The center’s research will communicate complex national security challenges to policymakers in a way that ‘make sense to the average person.’
Advancing American Freedom — a conservative policy shop founded by former Vice President Mike Pence in 2021 — is launching an Institute for National Security, according to plans shared exclusively with National Review on Monday.
The institute will fuse domestic free-market policies with America’s most pressing challenges as a global superpower, according to the group’s prospectus outlining the goals for the new policy center. Leading the institute is Dakota Wood, a retired Marine Corps officer and former editor of The Heritage Foundation’s Index of U.S. Military Strength, who will serve as Vice President. Wood was at Heritage for a decade until 2024.
“Dakota Wood checked all the boxes that we’re looking for: somebody who’s a strong manager, somebody who has his own experience to lean on, and somebody who has ideas about the future,” AAF president Tim Chapman told NATIONAL REVIEW.
Wood said he hopes the center’s research product will communicate complex national security challenges to policymakers in a way that “make sense to the average person.” “We would like to drive conservative discussion on foreign policy [toward] policy decisions that reflect America and American values,” he said.
The institute will focus on five primary priorities: Pursue victory in the strategic competition with China across AI development, critical mineral access, energy production, and resistance to economic coercion; promote enhanced burden-sharing among key NATO partners while firmly endorsing the alliance’s strategic importance to American global leadership; Strengthen trade ties with allied nations, reinforcing critical supply chains, and bolstering the defense industrial base; combine fiscal health with enduring national power by taking on America’s growing debt crisis; support Israel against terrorist proxy forces while advocating for an end to the conflict with Iran on favorable terms for the United States.
AAF has publicly supported the strike to kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other regime leaders, which kicked off the war in February. The group also vocally opposed the failed memorandum of understanding to end the war spearheaded by Vice President JD Vance in the summer. In August, Mike Pence said that the United States should “finish the job in Iran before it’s too late.”
The institute will complement AAF’s domestic policy work, working closely with the group’s other policy institutes, according to Chapman.
“It has become very clear that national security and domestic policy are more intertwined than they’ve ever been,” Chapman said, pointing to the Trump administration’s attempt to take partial state ownership of private companies — justified under the banner of national security — as a key area of concern for traditional free-market conservatives.
“Our unique value add as an organization is to be a true ‘three legs of the stool’ conservative organization that can talk about social policy, domestic economic policy, and peace through strength foreign policy, and weave all of those different legs of the stool together,” Chapman said.
Last year, after a hiring blitz of ex-Heritage staffers in the wake of president Kevin Roberts’s defense of Tucker Carlson, AAF created three domestic policy centers: the Plymouth Institute for Free Enterprise, the Institute for Statistical Policy Analysis, and the Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law.
Wood and Chapman both said that the institute will attempt to frame national security issues through the lens of their impact on everyday Americans. “We want to talk about how [an issue] is affected by and how it affects the other elements of America,” Wood said.
The announcement comes close to a week after Republicans saw historic losses in the midterm election cycle, one that has been pinned on the Iran war. Polls show the Iran war is deeply unpopular with Americans and is to blame for high costs, particularly at the gas pump.
The institute will also face head-on the isolationist winds coming from much of the New Right, who decry past American foreign policy as “moralizing” for emphasizing a values-based foreign policy alongside a dogged pursuit of national interest. The desire to retreat from the global stage is downstream from a broader pessimism about America at home, Chapman says.
“There’s a lack of confidence in America’s position as a leader on the world stage, and that’s because there’s a lack of belief that America is an exceptional nation,” he said.
AAF plans to hire half a dozen staff at the institute’s onset, drawing from a diverse set of disciplines to reflect “the Institute’s conviction that grand strategy requires an integrated understanding of national power.”