Dr. Klaus Schwab or: How the CFR Taught Me to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
The World Economic Forum’s recorded history has been manufactured to appear as though the organisation was a strictly European creation, but this isn’t so. In fact, Klaus Schwab had an elite American political team working in the shadows that aided him in creating the European-based globalist organisation. If you have a decent knowledge of Klaus Schwab’s history, you will know that he attended Harvard in the 1960s where he would meet then-Professor Henry A. Kissinger, a man with whom Schwab would form a lifelong friendship. But, as with most information from the annals of the World Economic Forum’s history books, what you’ve been told is not the full story. In fact, Kissinger would recruit Schwab at the International seminar at Harvard, which had been funded by the US’ Central Intelligence Agency. Although this funding was exposed the year in which Klaus Schwab left Harvard, the connection has gone largely unnoticed – until now.
My research indicates that the World Economic Forum is not a European creation. In reality, it is instead an operation which emanates from the public policy grandees of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixonian eras of American politics; all of whom had ties to the Council on Foreign Relations and the associated “Round Table” Movement, with a supporting role played by the Central Intelligence Agency.
There were three extremely powerful and influential men, Kissinger among them, who would lead Klaus Schwab towards their ultimate goal of complete American Empire-aligned global domination via the creation of social and economic policies. In addition, two of the men were at the core of manufacturing the ever present threat of global thermonuclear war. By examining these men through the wider context of the geopolitics of the period, I will show how their paths would cross and coalesce during the 1960s, how they recruited Klaus Schwab through a CIA-funded program, and how they were the real driving force behind the creation of the World Economic Forum.
Henry A. Kissinger
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Bavaria, Germany, on 27 May 1923 to Paula and Louis Kissinger. The family had been one of many Jewish families fleeing the persecution in Germany to arrive in America in 1938. Kissinger would change his first name to Henry at 15 years old when arriving in America by way of a brief emigration to London. His family would initially settle in Upper Manhattan with the young Henry Kissinger attending George Washington High School. In 1942, Kissinger would enroll in the City College of New York, but, in early 1943, was drafted into the US Army. On 19 June 1943, Kissinger would become a naturalised US citizen. He would soon be assigned to the 84th Infantry Division where he would be recruited by the legendary Fritz Kraemer to work in the military intelligence unit of the division. Kraemer would fight along Kissinger during the Battle of the Bulge and would later become extremely influential in American politics during the postwar era, influencing future politicians such as Donald Rumsfeld. Henry Kissinger would describe Kraemer as being “the greatest single influence on my formative years”, in a New Yorker article entitled, The Myth of Henry Kissinger, written in 2020.
The writer of that article, Thomas Meaney, describes Kraemer as:
“A Nietzschean firebrand to the point of self-parody—he wore a monocle in his good eye to make his weak eye work harder—Kraemer claimed to have spent the late Weimar years fighting both Communists and Nazi Brown Shirts in the streets. He had doctorates in political science and international law, and pursued a promising career at the League of Nations before fleeing to the US in 1939. He warned Kissinger not to emulate “cleverling” intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses. Believing Kissinger to be “musically attuned to history,” he told him, “Only if you do not ‘calculate’ will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people.””
Henry Kissinger, Klaus Schwab and Ted Heath at the 1980 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
During World War II, whilst Kissinger was serving in the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps, he would be promoted to the rank of sergeant and would go on to serve in the Military Intelligence Reserve for many years after peace was declared. During that period, Kissinger would take charge of a team hunting down Gestapo officers and other Nazi officials who had been labeled as “saboteurs”. After the war, in 1946, Kissinger would be reassigned to teach at the European Command Intelligence School, a position he would continue to work in as a civilian after officially leaving the army.
In 1950, Kissinger would graduate from Harvard with a degree in political science where he would study under William Yandell Elliott, who would eventually be a political advisor to six US presidents and would also serve as a mentor to Zbigniew Brzezinski and Pierre Trudeau, among others. Yandell Elliott, along with many of his star pupils, would serve as the key connectors between the American national security establishment and the British “Round Table” movement, embodied by organisations such as Chatham House in the UK and the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States. They would also seek to impose global power structures shared by Big Business, the political elite and academia. Kissinger would continue to study at Harvard, gaining his MA and PhD degrees at the prestigious university, but he was also already trying to forge a career path in intelligence, reportedly seeking recruitment as an FBI spy during this period.
In 1951, Kissinger would be employed as a consultant for the Army’s Operations Research Office, where he would be trained in various forms of psychological warfare. This awareness of psyops was reflected in his doctoral work during the period. His work on the Congress of Vienna and its consequences invoked thermonuclear weapons as its opening gambit, which also made an otherwise dull piece of work a little more interesting. By 1954, Kissinger was hoping to become a junior professor at Harvard but, instead, the dean of Harvard at the time, McGeorge Bundy – another pupil of William Yandell Elliott, recommended Kissinger to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). At the CFR, Kissinger would start managing a study group on nuclear weapons. From 1956 to 1958, Kissinger also became the Director of Special Studies for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (David Rockefeller was vice-president of the CFR during this period), as well as going on to direct multiple panels to produce reports on national defense, which would gain international attention. In 1957, Kissinger would seal his place as a leading Establishment figure on thermonuclear war after publishing, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, a book published for the Council on Foreign Relations by Harper & Brothers.
In December of 1966, The Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, John M Leddy, announced the formation of a 22-man panel of advisors to help “shape European policy”. The five most prominent actors of this panel of advisors included: Henry A Kissinger representing Harvard, Robert Osgood of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research (funded by Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie money), Melvin Conant of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Warner R Schilling of Columbia University, and Raymond Vernon who was also of Harvard. The other people on the panel included four members of the Council on Foreign Relations, Shepard Stone of the Ford Foundation, with the rest being a mix of representatives from leading American universities. The forming of this panel could be considered the laying of the proverbial foundation stone marking the American branch of the “Round Table” establishment’s intent to create an organisation such as the World Economic Forum, whereby Anglo-American imperialists would mold European policies as they saw fit.
Post-war Europe was at a vital stage of its development and the powerful American Empire was beginning to see opportunities in the rebirth of Europe and the emerging identity of its younger generation. In late December of 1966, Kissinger would be one of the twenty-nine “American authorities on Germany” to sign a statement declaring that “recent state elections in West Germany do not indicate a rebirth of Nazism”. The document, also signed by the likes of Dwight Eisenhower, was meant to signal that Europe was starting afresh and was meant to begin putting the horrors of European wars in the past. Some of the people involved in creating the aforementioned document were those who had already been externally influencing European policy from abroad. Notably, one of the signatures alongside Kissinger and Eisenhower was Prof. Hans J Morgenthau who was also representing the Council on Foreign Relations at the time. Morgenthau had famously written a paper entitled, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, and argued against an “overreliance on science and technology as solutions to political and social problems”.
In February 1967, Henry Kissinger would target European policy making as having been the reason for a century of war and political turmoil on the continent. In a piece entitled, Fuller Investigation, printed in the New York Times, Kissinger would state that a work by Raymond Aron, Peace and War. A Theory of International Relations, had remedied some of these issues.
In this article, Kissinger would write:
“In the United States the national style is pragmatic; the tradition until World War II was largely isolationist; the approach to peace and war tended to be absolute and legalistic. American writing on foreign policy has generally tended to fall into three categories: analyses of specific cases or historical episodes, exhortations justifying or resisting greater participation in international affairs, and investigations of the legal bases of world order.”
It was clear that Prof Henry A Kissinger had identified American involvement in European policy creation as being vital in the future peace and stability of the world. At this time, Kissinger was based at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here, the future founder of the World Economic Forum, a young Klaus Schwab, would catch the eye of Henry A Kissinger.
Kissinger was the executive director of the International seminar, which Schwab often mentions when recollecting his time spent at Harvard. On 16 April 1967, it would be reported that various Harvard programs had been receiving funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This included $135,000 of funding for Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar, funding which Kissinger claimed he was unaware had come from the US intelligence agency. The CIA’s involvement in funding Kissinger’s international seminar was exposed in a report by Humphrey Doermann, the assistant to Franklin L Ford, who was dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science. Humphrey Doermann’s report, written in 1967, only centred on the CIA funding from between 1961 to 1966, but Kissinger’s International seminar, which had received the most funding out of all the CIA-funded Harvard programs, would still run through 1967. Klaus Schwab arrived at Harvard in 1965.
On 15 April 1967, The Harvard Crimson would publish an article, attributed to no author, concerning Doermann’s report that stated, “There were no strings attached to the aid, so the government could not directly influence research or prevent its results from being published.” The dismissive article, entitled, CIA Financial Links, nonchalantly closes out by stating,”In any case, were the University to refuse to accept CIA research grants, the shadowy agency would have little trouble channeling its offers through another agrecy.” (agrecy being a pun meaning a form of intelligence).
The evidence points to Klaus Schwab having been recruited by Kissinger into his circle of “Round Table” imperialists via a CIA funded program at Harvard University. In addition, the year he graduated would also be the year in which it was revealed to have been a CIA-funded program. This CIA-funded seminar would introduce Schwab to the extremely well-connected American policy-makers who would help him create what would become the most powerful European public policy institute, the World Economic Forum.
By 1969, Kissinger would be sitting as the head of the US National Security Council, of which the sitting president, Richard Nixon would “enhance the importance of” during his administration. Kissinger was Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs between 2 December 1968 to 3 November 1975, serving concurrently as Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State from 22 September 1973. Kissinger would dominate the making of US foreign policy during the Nixon era and the system he would bring to the National Security Council would seek to combine features of the systems previously implemented by Eisenhower and Johnson.
Henry Kissinger, who had been one of the people to manufacture tensions between thermonuclear powers over the previous two decades, was now to act as “peacemaker” during the Nixon period. He would turn his focus to the European stand-off and would seek to relax the tensions between the West and Russia. He negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (culminating in the SALT I treaty) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Kissinger was attempting to rebrand himself as a trusted statesman and diplomat.
In the second term of President Richard Nixon’s administration, their attention would turn to relations with Western Europe. Richard Nixon would describe 1973 as being the “Year of Europe”. The United States’ focus would be on supporting the states of the European Economic Community (EEC) which had become economic rivals to the US by the early 1970s. Kissinger grasped the “Year of Europe” concept and pushed an agenda, not only of economic reform, but also arguing to strengthen and revitalise what he considered to be the “decaying force”, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Throughout this period, Kissinger would also promote global governance.
Years later, Henry Kissinger would make the opening address of the World Economic Forum’s 1980 conference, telling the elites at Davos: “For the first time in history, foreign policy is truly global”.
John K. Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith (often referred to as Ken Galbraith) was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public policy maker, and Harvard intellectual. His impact on American history is extraordinary and the consequences of his actions in the late 1960s alone are still being felt around the world today. In September 1934, Galbraith would initially join the faculty at Harvard University as an instructor with a salary of $2,400 per year. In 1935, he would be appointed a tutor at John Winthrop House (commonly known as Winthrop House) which is one of twelve undergraduate residential houses at Harvard University. In that same year, one of his first students would be Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, with John F. Kennedy arriving two years later, in 1937. Soon after, the Canadian Galbraith would become naturalised as a US citizen on 14 September 1937. Three days later, he would marry his partner, Catherine Merriam Atwater, a woman who, a few years before, had been studying at the University of Munich. There, she had lived in the same rooming house-dormitory as Unity Mitford, whose boyfriend was Adolf Hitler. After marrying, Galbraith would travel extensively in Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Italy, France, but also Germany. Galbraith had been due to spend a year as a research fellow at the University of Cambridge under famed economist John Maynard Keynes, but Keynes’ sudden heart attack would see Galbraith’s new wife persuade him to study in Germany instead. During the summer of 1938, Galbraith would study German land policies under Hitler’s government.
The following year, Galbraith found himself involved in what was termed at the time, “the Walsh-Sweezy affair” – a US national scandal involving two radical instructors who had been terminated from Harvard. Galbraith’s connections with the affair would result in his appointment at Harvard not being renewed.
Still from Galbraith’s interview with Charlie Rose
Galbraith would take a demotion to work at Princeton, where he would soon after accept an invitation from the National Resource Planning Board to be part of a review panel into New Deal spending and employment programs. It is this project which would see him first meet Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1940, as France fell to Nazi forces, Galbraith would join the staff of the National Defense Advisory Committee, at the request of FDR’s economic advisor, Lauchlin Curry. Although that committee would be swiftly dissolved, Galbraith soon found himself appointed to the Office of Price Administration (OPA), heading up the division tasked with price control. He would be dismissed from the OPA on 31 May 1943. Fortune Magazine had already been trying to headhunt Galbraith since as early as 1941, and would soon scoop him up to join their staff as a writer.
The biggest shift in focus for Galbraith happened in 1945, the day after the death of Roosevelt. Galbraith would leave New York for Washington, where he would be duly sent to London to assume a division directorship of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, tasked with evaluating the overall economic effects of the wartime bombing. By the time he had arrived at Flensburg, Germany had already formally surrendered to the Allied forces and Galbraith’s initial task would change. He would accompany George Ball and be part of the interrogation of Albert Speer. In this one move, Galbraith had gone from being a policy advisor dealing with statistics and projections concerned with pricing, to the co-interrogator of a high-ranking Nazi war criminal. Speer had been in various important positions during the war, including as the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, one of the key men behind the organisation, maintenance and arming of every part of the Nazi Wermacht.
Soon after, Galbraith would be sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to evaluate the effects of the bombing. In January 1946, John Kenneth Galbraith was involved in one of the defining moments of American economic history. He would take part in the American Economic Association meetings in Cleveland, where, alongside Edward Chamberlin of Harvard and Clarence Ayres of Texas, he would debate Frank Knight and other leading proponents of classical economics. This event marked the coming-out of Keynesian economics, which would come to dominate post-war America.
In February 1946, Galbraith would return to Washington, where he would be appointed director of the Office of Economic Security Policy. It is here, in September of 1946, where Galbraith was tasked with drafting a speech for the Secretary of State, William Byrnes, outlining American policy towards German reconstruction, democratisation, and eventual admission into the United Nations. Galbraith, who opposed the group of politicians at the time referred to as “the Cold Warriors”, would resign from his position in October of 1946, returning to Fortune Magazine. He would also be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom that same year. In 1947, Galbraith would co-found the organisation, Americans for Democratic Action, alongside others including Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Ronald Reagan. In 1948, Galbraith would return to Harvard as a lecturer in Agricultural Forestry and Land-Use Policy. Soon after, he would be installed as a Professor at Harvard.
By 1957, Galbraith was beginning to form a closer relationship with his former student John F. Kennedy, who was by then junior senator for Massachusetts. The following year, JFK would publicly declare Galbraith as the “Phileas Fogg of the academic world” after receiving a copy of Galbraith’s book, A Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia, where he examined socialist planning up close. It is also in 1958 where Galbraith published “The Affluent Society” to critical acclaim, where he coined terms such as “conventional wisdom” and the “dependence effect”. It is around this time when Galbraith became the Paul M. Warburg Chair in economics at Harvard. This is the same position he would hold when he would first be introduced to a young Klaus Schwab.
By 1960, John Kenneth Galbraith had become an economic advisor to the Kennedy campaign. After Kennedy was elected President, Galbraith began staffing the new administration, famously being the man who recommended Robert S. McNamara for Secretary of Defense. In 1961, Kennedy would name Galbraith as ambassador to India and, later in the year, Galbraith would travel to Vietnam, at the behest of the President, to give a second opinion on the Taylor-Rostow report. On Galbraith’s advice, Kennedy would begin to withdraw troops from Vietnam.
In 1963, Galbraith would return to the United States, refusing an offer from Kennedy to take up an ambassadorship in Moscow, so as to return to Harvard. On the day Kennedy was assassinated, Galbraith was in New York with the publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham. Galbraith would go straight to Washington and would be the man who drafted the original version of the new President’s speech to the joint session of congress. The year following JFK’s assassination, Galbraith would return to Harvard to develop a famous and highly popular course in Social Science that he would go on to teach for the following decade. He would still retain his position as an advisor to President Johnson, but would spend the rest of the year writing his final academic journals exclusively in economics.
By 1965, Galbraith had become increasingly louder in his opposition to the war in Vietnam, writing speeches and letters to the President. This rift would persist between Galbraith and Johnson, with Galbraith finally assuming the presidency of Americans for Democratic Action and going on to launch a national campaign against the Vietnam War entitled, “Negotiations Now!” In 1967, the rift between Galbraith and Johnson would only become wider when Senator Eugene McCarthy was persuaded by Galbraith to run against Johnson in the coming primary elections. Robert F. Kennedy was also hoping to recruit Galbraith to his own campaign but, although Galbraith had formed a close bond with the late JFK, he had not been so keen on Robert F. Kennedy’s distinctive style.
By the late 1960s, John K. Galbraith and Henry A. Kissinger were both considered to be two of the foremost lecturers, authors and educators in America. They were also both grandees at Harvard, Galbraith as the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, and Kissinger as a Professor of Government, and the two men were focused on the creation of foreign policy for both America and the emerging new Europe. It was announced on 20 March 1968 that Kissinger and Galbraith would be the first speakers of the spring session of what was referred to as the “Mandeville Lectures series”, due to take place at the University of California, San Diego. Galbraith’s speech would be entitled, “Foreign Policy: The Cool Dissent”, whilst Kissinger’s speech was called “America and Europe: A New Relationship”.
Kissinger would introduce Klaus Schwab to John Kenneth Galbraith at Harvard and, as the 1960’s came to a close, Galbraith would help Schwab make the World Economic Forum a reality. Galbraith would fly over to Europe, along with Herman Kahn, to help Schwab convince the European elite to back the project. At the first European Management Symposium/Forum (the original name/s of the WEF), John Kenneth Galbraith would be the keynote speaker.
Herman Kahn
Herman Kahn was born in Bayonne, New Jersey on 15 February 1922 to Yetta and Abraham Kahn. He was brought up in the Bronx with a Jewish upbringing, but would later become atheistic in his beliefs. Throughout the 1950s, Khan would write various reports at the Hudson Institute on the concept and practicality of nuclear deterrence, which would subsequently become official military policy. He would also compile reports for official hearings, such as the Subcommittee on Radiation. It is in the primordial hysteria of the earliest years of the Cold War where Kahn would be given the intellectual, and some may say ethical and moral, space to “think the unthinkable”. Khan would apply game theory – the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents – to wargame potential scenarios and outcomes concerning thermonuclear war.
In 1960, Kahn would publish, The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence, which studied the risks and subsequent impact of a thermonuclear war. The Rand Corporation sums up the kinds of deterrents discussed in Kahn’s work as: the deterrence of a direct attack, the use of strategic threats to deter an enemy from engaging in very provocative acts other than a direct attack on the United States, and, lastly, the acts that are deterred because the potential aggressor is afraid that the defender or others will take limited actions, military or non-military, to make the aggression unprofitable.
Herman Kahn (left) with Gerald Ford and Donald Rumsfeld
The following year, Princeton University Press would first publish Herman Kahn’s seminal work, On Thermonuclear War. This book would have an enormous impact on the near and distant future of global politics and would drive American Establishment politicians to create foreign policy specifically designed to counter the potential worst case thermonuclear scenario. On the release of Kahn’s terrifying work, the Israeli-American sociologist and “communitarian”, Amitai Etzioni, would be quoted as saying, “Kahn does for nuclear arms what free-love advocates did for sex: he speaks candidly of acts about which others whisper behind closed doors”.
Khan’s complex theories have often been erroneously paraphrased, with most of his work being impossible to sum up in just a sentence or two, and this is emblematic of his ideas concerning thermonuclear war. Kahn’s research team were studying a multitude of different scenarios, a constantly evolving, dynamic, multipolar world, and many unknowns.
On Thermonuclear War had an instant and lasting impact, not only on geopolitics, but also on culture, expressed within a few years by a very famous movie. 1964 saw the release of the Stanley Kubrick classic, Dr Strangelove, and from the moment of its release, and ever since, Khan has been referred to as the real Dr. Strangelove. When quizzed about the comparison, Khan would tell Newsweek, “Kubrick is a friend of mine. He told me Dr. Strangelove wasn’t supposed to be me.” But others would point out the many affinities between Stanley Kubrick’s classic character and the real life Herman Kahn.
In an essay written for the Council on Foreign Relations in July 1966, entitled, Our Alternatives in Europe, Kahn states:
“Existing U.S. policy has generally been directed to the political and economic as well as the military integration or unification of Western Europe as a means to European security. Some have seen unification as a step toward the political unity of the West as a whole, or even of the world. Thus, the achievement of some more qualified form of integration or federation of Europe, and of Europe with America, has also been held to be an intrinsically desirable goal, especially as national rivalries in Europe have been seen as a fundamentally disruptive force in modern history; hence their suppression, or accommodation in a larger political framework, is indispensable to the future stability of the world.”
This statement suggests that the preferred solution for future European/American relations would be the creation of a European union. Even more preferable to Kahn was the idea of creating a unified American and European superstate.
In 1967, Herman Kahn would write one of the most important futurist works of the 20th century, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. In this book, co-authored by Anthony J Wiener, Khan and company predicted where we would be technologically at the end of the millennium. But there was another document released soon after Kahn’s The Year 2000, which had been written simultaneously. That document entitled, Ancillary Pilot Study for the Educational Policy Research Program: Final Report, was to map out how to achieve the future society Kahn’s work in The Year 2000 had envisaged.
Under a section titled “Special Educational Needs of Decision-Makers”, the paper states: “The desirability of explicitly educated decision-makers so that they are better able, in effect, to plan the destiny of the nation, or to carry out the plans formulated through a more democratic process, should be very seriously considered. One facet of this procedure would be the creation of a shared set of concepts, shared language, shared analogies, shared references…” He goes on to state in the same section that: “Universal re-teaching in the spirit of the humanistic tradition of Europe – at least for its comprehensive leadership group – might be useful in many ways.”
When you study the previously mentioned rhetoric and decipher what it means, in this document Herman Kahn suggests subverting democracy by training only a certain group in society as potential leaders, with those pre-selected few who are groomed for power being able to define what our shared values as a society should be. Maybe Herman Kahn would agree with the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader scheme, which is the exact manifestation of his original suggestion.
In 1968, Herman Kahn would be asked by a reporter what they do at the Hudson Institute. He would say, “We take God’s view. The President’s view. Big. Aerial. Global. Galactic. Ethereal. Spatial. Overall. Megalomania is the standard occupational hazard.” This was reportedly followed by Herman Kahn rising out of his chair, pointing his finger towards the sky and suddenly shouting out: ‘Megalomania, zoom!'”
In 1970, Kahn would travel to Europe with Galbraith to support Klaus Schwab’s recruitment drive for the first European Management Symposium. In 1971, Kahn would be sitting centre stage to watch John Kenneth Galbraith’s keynote speech at the historic first session of the policy making organisation which would eventually become the World Economic Forum.
In 1972, the Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth”, which cautioned that the needs of the global population would exceed available resources by the year 2000. Kahn spent much of his final decade arguing against this idea. In 1976, Khan would publish a more optimistic view of the future, The Next 200 Years, which claimed that the potentials of capitalism, science, technology, human reason, and self-discipline were boundless. The Next 200 Years would also dismiss pernicious Malthusian ideology by predicting that the planet’s resources set no limits to economic growth, but rather, human beings would “create such societies everywhere in the solar system and perhaps to the stars as well.”
Schwab’s Three Mentors
Kahn, Kissinger and Galbraith had become three of the most influential people in America with regards to thermonuclear deterrence, foreign policy creation, and public policy making, respectively. Most of the focus throughout these men’s career had been on Europe and the Cold War. However, their varying roles in other important events of the period all have the potential to easily distract researchers from other more subversive and well hidden events.
These three powerful Americans were all linked with each other in various ways, but one interesting and notable thread in particular ties these men together during the period between 1966, with the creation of the Kissinger-led 22 man panel of advisors to help “shape European policy”, through to 1971, and the founding of the World Economic Forum. All three men were members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American branch of the Anglo-American imperialist “Round Table” movement. Kissinger already had deep ties to the CFR, having been recruited by them straight after graduation. Galbraith had reportedly resigned his membership of the CFR in a “highly public way” in 1972, stating that the CFR was boring and telling a journalist, “Most of the proceedings involve a level of banality so deep that the only question they raise is whether one should sit through them.” Although there is no public date of when Galbraith became a member of the CFR, he had written for their publications from as early as July 1958 with “Rival Economic Theories in India,” being printed in Foreign Affairs, the official CFR journal/magazine. Khan could also be found publishing some of his essays through the CFR, writing the piece “Our Alternatives in Europe” in July 1966, and “If Negotiations Fail” in July 1968, both whilst working as an official advisor to the State Department.
Before the 1960s, these three extremely influential American intellectuals had each been deeply involved in trying to understand the problems of a postwar Europe, and mapping out the future of the war-stricken continent. Galbraith had traveled extensively throughout Europe, including studying policies in Germany during the Third Reich, and, after the collapse of Hitler’s Germany, Galbraith would go on to study the Soviet systems in much the same way. Galbraith’s influence over the future president, John F. Kennedy, from a very early age cannot be understated, and Galbraith was powerful enough to see JFK begin withdrawing troops from Vietnam on his recommendation. When Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Galbraith would be the man to draft the incoming president’s initial address to the nation, but Galbraith was soon to be pushed off to the sidelines. During the turmoil of the 1960s, Galbraith would be close with Henry Kissinger, both men being Harvard Professors, members of the CFR, and both men having the same goal of making Europe stable so that the Continent was well defended against any potential Soviet aggression.
To Galbraith and Kissinger, and also to the wider American political Establishment, Europe was the main threat to not only global stability, but also to the prevailing American hegemony in general. The relative stability in Europe during the postwar period was perceived as being due to the thermonuclear stand-off, and, from very early-on, Kissinger identified this dynamic and began to manipulate the situation for the benefit of American supremacy. Henry Kissinger was not alone in trying to understand the complex dynamics at play in relation to thermonuclear deterrence and how it affected policy making. Herman Kahn was the leading figure on thermonuclear strategic planning during the same period and Kissinger’s work concerning the same subject matter from the mid-50s onwards would see him cross paths with Kahn on many occasions.
Kahn offered Kissinger something which all politicians and policy makers crave, the ability to predict future events with relative accuracy. Kahn was a veritable prophet concerning the technological advancements of the not-so-distant future, and his work, although often stoic and bereft of human emotion, has stood up very well to the test of time. Kahn and Kissinger’s goals would overlap during the mid and late 1960s, and as the threat assessments Kahn made during this period became more optimistic, Kissinger would see Kahn’s work as being fundamental in offering a new future to the people of the world.
However, Henry Kissinger’s vision of the future was not of a free and fair society advancing into a “brave new world” together, but rather, Kissinger intended to create an image of the world which had been skewed by his own CFR-driven Establishment perspective. Although he would attempt to rebrand himself as a true statesman, Kissinger would continue to subvert not only foreign democratic processes, but also to undermine the American system for the eventual benefit of a globalist agenda. When Schwab was first recognised by Kissinger as a potential future globalist leader, the relatively young German would soon be introduced to Galbraith and Kahn. This would coincide with Kahn’s work identifying the need to specifically train individuals with leadership potential separately from those who attend the prevailing standard educational models.
Klaus Schwab speaking at the inaugural meeting of the World Economic Forum, 1971
In the year Klaus Schwab left Harvard, he was approached by Peter Schmidhei
- Source : Johnny Vedmore
