Center for Security Policy

Center for Security Policy is a Washington-based organization set up by the hardline neocon Frank Gaffney, who worked in the defence department during the Ronald Reagan era. According to Jim Lobe, it is a "a small think tank funded mainly by U.S. defence contractors, far-right foundations, and right-wing Zionists".^[1] It operates with the tagline 'promoting peace through strength', by which they appear to mean that global US dominance is the route to peace.

The Center states its mission as follows:

To identify challenges and opportunities likely to affect American security, broadly defined, and to act promptly and creatively to ensure that they are the subject of focused national examination and effective action.^[2]

The Center has run campaigns and research on the subjects of nuclear deterrents, the war of ideas, weapons in space, Islamism and terror, among others.^[3] Indeed Frank J. Gaffney Jnr describes his Center for Security Policy as "the special forces in the war of ideas"^[4], stating that it has the advantage over a think tank of not being "slow and unwieldy" and being "able to turn around a product in a matter of hours".^[5]

History

1976-1988

Important in itself, the Committee on the Present Danger’s (CPD) second incarnation in the 1970s and early 1980s was an extremely important predecessor to the Center for Security Policy. Set up as an independent and not-for-profit organisation, it was to assess the Soviet Union’s capabilities and threat to the United States in a non-partisan way. The group was originally called ‘Team B’ in opposition to the ‘Team A’ which currently did this job for the CIA, and had a political base through the Coalition for a Democratic Majority which was founded to try and fight back against any concessions made by the Democrats to the Soviet Union with regards to Foreign Policy. In 1976, this group helped set up the Committee for Present Danger to put pressure on Democrat President Jimmy Carter. The parallels with groups such as the Center for Security Policy can be shown by looking at who have been members of both – Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and even Ronald Reagan in 1979.

1988-1992

In 1987, Frank Gaffney broke with the Reagan administration over its decision to pursue treaties that aimed for nuclear arms reduction in cooperation with the Soviet Union. Gaffney argued against this policy and continued to push for a hard-line, anti-Soviet rhetoric and the continued buildup of nuclear weapons. The following year he founded the Center for Security Policy, basing it loosely on the Committee for Present Danger, which had taken up the same aggressive opposition to nuclear arms reduction. Gaffney and his colleagues were quick to criticise the Republican President for moving towards liberal governance and preferred to push claims about the level of threat posed to the United States by the Red Menace and the need to possess a much larger nuclear arsenal than that of their rival.