The Trilateral Commission.

The Trilateral Commission is an elite body of some 200 North American, Western European and Japanese capitalists. Its members include prominent bankers transnational corporation heads, corporate lawyers and academics. All the key posts of Carter's administration are filled with luminaries of the Trilateral Commission. Amongst them are Carter, Vice-President Mondale, Secretary of State Vance, Secretary of the Treasury Blumenthal, Secretary of Defence Brown, National Security Adviser Brzezinski, Secretary for Health, Education and Welfare Califano, Secretary for Housing Harris and UN Ambassador Young. Lesser posts are filled with Trilateral Commission members.

Other members include two British ambassadors to the US, a Japanese foreign minister, the chairmen of Dunlop, Royal Dutch Shell, S.G. Warburg. Barclay's Bank and numerous Japanese banks, French financiers and representatives of papers such as the Financial Times, NY Times, Time and Chicago Sun-Times.

According to its first director, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Trilateral Commission arose out of two key factors.

One was the need to rebuild the US foreign policy consensus shattered by the Indochina war. In the past, foreign policy was created by a tightly-knit elite connected with the American monopoly capitalist class. As G. William Domhoff says, "American foreign policy during the postwar era was initiated, planned and carried out by the richest, most powerful, and most internationally minded owners and managers of major corporations and financial institutions." When it became clear that the US could not win in Vietnam, the elite fragmented over differences in strategy. Those outside the inner circle began to affect policy, and that had to be ended.

The second factor was the increasing fragmentation of the industrialised capitalist world. Trilateralists saw the main impulses for fragmentation coming from the Nixon Kissinger policies and the effects of OPEC and rising Third World nationalism.

During the Nixon years, Kissinger saw the world as being dominated by five power poles — the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Western Europe and Japan. Within this power distribution, the Nixon administration acted unilaterally, shifting with the circumstances so as to ensure US hegemony. The policies of the so-called Nixon "shock years' (the unilateral opening to China, devaluation of the US dollar, surcharges on Japanese imports) led to deteriorating relations with Japan and the formulation of independent policies in the EEC countries. A clear example was given during the October 1973 war in the Middle East. Some West European countries, concerned with their oil supplies, severely limited the ability of the US to operate from their territory in support of Israel.

Brzezinski states that the primary emphasis in US foreign policy must be on relations with Western Europe and Japan because they share with the United States "certain common aspirations and certain common responsibilities. These three regions are the most wealthy regions in the world and they're also the most democratic regions of the world. It is thus both in our political interest and our moral responsibility to try to work together in creating a more just international structure."