Wall Street's Think Tank. Laurence H. Shoup

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”