Perhaps better known in Britain-where one broadsheet calls him "Rupert Murdoch's representative on Earth"-than in the United States, Irwin Stelzer is an economist at the Washington-based Hudson Institute (New Statesman, August 6, 2001). He is also a long-standing cadre of the neoconservative political faction. A close friend of Murdoch's and a frequent writer for many of the right-wing media mogul's newspapers, Stelzer has long been regarded in the United Kingdom as Murdoch's messenger to elite British policy-makers, including Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown, with whom Stelzer maintains close contact.
Stelzer's relationship with Murdoch (and assiduous habit of promoting Murdoch's News Corporation-line on domestic and foreign policy) has made Stelzer few friends among liberal elites in the United Kingdom. In a 2004 expose about Stelzer, the Guardian quoted former EU commissioner Chris Patten: "I wouldn't sup with Irwin Stelzer if I had a spoon a yard long" (Guardian, October 17, 2004). The Guardian added: "But there are two men who do regularly sup with the patrician New Yorker: Blair and Gordon Brown . It is therefore unsurprising that, in the eyes of liberal conspiracy theorists, when Murdoch says jump and the prime minister jumps, it is Stelzer wielding the cattle prod."
According to the Guardian, "a brutal example" of the purported influence wielded by Stelzer was the dramatic turnaround in Blair's stance vis-à-vis a referendum on the EU constitution. Blair, who initially supported pushing through UK support for the constitution without subjecting it to a public referendum, made an about-face on the issue shortly after Stelzer made a personal visit to the prime minister in early 2004. Reported the Guardian: "Political commentators were in no doubt: Stelzer had threatened Blair with an ultimatum that, unless he let the people decide, the Eurosceptic Murdoch would order the Sun and the Times to withdraw their support and back the Tories at next year's general election."
Responding to these allegations, Stelzer told the newspaper: "Think of all the pieces of silliness you've just said. Number one: I would threaten the prime minister. That's an idea that's crazy. The prime minister is standing there being threatened by 600 people almost every day in parliament but doesn't cave in. They can question his job; Rupert Murdoch can't do that. I know 'it's the Sun wot won it' and all that-that's great stuff-but I don't really believe it."
Stelzer's advocacy work in Britain is not limited to elite policy-makers. In March 2005, Stelzer-along with an eclectic group of British scholars, journalists, and politicians-signed the statement of principles of the neoconish Henry Jackson Society, a British advocacy organization that promotes a "forward strategy" aimed at assisting democratization across the globe. The strategy includes ensuring the maintenance of a strong U.S. military, giving "two cheers to capitalism," and promoting the idea that "any international organization which admits undemocratic states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed." Among the group's "international patrons" are well-known neoconservatives William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard; Bruce Jackson, president of the Project on Transitional Democracies; Robert Kagan, cofounder with Kristol of the Project for the New American Century; Clifford May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; Richard Perle, former Defense Policy Board chairman and coauthor with David Frum of the 2003 book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror; Joshua Muravchik, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; and former CIA director James Woolsey.
Stelzer created a bit of a stir in 2002 when he published in the Guardian an apologia for Enron (an earlier version of which had appeared in the Weekly Standard), in which he argued that the company deserved public approbation for its role in promoting competition in energy markets. Pointing to what he called were liberals' "ill-concealed chortles" at seeing "a wealthy energy industry boss with conservative views laid low," Stelzer wrote: "A generation of lawyers will very likely get rich as the government and private litigants seek to sort out the Enron mess. Many utility executives, their cozy monopolies now destroyed or under threat, will be glad to see Enron gone. Liberal commentators, who see every shrinkage of government power as a threat to their control, will call for regulation. But although Enron made mistakes, creating competitive markets was not one of them" (Guardian, January 29, 2002).
More recently, in a September 26, 2006 article for Hudson about Federal Reserve Board policy, Stelzer argued that the esoteric detail about monetary policy was lost on most Americans. He wrote: "They see Ford and General Motors laying off tens of thousands of workers, read that nutters in Venezuela and Iran are plotting to cut off supplies of oil, get depressed about the situation in Iraq as the nightly television news casts a pall over dinner tables, and see American foreign policy impotent in the face of a drive by America's old adversary, France's Jacques Chirac, to thwart President George Bush's efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons" (London Sunday Times, September 26, 2006).
Stelzer is the editor of the 2004 volume The Neocon Reader (Grove Press, New York), a compendium of writings from different political figures and authors that describes aspects of neoconservatism. Commenting in the book's introduction on Joshua Muravchik's contribution, in which the AEI fellow endeavors to dispel the idea that neoconservatism is a Jewish "cabal," Stelzer argues that this can hardly be the case "since neither Colin Powell nor Condoleezza Rice, the president's principal foreign policy advisers, are Jewish; nor are Vice President Dick Cheney . Donald Rumsfeld . or George Tenet." Stelzer's inaccurate implication that neoconservatism encompasses a large array of individuals with diverse political allegiances is a standard obfuscatory neoconservative tactic.
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Affiliations
Hudson Institute: Director of Center for Economic Policy
American Enterprise Institute: Former Resident Scholar
Henry Jackson Society: Signatory, Statement of Principles
Regulatory Policy Institute (Oxford): Board Member
Private Sector
News Corp.: Consultant
Rothschild Inc.: Former Managing Director
National Economic Research Associates, Inc. (now part of Marsh & McLennan): Founder
Education
New York University: BA and MA
Cornell University: Doctorate in Economics
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