Wall Street's Think Tank
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The Council on Foreign Relations is the most influential foreign-policy think tank in the United States, claiming among its members a high percentage of government officials, media figures, and establishment elite. For decades it kept a low profile even while it shaped policy, advised presidents, and helped shore up U.S. hegemony following the Second World War. In 1977, Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter published the first in-depth study of the CFR, Imperial Brain Trust, an explosive work that traced the activities and influence of the CFR from its origins in the 1920s through the Cold War. Now, Laurence H. Shoup returns with this long-awaited sequel, which brings the story up to date. Wall Street’s Think Tank follows the CFR from the 1970s through the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present. It explains how members responded to rapid changes in the world scene: globalization, the rise of China, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the launch of a “War on Terror,” among other major developments. Shoup argues that the CFR now operates in an era of “Neoliberal Geopolitics,” a worldwide paradigm that its members helped to establish and that reflects the interests of the U.S. ruling class, but is not without challengers. Wall Street’s Think Tank is an essential guide to understanding the Council on Foreign Relations and the shadow it casts over recent history and current events.
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LAURENCE H. SHOUP received his Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University in 1974. He is the author of five books, including Imperial Brain Trust (with William Minter) and Rulers and Rebels: A People’s History of Early California, 1769-1901, as well as many articles in scholarly and popular publications. He has taught U.S. history at the University of Illinois, San Francisco State University, Sonoma State University, and has been active in anti-war and social justice movements since the 1960s.
The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976–2014
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In a feature article in the Financial Times, Richard N. Haass was called “one of the most prominent members of the US foreign policy establishment … president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the influential New York think tank.” He and his wife live on the Upper East Side of New York, near the CFR headquarters and Central Park, and also have a 300-year-old country house north of Manhattan.81 Haass was a Rhodes Scholar, and earned a master’s and doctorate from Oxford University, later teaching at the college level. Prior to being named CFR president, Haass was in and out of government, first as Special Assistant to George H. W. Bush and as part of the National Security Council. He received the Presidential Citizens Medal for helping to develop plans for the first invasion of Iraq, Operation Desert Storm. During the Clinton years he was out of government, working as a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment and as a vice president and director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. When George W. Bush took office, Republican Haass was again brought into government, this time as Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State and a close adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He left that position to become president of the Council.
In 2007 Haass was asked to join the board of directors of the Fortress Investment Group, a global investment management firm with over a thousand institutional and private investors. According to Forbes, in 2011 alone he received $210,000 in compensation from Fortress, including stock grants. He is the author of eleven books on American foreign policy, including The Opportunity: America’s Moment to Alter History’s Course.82
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