CFR: Still the Power Behind the Throne
2021 is a big year for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an organization that often is heralded as the most influential think tank in America, if not the entire world. Prominent on the Council’s website (cfr.org) is its centennial page, “Celebrating A Century,” a self-congratulatory promo of the organization’s accomplishments over the past hundred years. The promotional features an impressive cavalcade of pictorials, videos, and articles showcasing the Council’s worldly influence and power, as demonstrated by the hundreds of presidents, prime ministers, princes, potentates, politicians, kings, diplomats, and dictators — including mass-murderers — who have graced the organization’s meetings, and/or have written for its famed journal Foreign Affairs.
The CFR does indeed wield unparalleled influence in political, financial, business, media, and academic circles, and is regularly showered with accolades by “the great and the good.” It is the public face, the brain trust, and the central nervous system of what critics refer to as the Deep State — the unelected “permanent government” that has hijacked our country.
In April 1945, just days before the end of World War II, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius journeyed to Pratt House, the CFR’s headquarters in New York City. He had come, he said, to “bear witness, as every Secretary of State during the past quarter of a century, to the great services and influence of this organization in spreading knowledge and understanding of the issues of United States foreign policy.” Every secretary of state since then has continued the tradition. As you will see in the accompanying table showing CFR influence in the State Department (pages 26-27), Secretary Stettinius and almost every one of his successors — until the Trump administration — has been a member of the Council. And now, with the enthronement of Joe Biden, that CFR control of the State Department has resumed, with CFR member Antony Blinken taking over as secretary, and a bevy of Council members filling out the top posts at State and in the rest of the Biden Cabinet.
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