• 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.
3
THE CFR’S DOMESTIC NETWORK, 1976–2014
A meeting ground for powerful members of the U.S. corporate and foreign policy establishments….
—DAVID C. KORTEN
The Council counts among its members probably more important names in American life than any other private group in the country
—THEODORE WHITE
The Council on Foreign Relations is the ultimate networking and socializing institution of the U.S. capitalist ruling class. But it does not operate in isolation; rather, it is at the center of an extensive network of key institutions in a number of interconnected realms of U.S. social life: politics, think tanks, finance and economics, higher education, philanthropy, media, and culture. The U.S. capitalist class has a core and a periphery. The CFR and its members are at the core of the dominant sector of this class, but the network extends broadly. The nearly 5,000 individuals who are members and leaders of the Council collectively have hundreds of thousands of ties—social, economic, and political relationships that bind them into a community of the powerful. This is one reason why so many people want to join and participate in the Council and its activities. Those at the core of the large clique that makes up the CFR’s inner circle have common traits, access to the same general information, and mostly homogeneous opinions. They have close and frequent interactions—a daisy chain of connections to various organizations—resulting in strong ties and relationships with one another and powerful positions in their own groups, the political economy, and the larger society. Those with less close links may reflect the phenomena of the “strength of weak ties.” This phenomena points out the reality that to make new connections, gain new insights, and acquire new information, members of the core clique must look beyond it to