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Founding Fathers of the Council on Foreign Relations (John W Davis, Elihu Root, Newton D Baker, Hamilton Fish Armstrong)
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This essay surveys the operations of foreign policy think tanks, and how they have functioned to create transnational knowledge networks, since their emergence in the early twentieth century, around the First World War. It discusses how patterns of linkages among foreign policy think tanks changed and evolved over time, and were linked to broader A...
Citations
... Virtually any think tank may address international issues, but the sample collects the rather classic form of IR think tanks (Stone, 2021). IR think tanks are among the earliest to arrive on the policy advice scene (Parmar and Yin, 2021;Roberts, 2015). Some have been operating for a century, such as the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham), and the Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI), created in 1831, 1920, and 1934, respectively. ...
... Others have recently arrived, such as the Global Relations Forum (GRF), the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), and the New Foreign policy Society (NUPS), created in 2009, 2011, and 2021, respectively. Overall, the think tanks in the sample encompass several historical waves and forms of operation (Abelson, 2019;Roberts, 2015). ...
... While patrons may seek to prevent the think tank from being coopted by other stakeholders, they may also be wary of preempting the quality and utility of policy advice with undue control. As Roberts (2015: 2) has pointed out, 'credible' and 'respected' IR think tanks have become a sign 'of a country's international standing, prestige, and soft power', although some regimes-we would argue, some stakeholders-may give in to the temptation to overcontrol. The think tanks giving in to that temptation will show a displacement of the goals and distribution of value appropriation. ...
Patrons of think tanks—for example, governments, corporations, philanthropists, NGOs, and so forth—may control think tanks’ boards, that is, their highest decision-making body. Whether patrons are likely to control boards is a question that remains under-explored and under-theorised in public administration and governance scholarship. It is posited that patrons are likely to control boards when the marginal benefit of partaking in decision-making does not exceed the cost of information transfer. The comparative examination of International Relations think tanks’ statutes shows that patron control is substantial. However, patronage does not always guarantee board control. Patron control is moderated by the nature of the transaction. The conclusion assesses patron control concerning decision-making processes in the think tank and the idiosyncratic character of policy advice.
Points for practitioners
Practitioners can assess events of goal displacement in think tanks by learning about mechanisms that facilitate or hinder patron control over think tanks. Laying out the conditions under which patrons exercise control, the latter turns out to be substantial despite not all patrons having control over think tank boards. Patron control is shown to depend on the position of stakeholders in the decision-making chain and the nonlinear relation between effort and influence in policy advice.
... Or in Drezner's (2015, 639) apt phrasing, they connect "hands-on policymakers with hands-off academics, forcing the former to think about a time horizon longer than two weeks and the latter to think about a time horizon shorter than two decades." Depending on national context, think tanks present opportunities to shape scholarly research agendas aid in the intellectual exchange between the published and practiced corners of the IR discipline (Abb and Koellner 2015;Longhini 2015;Merke and Pauselli 2015;Roberts 2015;Woo 2015). ...
Prompted by Hagmann and Biersteker's (2014) call for a critical pedagogy of international relations, this article addresses the “taught discipline” of international relations arguing that the field needs a sustained and systematic debate on the role of IR pedagogy. In typical disciplinary stocktaking, scholars focus primarily on the “published discipline” and the “practiced discipline,” leaving a gap in our understanding of a major component of academic international relations—teaching. This article maps the discipline's intellectual system of influence and exchange to demonstrate the attenuated influence of the taught discipline. Then it presents critical questions to initiate a robust debate on the place, purpose, and scope of IR pedagogy. The purpose here is to improve the quality and thoughtfulness of classroom teaching, and to explore the underappreciated potential of the taught discipline as a site of rejuvenation in the intellectual life of international relations.
... The Anglo-American character of the event is nicely captured by Jones' diary of the subsequent dinner at the Hotel Majestic on 30 May 1919: 'Sat between Latham (Australia) and Whitney Shepardson (USA)'. The initiating role of Curtis was crucial (Hall 1937;Nicolson 1964Nicolson [1943Lavin 1995;Roberts 2015). In his speech to the inaugural gathering at the Majestic, Curtis focused upon public opinion and the importance, in the new circumstances, of moulding 'right public opinion' especially in the 'two great commonwealths'. ...
It was the consensus of the Anglo-American policy intellectuals gathered in Paris in 1919 that new actors, new institutions, and new networks were required to deal with the disruption caused by the Great War. The post-1919 re/construction of international society was thus an attempt to identify and frame interests, rules and institutions that would provide the foundations for an ordered world of states. This emerging policy elite argued the case for new institutions to manage international affairs, and advocated educating the citizenry of the more advanced nations to accept the responsibilities implicit in the idea of an ‘international mind’. A cautious institutional liberalism was to replace the unaccountable rulers and foreign policy elites of the previous era; ‘international relations’ as an academic discipline was required to provide the technical knowledge needed for policy conceptualisation and formation. The Chatham House network flourished between the wars, transforming the way foreign policy was formulated, understood and practiced.
The aim of this paper is to contribute to research on the role of elite networks in democracies. The specific research topic is an attempt to measure (for the first time) the influence of different elite networks on U.S. government administrations from 1901 to 2021. The strategy is based on the identification of U.S. government officials, who were also members of secret elite networks during their time in office. To this end, each government position received an influence value based on its importance. If an official in this position was also a member of an elite network, then the influence of the position is counted towards the influence of the network. The total influence of a network is divided by the total influence of all government positions in order to receive its relative influence score in a given administration. The results show that Freemasons had a strong influence on most U.S. governments until 1953, whereas the Anglo-American Network, with its most prominent arm, the Council on Foreign Relations, became the dominant force from Eisenhower onward. Only Nixon’s first cabinet and Donald Trump constituted exceptions thereafter, relying less heavily on this network. The implication of this study is that it is impossible to understand American history or World history in the last 120 years without also analyzing the role and interests of elite networks, given their consistent and surprisingly high level of influence, as revealed by this study.
Created in 1920, the London-based ‘British Institute of International Affairs’ (in 1926 renamed the Royal Institute of International Affairs) has for a century been at the forefront of an ongoing ‘Anglo-American’ conversation about world politics. Yet even though the Institute was regarded from the outset as the institutional expression of a very ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the United States, it did very little independent research of its own on US foreign policy. This however began to change in the 1990s when the United States appeared to have become a ‘superpower without a mission’. It then took on a more organized form following the attack of 9/11. At this critical juncture Chatham House decided to establish a new Study Group—the ‘United States Discussion Group’ (USDG)—which went on to discuss US foreign policy in depth. What this article sets out to do is outline the origins of the USDG, the main contours of what was discussed within the Group, the degree to which these discussions were different to those then underway within the US itself, and finally assess the contribution it made in helping encourage further debate on the United States within Britain’s foremost foreign policy Think Tank.
Varieties of cognitive "tank" beyond the conventional "think tank"
Thinking "inside-the-box" as reinforced by think tanks
Cognitive boundaries of cognitive process containers
Recognizing the ecosystem of cognitive tanks
Information warfare as predominant feature of future civilization
Memetic tank warfare "under the radar" of think tanks?
Clustering and interrelating strategic insights
Indicative simulations of memetic "tank warfare" in psychosocial systems?
Systemic configuration of highly disparate cognitive modalities -- in the light of 5-ring strategy?
Dynamics of tank comprehension and enclosure
In quest of new questions of strategic relevance
