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PREFACE

We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.

—SUPREME COURT JUSTICE LOUIS BRANDEIS

The think tank of monopoly-finance capital, the Council on Foreign Relations is the world’s most powerful private organization. The CFR is the ultimate networking, socializing, strategic-planning, and consensus-forming institution of the U.S. capitalist class. It is the central “high command” organization of the plutocracy that runs the country and much of the world. The Council is the most important U.S. and global center of “deep politics” and the “deep state” that rules behind the scenes, a way that the 1 percent conducts their unrelenting class war against the 99 percent. Despite pretensions to “democracy” and endless attempts at instructing the world, U.S. “democracy” is, in reality, largely a fraud, a hollowed-out shell, devoid of any substantive content. The fact is that the U.S. government—led behind the scenes by the CFR—is largely run in an anti-democratic fashion by and for the interests of a financialized capitalist class, their corporations, and the wealthy families that control and benefit from these corporations. No matter who is elected, people from the Council propose, debate, develop consensus, and implement the nation’s key strategic policies. The deep state, in the form of the CFR, operates behind the scenes, making and enforcing important decisions outside of those publicly sanctioned by law and society. A focus on the Council on Foreign Relations is a key way to understand concretely the central sector of the ensemble of power relations in the United States and its informal global empire.

The globalized system that the Council operates within and influences the development of is monopoly-finance capitalism.¹ Neoliberalism is today’s enabling and legitimizing ideology of monopoly-finance capitalism, helping the system grow and spread. We say “capitalist” because this system is mainly privately controlled and has as its primary goal constantly increasing profits and the use of these for the endless accumulation of capital. The plutocracy that dominates the system is centered in the United States, but has powerful allied branches in Western Europe and Japan especially. We say “monopoly” capitalist system because production is dominated by a relatively few giant multinational corporations able to exercise considerable monopoly power. We say “finance” capitalist system because financial speculation has become a key way that the stagnation tendencies of the system have been, at least temporarily, overcome. Banking corporations like JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs, as well as nominally industrial conglomerates like General Electric, all enjoy financial super profits under this regime.

The CFR network of people and institutions at home and abroad is extensive and is a key factor in the ongoing forging of a transnational capitalist ruling class. What David Rothkopf (himself a Council member) calls the “superclass” and “Davos Man”—the six thousand individuals that he says run the world—has its main base in the CFR.² Studying and understanding the Council is therefore a critical way to know concretely how a dominant economic class has ruled in the past and continues to rule today. Council leaders recognize these facts, but prefer to remain behind the scenes and to label the CFR the world’s “leading” or “most influential” foreign policy organization rather than most powerful.³ This preference, along with its mode of operation, has resulted in the Council being less widely recognized than its real influence would suggest.

A big and complex organization, the CFR is unique because it combines a well-staffed, scholarly think tank with a large and active dues-paying membership. It has a long history, many faces, and multiple facets, including publishing Foreign Affairs, a magazine founded in 1922 that the Washington Post has called “the bible of foreign policy thinking.” It has published tens of thousands of publications of various types—from books to blogs—during recent decades. During every decade, it holds thousands of membership meetings starring top political and economic leaders from a wide variety of nations, as well as many leading intellectuals. The Council’s work since the mid-1970s has largely focused on creating, planning, promoting, and defending a U.S.-dominated, world-spanning neoliberal geopolitical empire that, due to the resulting mass poverty of billions of people, has been called “a criminal process of global colonization” by the Brazilian theologian Frei Betto.⁴ Samir Amin labels the system as one that imposes a “lumpen development” model of pauperization and super-exploitation on the people of the South, the majority of humankind.⁵ This imperialist empire is mostly an informal one, but its rule over and exploitation of a considerable part of the world and its people is nevertheless very real.

The CFR’s connections to and relationships with economically and politically powerful people and institutions around the world mean that the neoliberal geopolitical worldview of its members and leaders matters a great deal. The Council’s leaders select the intellectuals who set the agendas, shape the critical debates, and design the policies that serve the capitalist class. The CFR also works very hard to produce and disseminate ideas about which policies are best so that the Council/capitalist class view gains “commonsense” acceptance among the public. In this way the framework for policymaking and publicity on a variety of key issues is established. More often than not, CFR leaders and members are the “in-and-outers” who pass through the revolving door of the federal government to high positions of authority, no matter who is elected. The CFR helps unite the capitalist class community, making it not just a class in itself, but also a class for itself. It achieves this by promoting the exchange of information and policy opinions necessary to foster consensus among the rulers on what the goals and tactics of U.S. foreign, and increasingly domestic, policy should be. As Council people cycle into and out of government, policies are implemented that mostly benefit those at the top of the economic structure, creating the vast wealth and income inequality that exists today.

The need to conduct such planning efforts reflects the fact that capitalism is a system in dynamic disequilibrium, always in a process of breakdown and recovery, and so requires a think tank like the CFR as a strategic guide to map out new directions for the capitalist class and the government itself before the inevitable crises become too acute. The speeding up of change due to the capitalist globalization promoted by the Council and related organizations has added to the complexity of the issues that must be addressed. All of these aspects mean that understanding the behemoth that is the Council on Foreign Relations requires an effort. There are no easy shortcuts to fully understanding this complex organization and its policies.

This book has had a long genesis; it is the result of a decades-long research process, dating to the early 1970s. William Minter and I went to different universities for graduate study, and both decided, before we met, to study the CFR. Minter did his work in sociology; I did mine in U.S. history. Our dissertations on the Council complete, we decided to combine them, with additional research, in a book. In July of 1976, we put the final touches on Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Monthly Review Press, 1977). Gerald Ford was president, Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State, and Alan Greenspan was Ford’s chief economic adviser. The Soviet Union was a world power. The Internet, cell phones, personal computers, the financialization of capital accumulation, neoliberalism, the “Washington Consensus,” and many other things that are commonplace today were either not yet fully implemented or had not been invented.

In 1976, we believed that U. S. foreign policy was a disaster, not only for the billions of working-class people in the poorest parts of the world who suffer the most exploitation and the hardest blows from the imperialism and empire characteristic of monopoly-finance capitalism but also for the vast majority of the people of our own country. We also believed that a main source of the problem was the top-down control of U.S. foreign policy by a relatively small group of capitalists and their in-house experts operating through many channels, central among them the Council on Foreign Relations. Our book received gratifying attention in some quarters, but overall was ignored or its views disputed by most experts and attentive publics. Imagine my surprise almost two decades later when I found the following words in the CFR’s own Annual Report for the 1994 fiscal year:

For much of this century, U.S. foreign policy was made by several hundred leading politicians and figures dedicated to public service from the professions of law, banking, business, the military and diplomacy. The Council was conceived by members of this professional class in the years immediately following World War I. For many decades, this same professional class gave the Council its cachet, energy, and influence, serving as its membership as well as its principal constituency.

Particularly after the Kennedy administration, this traditional group was expanded by policy experts from the academy and the think tanks, mainly people with increasingly professional training in the foreign and defense policy fields that dominated the country’s Cold War concerns. This enlarged foreign policy community joined the Council’s ranks and, like its predecessor, gave us weight, reach, and intellectual strength.⁶

Here we had the CFR’s own leaders, in their own publication, stating that U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century was made by a “professional class” (their term for a ruling capitalist class) of only “several hundred” people, augmented by a number of “experts” beginning in the 1960s. Almost all of these people were members of the CFR, which actively promoted a foreign policy suitable to the U.S. capitalist class, while, of course, expecting the people of the United States and the world to pay for the results of these policies with their blood and treasure. William Minter and I had been right to stress these realities in Imperial Brain Trust, and, in a very real sense, even the Council and its leadership were open to stating this truth by 1994. CFR leaders have gone even further in recent years; the Council’s president Richard Haass stated in 2007 that the CFR is “the leading foreign policy organization in the world.”⁷ This book represents an effort both to document this assertion and go beyond it.

To fully understand this power one must delve into the subject of class. With few exceptions, the dominant culture pretends that we live in a classless society, one where all—no matter what their wealth and income level, race or gender, type of employment or where they live—have common interests. The United States is, however, a racialized and gendered class society, one with sharp divisions and different interests, and one where a ruling class of monopoly capitalists control almost everything of importance, either openly or behind the scenes. Their class interest lurks behind the all-encompassing veil of what is labeled the “national interest.” But this does not happen by accident: the capitalists are highly organized and pursue their class interests relentlessly. One of the key places they do this is at the CFR, which consequently makes this organization so important to understand in depth. Studying the Council in detail allows us to understand the goals, strategy, and tactics of the powerful, how and why they define the “national class interest” as they do; it shows how this organization develops new initiatives, forges unity around them, then shapes the public agenda and debate, including discussions among public officials, a large number of whom are CFR members. A focus on the CFR illustrates key abstractions like “capitalist class,” “ruling class,” and “ideological hegemony.” It yields a deeper understanding of specific historical events like the U.S. war on Iraq and the rapidly evolving ecological crisis, pointing out the potential vulnerabilities of this ruling class.

The Council has been pursuing a world-spanning hegemonic project since it was founded in the 1918–1921 period. One critical ingredient of such a project has been the capacity to provide intellectual leadership. Such leadership combines knowledge, experience, and a collective worldview to create and spread its vision and have the power and legitimacy to implement it. The CFR’s constant stream of interpretations, recommendations, and development priorities are meant to provide a framework for a capitalist-class agenda and a strategy that can be deployed through the vast Council network of political-economic and cultural influence at home and worldwide. In this way a particular worldview, agenda, and policy discourse become effective in the real world. A full-scale analysis of the overall CFR worldview and grand strategy of neoliberal geopolitical economics was not formally developed in Imperial Brain Trust. This worldview will be outlined in some detail in the second half of the present volume, including the Council’s key role in the development of neoliberalism as an effective doctrinal and ideological cluster, a governing philosophy.

Following the publication of Imperial Brain Trust, I continued to be interested in the CFR, and, have, over an almost forty-year period, collected a large archive of data, useful in producing Wall Street’s Think Tank. Today (early 2015), the Council on Foreign Relations has an individual membership of almost 5,000, a corporate membership of about 170, a staff of over 330, supported by an annual budget of about $60 million and assets of almost $492 million.⁸ It remains the largest and most powerful of all U.S. private think tanks that presume to discuss and decide the future of humanity in largely secret meetings behind closed doors in the upper-class neighborhoods of New York and Washington. During the last four decades the CFR has not only successfully continued its central position as the most important private organization in the United States, one with no real peer in the country. It has clearly succeeded in expanding its key role, and remains at the center of the small plutocracy that runs the United States and much of the world.

The reader will kindly take note that no monied interests, foundations, universities, corporations, research institutes, or think tanks have in any way funded or otherwise influenced the production of this book. It is an effort of independent scholarship, by someone who believes that the current power structure is bankrupt and fundamental changes are needed if the great majority of humanity is to survive the ecosystemic catastrophe and violent conflicts that the One Percent and their monopoly-finance capitalist system are creating for life on our planet.

I would like to especially thank Suzanne Baker, Dr. Daniel D. Shoup, Dr. Paul W. Rea, and Jennifer Ho who all took out time from their busy lives to read parts of the book and make suggestions on ways to improve it. Thanks also to Michael D. Yates and Erin Clermont, my editors at Monthly Review, who worked hard making numerous corrections and offered many helpful suggestions. Any remaining shortcomings are, of course, my responsibility alone.

—LAURENCE H. SHOUP

March 2015