Tag Archives: Council on Foreign Relations

Joe Biden: Return Of The CFR, by Swiss Policy Research

Posted on November 28, 2020 | Leave a comment

With a Joe Biden presidency, the group that has presided over US foreign policy will be back on top. From Swiss Policy Research at zerohedge.com:

A Joe Biden presidency means a “return to normality” simply because it means a return of the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

In 2008, Barack Obama received the names of his entire future cabinet already one month prior to his election by CFR Senior Fellow (and Citigroup banker) Michael Froman, as a Wikileaks email later revealed. Consequently, the key posts in Obama’s cabinet were filled almost exclusively by CFR members, as was the case in most cabinets since World War II. To be sure, Obama’s 2008 Republican opponent, the late John McCain, was a CFR member, too. Michael Froman later negotiated the TPP and TTIP international trade agreements, before returning to the CFR as a Distinguished Fellow.

In 2017, CFR nightmare President Donald Trump immediately canceled these trade agreements – because he viewed them as detrimental to US domestic industry – which allowed China to conclude its own, recently announced RCEP free-trade area, encompassing 14 countries and a third of global trade. Trump also canceled other CFR achievements, like the multinational Iran nuclear deal and the UN climate and migration agreements, and he tried, but largely failed, to withdraw US troops from East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa, thus seriously endangering the global US empire built over decades by the CFR and its 5000 elite members.

Unsurprisingly, most of the US media, whose owners and editors are themselves members of the CFR, didn’t like President Trump. This was also true for most of the European media, whose owners and editors are members of international CFR affiliates like the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, founded by CFR directors after the conquest of Europe during World War II. Moreover, it was none other than the CFR which in 1996 advocated a closer cooperation between the CIA and the media, i.e. a restart of the famous CIA Operation Mockingbird. Historically, OSS and CIA directors since William Donovan and Allen Dulles have always been CFR members.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Imperialism, Intelligence, Politics

Tagged ,

Getting China Wrong, Yet Again, by Dennis Etler

Posted on June 11, 2019 | Leave a comment

What’s China really after? From Dennis Etler at antiwar.com:

The influential Council on Foreign Relations has released a remarkable special report by longtime diplomat Robert Blackwill entitled “Trump’s Foreign Policies are Better Than They Seem.” The report singles out Trump for praise because he identified China as a threat to the United States in economic, military, and cultural terms and criticized previous presidents for suggesting there was a need for strategic cooperation with China. The implication of the report is that the Obama and Bush administrations betrayed national interests by not taking a hard line on China.

The Council on Foreign Relations has a preeminent position in U.S. foreign policy, and this special report captures the Washington consensus on China at this moment. Politicians across the spectrum, from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are increasingly speaking of China as a serious threat to American security and competitiveness.

Yet, in its effort to justify Trump’s more extreme actions against China, the report makes a series of deeply misleading assertions. For example, the report states:

While these presidents were making such optimistic statements over a nearly twenty-year period, China implemented a grand strategy under Xi Jinping; used geoeconomic tools to coerce its neighbors and others, including most recently though the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); violated international commercial practices, including by committing massive theft of US intellectual property; manipulated its currency for trade benefits; threatened Taiwan; build up its military forces to push the United States beyond Japan and the Philippines; constructed and militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea, in violation of the international law. . . and patiently and incrementally built its power and influence with the strategic goal of challenging the United States as the primary power in Asia.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments

Tagged ,

Doug Casey on the Self-Identified Elite

Posted on October 17, 2016 | Leave a comment

Doug Casey has a pretty good take on what our betters have in store for us. From Casey at internationalman.com:

Mark Twain said, “If you don’t read the papers you’re uninformed. If you do read them, you’re misinformed.”

That’s why I want to draw your attention to a recent article called “The Isolationist Temptation,” in The Wall Street Journal, written by Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The piece wasn’t worth reading—except that it offers some real insight into what the “elite” are thinking. The CFR is one of about a dozen groups, like Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove, and Davos, where the self-identified elite gather.

These groups don’t have political power, per se. But their members are members of governments, large corporations, universities, the military, and the media. They all went to the same schools, belong to the same clubs, socialize together and, most important, share the same worldview. What might that be? They believe in the State—not the market—as the best way to organize the world.

Believe it or not (I still don’t…) I was recently invited to one of these conclaves. Probably by mistake. I don’t expect to be a fox in the henhouse, but more like a skeleton at a feast. I’ll tell you all about it next month…

But back to the current topic. Like me, you’ve probably asked yourself, “Who are these people? Are they knaves, or fools, or both? What are they smoking? Are they actually crazy?”

Haass starts out by dividing the world of foreign policy observers into the “internationalists” and the “isolationists”—a false, misleading, and stupid distinction. They’re not “internationalists” (which are people who move between countries); they’re “globalists” (people who want to work for one world government, that they control). He uses the term “isolationists” as a pejorative term for the enemy camp, conflating them with non-interventionists—who are a totally different group. Isolationists bring to mind a backward cult, hiding from the rest of the world. Non-interventionists simply don’t want to stick their noses in other people’s business.

He lauds so-called internationalists (i.e., globalists) as “those who want the U.S. to retain the leading international role it’s held since WW2.” By that he means minions of the U.S. government should roam the world to “spread democracy.” He assumes that democracy—which is actually just a more polite form of mob rule—is always a good thing. Apart from the fact that democracy is only rarely the result of U.S. intervention. Another division he makes (and here I admire his candor) is between the “elites”—like high government officials and people like those in the CFR—and the “non-elites.” He actually uses these words. He terms U.S. invasions and regime change efforts as “an ambitious foreign policy.”

He says, even after referencing disastrous U.S. failures like the Korean, Vietnamese, Afghan, and Iraq wars, and ongoing catastrophes in Libya and Syria, that we should continue on the same course.

He loves the idea of alliances, of course. Despite the fact that alliances only serve to draw one country into another one’s war. Alliances just take relatively small local disputes, and move them up to catastrophic levels. This has always been the case. But the classic example is World War 1, which signaled the start of the long collapse of Western Civilization. Alliances can only serve to draw the U.S. into wars between nothing/nowhere countries that few Americans can find on a map.

To continue reading: Doug Casey on the Self-Identified Elite

 

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Cronyism, Foreign Policy, Government

Tagged

CFR Says China Must Be Defeated And TPP Is Essential To That, by Eric Zuesse

Posted on May 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

If you ever want to know what the powers that be are thinking about foreign affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations public disclosures a good place to start. The CFR wants to stifle Chinese “hegemonic” aspirations to preserve US hegemony. From Eric Zuesse, via zerohedge.com:

Wall Street’s Council on Foreign Relations has issued a major report, alleging that China must be defeated because it threatens to become a bigger power in the world than the U.S.

This report, which is titled “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China,” is introduced by Richard Haass, the CFR’s President, who affirms the report’s view that, “no relationship will matter more when it comes to defining the twenty-first century than the one between the United States and China.”

Haass gives this report his personal imprimatur by saying that it “deserves to become an important part of the debate about U.S. foreign policy and the pivotal U.S.-China relationship.” He acknowledges that some people won’t agree with the views it expresses.

The report itself then opens by saying: “Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals, first on the North American continent, then in the Western hemisphere, and finally globally.” It praises “the American victory in the Cold War.” It then lavishes praise on America’s imperialistic dominance: “The Department of Defense during the George H.W. Bush administration presciently contended that its ‘strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor’—thereby consciously pursuing the strategy of primacy that the United States successfully employed to outlast the Soviet Union.”

The rest of the report is likewise concerned with the international dominance of America’s aristocracy or the people who control this country’s international corporations, rather than with the welfare of the public or as the U.S. Constitution described the objective of the American Government: “the general welfare.”

The Preamble, or sovereignty clause, in the Constitution, presented that goal in this broader context: “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

The Council on Foreign Relations, as a representative of Wall Street, is concerned only with the dominance of America’s aristocracy. Their new report, about “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China,” is like a declaration of war by America’s aristocracy, against China’s aristocracy. This report has no relationship to the U.S. Constitution, though it advises that the U.S. Government pursue this “Grand Strategy Toward China” irrespective of whether doing that would even be consistent with the U.S. Constitution’s Preamble.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-05/cfr-says-china-must-be-defeated-and-tpp-essential

To continue reading: CFR Says China Must Be Defeated

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Other Views

Tagged ,