Council on Foreign Relations

• 1. Introduction

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  The Council on Foreign Relations has shaped American foreign policy from its earliest days in ways that most citizens never see. Its members have included secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, and prominent media figures. Its headquarters sits in New York City, with a second office in Washington, D.C. The questions worth asking are how such an organization came to exist, who built it, and what it has actually done with its influence.

  The story begins not in a boardroom but on a Paris street in the final days of World War I, when a group of American scholars were sent to brief the president on what a postwar world might look like. Their work would eventually produce an institution that, decades later, would help design containment doctrine, open China to American diplomacy, and become entangled in the Iranian hostage crisis. How a fellowship of 150 academics became one of the most consequential think tanks in American history is the thread running through everything that follows.

• 2. Born From War

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  In September 1917, President Woodrow Wilson assembled roughly 150 scholars into a group called "The Inquiry." Their task was to brief him on options for the world after Germany's defeat. Walter Lippmann served as Head of Research. Edward M. House, Wilson's closest adviser, directed the effort. The team produced more than 2,000 documents analyzing political, economic, and social conditions around the globe. Those reports provided the intellectual foundation for Wilson's Fourteen Points.

  The scholars then traveled to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Conversations there sparked a new idea: an Anglo-American organization called "The Institute of International Affairs," with offices in both London and New York. The British eventually built their own version, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, better known as Chatham House. The American side hit a wall. Isolationist sentiment at home made the grand transatlantic project difficult to sustain.

  So the American organizers shifted their attention to a quieter set of meetings that had been happening since June 1918 in New York City, already carrying the name "Council on Foreign Relations." Those gatherings were led by corporate lawyer Elihu Root, a former Secretary of State under President Theodore Roosevelt. The 108 attendees included high-ranking officers of banking, manufacturing, trading, and finance companies, along with many lawyers. On the 29th of July, 1921, they filed a certification of incorporation. The founding roster named Root as honorary president, John W. Davis as first elected president, Paul D. Cravath as vice-president, and Edwin F. Gay as secretary-treasurer.

• 3. Foreign Affairs and Early Reach

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  Edwin Gay had been the founding dean of the Harvard Business School and a director of the Shipping Board during the war. In 1922 he turned his attention to a publication project: a magazine that would be the authoritative voice on foreign policy. Gay raised US$125,000 from wealthy council members and by sending letters to what he described as "the thousand richest Americans." The first issue of Foreign Affairs appeared in September 1922. Within a few years, trade press was calling it the most authoritative American review dealing with international relations.

  The journal is still published today as a bi-monthly, carrying that same mandate it received at its founding. The Council also established Committees on Foreign Relations in 1938, supported by a Carnegie Corporation grant, designed to bring influential local figures in cities across the country into discussions and bring their communities' views back to New York. Ford and Rockefeller Foundations also began providing financial support in the late 1930s. These local committees were designed both to shape public opinion in favor of the Council's preferred policies and to serve as listening posts through which Washington could gauge sentiment in the country.

• 4. War, Secrecy, and Government Power

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  During the Second World War, the Council established the War and Peace Studies, a strictly confidential project funded entirely by the Rockefeller Foundation. Even members of the Council not involved in it were unaware it existed. The project was divided into four functional groups: economic and financial; security and armaments; territorial; and political. Allen Welsh Dulles headed the security and armaments group. Dulles would later become a pivotal figure in the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor organization. The Council ultimately produced 682 classified memoranda for the State Department.

  A critical study later found that of 502 government officials surveyed between 1945 and 1972, more than half were Council members. During the Eisenhower administration, 40 percent of the top U.S. foreign policy officials held CFR membership; Eisenhower himself had been a member. Under Truman the figure was 42 percent. Under Kennedy it rose to 51 percent. It peaked at 57 percent under the Johnson administration. These numbers describe an organization that was not merely advising government but in many cases staffing it.

• 5. Containment, Kissinger, and China

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  In 1947, CFR study group member George Kennan published an article in Foreign Affairs without attaching his name to it. Titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," it introduced the concept of "containment" to American strategic thinking. The essay shaped U.S. foreign policy across seven successive presidential administrations. Forty years after writing it, Kennan remarked that he had never actually believed the Soviet Union intended to attack the United States, and had assumed that point was too obvious to require stating.

  Dwight Eisenhower chaired a CFR study group while he was President of Columbia University. One member later observed that whatever Eisenhower understood about economics, he had learned at those meetings. The group later helped create an organization called "Americans for Eisenhower" to support his presidential campaign. His primary CFR appointment was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who delivered a public address at the Harold Pratt House in New York City announcing the doctrine of "massive retaliatory power" as the cornerstone of Eisenhower's foreign policy.

  Following that speech, the Council convened a session on nuclear weapons and foreign policy and chose Henry Kissinger to lead it. Kissinger spent the following academic year at Council headquarters working on the project. His 1957 book from that research topped national bestseller lists and made him a nationally recognized figure. Kissinger continued publishing in Foreign Affairs and was later appointed National Security Adviser by President Nixon in 1969. In 1971 he made a secret trip to Beijing. Nixon followed him to China in 1972. Diplomatic relations were fully normalized when President Carter's Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, himself a Council member, completed the process.

• 6. Dissent and the Iran Crisis

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  The Vietnam War exposed fractures inside the Council that its reputation for consensus had masked. When Hamilton Fish Armstrong announced in 1970 that he was leaving Foreign Affairs after 45 years as its editor, new CFR chairman David Rockefeller proposed William Bundy as his replacement. Anti-war voices within the organization objected. They argued that Bundy's record at the State Department, Defense Department, and CIA made him unsuitable to lead a journal that claimed independence. Some members went further, calling Bundy a war criminal.

  Nine years later, in November 1979, Rockefeller's chairmanship brought him into the center of an international incident. He and Henry Kissinger, along with John J. McCloy and Rockefeller aides, persuaded President Carter through the State Department to allow the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, into the United States for hospital treatment for lymphoma. Carter later wrote in his memoir White House Diary that on the 9th of April, 1979, Rockefeller came in "apparently to induce me to let the shah come to the United States," and that "Rockefeller, Kissinger, and Brzezinski seem to be adopting this as a joint project." The decision directly precipitated the Iran hostage crisis and drew intense press scrutiny of Rockefeller, including from The New York Times.

• 7. Membership, Money, and Criticism

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  Term membership at the Council lasts five years and is open only to those between the ages of 30 and 36. Life membership requires a written nomination by one Council member and a secondment by at least three others. Women were excluded from membership until the 1960s. Eligibility is restricted to U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have applied for citizenship.

  In 2019, the Council accepted a $12 million gift from Len Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-born billionaire described in press reporting as having close links to Vladimir Putin. Fifty-five international relations scholars and Russia experts wrote a letter to the board and then-president Richard N. Haass. Their letter described Blavatnik's philanthropy as funds "obtained by and with the consent of the Kremlin" and characterized the donation as an effort to "launder his image in the West." The controversy placed the Council under direct fire from its own members.

  More broadly, the Council has faced persistent criticism for perceived elitism and for reinforcing a consensus that critics say favors globalist policies, U.S. military intervention, and multinational corporate interests. Richard Harwood wrote in The Washington Post that CFR membership amounts to "the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States." In fiscal year 2016, Charity Navigator gave the organization a three-star rating out of four. By fiscal year 2023 that rating had risen to four stars, with a score of 98 percent.