Kit Klarenberg
It’s rather forgotten today how Washington’s post-9/11 imperial adventurism was not restricted to military intervention. A core component of the Bush administration’s “Freedom Agenda” – under the auspices of which calamitous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere were waged – was overt sponsorship of civil society-led coups throughout the former Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia. Citizens of these regions, and the world, live with this meddling’s destructive consequences to this day. The seemingly never-ending – and ever-escalating – Ukraine proxy war is a particularly visceral legacy.
The 1983 creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, a US state entity avowedly concerned with executing overtly what the CIA once did covertly, ushered in a new era of “spyless coups”. Working in close conjunction with USAID and George Soros’ Open Society Institute, NED ever after provided funding, training and material assistance to NGOs, ‘independent’ media outlets, opposition groups, and other initiatives in service of regime change, across every corner of the world.
Come 9/11, NED and its confederates had devised a supremely cunning, cost-effective template for toppling troublesome governments – be they left-wing, nationalist, or even former US puppets who’d stepped out of line. The previous October, longtime Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic was brought down in what the Washington Post bombastically dubbed “an extraordinary US effort to unseat a foreign head of state, not through covert action of the kind the CIA once employed in such places as Iran and Guatemala, but by modern election campaign techniques.”
At the anti-Milosevic effort’s forefront was Otpor! (Serbian: Resistance!), a rebellious NED-funded youth activist group. Through a mix of civil disobedience, non-violent resistance, rock concerts, street theatre, and graffiti, they fomented mass public opposition to the Yugoslav President. When election day came and official results pointed to Milosevic’s victory, an NED-funded “parallel vote tabulation” purported to expose major fraud, sending millions to the streets of Belgrade to peacefully demand the President’s resignation. Milosevic duly capitulated, in the face of seemingly overwhelming people power.
The supposedly heroic struggle of Otpor! and other US-supported anti-Milosevic groups was immortalised in a slick ‘documentary’, Bringing Down A Dictator. Milosevic’s fall provided a precise blueprint for future ‘color revolutions’ – so-called because frequently, the Empire-supported activists who led these mob putsches prominently adopted specific colours for their banners, branding and logos. Initially, US officials eagerly associated themselves publicly with this upheaval. Meanwhile, the mainstream media routinely published remarkably illuminating post-mortems of the revolts, extensively exposing Washington’s guiding hand and oft-enormous financial outlay.
Nonetheless, politicians, pundits and journalists alike universally framed colour revolutions as ultimately spontaneous uprisings by liberal, progressive elements with legitimate grievances, who yearned for democracy and freedom. In reality, they almost invariably produced corrupt, repressive governments that ruled via intimidation and brutality, including political assassinations. Post-colour revolution regimes also typically conducted sweeping privatisation and other ravaging ‘reforms’, destroying living standards for average citizens by prostrating their countries to the EU, IMF, NATO, World Trade Organization, and other mechanisms of Western economic, military, and political subjugation.
Slobodan Milosevic’s NED-orchestrated ouster is nicknamed the ‘Bulldozer Revolution’, due to iconic scenes during the upheaval of a wheel loader helping anti-government agitators occupy state buildings. However, its driver quickly turned against the “Revolution”. Subsequent “shock therapy” decimated Yugoslavia’s mixed market economy, causing his successful independent business to fail, and him to go bankrupt. He subsisted until his dying day on meagre state welfare payments. For most participants, subsequent colour revolutions were similarly an object lesson in being careful about what one wishes for.
‘External Shove’
In February 2005, President George W. Bush gave a swaggering address in Bratislava, Slovakia. He hailed how “in recent times, we have witnessed landmark events in the history of liberty.” This included Georgia’s November 2003 Rose Revolution, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution the next year, and Iraq’s Purple Revolution a month prior. “The advance of freedom is the concentrated work of generations,” Bush declared. He looked ahead to Moldova, and “inevitably” Belarus, “someday proudly [belonging] to the country of democracies [sic]”:
“Eventually, the call of liberty comes to every mind and every soul. And one day, freedom’s promise will reach every people and every nation.”
Moldova’s forced transformation into a staggeringly corrupt effective EU-US colony took many years. Belarus conversely remains stubbornly resistant to “freedom’s promise”, as defined by Brussels, London, Washington, and other centres of imperial power. Still, President Bush’s confidence was well-founded. Waves of insurrectionary unrest unleashed by his government’s “Freedom Agenda” had systematically swept away designated enemy governments one by one annually since he took office. Indeed, within weeks of Bush’s speech, Kyrgyzstan’s insufficiently pro-Western leader fell victim to yet another colour revolution.
He would not be the last. Prior colour revolutions had enthusiastically emphasised the importance of techniques of nonviolent resistance – many of which were crafted by Gene Sharp, who was intimately enmeshed within the US military and intelligence establishment for much of his life. However, Kyrgyzstan’s NED-created regime change army, KelKel – directly modelled on Otpor! – attacked police, torched government buildings and even carried out bombings. Their ferocity was actively encouraged and promoted by US-funded TV stations locally. Such belligerence subsequently became a colour revolution calling card.
Ukraine’s Orange Revolution
That colour revolutions represented a formal weapon of war in the Empire’s post-9/11 arsenal was enthusiastically spelled out by arch-neoconservative Max Boot in late December 2004. He gushed how Ukraine’s Orange Revolution days earlier, which brought a pro-Western government to power, was “one of the most inspiring events” of that year. Boot declared the “triumph” and “miracle” of the revolution “should dispel the quaint notion still prevalent in many Western universities and foreign ministries that democracy is a luxury good suitable for rich countries”:
“These revolutions reveal the hollowness of the cliché that ‘democracy can’t be imposed by outsiders’…sometimes, when dealing with an entrenched dictatorship, this requires military intervention of the kind that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. More brittle regimes can be brought down by their own people, but even they often need a little external shove…There was nothing nefarious about the US intervention in Ukraine.”
Boot boasted how Washington had “spent $58 million on democracy promotion in the last two years” in Ukraine. He proposed Kiev receive “expedited NATO and European Union membership,” to finish off the Orange Revolution. “In the meantime, we need to apply elsewhere the lessons of Ukraine” Boot demanded, suggesting “an obvious candidate for a similar transformation is Iran.” He explained, “it’s hard to think of a higher priority than the overthrow of the mullahs,” encouraging the Bush administration to prioritise “liberating Iran.”
‘USAID Help’
Such was the insurrectionary fervour of the time, in January 2006 USAID went to the extent of publishing a glossy magazine, Democracy Rising, revealing in detail Washington’s central role in fomenting “grassroots” rebellions as far afield as Afghanistan, Gaza and Lebanon. Dedicated sections on colour revolutions to date were replete with stunningly forthright passages. A section on Georgia’s November 2003 Rose Revolution described how NED had financed regime change training for local “lawyers, judges, journalists, members of parliament, NGOs, political party leaders, and others.”
The stated purpose of this investment was to give Georgians “a sense that they should regulate the government.” The Rose Revolution “was the climax of these efforts.” One recipient of US financial support remarked, “without foreign assistance, I’m not sure we would have been able to achieve what we did without bloodshed.” Meanwhile, several pages were dedicated to the Orange Revolution. It noted how thousands of Ukrainian journalists were given training in “investigative reporting”, bankrolled by NED and USAID.
Democracy Rising on the Orange Revolution
An alumni told Democracy Rising this sponsorship “created a feeling that others stood with them ‘in the trenches’.” Concurrently, NED-affiliated Freedom House flooded the coffers of NGOs “that sponsored voter education, mobilized voters to get to the polls and observed elections.” These organisations “also held meetings, youth dances, rock concerts and karaoke to attract young voters,” and “ran public service ads on TV stations, informing people about their right to vote.” Meanwhile, “democracy trainers from Serbia, Slovakia, Russia and Croatia” were flown into the country.
In the second round of Ukraine’s presidential election, NED-financed NGOs claimed to have been inundated with tens of thousands of reports of fraud from voting stations all over the country, while exit polls they produced pointed to widespread rigging having denied pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko a landslide victory. Vast protests, combined with opposition-organised general strikes, widespread civil disobedience and occupations of government buildings forced a rerun. A US-funded think tank apparatchik asserted:
“USAID help for the poll was absolutely important – the poll results after the second round made people go to the street.”
For all the hype and self-assurance of Democracy Rising, its publication came at a time when colour revolutions were increasingly being viewed with hostility and suspicion at a state and public level throughout the Global South. In every case, the radical outcomes promised by colour revolution leaders and advocates failed to materialise, while US rhetoric about the commitment of resultant pro-Western regimes to democracy and freedom was a perverse fraud.
In Ukraine, US-installed Yushchenko implemented economic austerity, slashed regulations and social spending, bailed out criminal banks, broke open state industry and natural resources for foreign plunder, attacked the rights of Russian speakers, and began preparing the country for locally-feared NATO membership. Within just nine months of entering office, his coalition government – comprised of Orange Revolution activists – collapsed due to deeply corrupt battles with feuding Ukrainian oligarchs over control of key media and industrial assets.
Yushchenko was voted out in the January 2010 presidential election, finishing fifth in the first round with just 5.5% of the vote. As Empire house journal Foreign Policy lamented years later, the Bush administration’s much-vaunted colour revolutions all turned out to be “terribly disappointing.” Each and every time, “elite corruption still continued apace” and “promises of far-reaching change never really materialized.” Damningly, “maladies that typified the preceding regimes quickly came to describe” the governments created by colour revolutions themselves.
‘Revolution Business’
That’s quite some euphemism. In Georgia, longtime Soros acolyte Mikheil Saakashvili granted himself unilateral power in key policy areas, before brazenly exploiting his position to harass and jail business and political rivals. Saakashvili’s targets would be raped and/or tortured in prison, their ordeals filmed for primetime broadcast on local TV networks. Grave questions abound over his personal involvement in several suspicious deaths, including government ministers’. He was voted out in October 2012, despite NED’s best efforts.
Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution installed Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who proceeded to run the country as his personal fiefdom for five years. Bakiyev’s relatives profited exorbitantly from legally questionable privatisation of state industries. For example, his family signed a highly controversial $1.8 billion deal to supply fuel to a local US military base, close to Kyrgyzstan’s total GDP in 2003. Elsewhere, Bakiyev’s brother oversaw Bishkek’s security apparatus – arbitrary detentions, bogus convictions, torture, and murders of opposition activists, journalists, and politicians became commonplace.
Bakiyev was himself chased out of not only the presidential palace but Bishkek itself in April 2010, following a massacre of anti-corruption protesters in which up to 100 were killed and at least 450 wounded. Thereafter, Kyrgyzstan was plunged into economic and political chaos for a decade, with numerous governments collapsing along the way. The freest and most stable Central Asian state prior to the Tulip Revolution, it is only since 2020 – following another Anglo-American coup – the country has regained some semblance of stability.
A key player in that upheaval was British ambassador Charles Garrett. He arrived in Bishkek from Macedonia, where as this journalist has revealed from April 2016 he steered what was known as the “colorful revolution”. Illegally obtained, deceptively edited wiretaps seemingly implicating government officials in shocking crimes produced huge protests, featuring widespread arson attacks and brutal clashes between demonstrators and police. Garrett distributed cash to NGOs and activists involved in the unrest from his diplomatic pouch, encouraging them to cause mass havoc.
George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, NED, and USAID were also colorful revolution participants. Some protesters even proudly wore “Soros Army” shirts. Despite a huge public counter-revolutionary fightback, the tumult paralysed the Macedonian economy and state, leading to the installation of a doggedly pro-Western, dangerously dysfunctional administration that engaged in industrial scale graft, jailed political opponents on bogus charges, and changed the country’s name despite widespread opposition. Meanwhile, existing economic problems, including crippling brain drain, were gravely exacerbated.
The unfailingly disastrous results of colour revolutions surely contributed to White House officials abruptly and firmly distancing themselves from the entire enterprise, before the Bush administration’s second term was even over. The “Freedom Agenda” was quietly forgotten. The President – who in October 2004 openly mandated financial assistance to Belarusian opposition activists, and once publicly praised the Rose Revolution as an example to be followed throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia – went so far as to deny the US was in the “revolution business” at all.
‘Alternate Reality’
Colour revolutions have continued apace ever since, with the same strategies being recurrently applied the world over, to varying degrees of success. All along, non-Western governments – in particular China, Iran and Russia – have become increasingly vocal in their condemnation of and opposition to colour revolutions, in some cases passing legislation seeking to curtail the operations of foreign funded NGOs on their soil. Yet, the mainstream media long ago adopted a rigid Omertà on Washington’s culpability for civil society-driven destabilisation overseas.
In a striking example of this paradigm shift, in November 2004, before the Orange Revolution was over, The Guardian published a revealing report exposing the “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev.” The outlet stated unambiguously the revolt was “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.” NED, the State Department and USAID were all fingered as culprits.
Fast forward to July 2015 however, and a Guardian article on Russia’s banning of NED under foreign agent laws quite amazingly relied on a brief quote pulled from the Endowment’s official website to describe its operations. In the intervening time, the Maidan Revolution overthrew Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, setting Kiev on the warpath with Moscow. Washington’s irrefutable involvement was strenuously denied at the time by the mainstream media, and has been ever since.
Following the Ukraine proxy war’s February 2022 eruption, The New York Times took vigorous aim at independent journalists for spreading the “conspiracy theory” Maidan was US-orchestrated, dubbing the proposition an “alternative reality” and “Russian disinformation”. This is despite every prominent Maidan actor – including the individuals who started the demonstrations – receiving NED or USAID funding, leaders of US-bankrolled organisations in the country advertising their intention to overthrow Yanukovych years prior, and the Endowment spending $20 million in the country in 2013 alone.
After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, NED removed its grant records on Ukraine, listing its investment in a panoply of initiatives in the country over many years – many of which ultimately targeted Russia, one way or another. In mid-2024, the Endowment undertook the unprecedented step of removing grant records for the entire world. Today, brief entries on different geographical regions describe in vague terms the Endowment’s specific aims locally, and overall sums being spent. The crucial questions of where, and on what, aren’t clarified.
NED going underground makes the task of tracking and exposing contemporary colour revolutions difficult, but not impossible. In September 2025, mass rioting ignited in Nepal. Major news outlets without exception reported the fiery agitation as an organic burst of dissent by the country’s disaffected “Gen Z”, motivated by corruption, unemployment, and state censorship of social media. Publications barely acknowledged demonstrators committed serious crimes, including torching Nepal’s parliament and the Prime Minister’s official residence, which sent occupants fleeing in helicopters.
Based on publicly available information, the clear insinuations of a colour revolution could be discerned. An NGO that organised the protests, Hami Nepal, had clear links to organisations known to be in receipt of NED funding. Subsequent leaks amply demonstrated the Endowment and USAID expended substantial sums over the years preceding the coup training young Nepalese citizens how to protest, founding NGOs and political parties, and “advocate concerns” on issues such as corruption. Evidently, the post-9/11 “Freedom Agenda” never actually ended.
