CFR: Still the Power Behind the Throne

by William F. Jasper


For a century, the globalist Council on Foreign Relations has been the “power behind the throne” in U.S. politics. This tradition has continued under the Biden administration.


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.

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.

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. 

Authors Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomasreferred to the Council’s leading lights as “The Wise Men,” a reverential term that has been generously applied to the CFR at large by the Council’s academic and media shills. Journalist and presidential speechwriter Joseph Kraft famously referred to the Council as a “School for Statesmen.” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist-historian David Halberstam called it “the Establishment’s unofficial club.” Historian and presidential advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. described the CFR as a “front organization” for “the heart of the American Establishment.” Like Secretary Stettinius, all of the individuals offering these respectful remarks were themselves prominent CFR members, though they were not identified as such when they made the comments.

However, a description by another Council member, author-journalist Richard Rovere, conveys a more ominous and telling image. “The directors of the Council on Foreign Relations,” he said, “make up a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation.” Rovere’s choice of the word “Presidium” was apropos. He obviously was comparing it to the murderous, unelected, and unaccountable gang of criminals that ran the Soviet Union and still runs communist dictatorships such as China and North Korea. That such a body “guides our destiny as a nation” should be a truly chilling thought for every American. However, Rovere appears to have offered that evaluation as a compliment to his fellow CFR members, not as a condemnation, thus reinforcing the perception gained from decades of observing the CFR elite hobnobbing with the communist elite that the Pratt House princelings are far more comfortable with communist absolutism than with constitutionally limited government.

Those familiar with the true history of the Council on Foreign Relations know full well that its hundred-year history is a sordid record of treachery, treason, subversion, and betrayal. That is a serious charge, but it is not hyperbole, as we will show within the limits of this short survey. The history of the CFR is a chronicle of a century-long war against national sovereignty, and an unremitting effort to build an all-powerful world government, which CFR globalists have frequently referred to as their “New World Order.” 

Yet, despite being composed of the high and mighty of American society, and despite its central role in global events and its extensive connections to world movers and shakers, the Council was largely unknown to most Americans for much of its existence. That is as the Council’s leaders desired, since they preferred to be the power behind the scenes. Modesty was not the reason they operated in the shadows; they knew that openly revealing their agenda would invite a severe public backlash from the American people. In the past two decades, the CFR has come out more into the open, and its president, Richard N. Haass, and various CFR spokesmen and “experts” now appear regularly as Wise Men in the major media, dispensing their wisdom to the masses on sundry topics. Their increased public visibility has not brought any genuine transparency, but for those with eyes to see and brains to reason, the past four years and the past few months have removed all doubt about the existence of the Deep State and its tyrannical designs for our future.

The unprecedented fury of the non-stop attacks on President Trump, his family, his administration, and his supporters — not only by the “liberal” media and “progressive” Democrats, but also by neoconservatives, “moderate” Republicans, and a host of high-level government officials (some retired and some still serving) — has awakened millions of Americans to the fact that there is a hostile power operating not only within the highest levels of our government but within the top levels of institutional power throughout our society. If you are among the newly awakened, it is crucial that you understand that this hostile power — this “power elite,” as leftist professor C. Wright Mills and conservative columnist Edith Kermit Roosevelt referred to it — is not a recent phenomenon. The CFR Deep State, as noted above, has been building and concentrating its power for a century, patiently penetrating and corrupting all of our foundational institutions.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ founders were the architects of, and prop-agandists for, the failed League of Nations following World War I, as well as engineers of the successful effort that launched the United Nations after World War II, and the multitude of UN agencies and international organizations that have burgeoned forth since then. They have been the primary moving force behind virtually every destructive policy that has been undermining America on all fronts, while simultaneously aiding our enemies. Through both Democrat and Republican administrations, the CFR’s members and minions have provided the leadership for the devastating programs and policies that are now dangerously close to extinguishing freedom as we know it and terminating our constitutional republic. They are, for example, the main promoters of, and cheerleaders for, open borders, unsustainable spending and taxing, foreign aid, LGBTQ “diversity,” racial polarization and discord, election thievery, gun confiscation, feminization and politicization of our military, fanatical environmentalism, global-warming hysteria, COVID panic and medical dictatorship, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Fake News, Big Tech censorship, oppressive regulation, trade policies that are outsourcing our industry and technology, communistic cancel culture, federal usurpation of state and local authority, indoctrination of our children and youth in immorality and Marxist ideology — and much, much more.

Deep State Comes Out

The CFR elite are celebrating 2021 not only because it is their organization’s centennial year, but because they have succeeded fabulously in creating chaos by undermining our nation in all the areas listed above. And they have succeeded in ousting President Donald Trump and installing their favored candidate, Joe Biden, in the White House. Biden is not a CFR member, but he has loaded his administration with Pratt House “Wise Men” (see page 17) and has reversed course on nearly every front where President Trump had moved against the CFR globalists’ New World Order agenda. During a videotaped appearance on January 23, 2018 at the Council’s headquarters, Biden uttered a revealing comment. When CFR President Richard N. Haass introduced himself and remarked that he worked for the Council, Biden, who was sitting next to Haass, quipped, “And I work for Richard.” Just a harmless joke, right? But, as the well-known adage goes, “Many a truth is spoken in jest.” The same applies to the comment by Hillary Clinton, who, while secretary of state, admitted at the CFR’s new Washington, D.C., office that she had been many times to the organization’s “mothership” in New York, but that the new office was much more conveniently located. “We get a lot of advice from the Council,” she claimed, “so, this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing, and how we should think about the future.” (Emphasis added.)

https://thenewamerican.com/cfr-still-the-power-behind-the-throne/