U.S. government opposition, not Heritage alone, drove UNCTC’s closure.

Evidence

Although it is not surprising that Heritage’s leadership sees evidence of its influence on developments at the United Nations, some skepticism about this account of events is warranted. Corea’s resignation from UNCTAD likely had as much to do with the embattled status of his Integrated Programme for Commodities as it did with any “dressing down” he received from Heritage staff. More generally, the Reagan administration was already warmly disposed toward many of the proposals that would be advanced by the Heritage Foundation’s United Nations Assessment Project, including the closing of the United Nations Center on Transnational Corporations. In fact, U.S. opposition to the UNCTC was most likely a decisive factor in Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s decision to fold the Center into UNCTAD as part of the reforms he made upon becoming secretary general in 1992. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1814

Categorization

• QUESTION: How much of Heritage’s claimed UN influence was actually pre-existing Reagan administration policy? This invites checking archival evidence.
• XREF: Resonates with the general historiography question of whether think tanks drove policy or ratified administration preferences. — connects to: The UNCTC balanced development-country aid against corporate information gathering — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1788