The Vanity of Influence

Ashley Tellis’ arrest exposes how Chinese influence operations and think-tank funding networks have blurred the line between scholarship and statecraft.

For decades Ashley J. Tellis was the cleverest man in the room. A Mumbai-born academic who climbed to the summit of Washington’s strategic establishment, he helped craft the Bush administration’s civil-nuclear deal with India, taught realism to idealists, and wrote with the serene assurance of one who believed himself indispensable to the management of global order. His fall, therefore, has been spectacular.

When Tellis was recently arrested at his Virginia home, the news rippled through the capital’s think-tank circuit with the disbelief of a scandal too improbable to be true. A man who once helped midwife the landmark 2008 U.S.–India civil nuclear accord now stands accused of unlawfully retaining classified defence documents and meeting Chinese officials. Tellis, 64, has denied any wrongdoing. His lawyers insist that he will “vigorously contest” what they describe as “unfounded insinuations” of espionage.

The affidavit, however, paints a different picture. Federal investigators say Tellis printed sensitive U.S. Air Force documents at the State Department and was later seen meeting Chinese representatives at a Fairfax restaurant, leaving behind a manila envelope. When the FBI searched his home, they claim to have found over 1,000 pages of material marked ‘Top Secret.’ The Justice Department has charged him with unlawful retention of national defence information — a felony carrying up to ten years in prison.

Tellis was not an obscure bureaucrat but a fixture of America’s foreign-policy establishment. He was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adviser to both the Pentagon and the State Department, and holder of the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs, a position that symbolised the intellectual convergence between Washington and New Delhi.

His career told the story of India’s ascent in American strategic thinking. Born in Mumbai and educated in Chicago, Tellis made his mark as one of the architects of the Bush administration’s outreach to India.

His perch at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he held the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs, offered proximity to power without the tiresome accountability of office. When intellectuals believe they are custodians of the national interest, the line between analysis and policy can dissolve alarmingly fast.

In recent years, Tellis’s worldview had grown increasingly detached from the India he once helped bring into America’s orbit. His essays bristled with scepticism about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom he saw as illiberal, unreliable and temperamentally unfit for alliance politics. Such criticisms echoed a fashionable disdain within Western policy circles that regarded India’s nationalism as an inconvenience to their interests.

The coincidence of his arrest with revelations about Chinese recruitment of academics and consultants is telling. Britain’s MI5 chief recently admitted frustration after a Chinese-linked espionage case collapsed, even as new investigations proliferate across Europe and America. China’s United Front Work Department, the century-old engine of Communist influence, has learned to operate not through bribery but by appealing to the vanity of Western experts who enjoy being courted by important foreigners.

The Carnegie Endowment, long revered as a temple of sober policy analysis, has accepted millions of dollars from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, among others. Soros’s global philanthropy, avowedly liberal but nakedly political, aims to ‘correct’ governments that deviate from his preferred model of democracy. Tellis’s own disdain for India’s elected leadership fitted neatly within that milieu. The scholar who once spoke for strategic partnership had become a fixture in a world where moral superiority was the last permissible indulgence.

Carnegie, Tellis’s institutional home, has received more than $3 million in recent years from Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

Open societies depend on openness, yet that very openness provides entry points for financial, ideological or digital manipulation. Beijing no longer needs to steal secrets when it can shape the premises of debate.

Tellis’s defenders call him a casualty of overzealous prosecutors; his detractors see something darker - a symptom of a decadent policy elite that prizes reputation over responsibility. Either way, his predicament exposes the thin moral insulation of Washington’s intellectual class. The same man who once lectured India on the virtues of transparency now pleads for nuance in the handling of his own secrets.

The Tellis affair is ultimately about the corrosion of judgement in a system where access confers immunity, and where clever men mistake influence for virtue.

In the great game of nations, the most perilous vanity is believing one’s own intellect is a sufficient defence.