Last week, I wrote about the expansion of the American right-wing website Breitbart News Network into the UK, a prime example of the converging forces of climate denialism, fossil fuel addiction, and xenophobia. The editorial marriage between Breitbart London's James Delingpole and Raheem Kassam gives us useful insight into this perturbing mind-set as it attempts to popularise itself in the British media scene.

But Breitbart is merely one strand in the growing neocon web. At its heart is a nexus of power reaching into the recesses of not just the US and UK governments, but the financial services and fossil fuel industries that lobby them.

As I'd pointed out, Breitbart's managing editor Raheem Kassam is an Associate Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), where he heads up the so-called 'Student Rights' campaign – the HJS-funded and based project widely criticised as anti-Muslim and right-wing.

So who are the Henry Jackson Society? The HJS was first founded in 2005 as a registered charity with the support of senior British and American academics, journalists and policymakers. Its 'Statement of Principles' advocated:

"… a 'forward strategy' to assist those countries that are not yet liberal and democratic to become so. This would involve the full spectrum of our 'carrot' capacities, be they diplomatic, economic, cultural or political, but also, when necessary, those 'sticks' of the military domain."

The Society called for maintaining "a strong military… armed with expeditionary capabilities with a global reach." At some point, the original Statement was amended to remove direct reference to 'military sticks,' but still contains the contradictory insistence that despite recognising the legitimacy of "only modern liberal democratic states," it may at times be necessary to "compromise" by forging "alliances with repressive regimes" - which is fine as long such relationships are defined as "temporary."

Henry Jackson Society spokesperson Rosanna Rafel dismissed my characterisation of the seemingly 'imperial' character of these principles:

"It is not 'imperialism' to want to stop the carnage in Syria wrought by Assad's killing machine or to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East through an Iranian nuclear weapon. That is humanitarian concern. And we do not advocate re-drawing boundaries through Western intervention, or promoting democracy by force, so again this is a mischaracterisation of our position."

Among the HJS Statement's signatories are Gerard Baker, chief editor at Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal; Paul Beaver, special advisor to the Parliamentary Defence Committee; Jamie Shea, NATO deputy assistant secretary general for emerging security challenges; Irwin Stelzer, Rupert Murdoch's former right-hand man; Col Tim Collins, CEO of security services firm New Century; Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 during the Iraq War WMD farce; several government ministers - secretary of state for education Michael Gove, culture minister Ed Vaizey, and minister for universities and science, David Willetts; among many other Labour and Conservative MPs.

According to a 2008 paper in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, the Henry Jackson Society has influenced "Conservative party foreign policy discussion," especially the "interventionist convictions" of David Cameron and William Hague.

Indeed, the Society's list of international patrons reads like a 'Who's Who' of American right-wing hawks. Stand-out names include Michael Chertoff, former US homeland security secretary; Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – the notorious Reagan administration-founded, Congressional funded 'NGO' specialising in providing funds on behalf of "a very particular form of low-intensity democracy chained to pro-market economics" to support "handpicked pro-market allies"; Bruce Jackson, foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain during his 2008 presidential candidacy; Robert Kagan, foreign policy adviser to President Obama's then secretary of state Hillary Clinton and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – the now defunct think-tank closely linked to senior Bush administration officials calling for the military occupation of the Gulf as a stepping stone to global US military hegemony; William Kristol, founding editor of Murdoch-founded neocon rag The Weekly Standard and PNAC co-founder with Kagan; General Jack Sheehan, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic; Richard Perle, PNAC signatory and chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board until 2003; James Woolsey, former CIA director and current Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton – the same giant US defence contractor that employed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and which runs the US Army's war games on impacts of climate, energy and economic crises for homeland security.

It should not be entirely surprising in this context that while advocating for regime change in Iran, war-mongering in Syria, and hyping up US homeland terror (despite terrorist incidents steadily declining over the last decades and now at an all time low), the Henry Jackson Society invests much of its energies in intellectual agitation on behalf of elite Anglo-American financial, security and fossil fuel interests.

According to an HJS announcement on the website of BritishAmerican Business - the Secretariat for the British-American Business Council (the world's largest transatlantic business network) – the Society launched its new political risk consultancy, Strategic Analysis (SA), in 2012. The project provides clients with "commercially-relevant research, analysis and consulting services to assist them with mitigating risks and identifying opportunities for their business" – especially, "the economic, security and political risks which may impact our clients operating in the Middle East."

Rafel denied that this posed a "conflict of interest" with the Society's "support for freedom and democracy in the Middle East": "Our analysts merely provide their interpretation of what is happening on the ground in such countries and how economic investment might be affected by events. We do not provide recommendations for companies on investment strategy."

SA describes its flagship product as a quarterly "Middle East and North Africa Oil and Gas Sector Risks and Forecasts Report" consisting of 14 country profiles designed to "benefit individuals within the legal, financial services, energy, banking, consultancy, infrastructure sectors." A description of the first July 2012 report reads:

"Since the discovery of the first significant oil field in Persia in 1908 Middle Eastern oil has been central to the world's energy needs. Over the past 105 years MENA [Middle East and North Africa] countries have been invaded, coups implemented, politicians overthrown and wars undertaken in order to gain access to and protect oil. Today with MENA accounting for 57.8% of global oil reserves the threats and challenges to the region are just as present as ever."

It adds that "by understanding where risks are likely to come from it is possible to take steps in order to mitigate the effect of the risk" – presumably including 'military sticks.' SA thus offers a "detailed analysis and forecast of the oil and gas sector in all twenty MENA countries" to explore "the opportunities for investors" as well as "risks to their business."

Perhaps the most revealing paragraph, however, makes the following telling recommendation:

"… despite the political events in the region, the oil and gas sector will benefit from continuing to operate as an enclave industry, something it is often highly criticised for, and overall remains distanced from political events."

The notion of an 'enclave' industry or economy was widely deployed by American economists and sociologists with reference to a particular form of continued economic dependence of the developing world on the west. The concept denotes a foreign-dominated industry (in this case, oil) designed to extract resources and export them internationally, and was associated with exploitive labour practices, inequality, corruption, foreign firms or governments holding undue influence on the host countries, and a weakening of democracy – a 'new imperialism' in the words of UCL development expert Dr Robert Biel.

Most pertinently, a 2009 paper in the journal Studies in Comparative International Development by Harvard scholar Prof James Robinson, concludes tentatively "that enclaves have been less democratic," are "disadvantaged" by "smaller domestic markets" and "less developed middle classes," but have "greater state capacity" that "seems to have come at the cost of less democracy."

Last year, in a brief aptly titled 'Light at the end of the pipeline,' SA director Ruth Lux explained how "the investment opportunities within the infrastructure sector" in the Middle East "are more numerable than ever, no more so than in pipelines which serve as a barometer for the health of the region as a whole."

So here, the Henry Jackson Society's neocon ideology is laid bare: western "financial services, energy, banking" and other commercial interests are the prime beneficiaries from a "forward strategy" of regional 'liberalisation' designed to reinforce the very "enclave" economies that undermine real democracy.

Rafel, however, denied that the Society supports energy interests, or receives support from them. She described critics of the Society's interventionist ideology as "peddling conspiracy theories rather than addressing the concerns about dictatorships, theocracies and human rights that we raise."

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed