The Trilateral Commission

In 1973 the Trilateral Commission was founded by David Rockefeller, Chase Manhattan Bank chairman; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor, and other like-minded eminent private citizens. Some 300 members (up from about 200 members in 1973) are drawn from international business and banking, government, academia, media and conservative labour. The Commission’s purpose is to engineer an enduring partnership among the ruling classes of North America, Western Europe and Japan - hence the term “trilateral” - in order to safeguard the interests of Western Capitalism in an explosive world. It was only at the time of Carter’s election that the Trilateral Commission was given much media attention. Jimmy Carter picked no less than twenty-five trilateralists to serve in the highest posts of his administration. Besides Brzezinski, founding director of the Trilateral Commission, we find: vice-president Walter Mondale, former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, former Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, Secretary of Defence Harold Brown, and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Paul Volcker. It is also interesting that 5 leading candidates for Federal Reserve Chief were all Trilateralists.

Bruce K MacLaury, president of the Brookings Institution, remained in the running with Volcker. David Rockefeller; A W Clausen, chairman of the Bank of America; and Robert Roosa, partner in the investment banking firm of Brown Bros, Harriman, took themselves out of consideration (New York Times, 25 July 1979). Clyde M Farnsworth reports that Volcker “was part of the Roosa ‘brain trust’” and also served in management positions at Chase Manhattan Bank. Rockefeller “and Mr Roosa were strong influences in the (sic) Mr Carter’s decision to name Mr Volcker for the Reserve Board Chairmanship.” (New York Times: 26 July 1979). An example of the key themes of Trilateralism is captured in the following statement:

The public and leaders of most countries continue to live in a mental universe which no longer exists - a world of separate nations - and have great difficulties thinking in terms of global perspectives and interdependence.

The liberal premise of a separation between the political and economic realm is obsolete: issues related to economics are at the heart of modern politics. –“Toward a Renovated International System” (Trilateral Task Force Report: 1977)

In short, Trilateralism is the attempt by ruling elites to manage both dependence and democracy, at home and abroad.

Trilateral Origins: Western Business on the Defensive

Trilateralism is rooted in a long tradition of elite ideology and corporate planning. For example, a private US organisation called the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), founded in 1918, remains a powerful force in shaping public policy and perception. As the Council’s 1918 handbook explains:

‘It is a board of initiation - a Board of Invention. It plans to co-operate with the government and all existing international agencies and to bring them all into constructive accord.’

The CFR had its special chance to be a “Board of Invention” during and after World War II when it played a pivotal role in formulating US war aims, constructing the post-World War II international economic and political order, and guiding US policy over the last quarter century. In the post-war period, it was relatively easy to bring all parties into “constructive accord”. Western Europe and Japan were in ruins; the US emerged from the war as the unrivalled economic, military and political power. Through massive economic and military assistance programmes like the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Western Europe and Japan were reconstructed, following US specifications, into stable trading partners and bulwarks against the “communist threat”. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other international organisations were founded during that early period. They became pillars of the post-war international trade and monetary system known as the Bretton Woods System ; the Soviet Union and other “Socialist bloc” countries dropped out in the early stages when it became clear the system was to be designed mainly by and for the United States.

A lesser-known companion institution to the CFR is the Bilderberg Group. Bilderberg, founded in 1954, is a European-led organisation which is well attended by heads of state and other “influential’s” from Western Europe, the US and Canada. The catch-word for the times was “Atlanticism” not “Trilateralism”.

Japan had not yet earned its place in the so-called “club of advance nations” which formed the Atlantic Alliance.

Domestic stability and international stability were closely linked under the umbrella of the welfare/warfare state. Policy makers and presidents like John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson stepped up efforts to fight the world-wide “war on communism” alongside the domestic “war on poverty” - with the support of liberals, big labour, and big business. Corporations reaped huge profits from domestic military production and rapidly expanded out into the empire which US foreign aid remodelled and US guns protected. Stability at home was maintained with varying doses of “butter” (expanding social welfare programmes in the context of a prosperous economy) and political repression (McCarthy era of the 1950’s; FBI and CIA counter-intelligence programmes to disrupt and destroy progressive movements in the 60’s and 70’s; systematic police brutality against Chicano/as, Blacks, Native Americans and Puerto Ricans).

With the sixties and early seventies came the collapse of the post-war international economic system and crisis in the welfare/warfare state.

The rout of the US military from Vietnam undermined severely the US role as global police for international capitalism. Domestic constraints were placed on direct intervention abroad and Congress took steps to curb the imperial presidency and its zealous scouts, the CIA. Example: Kissinger and Ford wanted to escalate ongoing CIA operations in Angola where the US supported factions backed by South Africa and Zaire fighting the MPLA. The Senate and the House banned further covert aid in December 1975 and January 1976.

The “oil shock” came with the October 1973 Arab oil embargo and the OPEC price hikes of 1973-74. Oil gave OPEC the clout to force the rising Third World call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) onto the Western agenda.

But the post-World War II economic order began to disintegrate even before OPEC and Vietnam cracked the armour of Western imperialism. The new menace of “stagflation” and rivalry was mounting among the US, Japan and Western Europe. West Germany and Japan were fast becoming economic giants, challenging US hegemony over the international capitalist system. By the mid-sixties the traditionally large US trade surplus had begun to erode; by 1971 the US was running trade deficits, importing more than it exported. A huge build-up of dollars outside the US - a result of hegemonic military and foreign aid activities - became disruptive of international monetary relations. Through inflation and speculation the dollar weakened against the Japanese yen and West German mark. International economic reform was needed. But before mutually agreeable reforms could be initiated President Nixon and Treasury Secretary John Connally unilaterally demolished the tottering Bretton Woods System on August 15, 1971, and attempted to reassert US supremacy with a strongly protectionist “New Economic Policy” (See file number 28 - article by Jeff Frieden for a perceptive review of these events leading up to the building of the Trilateral Commission).

The “Nixon shocks” violated the rules of “free trade” - the unobstructed flow of money, goods and services between countries - enshrined in Bretton Woods. Indeed, such a harsh display of economic nationalism raised the spectre of trade wars between the so-called free world powers, and horrified corporate captains such as David Rockefeller for whom international free enterprise is gospel.

On the political front, Nixon and Kissinger attended to the emerging US-China-USSR triangle to the neglect of the Cold War alliance. Western Europe welcomed détente with the Soviet Union, but not at the expense of its special relationship with the US.

The overtures to Peking marked by Kissinger’s secret trip in July 1971 and Nixon’s pageant in February 1972 came as a special shock to an uninformed Japan.

The Trilateral Commission was launched before all the tremors described above had yet registered on the economic/political seismograph. The Commission’s aim is to “nurture habits and practices of working together” among the trilateral regions in order to: promote a healthy (mutually beneficial and not mutually suicidal) level of competition between the capitalist powers; forge a common front against the Third World and Soviet Union; “renovate” the international political economy in the interest of global business and finance; make trilateral democracy more “governable”.

The trilateral regions, Commissioners point out, “have the largest share of world trade and finance and produce two-thirds of the world’s output.” The Commission’s overriding concern is that trilateral nations “remain the vital centre” of management, finance and technology (ie power and control) for the world economy - a world economy which (in Brzezinski’s words) would “embrace” and “co-opt” the Third World and gradually reintegrate the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China (known as the “drop-outs” in trilateral lingo).

Trilateral Commissioners assert: “history shows that every effective international system requires a custodian.” Today, the super economies - West Germany and Japan - must share the custodial role with the United States. Trilateralism, a form of “collective management” under US tutelage, is the necessary response if corporate capitalism is to endure and prosper.

Note: An analysis of the portfolio holders in the Security Display involving those “custodians” of the B-series bonds totally in excess of $140 billion - see file numbers 2 and 37 - provides an example of the kind of collaboration that was involved in moving this sum of money from all corners of the earth.