American Enterprise Institute

Orientation: centre-right, favouring free enterprise and limited government, and more establishment in tone than Heritage. Funding: foundations, corporations and individuals. AEI's best-known intervention is Choosing Victory, the January 2007 plan by Frederick Kagan and retired General Jack Keane that argued for a troop surge in Baghdad while the Bush administration weighed its Iraq options; it is widely credited as a framework for the surge that followed. Its range is broader than that neoconservative reputation suggests, taking in housing, poverty and social mobility research and a Survey Center on American Life, so a reader meets AEI work well beyond foreign policy.