Rival Projects? The Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute of Pacific Relations

Abstract

World War I was the catalyst that led to the creation of two of the most significant US think tanks focusing on international affairs: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). In extremely significant ways, these two organizations were very different from each other. The first was—like Chatham House—an outgrowth of the Paris Peace Conference. It represented the impulse among the expert British and American advisers gathered there, many of them civilians temporarily seconded into government service during the war, to continue their deliberations and efforts to affect the conduct of foreign policy once peace had been made. The second was an outgrowth of the cross-fertilization between wartime Wilsonianism and the American missionary spirit, an initiative originally conceived and spearheaded by YMCA operatives based in Hawaii. Although founded and substantially funded by Americans, the IPR was a transnational federation of think tanks, that sought to transcend national, state, and racial boundaries and promote and encourage more harmonious relations among the nations bordering or with interests in the Pacific. The two organizations might even be seen as embodying the realist versus the idealist traditions of international relations. Or, as I argued in an earlier article, the Anglo-American version of world order as opposed to the Wilsonian universalist vision.