About
The New Atlantic Initiative was launched in June 1996 following the Congress of Prague, where more than 300 conservative politicians, scholars, and investors discussed “the new agenda for transatlantic relations.” Headquartered at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC, the New Atlantic Initiative is dedicated to strengthening North Atlantic cooperation, admitting the transitional democracies of the former Soviet bloc into NATO and the European Union, and establishing a free trade area between an enlarged European Union and the NAFTA countries. (1)
The project’s six patron luminaries are: Václav Havel, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Schmidt, Leszek Balcerowicz, Henry Kissinger, and George Schultz. Its executive director is Radek Sikorski. (1)
Henry Kissinger is the chairman of an international advisory board that is heavily weighted with neoconservatives, neoliberal ideologues, and European rightists. Bruce Jackson of the Project for Transitional Democracies and the now-defunct U.S. Committee on NATO was a founding member of the New Atlantic Initiative. (2)
The New Atlantic Initiative hosts international forums on transatlantic relations and publishes the work of its own staff and advisers as well as that of other rightists and hawks. Typical of the kind of analysis promoted by the New Atlantic Initiative is a Wall Street Journal article by Vladimir Socor of the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies calling for NATO air policing of the Baltic states entering NATO and the drawing up of contingency plans for their defense in the advent of aggression from the Russian Federation. (3)
Funding
In the 1995-2002 period the New Atlantic Initiative has received $2.808,000 from the right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. (4)
