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.