Talk:Council on Foreign Relations

Support for Israel
Is there any evidence to suggest that the CFR has supported Israel in the past, or that it continues to defend Israeli policies to this day ? I have been reading several documents produced by the CFR and I got the impression was that it did have such pro-Israel sentiment. ADM (talk) 11:09, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Check out the names of many of the members and make that deduction for yourself (not being anti-semitic, just pointing out a fact).99.120.56.76 (talk) 02:59, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Check out the bio of CFR member Elliott Abrams,convicted of withholding information to Congress in the Iran-Contra Affair investigation, who took a leading role in pushing the U.S. into the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Activist (talk) 11:51, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

Are referring to the names Zakaria and Whitman? Yeah, big Israel supporters! Sarcasm off. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1012:B16D:CC1:8434:6DA8:A2E8:9C9D (talk) 12:22, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

I disagree that CFR is neoconservative, and think that should definitely be removed from the introductory paragraph. CFR has entertained a wide range of opinions. How are board members like Colin Powell, who battled the neocons in the W administration, Bill Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, or PBS NewsHour's Margaret Warner, not to mention three former Obama cabinet members, being lumped together with neoconservatives? It's blatant misinformation in my opinion to say that this think tank is neoconservative, especially when there have been so many influential think tanks that are clearly and legitimately neoconservative, from the Project for the New American Century to the Center for Security Policy. Having a wide enough range of perspectives that an organization includes some neoconservative-leaning people absolutely does not mean that it represents that one specific viewpoint.--100.4.144.117 (talk) 17:43, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

I want to add that there is a big difference between internationalist or globalist style engagement abroad and neoconservative engagement. At the bottom of the CFR page, it says that paleoconservatives and the John Birch Society have accused CFR of wanting "to build a one world government." Neoconservatism is not identified with international cooperation as much as it is with muscular, preemptive foreign intervention. Although it is not isolationist, it is also very different from the type of international engagement that has been encouraged by the likes of Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and Obama.

HW Bush summarized the neoconservative posture pretty well not long before he died. He said that Dick Cheney had changed. “He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with." He said of him, "Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East."

He said of W's Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He's more kick ass and take names, take numbers."

Although Trump's approach is very much not neoconservative -- except arguably where it comes to his lack of concern for fiscal discipline -- that doesn't mean that all types of international engagement are by contrast neoconservative. The Council on Foreign Relations pretty obviously talks about foreign engagement, but it is not typically or consistently a cheerleader for neoconservatism like some other organizations have been. Take the article by Philip Gordon in 2006 in CFR's respected magazine Foreign Affairs, "The End of the Bush Revolution". The Bush Doctrine he refers to there is a generally neoconservative doctrine, since it includes the use of preemptive war.

Gordon wrote, "The question is not whether the president and most of his team still hold to the basic tenets of the Bush doctrine -- they do -- but whether they can sustain it. They cannot. Although the administration does not like to admit it, U.S. foreign policy is already on a very different trajectory than it was in Bush's first term. The budgetary, political, and diplomatic realities that the first Bush team tried to ignore have begun to set in."

He continued, "The reversal of the Bush revolution is a good thing. By overreaching in Iraq, alienating important allies, and allowing the war on terrorism to overshadow all other national priorities, Bush has gotten the United States bogged down in an unsuccessful war, overstretched the military, and broken the domestic bank..."

Leading up to the war in Iraq, note too that even many Democrats and the New York Times' Judith Miller, for example, had been accused of cheerleading for the war. That doesn't mean that the New York Times or the Democrats who voted to go to war with Iraq are truly neoconservative.

Gordon's measured analysis of foreign policy there is pretty typical of the magazine, and of many of CFR's members. Given that there have been a number of legitimately agenda-driven neoconservative think tanks out there (although the influential PNAC is now defunct), this classification of CFR as neoconservative to me is clearly false. And that somebody placed it right in the opening paragraph, without calling it his own opinion, makes the classification even more inappropriate. --100.4.144.117 (talk) 19:04, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

I think if nobody can come up with a resonable citation for the claim that CFR is neoconservative, it ought to be removed. ThirdDolphin (talk) 19:25, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Epstein
For some reason, my change pointing out that Epstein was a member of the CFR was reverted and replaced with a deliberately misleading sentence (hidden in the "charity" section) claiming that Epstein was not a member of the CFR. Epstein was a member of the CFR. I have edited the sentence to reflect reality. It should probably moved from the charity section as well, but I figure I shouldn't push my luck. From the Washington Post: "Epstein was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose 5,000 members include many big names in the business, government and media elites, from 1995 until 2009, at least two years after he came under investigation for sexual abuse of minors, according to council donor lists and Haass’s memo." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.5.41.224 (talk) 12:10, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Updated the intro paragraph with accurate information about the CFR's association with member Epstein, was immediately reverted. Why? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.5.41.224 (talk) 12:20, 19 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Epstein is not an intro-worthy aspect of the CFR, more of a detail at best. What you tried to describe as large amounts of money. What you tried to describe as large donations simply aren't, on the CFR scale; over the course of 15 years, the total amount he gave is about 1/2 of one percent of CFR's annual budget. It does not speak to the core of what they are and what they do. --Nat Gertler (talk) 14:36, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

History stops in 1979??
A few things have happened since then. Ttulinsky (talk) 23:13, 26 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Then add them! -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:29, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Object of conspiracy theories
I just finished reading the article, and making a few minor edits to grammar etc. I had previously known about the CFR mainly as being the target of "conspiracy theories." I expected to see this mentioned and was surprised to not. BookeWorme (talk) 05:29, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Minor change request for top section
The final line of the introductory section reads:

"Richard N. Haass stepped down as company president in June 2023, with Michael Froman replacing him."

Two requests, one more objective than the other:

1) CFR is not a "company" but a nonprofit organization. 2) Froman has been president for 10 months. Can we consider deleting this line, or rearranging it to note Froman's presidency directly? I came across this issue because Google was incorrectly answering the query "president of the Council on Foreign Relations" while incorrectly snippetting this line. Google's procedural errors are not Wikis responsibility, but it would still improve the information environment.

Disclosure: I am an employee of CFR, and came across these issues in the course of my work. 96.239.71.174 (talk) 01:15, 25 April 2024 (UTC)