“The terrain is more rugged than I
imagined,” Secretary of State George
Shultz bluntly declared in a February
visit to recolonized Grenada, “but it
is certainly a lovely piece of real es-
tate.” The Grenada invasion sent
shockwaves throughout the trilateral
alliance and the world. Further trem-
ors were felt in April, when what had
been only rumors of CIA mining of
Nicaragua’s harbors became fact. And
in May, the trilateralists’ growing fears
about Reagan’s belligerence seemed
to be reinforced when the Administra-
tion snubbed its nose at a World Court
decision in Nicaragua’s favor, and
thereby at the system of international
law altogether.
At the Trilateral Commission’s
April plenary meeting in Washington,
Central America claimed a prominent
place on the agenda, and the commis-
sion’s quarterly magazine, Trialogue,
printed excerpts from the discussion.
Central America has fuelled con-
tradictions within the trilateral forces
and brought its adherents into the
thick of policy debate anew. When
Jimmy Carter left Washington and re-
tired to Plains, many observers as-
sumed that the trilateralists had retired
along with him. Yet commission
members have been active in and out-
side the Reagan coalition, and are key
actors in the elite debate over Central
America.
Clearly, trilateralists are split be-
tween support for the Kissinger Com-
mission or for the pro-Contadora
Inter-American Dialogue, co-chaired
by corporate lawyer Sol Linowitz,
who served in several ambassadorial
capacities during the Carter years.
Trilateral commissioners have served
on both groups: Kissinger; AFL-CIO
Holly Sklar is the editor of
Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commis-
sion and Elite Planning for World
Management (South End Press, 1980)
and co-author of our May/June 1982
Report, “South Atlantic Triangle.”
President Lane Kirkland; former Am-
bassador at Large to the Middle East,
Robert Strauss; and Council on For-
eign Relations President Winston
Lord (as senior counselor) on the Kis-
singer Commission. On the Linowitz
Commission are Trilateral North
American Chairman David Rockefel-
ler; former World Bank President
Robert McNamara; University of
Notre Dame President Theodore Hes-
burgh; Coca-Cola Chairman Roberto
Goizueta; former Secretary of Com-
merce Juanita Kreps; and former De-
fense Secretary Elliot Richardson.
From this line-up, the Trialogue
discussion and other references, it
seems the trilateralist majority lies
with the Linowitz Commission, even
among U.S. members. The Trilateral
Commission’s most important recent
report, Democracy Must Work,
fudges the matter by not taking an
explicit position on Contadora, for ex-
ample, but leans toward political set-
tlement:
“An America beleagured and bog-
ged down in a crisis immediately
south of its border is likely to be an
America less able to enhance trilateral
cooperation and to promote trilateral
security . . . West Europe and Japan
should give some serious considera-
tion to becoming associated-as
Canada already is- with longer-term
socio-economic development plans
for the Central American and Carib-
bean regions . . . such external assist-
ance would mitigate the tendency in
the United States to perceive the Cen-
tral American problem purely as a
Soviet-Cuban challenge and encour-
age the needed longer-range and more
patient policy of both political and
economic development.”
Managing Interdependence
Twelve years have passed since 17
influential North Americans, Euro-
peans and Japanese gathered at the
Rockefeller estate in Tarrytown, New
York to plan the Trilateral Commis-
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
sion. They were concerned that grow-
ing economic and political rivalries
would damage, or, possibly destroy,
the Western alliance. They rejected
Nixon’s unilateralist attempt to reas-
sert U.S. hegemony over Western
Europe and Japan, and advocated in-
stead a strategy of “collective man-
agement” over an increasingly “in-
terdependent” world economy.
By the time the commission’s first
plenary meeting was held in Japan in
May 1975, the Ford Administration
was following a more trilateralist ap-
proach and preparations were under-
way for the first Western economic
summit. The emphasis had shifted
from internal to external challenges: a
wave of Third World national libera-
tion struggles loomed larger in the
wake of the April 1975 U.S. defeat in
Vietnam; the 1973-74 OPEC oil
shocks raised the specter of “com-
modity power” behind the Third
World call for a New International
Economic Order (NIEO); and Soviet
power appeared to be on the ascent.
A broad prescription for strengthen-
ing trilateralism and overcoming these
global challenges was spelled out in
the commission’s 1977 report, To-
ward a Renovated International Sys-
tem. It advocated accommodation and
cooptation in place of a futile effort to
preserve the status quo with confron-
tation. “A minimum of social justice
and reform,” said the report, “will be
necessary for stability in the long
run.” “New influentials” or “mid-
dle-class countries”–such as Saudi
Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, Mexico-
should be conceded a larger role and
stake in the capitalist club. Debt de-
pendency, policed by the Internation-
al Monetary Fund (IMF), became the
preferred guarantor of neocolonial-
ism– la Jamaica.
In East-West relations, trilateralists
recognized the permanence of nuclear
parity and sought to extend detente.
Deeper economic ties were advo-
cated, both as a vehicle for Western
profit and as a means of diluting East-
ern bloc communism and restraining
Soviet support for national liberation
movements. The People’s Republic of
China, long considered a “drop out,”
was now ready to be assimilated into
the capitalist world economy and re-
12Jimmy Carter: Many assumed the trilateralists had retired with him.
warded for an enduring Sino-Soviet
split.
Contradictions Under Carter
Trilateralism had a major chance to
move from theory to practice when
President Jimmy Carter, who was
invited to join the commission in
1973, selected 25 fellow commissioners
for top Administration posts. Among
them were Vice-President Mondale;
Natonal Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski; Secretary of State Cyrus
Vance; Special Negotiator for the
Panama Canal Treaties Sol Linowitz;
and United Nations Ambassador An-
drew Young. And, indeed, trilateralist policies
were successful in many areas: the
“peaceful” ouster of Michael Manley
in Jamaica; the Panama Canal Trea-
ties; democratization in the Domini-
can Republic; a negotiated settlement
in Zimbabwe; the Camp David Peace
Accords; integration of OPEC into the
international monetary system (in part
by channeling petrodollars into West-
ern governmental and private banks
and into IMF and World Bank cof-
fers); fragmentation of forces support-
ing the NIEO; and strengthening of
the IMF and World Bank. Trilateral-
ism was further institutionalized,
especially Japanese participation, through the annual Western summits.
As time passed, however, it’was
clear trilateralism was suffering from
an acute case of contradictions. For
the Carter Administration it was fatal.
In 1980, Brzezinski expressed the
central foreign policy contradiction,
but he insisted it was merely two sides
of the same coin. “One: to make the
United States historically more rele-
vant to a world of genuinely profound
change; and secondly, to improve the
United States’ position in the geo-stra-
tegic balance with the Soviet Union.”
Brzezinski increasingly advocated
militaristic geostrategic policies, at
the expense of accommodation to
Third World change, while Secretary
of State Vance remained committed to
negotiation and detente. Outside the
Administration, right-wingers saw
accommodation as appeasement, and
they turned on the pressure from
groups such as the Committee on the
Present Danger. The Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan and the year-long hos-
tage crisis in Iran provided shock
therapy for the “Vietnam Syn-
drome,” as the Carter Administration
emphasized rapid intervention over
reform and substituted the second
Cold War for detente (which long be-
fore Afghanistan was being perceived
as a failure in co-opting the Soviet
Union).
Rollback Versus Containment
Even before Ronald Reagan’s inau-
guration, the trilateral accommoda-
tionist consensus had fractured and a
harder-line posture of “limited con-
tainment” or “selective intervention”
was being readied. Trilateralists in-
side and outside the Reagan Adminis-
tration resisted the right-wing attempt
at all-out rollback. But they were
hampered by their own lack of con-
sensus in defining the means and
priorities of their more “moderate,”
selective intervention.*
Trilateralism, albeit hard-line tri-
lateralism, has been represented in the
Reagan Administration primarily by
Vice-President George Bush, Federal
Reserve Chief Paul Volcker, and (ex-
cept on Central America) Secretaries
of State Alexander Haig and George
Shultz. (Shultz’s Bechtel partner,
Caspar Weinberger, was a member of
the Trilateral Commission before be-
coming secretary of defense, but a
born-again rollbacker, he’s hardly
likely to rejoin.)
The benchmarks of trilateral suc-
cess in the 1980-84 period are few,
but, nonetheless, significant. To the
horror of the rollbackers-among
them U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirk-
patrick; CIA Director William Ca-
sey; Undersecretary of Defense Fred
Ikl6-Reagan promised to adhere to
“SALT II, maintained assistance to
Zimbabwe and helped bail-out the
debt-ridden Polish economy.
In 1983, Reagan won an increase in
the U.S. contribution to the IMF over
*For a fuller discussion of elite debates
over foreign policy, see Holly Sklar,
“Many Paths to War,” in Beyond Survival
(South End Press, 1983), edited by Michael Albert and Dave Dellinger.
SEPTEMBERIOCTOBER 1984 13 SEFFPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 13strong opposition from right-wingers
who saw it as a bail-out of unpatriotic
multinational banks and spendthrift
Third World countries. And to the
rollbackers’ dismay, Reagan showed
that he could even be tempered on the
issue of anti-communism. After initial
seesawing over the two-Chinas pol-
icy, Reagan strengthened relations
with the People’s Republic.
The essence of trilateralism is a
strong core alliance among North
America, Western Europe and Japan.
At the 1983 Williamsburg Economic
Summit, Japan’s important role in
Western security was given explicit
recognition. While the alliance has
been strained greatly by Reagan’s un-
ilateralist and militaristic tendencies,
undoubtedly there would have been
greater fissures if trilateralists had not
applied some countervailing pressure.
An Updated Trilateral Agenda
After undermining trilateralism in
practice during the Carter years, Zbig-
niew Brzezinski has recently taken
another shot at trilateralism on paper.
He is the author of Democracy Must
Work: A Trilateral Agenda for the De-
cade, along with David Owen, former
foreign secretary under the Labor
Party and chair of the splinter British
Social Democratic Party, and Sabui’o
Okita, head of Japan’s Institute for
Domestic and International Policy
Studies and former foreign minister.
Reflecting the renewed tilt toward
accommodationism, the report is de-
signed as an agenda for upcoming
Western summits. From this and pre-
vious reports,* renovated trilateralism
can be sketched as follows:
Trilateral Relations: Trilateralists
see the annual summits as important
arenas for building consensus, nego-
tiating trade-offs and gaining momen-
tum for policies which go against the
domestic grain (such as the commit-
ment to decontrol U.S. oil prices at
the 1978 Bonn Summit). Future meet-
ings should be known as Strategic or
Policy Summits, rather than the out-
*Facilitating Development in a Changing
World: Trade, Finance, Aid; Trilateral Se-
curity: Defense and Arms Control Policies
in the 1980s; Sharing International Re-
sponsibilities Among the Trilateral Coun-
tries, etc.
dated description of Economic Sum-
mit. A top priority for trilateral action
is reduction of the U.S. budget de-
ficit, in part by cutting back on the
rate of growth in military spending.
As trilateralists see it, deficit reduc-
tion would help ease the high interest
rates which aggravate the debt crisis
and drain investments from other in-
dustrial nations.
East-West Relations and Military
Policy: The report on trilateral secu-
rity places the West and the Soviet
Union at a crossroads: “They can
either reach accommodations which
will make possible a reduction of their
military competition or face an in-
creasingly unstable world in which the
economic burdens of defense will
grow and the security of all nations
will diminish.” A gradual resumption
of detente is recommended. While the
Trilateral Commission held a meeting
in Peking in May 1981, there is disa-
greement over whether to extend the
economic embrace of China into a
military alliance. The debate turns on
the Soviet Union: is detente to be
buried completely under a trilateral-
Chinese axis or is detente with the
Soviets a higher priority?
While some commission members
support the Nuclear Freeze and/or a
No-First-Use policy, the trilateral re-
ports reject both approaches. Instead
they call for renewed arms control ef-
forts following the more traditional
mix of negotiation and moderniza-
tion. There is heavy emphasis on
strengthening conventional forces, os-
tensibly as a means of decreasing re-
liance on nuclear weapons. Both the
United States and Britain should back
this with some form of compulsory
military service. Western European
governments should make a long-
term commitment to raising military
spending at a rate of 3 to 4 percent an-
nually. Japan should be encouraged to
meet its growing alliance obligations
under the flexible rubric of “com-
prehensive security” which encom-
passes economic security assistance as
well as military commitments. For ex-
ample, Japan should increase its role
in economic assistance to strategically
important countries such as Turkey,
Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand and
Egypt.
14
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
North-South Relations: There is
great concern with the possibility of
“major social breakdowns” in the
Third World, including massive fam-
ines, population migrations and en-
hanced “opportunities for extremists
of the left and right to seize power.”
The trilateral countries are encouraged
to increase official development as-
sistance, liberalize import restrictions
and expand the resources of the IMF,
World Bank and regional develop-
ment banks. Newly industrialized
countries should be further integrated
into the management of the interna-
tional economy (within trilateral
rules) through these multilateral lend-
ing agencies.
The international debt crisis is seen
as a “liquidity” crisis (rather than a
“solvency” crisis), requiring flexible
re-scheduling of payments, moderate
infusions of new private bank credit
and strong IMF intervention.
When Accommodation Fails….
Trilateralists are regrouping for
another round of global renovation,
and debate over Central America is
one of their prime testing grounds.
But trilateralism remains fraught with
contradictions and trapped in the il-
logic of minority rule on a world
scale. Despite lip service to more
equity in resource distribution and
decision-making, trilateralists have
proven quite willing to use force in an
attempt to impose order where co-op-
tation is inadequate and the stakes too
high. In the Middle East, the question
is not whether to use military force in
defense of alleged U.S. vital interests,
but how much and when. In the case
of Central America, it is likely a Mon-
dale Administration will attempt a
negotiated settlement for Nicaragua
and El Salvador (applying lessons
from the Zimbabwe experience). But
even if accommodation succeeds
here, it is likely the counterrevolution-
ary consensus will retrench at the
Guatemalan border. If Reagan is re-
elected, many trilateralists can be ex-
pected to voice their opposition to the
probable massive intervention in Cen-
tral America. But establishment de-
bate will be over the means to pre-
serve Western dominance in the Third
World, and not the ethics of domina-
tion itself.
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