and covert warfare that the U.S. adopts are rarely if ever discussed or blamed for causing hardships in targeted countries whose problems are solely blamed on their own leaders.[19]
[Source: ned.org]
Most of the articles are rooted in an ethno-centric, “end of history” worldview,[20] which assumes that U.S. and other Western governments are morally superior and that countries that adopt different political systems that draw on their own traditions and are designed to overcome the legacies of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism will only show progress if they become more like the U.S.[21]
The two editors of the Journal of Democracy are: Harvard Professor of Government Steven Levitsky, and University of Toronto[22]political scientist Lucan Way, who holds the title of distinguished professor of Democracy ironically enough.
Steven Levitsky [Source: levitsky.scholars.harvard.edu]
Lucan Way [Source: cddri.fsi.stanford.edu]
In 2022, Levitsky and Way co-authored a book called Revolution & Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism(Princeton University Press), which analyzes countries that fall into the crosshairs of U.S. foreign policy like Cuba, China, Vietnam, Iran and Soviet Russia. Echoing their depiction by the U.S. State Department and CIA, the revolutions that took root there are presented negatively, with little attention to their success in overcoming colonialism and neo-colonialism, in fueling industrialization and in combating poverty, advancing women’s rights and improving living standards.
Levitsky and Way also fail to adequately address how U.S. counter-revolutionary policies and subversion helped facilitate more authoritarian methods and how the durability of the regimes that they analyze was in part linked to the establishment of local governing councils and community projects that enhanced citizen political engagement at a time this was markedly declining in perceived model Western democracies.[23]
[Source: amazon.com]
In a piece centered on Latin America, Levitsky characterized Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as authoritarian states, though the latter two countries had elections that were internationally sanctioned and these were countries that adopted leftist policies designed to redistribute wealth and to establish control over their natural resources.
For his part, Lucan Way promotes the right-wing theory that, “when economic resources are concentrated in the hands of the state, autocracy becomes more likely”—an argument favored by U.S. corporations which do not want their assets nationalized.[24]
Way’s extreme views were apparent in his condemnation of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel for an allegedly “soft response to Russia’s 2014 invasion” of Ukraine that, Way says, “paved the way to the current horror in Ukraine.”
A big problem with this statement is that Russia did not invade Ukraine in 2014, rather, Obama and Merkel supported what the private intelligence agency Stratfor called a coup in Ukraine at that time. The latter eventually precipitated Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine to assist the beleaguered people there who were subjected to violent Ukrainian government attacks carried out with U.S weapons that Way fervently supported.[25]
Way claims that the Ukraine war has given Western democracies a “renewed sense of unity” and holds the potential for weakening the emerging “authoritarian international”—which somehow does not include Ukraine when its government banned 17 parties, killed its opponents, censored the press and held an estimated 20,000 political prisoners.[26]
Adopting the language of the new McCarthyism, Way wrote on X that Pope Francis was a “Russian stooge.” Way happens to be best friends with Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s former Deputy Prime Minister, who is the granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi and helped get Canada to become a major weapons supplier to Ukraine.
Amazingly, for someone who claims to champion democracy, Way co-wrote an article in May 2024 in theJournal of Democracy entitled “Why Ukraine’s Elections Can Wait.”[27] Four years earlier, Way wrote an article in the same journal praising a color revolution in Belarus whose support from the NED and other U.S. government agencies he predictably failed to mention.
Lucan Way and Chrystia Freeland [Source: x.com]
The NED journal’s co-editor, Tarek Masoud, is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and faculty director of the Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.
In April 2025, Masoud published an article in the Journal of Democracy expressing hope that Syria would achieve democracy under an al-Qaeda-linked leader imposed in a U.S. regime-change operation (Ahmed al-Sharaa) who was then engaged in ethnic-cleansing operations targeting Shia Alawites and Christians that Masoud ignored.
Tarek Masoud [Source: belfercenter.org]
Masoud contrasted the supposed ray of sunshine represented by Ahmed al-Sharaa, who had been on the State Department’s terrorist watchlist not long before he took power, with his predecessors, Bashar and Hafez al-Assad, “the butchers of Damascus” according to Masoud, who allegedly “kept Syria in a terrified thrall for over half a century.”
In fact, public opinion polls showed considerable support for the Assads, who adopted policies in the Syrian interest when compared with al-Sharaa, who has allowed the U.S. and Israelis to use Syrian air space to illegally bomb Iran and attack Lebanon.[28]
Students at Harvard are fed the official narrative on U.S. foreign policy by professors like Masoud who distort world affairs by a) vilifying U.S. enemies like the Assads, b) valorizing U.S. allies like al-Sharaa; and c) failing to address the imperialistic motives driving U.S. foreign policy in countries like Syria, such as the quest for access to natural resources, including oil and military bases.
The horrific human cost of U.S. covert warfare and sanctions like in Syria, whose living standard was thrust back to the Middle-Ages during the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore[29], is also never addressed by Masoud and his NED/Ivy League colleagues who fit to a tee the description of empire propagandists laid out in an article by Caitlin Johnstone.
According to Johnstone, empire propagandists “pretend the ‘authoritarian’ measures we’ve seen in nations like North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela happened completely separately from the western empire’s efforts to infiltrate, subvert and take over those countries,” and “pretend the violence of empire-targeted governments happens in a vacuum, completely divorced from western imperial agendas”—which the NED professors all do.[30]
Caitlin Johnstone [Source: fairobserver.com]
According to research conducted for this article, at least 17 members of the editorial board of the NED’s Journal of Democracy hold faculty appointments at top universities across the U.S. or in Europe.[31]
Students are thus paying more and more money to learn from professors who are not real scholars but propagandists with a world view out of the 1950s’ McCarthy era and who are affiliated with an intelligence outfit that journalist Stephen Kinzer said should be rightfully termed “the National Endowment for Attacking Democracy.”
Members of the Journal of Democracy’s editorial board include:
M. Steven Fish [Source: polisci.berkeley.edu]
M. Steven Fish, a tenured professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, who wrote an article in the Journal of Democracy analyzing Putinism as a “challenge to the Western democratic community,” which repeated discredited allegations about Putin’s “brazen interference” in the 2016 U.S. election. Elsewhere, Fish condemned Russia for invading Crimea when Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia, misleadingly called eastern Ukrainians who sought autonomy from Ukraine after it passed discriminatory language laws “separatists,”[32] and accused Russia of supplying weapons to shoot down a Malaysian aircraft (MH-117) that independent investigators determined could only have been shot down by Ukraine through air-to-air missiles.[33]
Victoria Tin-bor Hui [Source: politicalscience.nd.edu]
Victoria Tin-bor Hui, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, who worked to support Hong Kong’s NED-backed “color revolution” and whose scholarship has a strong anti-China flavor.[34] In January 2025, Tin-bor Hui published an article in theJournal of Democracy celebrating Jimmy Lai, billionaire leader of Hong Kong’s “color revolution” who has been described as the “Rupert Murdoch of Asia,”[35] was a close friend of famed right-wing economist Milton Friedman, had ties with U.S. naval intelligence and the CIA, and coordinated with neo-conservatives in Washington like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Protesters outside Lai’s home denounced him as a “running dog” of Washington and accused him of national betrayal by “unleashing chaos” in Hong Kong—which was reported on in The Grayzone but not, unsurprisingly, by Tin-bor Hui.[36]
Joshua Tucker [Source: as.nyu.edu]
Joshua Tucker, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University, who co-authored a study about Ukrainian political attitudes that equated Russian news—but not U.S. or Ukrainian news—with “misinformation.” Tucker also promoted the discredited claim—used to build public support for a proxy war on Russia via Ukraine—that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.[37]
Contributors to the NED’s Journal of Democracy[38] include:
Serhii Plokhy [Source: english.elpais.com]
Serhii Plokhy of Harvard, who wrote an article in the April 2025 issue that advocated for the U.S. to support regime change in Russia and arm Ukraine’s neo-Nazi-infested government—which Plokhy claims is a model democracy. Plokhy presented Ukraine as a modern-day David battling Goliath in the article, which obscures the fact that Ukraine was armed by the wealthiest and most rapacious countries in the world, which were using it to weaken Russia so they could control Central Asia’s rich oil and gas reserves.
Kathryn Stoner [Source: fsi.stanford.edu]
Kathryn Stoner, a professor of political science at Stanford, who wrote a paean to Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny that failed to mention his comparison of immigrants to cockroaches, and calls the Nazi-infested government of Ukraine, the “beachhead for global democracy.”[39] Like other NED professors, her analysis of the war in Ukraine ignores scholarship like that by Ivan Katchanovski, a professor at the University of Ottawa, which shows how far-right sectors in Ukraine, backed by the U.S., engineered a coup d’état in February 2014 that gradually drew the Russians into a conflict Stoner falsely presents as resulting from unprovoked Russian aggression.
Jessica Pisano [Source: newschool.edu]
Jessica Pisano, a professor at the New School in New York who wrote of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “inspiring wartime leadership.” This inspiring leadership involved press ganging Ukrainians into service on the front-lines of a suicidal war that has literally destroyed Ukraine. Zelensky’s own press secretary, Iuliia Mendel, said that Zelensky “did not believe that Ukraine was ready for democracy,” had opponents jailed and killed; called for Goebbels style propaganda, persecuted clergymen, and was involved in money laundering schemes. Pisano is a founding member of Decolonizing Eastern European Studies which uses a progressive sounding rhetoric to further Russophobic narratives that brand Russia as a regional colonizing agent while ignoring discussion of U.S. imperialism and its impact in Eastern Europe.
Professor Sharan Grewal, another NED-linked propagandist. [Source: american.edu]
Sharan Grewal of American University, a Princeton Ph.D. who co-wrote an article on the eve of the U.S.-Israeli invasion suggesting that Iran’s government would fall. Grewal predictably left out the fact that the NED had helped set the groundwork for the illegal invasion by triggering “civil society” protests designed to engender a crackdown that could then be played up for propaganda purposes.[40] In a Brookings Institution forum in January 2026, Grewal lauded the NED-backed Iranian protests, and said that “all revolutions seem impossible, until they become inevitable.” What Grewal was really talking about was a counter-revolution backed by a Western imperialist power, which he and his NED colleagues all want so badly for Iran and other countries they write about.
Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford and a consultant to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who has written numerous articles in the NED’s Journal of Democracy, and has blamed the Iranian government for the deaths of civilians caused by the U.S.-Israeli bombing of Iran. In an op-ed in The New York Times on March 3, 2026, entitled “The Coming Iranian Revolution,” Milani erroneously predicted that Iranians would overthrow their government. Seventeen years earlier, amidst presidential election protests, Milani called for the imposition of “multilateral and crippling sanctions” on Iran before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Iran’s government, then led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad named Milani in an indictment as “one of the most important leaders of the opposition” and accused him of being a CIA agent.[41]
Abbas Milani [Source: abbasmilani.people.stanford.edu]
Kanan Makiya, a senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University, who left Iraq to study at MIT in the 1960s. Similar to Milani’s wrong-headed prediction about Iran, Makiya predicted in March 2003 that American troops would be “greeted with sweets and flowers” after invading Iraq.[42] He was a close friend of Ahmed Chalabi, a con man who helped hoodwink the public about mythic WMDs and was championed by the Bush administration as a successor to Saddam Hussein.
Makiya had attracted the interest of the NED with his 1989 book Republic of Fear, which chronicled Saddam Hussein’s crimes and expressed disdain for Iraq’s left-leaning Baath Party. Makiya’s 1991 book Cruelty and Silence was also ideologically useful to the neo-conservatives because of its critique of the Arab World’s intelligentsia that favored Pan-Arab and socialist policies, which were antithetical to the designs of U.S. imperialism.
Kanan Makiya [Source: brandeis.edu]
In 1995, Makiya was a [scholar in-residence at the NED](https://www.ned.org/docs/annual/199