considerable monopoly power. We say “finance” capitalist system because financial speculation has become a key way that the stagnation tendencies of the system have been, at least temporarily, overcome. Banking corporations like JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs, as well as nominally industrial conglomerates like General Electric, all enjoy financial super profits under this regime.
The CFR network of people and institutions at home and abroad is extensive and is a key factor in the ongoing forging of a transnational capitalist ruling class. What David Rothkopf (himself a Council member) calls the “superclass” and “Davos Man”—the six thousand individuals that he says run the world—has its main base in the CFR.2 Studying and understanding the Council is therefore a critical way to know concretely how a dominant economic class has ruled in the past and continues to rule today. Council leaders recognize these facts, but prefer to remain behind the scenes and to label the CFR the world’s “leading” or “most influential” foreign policy organization rather than most powerful.3 This preference, along with its mode of operation, has resulted in the Council being less widely recognized than its real influence would suggest.
A big and complex organization, the CFR is unique because it combines a well-staffed, scholarly think tank with a large and active dues-paying membership. It has a long history, many faces, and multiple facets, including publishing Foreign Affairs, a magazine founded in 1922 that the Washington Post has called “the bible of foreign policy thinking.” It has published tens of thousands of publications of various types—from books to blogs—during recent decades. During every decade, it holds thousands of membership meetings starring top political and economic leaders from a wide variety of nations, as well as many leading intellectuals. The Council’s work since the mid-1970s has largely focused on creating, planning, promoting, and defending a U.S.-dominated, world-spanning neoliberal geopolitical empire that, due to the resulting mass poverty of billions of people, has been called “a criminal process of global colonization” by the Brazilian theologian Frei Betto.4 Samir Amin labels the system as one that imposes a “lumpen development” model of pauperization and super-exploitation on the people of the South, the majority of humankind.5 This imperialist empire is mostly an informal one, but its rule over and exploitation of a considerable part of the world and its people is nevertheless very real.
The CFR’s connections to and relationships with economically and politically powerful people and institutions around the world mean that the neoliberal geopolitical worldview of its members and leaders matters a great deal. The Council’s leaders select the intellectuals who set the agendas, shape the critical debates, and design the policies that serve the capitalist class. The CFR also works very hard to produce and disseminate ideas about which policies are best so that the Council/capitalist class view gains “commonsense” acceptance among the public. In this way the framework for policymaking and publicity on a variety of key issues is established. More often than not, CFR leaders and members are the “in-and-outers” who pass through the revolving door of the federal government to high positions of authority, no matter who is elected. The CFR helps unite the capitalist class community, making it not just a class in itself, but also a class for itself. It achieves this by promoting the exchange of information and policy opinions necessary to foster consensus among the rulers on what the goals and tactics of U.S. foreign, and increasingly domestic, policy should be. As Council people cycle into and out of government, policies are implemented that mostly benefit those at the top of the economic structure, creating the vast wealth and income inequality that exists today.
The need to conduct such planning efforts reflects the fact that capitalism is a system in dynamic disequilibrium, always in a process of breakdown and recovery, and so requires a think tank like the CFR as a strategic guide to map out new directions for the capitalist class and the government itself before the inevitable crises become too acute. The speeding up of change due to the capitalist globalization promoted by the Council and related organizations has added to the complexity of the issues that must be addressed. All of these aspects mean that understanding the behemoth that is the Council on Foreign Relations requires an effort. There are no easy shortcuts to fully understanding this complex organization and its policies.
This book has had a long genesis; it is the result of a decades-long research process, dating to the early 1970s. William Minter and I went to different universities for graduate study, and both decided, before we met, to study the CFR. Minter did his work in sociology; I did mine in U.S. history. Our dissertations on the Council complete, we decided to combine them, with additional research, in a book. In July of 1976, we put the final touches on Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (Monthly Review Press, 1977). Gerald Ford was president, Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State, and Alan Greenspan was Ford’s chief economic adviser. The Soviet Union was a world power. The Internet, cell phones, personal computers, the financialization of capital accumulation, neoliberalism, the “Washington Consensus,” and many other things that are commonplace today were either not yet fully implemented or had not been invented.
In 1976, we believed that U. S. foreign policy was a disaster, not only for the billions of working-class people in the poorest parts of the world who suffer the most exploitation and the hardest blows from the imperialism and empire characteristic of monopoly-finance capitalism but also for the vast majority of the people of our own country. We also believed that a main source of the problem was the top-down control of U.S. foreign policy by a relatively small group of capitalists and their in-house experts operating through many channels, central among them the Council on Foreign Relations. Our book received gratifying attention in some quarters, but overall was ignored or its views disputed by most experts and attentive publics. Imagine my surprise almost two decades later when I found the following words in the CFR’s own Annual Report for the 1994 fiscal year:
For much of this century, U.S. foreign policy was made by several hundred leading politicians and figures dedicated to public service from the professions of law, banking, business, the military and diplomacy. The Council was conceived by members of this professional class in the years immediately following World War I. For many decades, this same professional class gave the Council its cachet, energy, and influence, serving as its membership as well as its principal constituency.
Particularly after the Kennedy administration, this traditional group was expanded by policy experts from the academy and the think tanks, mainly people with increasingly professional training in the foreign and defense policy fields that dominated the country’s Cold War concerns. This enlarged foreign policy community joined the Council’s ranks and, like its predecessor, gave us weight, reach, and intellectual strength.6
Here we had the CFR’s own leaders, in their own publication, stating that U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century was made by a “professional class” (their term for a ruling capitalist class) of only “several hundred” people, augmented by a number of “experts” beginning in the 1960s. Almost all of these people were members of the CFR, which actively promoted a foreign policy suitable to the U.S. capitalist class, while, of course, expecting the people of the United States and the world to pay for the results of these policies with their blood and treasure. William Minter and I had been right to stress these realities in Imperial Brain Trust, and, in a very real sense, even the Council and its leadership were open to stating this truth by 1994. CFR leaders have gone even further in recent years; the Council’s president Richard Haass stated in 2007 that the CFR is “the leading foreign policy organization in the world.”7 This book represents an effort both to document this assertion and go beyond it.
To fully understand this power one must delve into the subject of class. With few exceptions, the dominant culture pretends that we live in a classless society, one where all—no matter what their wealth and income level, race or gender, type of employment or where they live—have common interests. The United States is, however, a racialized and gendered class society, one with sharp divisions and different interests, and one where a ruling class of monopoly capitalists control almost everything of importance, either openly or behind the scenes. Their class interest lurks behind the all-encompassing veil of what is labeled the “national interest.” But this does not happen by accident: the capitalists are highly organized and pursue their class interests