Trilateral Commission

The Trilateral Commission emerged from David Rockefeller’s vision of institutionalized cooperation among the world’s major capitalist democracies. Rockefeller, then chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, collaborated with political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski to establish the organization following concerns about declining American global influence and rising economic competition from Europe and Japan in the early 1970s.

The commission’s founding membership included approximately 300 prominent figures from politics, business, academia, and media across three regions: North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Early members included future U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and numerous corporate executives, cabinet officials, and central bankers. The organization meets annually in different member countries to discuss economic and political coordination.

Brzezinski served as the commission’s first executive director and articulated its core mission in “The Crisis of Democracy,” arguing that democratic societies required better coordination to address complex global challenges. The group’s policy discussions focused on trade relations, energy cooperation, and monetary coordination during the turbulent 1970s marked by oil crises and economic instability.

Conspiracy theories about the Trilateral Commission gained prominence through books like Holly Sklar’s “Trilateralism” (1980), which characterized the organization as a vehicle for corporate elite planning of global governance. These interpretations portrayed the commission’s policy recommendations as blueprints for undermining national sovereignty in favor of transnational corporate interests.

The John Birch Society and other anti-establishment groups incorporated the Trilateral Commission into broader New World Order narratives, alongside the Council on Foreign Relations and Bilderberg Group. Critics pointed to the Carter administration’s numerous Trilateral Commission members, including Carter himself, Vice President Walter Mondale, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, as evidence of the organization’s hidden influence.

The commission’s defenders emphasize its role as a policy discussion forum rather than a decision-making body, noting that its recommendations carry no binding authority. Academic analyses generally characterize it as one of several transnational policy networks that facilitate coordination among capitalist democracies, rather than as a shadow government directing world affairs.