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THE ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY OF THE COUNCIL, 1976–2014

You don’t go to speak to the Council; you go to get advice.

—TIMOTHY F. GEITHNER

A very influential organization…. There isn’t anything quite like the Council…. It’s unique in its scope and level of expertise and experience that members share…. it’s a good place to meet other people involved in making policy.

—JEANE KIRKPATRICK

On a January evening in 1999 the Council on Foreign Relations held a dinner at its New York headquarters in celebration of their new meeting facility. The organization’s entire membership was able to participate through new videoconferencing technology. Peter G. Peterson, the CFR’s chairman at the time, later described the night’s central activities:

It was the kind of event only the Council on Foreign Relations seems able to stage. With our beloved Honorary Chairman David Rockefeller presiding, the following Secretaries of State, Council members all, glittered onto the video screen: George Shultz from San Francisco, James Baker from Houston, Warren Christopher from Los Angeles, Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance from New York, and Madeleine Albright from Washington. For good measure, President Clinton greeted us from Washington, Council Vice Chairman Hank Greenberg joined us from Hong Kong, and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered the keynote address. All, as you would expect, did a splendid job of talking about new world challenges and opportunities and answering questions from our members. It demonstrated the quality discussions the Council, almost uniquely, can generate. It showed as well the technological possibilities now open to us for conversations among our members.⁹²

Chairman Peterson’s comments highlight the close connections between top government leaders and the CFR, but also the need to pay attention to the internal relations within the organization and its network of members. Such relations are central in determining the way that the capitalist class as a community recognizes, articulates, organizes, unifies, and acts on its own interests as a class and engages other classes and class fractions in relations of conflict and consensus. The CFR has been a pioneering organization in opening the world to U.S. capital through the influence of its board of directors and its membership, studies, and meetings programs. These four fundamental features make up the essential organizational foundation of the CFR.

THE CORPORATE BOARD

The CFR is a corporation, and it is governed, like other corporations, by its board of directors. Council members are like small individual stockholders, interested in what happens, but without much power to change anything. The board is technically elected by CFR members, but these elections are carefully managed by those in power and mainly exist to legitimate the self-perpetuating rule of the board of directors.

In 1981 the CFR had twenty-four directors on its board, divided into three groups of eight, with staggered terms of three years. Following the Council’s bylaws, a small nominating committee set up by the board took the 150 names suggested by CFR members and selected nine nominees for eight seats. In the resulting election, there was an unusually high turnout, 56.7 percent of those eligible to vote actually voted. The result shocked CFR leaders—Henry A. Kissinger, who had been a director since leaving the government in 1977, was the sole nominee who was not elected. President Winston Lord quickly pointed out that the CFR would continue to depend upon Kissinger’s “vast experience and wise perspective in the years ahead.”⁹³ The 1981 Annual Report stated what happened next: “A number of Council members expressed their concern with election procedures and the results produced…. Members were constrained to vote for eight out of nine names,” adding that “many considered this undesirable both for the members voting and the candidates running.”⁹⁴ Obviously, giving the Council’s membership a slight choice was considered a dangerous excess of democracy when a favorite of the CFR’s inner power structure was voted out. Within a few years election procedures were changed, and beginning in 1985 the nominating committee was required to “propose a slate of nominees equal to the number of vacancies in any election.”⁹⁵ This gave the existing directors absolute power over who would serve on the board, with the membership simply ratifying the selections of the nominating committee. In 1994–95 another change took place in the board’s election rules, whose effect was similar to the prior undemocratic setup. Since that point in time down to the present (2014), three board members are elected from a slate of six (or rarely seven) chosen by the nominating committee, and three or four more are selected by the board. Therefore, the three (or four) losing candidates in each election can be selected by the board, or the board can select different individuals. Thus, since 1985, with minor changes, power has been even more completely concentrated in the hands of the existing board, and the membership has been less and less involved in the overall election process, with typically only a little over a third of the members bothering to vote in a given “election.” The number on the board has gradually been expanded, and as of 2014 there were thirty-six individuals serving on it, each with a five-year term.⁹⁶

The 2011 board election at the Council was typical of elections since 1994–95; members chose three directors from a list of six candidates selected by the nominating committee, and three more directors were appointed by the board itself. Only about one-third of Council members (33.9 percent), bothered to vote, but this was considered acceptable and within the bylaws of the organization.⁹⁷ Elections held during 2012, 2013, and 2014 had similar results, low turnout of members, three individuals elected to the board, and four appointed.⁹⁸

The Nature of Democracy within the CFR

The CFR board election process makes it clear that like the nation as a whole, the organization operates under a form of managed “democracy.” Elections are a democratic formality without real choice, and half or more of all board directors are typically appointed by the existing board. There is a provision for CFR members to nominate additional candidates by petition, but this has been done only occasionally, and in every case the outside nominee or nominees lost. In sum, the choices offered to members in selecting the Council leadership are limited to capitalist-class insiders. Voting on candidates from a preselected list is not democracy, rather it is the hollowed-out illusion of democracy. The point of such farcical elections is simply to provide a veneer of legitimacy. But it is also clear that most members do not care and are satisfied to operate under the hegemony of the CFR’s existing power structure.

THE MEMBERSHIP

The second fundamental organizational feature of the Council is membership. The CFR has two categories of members, individual and corporate, and thus will be discussed in that order. In 1984, then-president Winston Lord described CFR’s individual membership as “our most important and vital resource and audience,” pointing out that even a “casual glance” at the membership list illustrates the “quality and range of American leaders who have been elected to join the Council.”⁹⁹ The Council’s 2011 Annual Report expanded on this by stating that it is a membership organization whose “ranks include top government officials, renowned scholars, business leaders, acclaimed journalists, prominent lawyers, and distinguished nonprofit professionals” who are “unmatched in accomplishment and diversity in the field of international affairs” and “discuss and debate the major foreign policy issues.” They “have unparalleled access to world leaders, senior government officials, members of Congress, and prominent thinkers.”¹⁰⁰ The 2014 Annual Report became even more specific:

CFR’s members are and always have been its most valuable asset, a pillar of the institution’s strength, and an indication of its influence. The roster today counts two former U.S. presidents and two vice presidents (there have been a total of seven of each in CFR’s history); twenty-six Pulitzer Prize winners; nine Nobel laureates; ninety-six Rhodes scholars; fifty-two leaders of Fortune 500 companies; forty-two special envoys; and sixty-two admirals and generals in the U.S. armed forces. Since CFR’s founding, thirty secretaries of state have served as members … the caliber of CFR’s members is one reason the organization is able to attract such prominent speakers.¹⁰¹

These quotes illustrate the CFR’s unique essence as a powerful body that is both a membership organization and a think tank marrying action and reflection—people of “affairs” with people of “ideas.” Its life and activities are made possible through a membership that is a delicately balanced combination of leaders of capitalist corporations, especially in finance but also industry, communications, and law; leaders of intellectual life, especially in top universities, but also in journalism and other think tanks; and leaders in government, especially the federal government, but also state and local government. If any of these three main components get too weak or too strong, the Council begins to lose what it considers its true character. For example, in 2011 membership was divided almost equally between men and women of “affairs”—from business, government and, law—and individuals of “ideas”—including university professors and administrators, nonprofit employees, and journalists—(49 percent and 42 percent respectively), with “other” making up the remaining 9 percent.¹⁰²

Individual membership in the Council is by invitation only. U.S. citizens with the time, interest, connections, foreign policy credentials, and the ability to pay high annual dues can apply, but the membership committee of the board and the board of directors decides who to invite to become a member. Potential members must be recommended by a current CFR member and be seconded by three other individuals, preferably also Council members.¹⁰³ CFR membership is always growing; it has increased from 1,725 in 1976 to 4,900 in 2014.¹⁰⁴ Once in the Council, as a regular member, one normally stays in the organization for life, as long as the yearly dues are paid. These dues are high, and there is internal pressure to make an additional donation every year. Depending upon age, residence location, and profession (business or non-business) members currently pay dues from a low of $250 to a high of $3,610 a year.¹⁰⁵

On rare occasions, a member will quit the organization. Chalmers Johnson, a University of California professor who late in life became disenchanted with the Council and U.S. foreign policy in general, called and told the female staffer on the phone that he wanted to cancel his membership. She answered, “Professor Johnson, I’m sorry, sir. No one cancels their membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. Membership is for life. People are canceled when they die.” Johnson, not missing a beat, replied, “Consider me dead.”¹⁰⁶

During the late 1960s–early 1970s the CFR recognized that its membership policies were outdated and needed a serious overhaul. Consequently, membership was opened for the first time to women, and the body also became more open to minorities and younger people, three groups that had previously been largely invisible in Council membership and activities. A five-year “term” membership category for people thirty to thirty-six years old was established to continuously recruit and train the next generation of foreign policy experts and leaders. Many of those in the term membership program have gone on to become regular lifetime members of the CFR. In addition, Council leaders determined that a better geographical balance was needed between the historically dominant New York, the rising Washington, and the rest of the nation. The need for a delicate balance dictated a very gradual approach, and several decades would be required to create a newer CFR membership. In 1977 Council president Bayless Manning made it clear that while increasing diversity, maintaining the right balance within the membership was of the highest importance. For example, the number of academics in the CFR had to be limited to the correct ratio compared to those from business, law, and government because academics can more easily allocate time to CFR activities, which could result in a tendency for the Council to lose its unique character as an organization connected to real-world policymaking and “become over-academicized.”¹⁰⁷

In 1978, the Council’s Annual Report stressed the need for continuing the “sustained emphasis on diversifying the Council membership,” adding that fully 42 percent of the current membership had joined since 1972. New members in 1978 included neo-conservatives like Richard N. Perle, Richard E. Pipes, George F. Will, and Norman Podhoretz, representing the beginning of a wave of neocons entering the Council.¹⁰⁸ By 1980 Council leaders could proclaim that the drive for geographic membership diversity was beginning to result in the buildup of clusters in key cities like Cleveland, Minneapolis, Houston, Dallas, Tulsa, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.¹⁰⁹ This was combined with steady growth in membership and activities in Washington, where, beginning in 1977, regular general meetings for area members were held at the Carnegie Endowment’s Conference Center. By 1980 there were 450 members in the D.C. area, a little over half the number in New York.¹¹⁰ Diversification by gender was so slow that after almost a decade of admitting women, CFR membership was still only 7.5 percent female.¹¹¹

During the early and mid-1980s Council leaders also stated that they were trying to add “more spice from the left and right” to the organization.¹¹² During 1981 and 1982 this meant particularly more “spice” from the right as more neoconservatives were added to the usual mix of establishment moderates and conservatives. The new neocon members during these years included Richard B. Cheney, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, John D. Negroponte, Casper Weinberger, and Francis Fukuyama.¹¹³ Few if any additions from the left were added, although apparently CFR leaders believed that a relatively few liberals represented a kind of “left wing” in the organization.

The Case of Condoleezza Rice

The process of diversification of the Council and the potential payoffs for the capitalist class can be illustrated with Condoleezza Rice. The year 1984 saw the election to membership of this obscure junior academic who would later play a key role as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration. Rice, in 1984 an Assistant Professor at Stanford University, became one of 228 female CFR members, and part of the 65 percent of Council members that had been elected to membership during the ongoing diversity drive that had started during the early 1970s.¹¹⁴ The rise to prominence of Condoleezza Rice took place to a large extent through her association with the CFR. This was reminiscent of Henry A. Kissinger’s rise to power a quarter-century earlier. Kissinger, a Harvard professor, had worked at the Council in the 1950s, wrote a book there, became a member, met and worked for Nelson Rockefeller, then solidified his career as a key member of President Richard M. Nixon’s foreign policy team, later commenting to the CFR’s leaders, “You invented me.”¹¹⁵ In Rice’s case, she became a member first, then was invited to become a Council International Affairs Fellow during 1986–87.¹¹⁶ During that year she also presided at some CFR meetings and was selected to serve on the board of directors’ term membership committee.¹¹⁷ Clearly satisfied with her potential as a representative of a more diverse CFR, as well as her service to the organization, the board then selected Rice to chair a 1988 task force on increasing minority representation.¹¹⁸ As revolutionary changes swept through Eastern Europe during the 1988–91 period, Rice, an academic expert on the USSR, was invited to speak on these changes at CFR programs in September of 1989 and April 1991.¹¹⁹ During these years of activity at the CFR, Rice met many of the individuals who helped her get better connected to the capitalist class and she was appointed to corporate directorships at Chevron, Transamerica, and Hewlett Packard, to higher positions at Stanford, and met and mingled with members of the Bush family. As a trustworthy minority female, well trained in the Council’s worldview, Rice’s CFR connection put her on the road to power, fame, and fortune as an enabler and legitimator of that worldview during her later years in government. Notably, her memoir conveniently leaves out these early years and her long relationship with the Council.¹²⁰

The true role of women and minorities in the CFR in the 1980s and early 1990s is illustrated by the fact that in 1990 the Council membership was still 87 percent male and 93 percent white. After almost two decades of stressing the need to diversify and increase the numbers of women and minority members, the numbers had reached only 13 percent and 7 percent respectively.¹²¹ During this period, however, there was a high level of loyalty within this membership. Chair Peter G. Peterson reported in 1990 for example, that over one-half of all members made annual gifts (above and beyond dues), to the organization, a higher level than any national organization as far as he knew.¹²²

Membership since the Early 1990s

The year 1992 was a banner year for the Council, its leaders, and members as William J. Clinton, a CFR member, was elected president of the United States. Chair Peter Peterson reported that “dozens of other Council colleagues were called to serve in cabinet and sub-cabinet positions, as many others were returning to private life…. These appointments testify to the value of maintaining a pool of leaders thoroughly informed about international issues and prepared to assume the burdens of office. That task is one of the hallmarks of the Council on Foreign Relations.”¹²³ Warren Christopher, the vice chairman of the Council, was quickly selected as the new Secretary of State. Four CFR directors—Richard Holbrooke, Donna Shalala, Strobe Talbott, and Cliffton R. Wharton Jr.—resigned to enter the government, and among those who replaced them on the Council board was Richard B. Cheney, a future vice president.¹²⁴ Peter Tarnoff resigned as CFR president to become undersecretary of state for political affairs. Leslie Gelb, the New York Times national security correspondent, replaced him as the Council’s president. Gelb immediately remarked that there were many foreign policy membership organizations and many think tanks, but only one had the strengths of both. This continued to be a key source of the CFR’s “uniqueness” and enabled it to play a “special role,” as “the world’s premier foreign policy organization.”¹²⁵

Under the leadership of Gelb, the CFR intensified its drive to diversify its membership and spread its reach across the United States and into the wider world. One example was the establishment of a joint venture with the Los Angeles–based Pacific Council on International Policy. CFR members, officers, and directors all had been involved in forming the PCIP in order to further Council expansion west of the Rocky Mountains. By 1994 there were 358 CFR members in this section of the country, and the PCIP’s purpose was to tie them to both organizations and develop CFR-type meetings and programs, especially on the West Coast.¹²⁶ At the same time, the Council’s “Committees on Foreign Relations,” in existence in dozens of U.S. cities since 1938 in order to strengthen ties to local power wielders, were transformed into new “Council on Foreign Relations” committees. CFR members in each city directly controlled these committees. As had been the case for over a decade, about a third of all Council members now resided outside of New York and Washington, and a more comprehensive and ambitious national program was now pushed forward more vigorously by Gelb and the other CFR leaders.¹²⁷ At the same time, the Council program in Washington was expanded, giving the CFR three main venues for its activities—New York, Washington, and nationally in varied cities around the country. One member, lawyer Richard Mallery, remarked that the Council was now becoming “an umbrella organization for the country.”¹²⁸

During the mid-1990s the Council printed in its Annual Reports quotes from a number of members focusing on what the organization meant to them. This provides a window into the organization at the membership level, and illustrates that an important part of what happens at the CFR goes on privately and informally between members who network with each other in a variety of settings, including within the government:

The Council has given me a tremendous range of important associations. When I was on Wall Street, the Council allowed me to interact in a non-pressurized setting…. It also broadened my thinking quite a bit…. It has been a very enriching experience, both in terms of the people with whom I have been able to build relationships and also in terms of ideas.

—JEFFREY E. GARTEN, Dean, School of Management, Yale University¹²⁹

The Council is sort of the land of opportunity for a junior scholar. You are immediately dropped into an environment where you have access to an incredible array of people from all the communities involved in policymaking in your field—-journalists, top academics, heads of corporations, and, of course, policymakers themselves.

—ELIZABETH ECONOMY, CFR Fellow for Chinese Studies¹³⁰

Outreach is an attempt … to expand the influence of the Council…. There is a generation of people within the government who routinely talk to their friends at the Council. These are people who would not move on important issues before they checked with people they know who are members of the Council, because they know they will get a perspective, a certain wisdom that they are unlikely to get anywhere else. Now what you’re trying to do … is to get younger people in government to place the same sense of value on the Council, get them familiar with people in the Council, privately, discreetly.

—CHARLES G. BOYD, General, U.S. Air Force (Ret.)¹³¹

The most important thing about the Council is that it is an assembly point for committed people in the United States about foreign affairs writ large, a wider range of society than people who are pursuing policy. And it provides a place for both government officials from the United States and, just as importantly, officials from other countries, to come and make a public/private statement of their views on issues.

—JOHN DEUTCH, former director, Central Intelligence Agency¹³²

I am involved in investing abroad, conversations with Council members who work in the same countries in which I’m interested give me a different perspective on some of the issues I may be addressing.

—NANCY GOODMAN, Attorney, Winslow Partners, LLC¹³³

Membership activities over the next nearly two decades, 1995 to 2014, focused on expanding numbers and diversity of members, activities in Washington, in the corporate membership sector, and nationally, while maintaining the Council’s New York base. This process of change continued to be slow; by 2014 women still represented only about 27 percent and minorities only about 16 percent of CFR membership.¹³⁴

In 1996 CFR director Robert B. Zoellick, later prominent in the George W. Bush administration and head of the World Bank, remarked on the importance of expanding the Council’s influence beyond New York to Washington and the rest of the country:

A national organization must have a significant presence in the nation’s capital as well as a major presence in the nation’s financial center. Washington is clearly the heart of policymaking and the policymaking debate. We never really had a base in Washington, now we do. We have foreign officials coming through, we have Congress, we have Council fellows; each offers opportunities to reach people that New York does not regularly reach. Looking ahead, the real challenge for the Council will be what it can do beyond New York and Washington.¹³⁵

Indicating that Zoellick’s call reflected a much wider consensus, chair Peter Peterson reported in 1997 that the Council was attempting to transform “itself from a New York–based organization into a truly national body—one that better reflects the diversity of the American body politic and its concerns and interests…. Now we are reaching further into America.”¹³⁶ At the same time that this outreach was ongoing, the CFR was building up its now twin bases—New York and Washington. A new building was completed and occupied in New York in 1997, one wired with the latest interactive video-conferencing technology. The CFR.org website was also established that year. In Washington, larger offices and meeting spaces were occupied in the new Carnegie Endowment building next door to the Brookings Institution. There was a large increase in meetings, and a new focus on Congress was inaugurated.¹³⁷

An expansion of the “national program” was also projected during this period, aiming at building membership and programs in key cities, including Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami, and Boston, with Seattle and Minneapolis to be added in the near future.¹³⁸ The aim was to create a solid core of Council members in each city, part of a network that could provide “real input into all our intellectual work.”¹³⁹ In 2001 the first CFR national conference was staged, a two-day event with seminars conducted by CFR senior fellows and kicked off with an opening presentation by President George W. Bush’s new National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice.¹⁴⁰

By 2005 the Council’s national program had expanded to over ninety annual sessions nationwide. The program included meetings of CFR senior fellows with Council members to discuss current research and share book drafts, reports, and articles in order to spread the CFR worldview and receive feedback and insights. This both helped shape the final product and involve “national” members (those outside New York and Washington) in the CFR’s core activities. The 2005 annual national conference, attended by over three hundred members, was at the CFR headquarters in New York and focused on the occupation of Iraq.¹⁴¹ Two years later the CFR reported that it now had programs in fourteen different cities and 37 percent of its members lived outside New York and Washington (that is, these two cities still had 63 percent between them). This distribution was not too different than was the case in 1981, when 31 percent lived outside these two key cities.¹⁴² What had really changed was the large expansion of members in D.C. with a resulting reduction in the percentage of New York members in CFR (although not in numbers, as the organization’s overall number of members continued to expand). This growth was reflected in the Council’s purchase of its own building in Washington—appropriately enough located very close to the White House and called the “Boss” Shepherd building, named for a former mayor of the District.¹⁴³ That same year, Council president Richard N. Haass, who had taken over from Gelb as president in 2003, began to refer to the organization he headed as “the leading foreign policy organization in the world.”¹⁴⁴

In recent years, information about the CFR membership’s views on foreign policy has become available due to polling efforts by the Pew Research Center in association with the Council. In November of 2013 the Pew-CFR team sent a set of questions online to all CFR members. Almost 40 percent of the Council members, a total of 1,838, responded. At the same time, they conducted a series of telephone interviews using the same questions with 2,003 people representing a sample of the American public. The most interesting results were in the areas in which the results from the public diverged most radically from the views of the CFR members. There was a serious difference, for example, on the issue of the relative priority that should be given in foreign policy to protecting the jobs of American workers. Fully 81 percent of the public group wanted this to be a “top priority,” whereas only 29 percent of the Council members did. Results for earlier years showed an even lower result, in 1997 for example, only 16 percent of CFR members interviewed thought that protecting the jobs of U.S. workers was a top priority.¹⁴⁵ Similarly, 73 percent of Council members believed that it was mostly helpful when U.S. companies set up operations overseas, whereas only 23 percent of the general public agreed.¹⁴⁶ On trade issues, fully 93 percent of Council members felt that “free trade” agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership were good things.¹⁴⁷ CFR members who responded also overwhelmingly believed that National Security Agency surveillance and drone attacks on other nations made the United States safer, although the public at large had a much lower positive response on these two issues.¹⁴⁸ These results reinforce the general point that, even at the membership level, the Council predominately represents the views of the higher levels of the class structure, those who are part of, or allied with, the capitalist class, in contrast to the needs and perspectives of whose who depend upon wage labor for economic survival.

Corporate Membership and Program

Another key part of the CFR as organization and network is its Corporation Service Program, for corporations that, by annual subscription, become corporate members of the Council. This program was started in 1953 and offers to executives of subscribing companies (both domestic and foreign-based) a series of meetings, discussions, dinners, conferences, seminars, workshops, trips abroad, access to the CFR’s reference service, advice from members of the CFR’s fellows and research staff, and (to those corporations who subscribe at the highest level) use of the Council’s “Harold Pratt House ballroom and library.” Additionally, “Multiple executives may take part in the Corporate Conference, a yearly summit on geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges.” Benefits vary depending upon the subscription/membership level, the annual price of which in 2014 ranged from $100,000 for “Founders” to $60,000 for “President’s Circle,” down to $30,000 for “Affiliates.”¹⁴⁹ As could be expected, the corporations that subscribe and become corporate members of the Council are the biggest, wealthiest, and most internationally oriented of U.S. corporations. For example, eight of the thirteen top U.S. corporations ranked by market capitalization are corporate members of the CFR. These eight alone are worth several trillion dollars.

There were also ten “Founders” on the CFR’s corporate membership list in 2014, each paying $100,000 a year for the benefits the CFR offers to them. In 2014 the Founders were conveniently divided into three groups, five finance capital corporations, three oil corporations, an industrial corporation, and a consulting corporation.¹⁵⁰

• Bank of America Merrill Lynch: This company has been called the world’s largest financial services company and wealth manager. The Financial Times lists it as number one, with almost $2 trillion of assets under management.¹⁵¹ Other sources list it as having $2.2 trillion under management. In 2010 Bank of America was ranked by Fortune as first in equity and the fifth-largest U.S. corporation by revenue.

• JP Morgan Chase: The website quotes chairman and CEO, CFR member Jamie Dimon, as stating that the bank’s “aim is to be the world’s most trusted and respected financial services institution.” Second in assets only to Bank of America, it holds over $2 trillion in assets, according to the website. It manages the investments of many thousands of “old wealth” U.S. and foreign families. In 2010 JP Morgan Chase was ranked by Fortune as second in equity and the ninth-largest U.S. corporation by revenue; the Financial Times lists it as third in dollar value of global mergers and acquisitions in 2011.¹⁵²

• Goldman Sachs: Although smaller in amount of assets owned and managed than the above two, Goldman Sachs is a leading global investment bank, offering a varied menu of securities, investment, finance, and management services. It ranked fifth on Fortune’s list of top U.S. commercial banks, and first in dollar value in global mergers and acquisitions in 2011.¹⁵³ Its current chair and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, is a member of the CFR, as are several other board members, one of whom, Stephen Friedman, is currently on the CFR board of directors. Robert Rubin, a former co-chair and co-senior partner of Goldman, is currently co-chair of the CFR.

• Citi: Another leading multinational Wall Street bank, it dates back to the City Bank of New York, founded in 1812. It was for many decades the largest U.S. bank, expanding through many mergers and acquisitions, and going under varied names over the years, including First National City Bank, Citibank, and Citigroup. It has long been both politically active (campaign contributions and lobbying) and CFR connected.

• Nasdaq OMX Group: Called the “world’s largest exchange company,” it owns and operates the NASDAQ stock market and a number of other stock exchanges worldwide.

• Chevron: Formerly Standard Oil of California and therefore part of the Rockefeller oil empire, this corporation is one of the world’s leading integrated energy companies. Its own growth, together with large-scale mergers with Gulf, Texaco, and Unocal, have made it the third-largest U.S. corporation by revenue.

• Exxon Mobil: Another former Standard Oil Company, it is also one of the world’s largest oil companies. Exxon Mobil ranked first in profits ($19.3 billion) and market value ($314 billion) and second in revenues ($284.7 billion) in 2009.¹⁵⁴

• Hess: Much smaller than Chevron and Exxon Mobil, it is still a large multinational oil corporation, one with close ties, current and historical, to the CFR. The company’s current (2011) chair and CEO, John B. Hess is a member of the CFR as are several other directors of the company.

• PepsiCo, Inc.: This is an integrated multinational food and beverage corporation, with interests in the manufacture, marketing, and distribution of snack foods, beverages and other products. It employed 274,000 people in 2013, and was the largest food and beverage company in North America measured by net revenue.

• McKinsey & Company, Inc.: This company has been called “the world’s most prestigious consultancy” by the Financial Times.¹⁵⁵ It is also a large organization, with over 1,200 partners and 9,000 consultants worldwide. It provides what is likely the most expensive advice that top corporate and government clients can buy. The 3,200 clients that it has reportedly served during the five years ending in 2011 included ninety of the top 100 companies worldwide. Its estimated revenues are about $7 billion a year. McKinsey also maintains a secretive and low-profile family of hedge funds and private equity firms collectively known as the “McKinsey Investment Office (MIO Partners)” for its own exclusive use, with over $5 billion under management. McKinsey received unwelcome attention in recent years due to the insider trading trial and conviction of hedge fund boss Raj Rajaratnam. Two McKinsey partners, one of them, Anil Kumar, an individual member of CFR, were accused of passing confidential insider information to Rajaratnam. Kumar plead guilty to the charge.¹⁵⁶

CFR Annual Reports point out that the corporate program “helps distinguish the Council from other think tanks…. Corporate members are an integral part of the Council.”¹⁵⁷ With about 175 (depending upon the year) corporations and their leaders involved, this represents a significant source of income for the CFR and “an extraordinary reservoir of hands-on experience in many of the countries and with many of the issues that the Council is studying.”¹⁵⁸ These issues centered around how to expand profit-making opportunities for U.S. corporations abroad, sometimes by working to weaken or overthrow governments that were standing in the way of the expansion of corporate capital.

During recent years, the CFR corporate program has organized over a hundred events each year. The most important is the annual corporate conference. Such conferences, starring big-name speakers, typically explore issues at the intersection of international economics and foreign policy.¹⁵⁹ For example, Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, long active in the Council, spoke at the second annual corporate program conference in 2005.¹⁶⁰ The largest category of corporate members were those with an especially keen interest in what Greenspan had to say. Non-bank financial institutions made up the biggest group of corporate members during this period, with over 30 percent of the total, and banks were another almost 11 percent, making finance capital the leading sector of the corporate program with 41 percent of all corporate members. Almost 25 percent were in services, media, telecommunications, and technology and 22 percent were industrial, energy, and power corporations.¹⁶¹ In 2010 the corporate membership program held 300 events, while over 500 events were held for the larger membership.¹⁶² How the Council helps its corporate members is illustrated by one of the CFR’s responses to the 2011 “Arab Spring,” when the corporate membership program had three conference calls. These were geared to corporate executives to help them assess current geopolitical business risks and opportunities in the Middle East and possible effects of the “turmoil” on international energy markets.¹⁶³

Outreach beyond the Council’s Membership

In the 2008 Annual Report, President Haass discussed a new aspect of the CFR’s work. For much of its history, the Council had concentrated on being a resource for its members—regular, term, and corporate—along with influencing powerful “elites,” especially top government decision makers and mainstream media. In recent years this agenda had been expanded to reach beyond these constituencies to new ones at least partly outside the CFR’s membership in the “broader public”: college administrators, professors, students, state and local officials, the religious community, and non-governmental officials. As usual when it comes to the Council’s work, this new outreach program was robust, with an e-newsletter called Educator’s Bulletin reaching 11,000 subscribers, plus conference calls, academic modules for professors based on CFR publications, and regular communication with about 5,000 state and local leaders as well as about 1,000 religious leaders.¹⁶⁴ By 2012 this program had “greatly expanded its work in the academic community…. The Academic Initiative connects educators and students at the college and graduate levels with CFR’s research and analysis.”¹⁶⁵ In 2014 the Council’s president proposed a new focus including reaching “advanced high school” students.¹⁶⁶ A “Higher Education Working Group” of college, university, and community college presidents and “select foundation heads” also convenes regularly for briefings on the global economy, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.¹⁶⁷ An “Educator’s Workshop” was also first convened in 2012 “as a forum for academics to share ideas and to solicit feedback on the utility of our materials for the classroom.”¹⁶⁸ Also a part of this continuing effort to go beyond traditional foreign policy circles was the continuing outreach to the religious community; in 2012 the Council organized its fifth annual “Religion and Foreign Policy Summer Workshop,” with over 100 participants from sixteen different religious traditions.¹⁶⁹

STUDIES: THE COUNCIL’S THINK TANK, 1976–2014

The 1978 CFR Annual Report described four purposes of the Council on Foreign Relations. First, break “new ground” in the consideration of international issues. Second, “help shape American foreign policy.” Third, “provide continuing leadership for the conduct of our foreign relations.” Fourth, inform and stimulate the CFR membership “as well as reach a wider audience.”¹⁷⁰

The serious intellectual work needed to achieve these goals is carried out in the Council’s Studies Program, its “think tank.” The CFR’s long-term approach to shaping policy and building consensus is illustrated by the following description of the Studies Program: “The Council examines the key issues in U.S. foreign policy today, considers what challenges the United States will confront in the next five to ten years, and debates policy options.”¹⁷¹ The board of directors and staff decides the agenda or “policy options” to be considered. In 1996 CFR director Robert D. Hormats, later a top State Department official in the Obama administration, but then vice chair of Goldman Sachs International, discussed the think tank and the role of the Council’s professional staff, most of whom are called “Fellows”:

Among the Council’s most important strengths are its membership and the Studies Program. The two interact with one another. Through the Studies Program, the Council generates new ideas about foreign policy for its membership and the broader public. In a way, it is the spark plug for the Council. Now the Studies Program is providing fresh insights into a whole new set of issues, and many of the fellows are at the forefront of this country’s intellectual probing as the issues change and new challenges arise.¹⁷²

That same year another CFR director, Robert B. Zoellick, later head of the World Bank, but then with Fannie Mae, stated: “A key goal at the Council has been to build up a Studies Program that is on the cutting edge of foreign policy thinking. The purpose is to draw ideas from the studies that will be the foundation for outreach to shape intellectual and public consideration of these topics.”¹⁷³

The Studies Program is made up of CFR employees who anchor the think tank. In 2013 there were 123 such employees: 14 administrative staff members headed by Senior Vice President and Director of Studies James M. Lindsay; 65 Fellows; and 44 members of the research and program staff, most of whom have the title “Research Associate.”¹⁷⁴ Working both independently and organized into study groups, they operate under the guidance of the Committee on Studies of the Council’s board of directors. This committee must review and approve all CFR publications, generally written by Council Fellows, other employees, or members.¹⁷⁵ As of the mid-1970s there were three main types of CFR study groups. The first is the Author’s Study Group in which a Fellow writing a Council book works together with other Fellows to complete the publication. The second is the Survey Discussion Group that produces varied written products, such as articles, monographs, or opinion pieces. And finally, the Current Issues Review Group, a less formal type of group, meets irregularly as required by conditions.¹⁷⁶

The key programmatic challenge faced by the Council during the 1970s was what its leaders called the “problem of outreach,” that is, how to successfully market the CFR’s work product and in this way spread its ideology, reaching “wider audiences” to “make a broad impact.”¹⁷⁷ This was partly solved by preparing numerous radio programs for National Public Radio, reaching an audience “approaching one million” that year.¹⁷⁸ This represented a “significant extension of the Council’s general program” and helped the CFR effectively inject “… its intellectual work product into the body politic of the nation.”¹⁷⁹ By 1977 there were CFR programs on all 196 NPR stations with an estimated three million listeners.¹⁸⁰

The Council’s magazine Foreign Affairs (FA), founded in 1922, is another venue in which the organization’s work product appears. It “has been the leading forum for serious discussion of American foreign policy and global affairs.”¹⁸¹ Foreign Affairs has frequently been called the “preeminent” or “premier publication in the field.” Time has called it “the most influential periodical in print,” and it own website, ForeignAffairs.com, states that its goal is “to guide American public opinion.” It has a paid circulation of over 150,000 and is distributed throughout the world.¹⁸² This readership includes the rich and powerful globally, with subscribers having an average household net worth of $1.4 million. As the Foreign Affairs website expressed it:

For brands seeking to command the respect of today’s Influential Elite, there is no media like Foreign Affairs. We are required reading in Congress, at G-8 Summits, in the C-suites of Fortune 500 companies, and at Davos. Our influence on policy can be seen in Congress and the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, and ministries and boardrooms around the world. Our articles are written by today’s most respected thinkers and most influential leaders. Foreign Affairs is the fuel that fires think tanks, a catalyst for economic change, and the intellectual capital that inspires businesses worldwide. For advertisers, we provide an unrivaled opportunity to have the undivided attention of the world’s most influential minds in business and politics.¹⁸³

The magazine’s board of advisers is made up of CFR members who constitute a committee of the board of directors, which in turn appoint the editor, who in 2014 was Council member Gideon Rose. A substantial percentage of the authors who appear in FA are CFR members, staff, or Fellows, but there are also many authors who are not. It is a key place where the foreign policy ideas of the Council community are floated. In 1994 CFR president Gelb described one of the key roles of Foreign Affairs as “setting the agenda for policy debates.”¹⁸⁴ Articles by CFR people sometimes get the attention of government officials in Washington, resulting in a call to government service. Such was the case with Admiral Stansfield Turner’s article on the naval balance in the January 1977 issue. The article reportedly resulted in Turner being tapped for director of the CIA.¹⁸⁵ In 2000, FA was ranked by an independent survey as the “most influential of all print media among government decision makers.”¹⁸⁶ By 2014 FA was expanding into social media and was reported to have 900,000 Facebook fans, as well as 300,000 Twitter followers and its own iPad app.¹⁸⁷

In terms of actual content, the work of the Studies Program during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s was especially focused on economics, “both directly and as components of relations with our allies, the developing world and the East.”¹⁸⁸ Key programs included a “Soviet Project” and a two-year “Future of Canada and the U.S. Interest” project that began in 1980 and was at least one origin point of the North American Free Trade Agreement that was signed by a former CFR director, President George H. W. Bush, in late 1992.¹⁸⁹ NAFTA’s goal and practice was to open up Canada and Mexico to neoliberalism and U.S. corporate economic penetration. As CFR chair Peterson stated in 1989, since the world was headed into a period characterized by “sea changes,” the Council needed to be in the forefront, playing a “leadership role”:

Whatever we may believe the new foreign policy agenda to be, it is clear they are likely to be strikingly different from much of the post–World War period. And the Board of Directors and the staff of the Council have decided that this institution should play a leadership role in defining these new foreign policy agenda, the root causes of these profound forces. The end product of this effort might well be to help define new and broader meanings to the concept of the national interest. Quite beyond difficult and substantive policy questions that must be asked, equally demanding challenges must be faced in the process of making foreign policy.¹⁹⁰

Peterson was correct—the 1990s turned out to be a transformational period both for the world and the CFR. By the mid-1990s the Studies Program had evolved into a much different set of study groups than had existed two decades earlier. In 1997–98 there were five organizational forms/study groups only one of which had existed in 1976. Authors’ Study Groups were carried over from earlier years; this form was employed to help CFR Fellows and Adjuncts write books, scholarly monographs, and articles through joint research, dialogue, and critique. The way this usually worked was to have the Fellow or adjunct write an outline or book chapter, distribute it, then use these written materials as the basis for discussion and possible revision.¹⁹¹ By 1994 Independent Task Forces (ITFs) were initiated to study and discuss a key foreign policy issue, reach consensus, then issue a report with recommendations to policymakers and the attentive public. CFR members typically dominate a given ITF. These study groups are called “independent” because, although the Council chooses the topic and those involved, each group can, in theory, come to whatever conclusions it wants, and thus are supposedly “independent” of the CFR, which “takes no institutional position on matters of policy.”¹⁹² This argument fails to convince, however, since, as we will see in detail in subsequent chapters, members of the capitalist class dominate the CFR, and members of this class have definite interests and policy positions. The Council also decides to admit certain members who have clear interests and perspectives, excluding others, and decides what topics will be studied, and the composition of the groups that will complete these studies. Its leadership decides to publish some works with definite policy positions, to publicize/promote these works, and to communicate to policymakers and larger publics certain views about foreign policy and economic, political, educational, and cultural matters. The excluded voices include serious leading world-class intellectuals (Noam Chomsky to name just one) who recognize that capitalism is playing a profoundly negative role in the world and the class that owns the capital is conducting destructive wars, exploiting billions of people, as well as impacting and destroying the ecologies upon which all life on earth depends.

The formation of the ITFs was clearly undertaken to get around the traditional Council prohibition on formally taking specific policy positions, allowing the CFR to become even more explicit about taking policy positions. In the 2001 Annual Report chairman Peterson said:

About eight years ago, Board Vice Chairman Hank Greenberg, Council President Les Gelb, the other Board members, and I faced a challenge. How could the Council increase its impact on the real world, which by its nature involves making specific policy recommendations, without violating the Council’s tradition of not taking institutional positions on policy matters?… One solution: The Council would periodically create and convene independent task forces on the top foreign policy issues of the day. Each independent task force, comprising current and former policymakers, academics, and leaders from the private sector … would meet over the course of several months to forge policy proposals that would help resolve or manage international problems on a nonpartisan basis. Today, the real-world impact of the independent task forces has exceeded our most fervent hopes.¹⁹³

For the CFR leaders and members involved, the ITF process requires high-level, but basically status quo intellectual work on key policy issues. In 1997, Gideon Rose, first a Council Fellow and now a CFR member and editor of Foreign Affairs, wrote about the goals and process of ITFs:

In Washington, the discussion of policy questions is so heavily politicized and so generally superficial that serious intellectual analysis is sorely lacking. In the academy, attention to policy matters is considered evidence of superficiality or excess practicality, so there you don’t often get a chance to marry rigorous analysis and policy relevance. Task forces provide a way to bring several worlds together—representatives of the political world, the academic world, the think-tank world, the business world, the NGO world, the armed services, the diplomatic corps—and pool all their talents and expertise. That’s not an experience you can get in many other places, and I think it’s one of the best things the Council can do for its members and for society at large. The objective is to try to shape the discussion that takes place at the highest levels, both inside government and out. These projects can help put issues on the agenda that might not have been there before, and they can help generate potential solutions and get policymakers to consider them.¹⁹⁴

A few examples of the successful work of the Independent Task Forces include a 1994 ITF on China and Most Favored Nation chaired by former secretaries of state Henry A. Kissinger and Cyrus R. Vance. They communicated their policy recommendations directly to President Clinton in a “timely special letter.”¹⁹⁵ The 1997 ITF chaired by Robert D. Blackwill on U.S.-Russian Relations reportedly “contributed toward the forging of a consensus on the steps that the Clinton administration took at Helsinki.”¹⁹⁶ According to CFR chair Peterson, the ITF began to have an even greater “real-world impact,” exceeding “our most fervent hopes,” in 2000–2001. During a Council-sponsored trip to Cuba,

every senior Cuban official we met cited proposals in the two reports of the Council-sponsored Independent Task Force on Cuba. Not that the Cubans were positive…. In our meetings, President Fidel Castro and other top Cuban officials pulled no punches in confronting our group with their objections to many of the task force’s recommendations. But the point of the task force’s work was never for Havana to like it. The object was to prompt new thinking … the task force did just that.¹⁹⁷

Peterson also noted an ITF that recommended engagement with North Korea, a policy adopted by both President Clinton and Bush II.¹⁹⁸ An ITF on Brazil “had resonance of major proportions.”¹⁹⁹ Among its recommendations was that the United States use Brazil as a focal point for its policy on South America. Brazil’s foreign minister immediately requested a meeting at CFR headquarters with the task force members, and when the president of Brazil later visited Washington, the ITF “findings were a focus of his trip.”²⁰⁰ At the request of President Clinton and his Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin (both CFR members), an ITF on global financial institutions and financial crisis was formed. Its recommendations were the subject of much debate and “mostly praise.” Peterson crowed: “Any time the most senior officials of the United States suggest we form an independent task force to help them solve a problem, that’s a sign that our task forces—like the Council itself—are making a genuine difference.”²⁰¹ In the Cuban and Brazilian examples, it is telling to note that the involved foreign leaders immediately, and correctly, assumed that it was the CFR itself that was responsible for the recommendations of the “independent” task force and engaged directly with CFR leaders. Since the CFR leaders did nothing to counter this assumption, it is clear that the Council’s supposed institutional neutrality is an illusion.

Another type of study group is the Council Policy Initiative, used when there are important but highly controversial issues about which it is unlikely a consensus can be reached. Clashing views are outlined as a summary of the choices available to the national leadership, then posted on the CFR website and debated in CFR circles around the country.²⁰² There are also Roundtables, informal discussion groups mainly composed of CFR members, led by a Council Fellow, to help members keep abreast of important subjects and provide ideas and information for Fellows to write short articles, such as op-ed pieces.²⁰³ Finally, Council Fellows organize conferences that focus on a broad political or economic issue discussed over a one- or two-day time frame.²⁰⁴

During the years at the turn of the twenty-first century two more innovations in CFR studies practice took place. The first was the establishment of a “Center for Preventive Action.” The idea was to recommend U.S. government actions that might prevent violent conflicts from even getting started, thereby limiting the need for further intervention. President Gelb pointed out that task forces focusing on specific places in the world would be “the means for developing ideas and selling the prevention plans to the proper authorities.”²⁰⁵

The second new initiative can be traced to CFR vice chair Maurice Greenberg’s belief that there was a “new centrality and power of economics in world affairs.”²⁰⁶ Key nations like China, Russia, Germany, and Japan were all concentrating on economic growth and Greenberg felt that the United States should make a similar transition. Following Greenberg’s lobbying, the Council formally launched the “Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies” in early 2002 with Vice President Richard B. Cheney as keynote speaker.²⁰⁷ CFR president Gelb had stated in 2001 that the “geoeconomist” was the “next generation of foreign policy expert” who could link the study of economy and finance to traditional strategic issues in national security, country and regional affairs, science and technology, drugs, environmental issues, and health.²⁰⁸ Geopolitical and geoeconomic thinking had, in truth, long been at the core of CFR and U.S. government thinking about foreign policy. The CFR’s War-Peace Studies program of 1939–45 had a geoeconomic as well as a geopolitical focus, as did the CFR’s 1980s Project during the mid- and late 1970s. Part II of this book will explore in depth this worldview that has long been a key aspect of Council thinking and the formulation and execution of U.S. foreign policy.

By 2005 the number of studies program staff (17) working at the Center for Geoeconomic Studies was second only to the number of staff at Foreign Affairs magazine (18).²⁰⁹ The numbers of staff focusing on other aspects of U.S. foreign policy were all much fewer during that year: Asia 11; Middle East 10; Council Meetings 9; Global Health and Environment, Science, and Technology 9; Europe 8; Washington Program 7; U.S. Foreign Policy 7; Director of Studies Office 7; National Security 5; Center for Preventative Action 3; Africa 2; Latin America 2.²¹⁰

These organizational changes at the Council were framed by dramatic events that put foreign policy front and center in the political and economic life of the United States. Within a week of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Gelb formed an Independent Task Force on terrorism, consisting of fifty individuals with longtime leaders Carla A. Hills and Richard Holbrooke as co-chairs. The group, labeled the “centerpiece of the Council’s work” during 2001–2002, met twenty times to define, debate, and discuss the key issues, then wrote a report that was submitted to members of the Bush administration.²¹¹ The CFR’s Annual Report for 2002 claimed a central role for the organization during this period: “This year, perhaps more than ever, the Council’s independent task forces have played an important role in shaping foreign policy. Decision makers in government look to the Council’s task forces … to help guide their decisions.”²¹²

The CFR’s role in setting the framework for policy decisions leading to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was also substantial. CFR Fellow and Director of National Security Studies Kenneth Pollack took a leading role, advocating war to force regime change in Baghdad when he wrote what chairman Peterson called a “trailblazing” article in Foreign Affairs in early 2002 and a CFR book that same year called Gathering Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.²¹³ The Council’s key role in the decision to go to war and the implementation of U.S. policy in occupied Iraq will be the subject of detailed study in Part II of this book.

Gelb retired as CFR president in 2003, succeeded by Richard N. Haass. In the 2003 Annual Report, chairman Peterson paid tribute to Gelb, pointing out that during his decade-long tenure, CFR programs sharply expanded, with the overall number of full CFR Fellows jumping from ten to seventy, and the Washington program’s Fellows going from zero to twenty-three. Study seminars in nine key cities went from zero to over fifty a year.²¹⁴ Independent Task Force reports were “having more impact than ever.”²¹⁵ In 2003 ITFs were studying Iraq, homeland security, public diplomacy, terrorist financing, and other topics, resulting in over a thousand news stories by nearly every major newspaper and news organization in the United States. New government policies followed.²¹⁶

The change in CFR’s presidents was to some extent connected with the developing situation of the United States in its war and occupation of Iraq. In June 2003, Richard Haass left his position as director of policy planning at the State Department to become CFR president. The New York Times stated that unidentified “friends of Mr. Haass” believe that he, as a close adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell, was frustrated about losing some Washington policy battles. But Haass told the Times that he was not leaving out of discouragement; rather it was because he was offered the important opportunity to lead the Council.²¹⁷ A few months later, however, the Times quoted Haass as being worried about translating U.S. power into “lasting influence…. It would be tragic or worse if history looked back at this period and said we did not use our power wisely.”²¹⁸ The Times portrayed Haass as an “enthusiastic devotee” of Henry A. Kissinger, and as a “beleaguered multilateralist” within the unilateralist-oriented Bush administration, and felt out of place by the late spring of 2003, and suggested that this is one reason he resigned from his State Department position.²¹⁹

By 2004, there was a somewhat changed mood in the CFR and within the larger U.S. capitalist class. Some movement was under way from a world hegemonic (and unilateralist) approach to foreign policy toward a more cautious balance of power perspective. CFR leaders were worried about the possible weakening of the NATO alliance system, because of growing strains over how to deal with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and an unstable Middle East. As a result, an ITF on “Transatlantic Relations” was organized, headed by Henry A. Kissinger and Lawrence H. Summers. The stated purpose was to

revitalize the Atlantic alliance by forging new “rules of the road” governing the use of force, adapting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to meet today’s threats coming from outside Europe, and launching a major initiative to bring about political and economic reform in the greater Middle East. The Task Force, which included former senior government officials, business leaders, and policy experts from both sides of the Atlantic, generated significant media attention on the United States and Europe. In addition to briefings in the United States, Task Force members took their report on the road, holding meetings and press conferences in London, Paris, Brussels, and Rome.²²⁰

During this period, the CFR also conducted studies on the issue of global warming, one product being a Council Policy Initiative in the form of a book by CFR Fellow David G. Victor. Meant to foster dialogue on a critical issue rather than develop policy consensus, Victor’s book, Climate Change: Debating America’s Policy Options, appeared in 2004.²²¹ It offered three weak policy options. The CFR’s overall policy on this important topic as well as Victor’s book will be returned to in chapter 8 of this book.

By 2005, the tenth anniversary of the CFR’s Independent Task Force program, over fifty reports had been completed. The 2005 Annual Report summed up this aspect of the Council’s work as follows:

As Task Forces are intended to help shape the public debate on critical foreign policy issues, the Council mobilizes its resources to maximize the impact of Task Force reports, both at the time of initial release and as developments warrant. In addition to media outreach, the Council supports the efforts of Task Force chairs and members to reach influential practitioners in the executive branch, in Congress, and beyond.²²²

Task force reports from the 2004–2005 period that appear to have had an important lasting influence include one on “Iran: Time for a New Approach” headed up by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert M. Gates, and another “In Support of Arab Democracy: Why and How” co-chaired by Vin Weber and Madeleine K. Albright.²²³

The year 2005 also saw the first discussion of a new type of CFR product, called a Council Special Report (CSR). Introduced in 2004, CSRs are concise policy studies that aim at contributing to an emerging debate or a rapid response to a developing crisis. They are produced in consultation with an advisory committee of experts chosen by CFR leaders and are published by the Council.²²⁴

After the Council’s Studies Program was renamed the “David Rockefeller Studies Program” in 2007, it was focused on what the CFR considered to be the four “most significant” foreign policy issues facing the United States in the twenty-first century: conflict in the Middle East; rising powers in Asia (that is, China and India); globalization; and the formulation of U.S. foreign policy.²²⁵ Council Fellows, representing what CFR leaders called the nation’s “preeminent foreign policy organization,” were busy briefing government officials—263 separate briefings were given during the 2006–2007 fiscal year, for example.²²⁶ These briefings included eight given to many of the aspiring 2008 presidential candidates, including Barack Obama, Joseph Biden, Hillary R. Clinton, and John S. McCain.²²⁷

The 2008–2011 years have been characterized by a gradual increase in Fellows briefings to U.S. and foreign government officials: 333 in 2009, 348 in 2010, and 438 in 2011.²²⁸ At the same time, media mentions of the CFR have skyrocketed from only about a thousand in 2003 to over 25,000 in 2008 and over 37,000 in 2010.²²⁹ A small section of these were articles and op-eds written by CFR Fellows: 350 in 2008, over 500 in 2010, and 570 in 2011.²³⁰ At the same time the Council’s website, CFR.org, was expanding rapidly, in 2011 reaching an average of over 1.2 million page views and 450,000 unique visitors each month.²³¹ The Studies Program also added a new publication series, Policy Innovation Memoranda, which targets critical areas where the Council believes new thinking is needed.²³²

The year 2011 also saw a major new CFR program, the Renewing America initiative, a prime example of “mission creep,” that is, the recent tendency for the Council to expand its focus of activity beyond foreign policy to the domestic realm. The CFR leadership believes that this new initiative is needed because the underpinnings of U.S. global power are weakening as unsolved problems grow within the country. The first problems to be examined as part of this program were trade policy and education reform, with ITF reports from two different study groups, one led by Thomas A. Daschle and Andrew H. Card, and another led by Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein.²³³ Other ITF reports were on “Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations,” which endorsed the Brazilian bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and “U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership,” which encouraged a new and closer relationship between the leaders of these two nations.²³⁴ In 2012 the Council published an ebook, Iran: The Nuclear Challenge, edited by Henry A. Kissinger and CFR Senior Fellow Robert D. Blackwill. This volume “maps objectives, tools and strategies for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program…. The volume aims to provide clarity on policy choices.”²³⁵ Reflecting the gradual globalizing of the Council’s work, a U.S.-India Joint Study Group was also formed in 2012, co-sponsored by the CFR and Aspen Institute India. Intellectual, business, and policy leaders from both nations participated in this study group.²³⁶

In the spring of 2012 the Council published a list of its think tank scholars, its CFR Experts Guide, a list of seventy-four Fellows and other experts working at the CFR who produce a key part of the intellectual output of the organization, including books, reports, articles, and op-ed pieces.²³⁷ The experts are also active in giving briefings and media interviews. At least twenty-three of the seventy-four have been or are university professors, ten have been or are journalists, and six are or have been business executives.²³⁸ The index covering the expertise of this group, together with their biographies, is instructive, indicating the current regional and issue foci of the Council. Geopolitical economics, a concentration on the most militarily powerful and resource-rich (especially oil) areas and nations, is a clear theme in terms of the interests and expertise of the seventy-four. Each scholar typically has a number of issues and areas of expertise, so the numbers below add up to much more than seventy-four. By region, the number of these Fellows and other experts is as follows, with the nations most commonly focused on in parentheses:

• Asia, 28 (India, Afghanistan, China)

• Middle East, 23 (Iran, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia)

• Europe/Russia, 16 (Russian Federation)

• Americas, 15 (United States, Mexico, Colombia)

• Africa, 12 (Nigeria, Algeria, Tunisia)

• Polar Regions/Antarctica, 1

By issue, the most common areas of expertise for these scholars are as follows:

• U.S. Strategy and Politics, 24

• Economics, 18

• National Security/Defense, 18

• Business and Foreign Policy, 16

• Defense/Homeland Security, 16

• Economic Development, 15

• Public Diplomacy, 14

• Defense Strategy, 14

• Terrorism, 14

• Trade, 13

• Democracy and Human Rights, 13

• Media and Foreign Policy, 13

A large majority of these seventy-four are “in-and-outers,” experts who have spent significant time in the U.S. government. The largest group served in the State Department (20), followed by the National Security Council (16), the Defense Department or as a higher officer in the Armed Services (14), and in economic institutions such as the Treasury Department, the Fed, World Bank, Trade Representative’s Office, etc. (8).

Output of the Studies Program

The CFR’s Studies Program has resulted in a truly prodigious output of publications aimed at influencing private and public policy agendas on a wide range of issues at home and worldwide. Statistics compiled from the Council’s website (CFR.org) offer a glimpse of this output. A total of 185 full-length books came out of the Council’s work during the 1987 to 2014 period alone. There were 1,796 academic and journal articles published by CFR scholars during the 1993 to 2014 years and 4,457 op-ed pieces during the 1998 to 2014 years. Since Independent Task Forces were first established in 1995, seventy-six of them had completed reports by 2013. There have been sixty-six Council Special Reports (2004–2013); 1,311 Analysis Briefs (2006–2013); 1,552 interviews (2001-2013); 198 cases of testimony before Congress (1998–2013); 597 podcasts (2006–2013); 201 videos (2010–2013); eighty-three Expert Roundup reports as well as smaller numbers of Policy Innovation Memoranda (30) and Contingency Planning Memoranda (19). These figures alone add up to over 10,000 products during the years mentioned, many more if a longer period is included.

MEETINGS: THE CONTINUOUS CAPITALIST-CLASS CONFERENCE ON FOREIGN POLICY

The fourth major fundamental feature of the Council is its meetings program, which amounts to a continuous conference starring global political, economic, and intellectual leaders. Council members are invited to attend a session with an important figure, introduced by a Council “presider.” The photos and lists of meeting participants in the Council’s Annual Reports over the years are impressive. To name only a few meetings among many over the years since 1976: David Rockefeller, presider, hosted on different occasions former President Carter, President Salinas of Mexico, King Juan Carlos of Spain, President Anwar el Sadat of Egypt, President Sarney of Brazil, Jessie Jackson, and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Cyrus Vance, presider, hosted China’s foreign minister and President Mubarak of Egypt. Henry Kissinger, presider, hosted the King of Morocco, Secretary of State Albright, and President Jiang of China. Peter Peterson, presider, hosted former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve, Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan, former president William J. Clinton, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and Vice President Richard Cheney.²³⁹

There are also informal, often unreported meetings between CFR leaders and foreign officials, reflecting the knowledge among foreign leaders that the Council represents the key capitalist-class power wielders behind the U.S. government. Only occasionally does information get published about such encounters. One such instance was when CFR president Haass wrote in the Financial Times about his September 2013 discussions with Iran’s new leadership, which had not yet met with President Obama: “In my two meetings with Mr. Rouhani and his foreign minister, I heard flexibility on the possibility of giving up uranium already enriched to higher levels—but not going back to the day when Iran had only a small number of centrifuges. So it is far from clear that what will be enough for Iran in the way of nuclear capacity will not be too much for Israel or the U.S.”²⁴⁰ Here is a case where the president of the CFR had two meetings with Iran’s new president, while the president of the United States was limited to one telephone call.

In recent years the Council has organized almost a thousand meetings of different types each year, mainly in New York and Washington, but also in other large U.S. cities.²⁴¹ The meetings program amounts to an organized dialogue mainly within the United States and world capitalist class, connecting the powerful but also the expert from many nations. It is therefore also a dialogue that includes selected professionals, as well as foreign political leaders whose cooperation is viewed as desirable. The meetings consist of both formal presentations from the powerful or knowing and informal discussions, all part of the ongoing attempt to assure ideological hegemony by setting policy agendas and frameworks, influencing governmental actions at home and abroad and developing ideas that will be put forward in books, articles, or CFR reports.

The formal meetings are touted in CFR’s Annual Reports as venues where Council members can interact and exchange ideas with world leaders, top U.S. policymakers, and opinion-shapers. This process is, in a sense, dialectical; ideas are presented, those present react to these ideas with either a critique or clarifying questions and propose alternatives leading toward a policy synthesis.

The informal meetings that take place between CFR leaders, fellows, and members on the one hand and foreign leaders on the other also have the deeper purpose of assessing personalities, co-opting leaders, and developing relationships. There is usually a gross power imbalance when a leader of a relatively small and weak nation travels to meet the leaders of what is the most powerful nation the world has ever known. A subtle type of informal negotiation often ensues in which access to the weaker nation’s people and resources are exchanged for current or future political-economic-military support. This process encourages corruption: the foreign leader is pressured to adopt the interests and ideology of the more powerful nation and sell out his or her nation’s sovereignty and national interests. This ongoing process in the context of corporate globalization and the empire of neoliberal geopolitics has resulted in the serious loss of sovereignty for numerous nations, and personal tragedies for uncounted millions of people.

The Council’s meetings program has held thousands of meetings since 1976, too many to cover adequately here. The essence of the meetings program will be summarized through a brief review of meetings during four different fiscal years, each ten years apart. These years will be 1975–76, 1985–86, 1995–96, and 2005–2006. In addition, three of the Council’s leadership trips to foreign countries will be covered to add further depth to our understanding of the CFR meetings program.

The 1975–1976 Meetings

The over a hundred meetings in the 1975–76 fiscal year all took place in New York City.²⁴² One of the highlights of that year was CIA head George H. W. Bush speaking on China. Soon chosen as a CFR director, in a little over a decade Bush would be elected U.S. president. Another high point was UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim who discussed the UN’s role in the Middle East. Other important speakers included Paul A. Volcker, soon to take over as Federal Reserve chair, speaking on the international monetary system; Margaret Thatcher, future prime minister of Britain, on conservatism; King Juan Carlos I on Spain; future president of France François Mitterrand on his nation’s foreign policy, and Italian industrialist Giovanni Agnelli on Western Europe.²⁴³

The 1985–1986 Meetings

The 1985–86 meetings program was also centered in New York City, but a few of the approximately 130 meetings were held in Washington and Los Angeles, illustrating the beginning of a long-lasting trend of expanding meetings to locations outside of New York.²⁴⁴ Planning for the fiscal year’s meetings began, as usual, in the spring, “assessing the areas and persons we hoped to include in a substantive, provocative and well-balanced program.”²⁴⁵ Council organizers also pointed out that an invitation to the CFR to discuss major issues in no way represented an endorsement of a person or a position, only a recognition that the individual represented a significant aspect of a given debate.²⁴⁶

This year saw a large spike in meetings on Africa, the result of the growing crisis in Southern Africa, as liberation movements—the African National Congress in South Africa and the Southwest African People’s Organization (SWAPO) in Namibia—grew in strength in their fight to overthrow the oppressive apartheid regime. Closely connected with these struggles was the war in Angola, where efforts of Cuban military volunteers to protect the Angolan government against South African aggression had been successful. Many of the key players in this appeared at CFR meetings to discuss the situation, and twelve of the fifteen Africa meetings that year focused on what the CFR called the “critical situation in Southern Africa.”²⁴⁷ Among those who spoke to and interacted with Council leaders and members were President Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, the Secretary-General of SWAPO, and Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the CIA supported National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), then engaged in a civil war to overthrow the Angloan government. The 1986 Annual Report summed up the other meetings/discussions on Southern Africa as follows:

We heard from Olusegun Obasanjo, former President of Nigeria and co-chairman of the Commonwealth Group of Eminent Persons which was formed to seek a non-violent solution to the situation in South Africa; from Samora Moises Machel, President of Mozambique, on the impact of the conditions in South Africa on the surrounding states; and from South African leaders in business, religion, education and politics.²⁴⁸

One key Council concern was to help manage a transition of power to the majority in South Africa that would preserve and even enhance U.S. and Western capitalist interests, an aim that was successfully achieved over the next decade.

The 1995–1996 Meetings

CFR meetings on October 23, 1995, illustrated the organization’s impressive convening power: “The Harold Pratt House rang with many different voices all at once. On one single fall day, the Council hosted Cuban President Fidel Castro Ruz, PLO leader Yasser Arafat, Uzbekistani President Islam Karimov, and Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel.”²⁴⁹

By this point in time, the CFR’s meetings program had expanded to include three separate elements: the New York program, still the largest and most important; the corporate meetings program; and a smaller national meetings program.

The major foci of the New York meetings during 1995–96 were twenty-four sessions on Europe/Russia. The high number of meetings was due to the need to focus on and take advantage of the transition to neoliberal “free market” capitalism going on in Eastern Europe and the nations of the former USSR. Highlights of the Europe/Russia meetings program included presentations by the president of Albania, the former head of the European Commission, the prime minister of Greece, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hungary, the former Economics Minister of Germany, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs for Russia, the former USSR ambassador to the United States, representatives to the United Nations from Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Bosnia Herzegovina, and Russian writer and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

The 2005–2006 Meetings

By 2005 the Council had altered the format of its Annual Report to only sum up the meetings and other CFR programs, not cover them in detail. The New York meetings program held over 130 events with a “strong focus on Iraq and other developments in the Middle East, U.S. intelligence, and the war on terrorism.”²⁵⁰ The CFR’s own summary of the key features of the year’s New York meetings was as follows:

Fifteen heads of state and chief ministers offered Council members their unique perspectives on world events. Mexican President Vicente Fox presented his views on Mexico’s economy and democracy. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan assessed the recent history and current state of U.S.-Turkey relations. Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo discussed corruption and other challenges facing his country; and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero focused on Spain’s commitment to fighting terrorism. Insights from the Middle East were provided by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, who made the case for fighting extremism, and Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabir al-Thani, who outlined his view of a strategic partnership with the United States ….

Council members also had the opportunity to exchange ideas with numerous current or former U.S. government officials. Former president Jimmy Carter assessed obstacles and chances for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld outlined the challenges for U.S. forces in today’s media age, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales engaged members in a discussion about the war on terrorism, and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff reviewed his priorities for maritime, air, and land security. In addition, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte discussed challenges for U.S. intelligence policy.²⁵¹

The Washington meetings program of 2005–2006 focused on bringing CFR members and leaders together with representatives from the Bush administration, including President George W. Bush, who spoke to the Council on the progress of the war in Iraq; Congress (eleven sitting members of Congress addressed the CFR, including Senator Barack Obama), business leaders, and discussions with ambassadors from a number of nations.²⁵²

The National meetings program held 110 sessions across the country, events that included manuscript review seminars, roundtables, the National Book Club Series, a film series, and general meetings. In contrast to the New York program, only a few foreign leaders attended the National program events, which were mainly focused on presentations and discussions led by CFR leaders and experts, evidently aimed at educating and influencing CFR members and attentive publics in various cities.²⁵³

CFR CORPORATE PROGRAM AND ITS FOREIGN TRIPS

The CFR described the 2005–2006 Corporate Program as follows:

Executives of member companies and individual members in the private sector took part in over seventy events in New York and Washington, DC, including the C. Peter McColough Roundtable Series on International Economics, the McKinsey Executive Roundtable Series on International Economics, the Corporate Program Energy Roundtable, the China Roundtable, and the World Economic Update Series. Featured speakers included four past chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet, and Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal.

A highlight of this past year was the Council’s second annual Corporate Conference held March 9–10 in New York City. The conference explored the economic and political vulnerabilities in the global system through sessions on global energy supply, corporate governance and social responsibility, the economic threat of a flu pandemic, China, India, and Europe. The CEOs of Caterpillar, Electronic Data Systems, and Estée Lauder opened the conference with a lively panel discussion, and U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman served as the event’s keynote speaker…. The Corporate Program also offered over thirty interactive conference calls with business and foreign policy specialists, including fellows from the Council’s Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and other experts. Corporate members exchanged ideas with Council scholars in other settings as well, such as roundtable discussions, exclusive dinners and receptions, and private meetings.²⁵⁴

During the 1987–90 period, the CFR’s Annual Report offered specifics on three corporate program trips taken by Council leaders. Over the years there were many such trips, but most were merely referred to, not covered in detail, such as the CFR trip to Cuba mentioned in the 2001 Annual Report, when CFR chair Peterson only mentioned that the CFR group met with President Fidel Castro and other “top Cuban officials.”²⁵⁵

The 1987 Annual Report stated that the CFR’s corporate program sponsored a “Middle East Trip” from April 21 to April 29, 1987. Council participants were not listed, but these top leaders of the three nations visited held meetings with the CFR group:

• Jordan: King Hussein, prime minister Zeid Al-Rifai, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Taher Al-Masri

• Egypt: President Hosni Mubarak, Prime Minister Atef Sedki, Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmed Abdel Meguid

• Israel: Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin.²⁵⁶

The 1989 Annual Report offered even more details about a trip to Poland and Hungary from February 28 to March 8. This time the Council participants were also listed. David Rockefeller and Peter G. Peterson led the CFR delegation. Others on the trip included Washington Post owner Katharine Graham and John C. Whitehead, a close associate of the Rockefeller family, former Reagan State Department official and retired chair of Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; CFR president Peter Tarnoff; William and Linda Dietel, he a former president of Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Richard and Isabel Furlaud, he a president of Bristol-Myers Squibb and Chair Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of Rockefeller University. Several experts on Eastern Europe were also included, among them Columbia University political science professor Seweryn Bialer and CFR Senior Fellow Michael Mandelbaum.²⁵⁷ In sum, the group was a mix of CFR leaders, business executives closely connected to the Rockefeller family economic and cultural empire, and experts who could provide insights about the political, economic, and cultural situation in Poland and Hungary as these countries stood on the verge of big changes as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate.

On the Polish side, the CFR group met with fifteen of the nation’s leaders, including the president of the Council of State, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, as well as the prime minister; Foreign Minister; Minister for Foreign Economic Cooperation; Finance Minister; Minister for Industry; and the Secretary of the Polish United Workers Party who was also a member of the Politburo. Besides government officials, the CFR group also met with opposition figures, including Lech Walesa, chairman of Solidarity; Professor Andrzej Stelmachowski, the chief Solidarity negotiator with the Polish government; and Cardinal Glemp.²⁵⁸ Hungary’s representatives who met with the CFR trip participants included the prime minister; the Minister of State; the Minister of Trade; the head of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, and the Secretary of the Central Committee of that party.²⁵⁹

The 1990 Annual Report provides specifics about a February 2 to 10 trip to the Persian Gulf, listing the CFR participants as well as those they met with in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman. David Rockefeller and Peter G. Peterson again led the Council excursion, which was dominated by CEOs of leading firms. The business leaders who were part of the CFR group included James Burke of Johnson & Johnson; Albert Gordon of Kidder Peabody; Peter Haas of Levi Strauss; William A. Hewitt of Deere & Co.; William D. Mulholland of Bank of Montreal, Harris Bank, Upjohn and BMO Financial Group; John G. Smale of Procter & Gamble and General Motors; and billionaire Mortimer B. Zuckerman, real property and magazine owner and editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report. Also on the trip were four wives of the business leaders as well as Pamela Harriman, wife of W. Averill Harriman and a leading Democratic Party fundraiser whose career was soon to include appointment to the post of U.S. ambassador to France by President Clinton.

Besides Rockefeller and Peterson, CFR leaders on the trip included Richard W. Murphy, who after a thirty-four-year career as a Foreign Service officer, State Department official, and ambassador had become the CFR’s Senior Fellow on the Middle East. As well as being an expert on that region, Murphy spoke Arabic. Two other Council leaders, President Peter Tarnoff, and Executive Vice President John Temple Swing rounded out the group.

The 1990 Annual Report stated that “participants met with top political, economic and cultural leaders.”²⁶⁰ They included the top leaders of Oman as well as the following:

SAUDI ARABIA

• King Fahd bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud

• HRH Prince Sultan bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud, Defense Minister and acting Minister of Foreign Affairs

• HRH Prince Abdullah bin Faisal bin Turki Al Saud

• HRH Prince Salman bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud, governor of Riyadh Province

• Ali Naimi, CEO of Saudi ARAMCO

• The Ministers of Finance, Commerce, Petroleum and Natural Resources, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Secretary General of both the Saudi Chamber of Commerce and the Gulf Cooperation Council

KUWAIT

• Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, Emir

• Sheikh Saad al-Abdullah al-Sabah, Crown Prince/Prime Minister

• Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister

• Sheikh Salem Sabah al-Salem, Minister of the Interior

• Sheikh Ali Khalifa, Oil Minister

• Rashed al-Rashed, Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs

• Shiekha Hussa Sabah al-Salem, Patroness of al-Sabah Islamic Art Collection, National Museum

• Suhail K. Shuhaiber, Director, Department of the Americas, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

What is striking about each of these trips is the extraordinary access granted to the CFR delegation by the most powerful leaders in each nation. Obviously, the rulers of these countries are quite aware of the central role played by the Council in the policies of the United States. Just as the United States has experts on other nations who are consulted by those in power to help understand a given country, its leaders, policies, and goals, other nations have their own experts on the United States who conduct studies and analyses on the United States. The Meetings Program well illustrates that top world leaders and their expert advisers uniformly and strongly believe that CFR leaders and members are central to the structure of power in the United States, and as such are quite worthwhile meeting to discuss political and economic issues of mutual concern. No other single private organization in the United States comes close to consulting with the number and range of leading world decision makers year in and year out.

TOWARD THE FUTURE I: GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND THE COUNCIL OF COUNCILS, 2008–2014

In 2008 the CFR began another of its periodic world order initiatives, this one called the “International Institutions and Global Governance Program,” a five-year program supported by a grant from the Robina Foundation. The initiative is seen as necessary and important because the present architecture of global governance reflects the world of 1945 more than it does the realities of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The Council aims to identify the institutional requirements—political, military, financial, developmental, and trade related—for effective multilateral cooperation in the future, taking into account the changes since the end of the Second World War. The full spectrum of CFR resources, its membership, studies, and meetings programs, are all expected to be brought into play to plan and implement the research and make recommendations to the Council leadership, government policymakers, and wider publics.²⁶¹

In early 2012 the CFR added an international aspect to its global governance research, planning, and policy formulation program. This was the founding by the CFR of a “Council of Councils” network to directly connect the Council on Foreign Relations with twenty-one other “leading foreign policy institutes” from around the world. Additional details of the work of the Council of Councils will be covered in chapter 4. The work of this body will bear close watching in coming years.

TOWARD THE FUTURE II: THE RENEWING AMERICA INITIATIVE

In its 2011 Annual Report, the Council announced that as a part of its ninetieth anniversary, it was launching a new project, called its “Renewing America Initiative.”²⁶² The purpose of this new, ongoing program is to

examine the slate of domestic challenges that have a direct impact on U.S. foreign policy and international leadership. Renewing America examines the domestic underpinnings of U.S. power as difficulties within the country increasingly limit what it can do outside its borders. The initiative focuses on six areas: infrastructure, education and human capital development, debt and deficits, corporate regulation and taxation, innovation, and international trade and investment. The scope of this initiative includes work by the David Rockefeller Studies Program; programming in New York, Washington and nationally; outreach to targeted constituencies, including government officials, business leaders, educators and students, religious leaders, and individuals active at the state, local, and community levels; publications, including Foreign Affairs; and the website, CFR.org.²⁶³

Thus as we move toward the CFR’s hundredth anniversary, the organization is again conducting a wide-ranging grand strategic assessment of overall U.S. policy similar to their War and Peace Studies during the Second World War era and the 1980s Project during the 1970s. CFR is planning to come to conclusions and attempt to influence the government and wider circles of people through intensive targeted outreach. What is different this time is that the Council has a domestic as well as foreign policy focus. One reason for this is the recognition of a key contradiction of the system of capitalist neoliberal geopolitics the Council has helped create since the mid-1970s, which is that the system results in high levels of inequality, a relatively few very rich plutocrats, and large numbers of poor working-class people. Since the working class is needed to keep all aspects of the system functioning and could also decide to resist the class struggle being waged on them from above with rebellion and class struggle from below, the situation is one that CFR and the capitalist class believes needs attention, research, analysis, consensus building, and action.

Should economic problems and the erosion of its domestic base go unaddressed, it is feared that the United States “will gradually lose its ability to influence friends and adversaries, to shape international institutions, and ultimately to project … power to defend … national interests.”²⁶⁴ Therefore the Renewing America Initiative focuses on both the neoliberal and geopolitical aspects of U.S. grand strategy, set by the capitalist class and the CFR. Not surprisingly, the policies of the Obama administration strongly resemble the policies being advocated by the CFR in its Renewing America Initiative, including a stress on nation building at home, the pivot to Asia, privatizing schools, and cutting rank-and-file “entitlements.”

As is the case with any of the larger Council programs, this one is producing numerous progress reports, working papers, round table discussions, backgrounders, policy innovation memos, scorecards, and blog posts, a full review of which would result in a book-length study. Short of such a study, the best window into this still developing body of agenda setting, policy planning, and policymaking is a 2013 book by CFR president Richard N. Haass: Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America’s House in Order.²⁶⁵ Haass has been participating in and keeping track of the entire Renewing America Initiative effort, approving the posting of some of the results on the CFR website, for example, and his book represents, in many respects, an initial summary of the whole. We will review material from this book as appropriate during coming chapters.