Jimmy Carter: The Unchanging of the Guard
Jimmy Carter had a real opportunity for new directions in foreign policy, campaigning as he did in the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, CIA scandals and corporate bribery revelations. But Carter has turned for global direction to a recycled clique of men whose credentials include the Cold War, the permanent war economy and the Indochina War, to mention only the major disasters of our lifetime. Under Carter the old foreign policy establishment has been reborn. If Vance, Brzezinski, Brown and Blumenthal sounds like a law firm, it’s not far wrong. These gentlemen all have the finest pedigrees from an inbred corporate world which has groomed every high-ranking diplomat for the past 30 years.
“Never has a self-defining, self-selecting and self-perpetuating group ever held power so long in American politics,” concluded Richard Barnet in his major study of the foreign policy elite, The Roots of War. Barnet found that between 1940 and 1967, “all the first- and second-level posts in a huge national security bureaucracy were held by fewer than 400 individuals”; and that 70 of 91 who held the top jobs at Defense and State departments, the armed services, the CIA and Atomic Energy Commission “have been businessmen, lawyers for businessmen, and investment bankers.”
Carter continues the pattern. His key foreign policy consultants appear to have been Zbigniew Brzezinski, now national security adviser, and Dean Rusk. When Rusk was secretary of state under Johnson, Brzezinski was on Rusk’s policy-planning council and Cyrus Vance, now secretary of state, was a special foreign policy representative to the president. Defense Secretary Harold Brown is the former Air Force chief who personally directed the largest bombing campaign in history (3.2 million tons were dropped on Indochina during his tenure alone, from ’65 to ’69 – which is 1 million tons more than the U.S. dropped during World War II) and who deliberately bombed civilians while saying in public that the targets were military “steel and concrete.” After the Johnson administration, Vance and Brzezinski sat on the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, the exclusive opinion-makers’ club in New York. Vance and Michael Blumenthal, Carter’s treasury secretary, became trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, which Rusk had earlier headed. Brzezinski is a longtime associate of David Rockefeller. Et cetera.
The newest coordinating mechanism of the elite is the Trilateral Commission, which no doubt will become the center of endless new conspiracy theories. And not without some reason.
Every single member of Carter’s National Security Council – the highest official policy-making body in America – came from the Trilateral Commission: Carter himself, Walter Mondale, Vance, Brown and Blumenthal. In his autobiography, Why Not the Best?, Carter wrote admiringly of the Trilateral Commission as a “splendid learning opportunity” and he has to date drawn 16 members of his administration from the commission.
‘Trilateral’ refers to the U.S., Western Europe and Japan, the major centers of corporate capitalism or, in the more polite language of the elite, the ‘developed world.’ The commission brings together some 180 influential leaders from the private sector seeking a unified strategy for avoiding intercapitalist rivalry and dealing with the demands of the underdeveloped countries. It reflects the end of America’s ‘unilateral’ power which grew out of World War II, and the rising challenge of the socialist and Third World governments. It also is a step toward forging a multinational elite consciousness in the age of multinational corporations.
What this means is that the Trilateral Commission has become a coordinating mechanism for the powerful against the weak. The coming decade is certain to see growing Third World indebtedness, food shortages and general despair. But if Carter’s men could countenance a decade of mass slaughter in Indochina they surely will have little difficulty stomaching mass starvation by millions of other brown and black peoples due to the more subtle mechanics of international finance and trade.
The origin of the Trilateral Commission apparently was a 1972 meeting of the equally secretive Bilderberg Conference, an elite gathering of political and business leaders under the auspices of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, recently tarnished by corporate bribery scandals. At this particular meeting, Michael Blumenthal spoke of the need for new unity to cope with economic challenges. His words fell on the sympathetic ears of David Rockefeller, who then engineered the Trilateral Commission.
Brzezinski, who became director of the Trilaterals, had made the original proposal for a global “consultative conference” in a 1970 book, Between Two Ages. In the book he gives a taste of Trilateral thought, drawing a quite rapturous picture of the coming “technotronic” age symbolized by electronic communications and global corporate systems. America’s mission is to lead the way. “Though it might not be popular to say so,” he wrote, “the fact is that a continental society like America could not survive by merely becoming another Sweden.”
He would like to remake the U.S. foreign service “operationally similar to the more efficient international corporations,” which he admires for having “effectively mastered the arts of accurate reporting, foreign representation and central control” (this was written slightly before universal corporate bribery and ITT’s operations in Chile became public knowledge). Brzezinski also advocated the “abandonment of restrictions, imposed by Congress in 1949 and 1954, on the international activities [of corporations] and on their foreign subsidiaries and plants.”
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