Wall Street's Think Tank by Laurence H. Shoup

Author:Laurence H. Shoup
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2015-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

great good sense, honesty and success . . . among his career high points was his service as Director on the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations—on two separate occasions. Those of us who worked with him on the Board and in all his other capacities know how lucky our nation is to have him where he is. Indeed, I, and many others, sleep better knowing he is there.444

The CFR has, for over three decades, made neoliberal geoeconomics a hallmark of its ideological orientation and worldview. This thinking is combined with a realist and idealist geopolitical theory based on military strength and the balance of power in world politics. Geopolitics focuses on the security of the nation-state and the imperial grand strategies required to achieve world power. The long-term geopolitical goals of the CFR and the larger U.S. power structure since 1941 have aimed at global military hegemony. Geopolitics, also called “power politics,” therefore goes hand in hand with geoeconomics and the spread of neoliberalism on a world scale—all usually discussed in ruling-class circles under the headings of “multilateralism,” “globalization,” and “internationalism.” A key part of geopolitics is locating and evaluating natural and economic resources and their relation to sea power and land power. In this way key spaces on the earth’s surface can be identified along with the existing balance of forces at any given moment, leading to potential actions: military buildups and wars of conquest, attempts to shape the world power environment through alliances and offshore balancing, as well as diplomatic engagement. Geopolitical analysis thus tends to be nationalistic and era-specific and changes with shifts in the relative power and ambitions of the world’s key nation-states.

Two basic geopolitical eras are considered here: the Cold War era (1976–90) and the post–Cold War era (1991–2013). A key CFR geopolitical thinker throughout both eras has been Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Council member for at least forty years, often a participant in Council study groups, a CFR director from 1972 to 1977, and a frequent writer for Foreign Affairs.445 He has had a close relationship with David Rockefeller, and was a co-founder, with Rockefeller, of the Trilateral Commission (1973). He has also long been a counselor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University. His views often reflect the consensus perspective of those in power due to his close relationships to the CFR and other ruling-class organizations.

Brzezinski was born in Warsaw of Polish nobility, escaping the fate of much of this old ruling class by the luck of living in Canada with his diplomat father during much of the Second World War. He became a cold warrior specializing in Eastern Europe and the USSR, teaching at Columbia and Johns Hopkins universities. As a Democrat but a hawk on Soviet-U.S. relations, his governmental positions have been in Democratic administrations, most prominently as Carter’s national security adviser (1977–81), where he famously clashed with the secretary of state, the less hawkish Cyrus Vance, but also as a Department of State policy planner during the Vietnam War, which he fully supported.

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