Wall Street's Think Tank. Laurence H. Shoup

of the key individuals, the decision makers, of what are widely considered to be central organizations in a given profit or nonprofit field, with the 2011 to 2014 CFR membership lists and the historical list of all Council directors. This procedure will document the vast number of interlocks between the CFR and most of the key institutions of U.S. society and political economy. Interlocks represent sociological anchors of a community of interest; they develop and cement the personal and institutional relationships that create the common ideology, cohesion, coordinated action, and unified political-economic influence and power of the capitalist class and its allies. At the same time, intra-ruling class conflict is reduced. Showing how the Council is at the center of a vast domestic network of the powerful, including a majority of the most important think tanks, represents additional concrete evidence that it is the most powerful organization in the United States and the world. Other think tanks around the globe have been established and grown up “under the shadow of American intellectual hegemony.”²⁶⁶ One recent work on think tanks elaborates as follows on this theme:

      The United States remains … the superpower of policy research: the prime exporter of concepts and intellectual frameworks, the most important source of transnational funding, the model that others take as their point of reference in the post–Cold War world. It is this intellectual “soft power” that leaves the USA “bound to lead” global political and economic order…. Across Europe, for example, students of foreign policy read the CFR journal Foreign Affairs, and take the arguments they find there as a starting point for their own work…. No European policy review attracts similar attention.²⁶⁷