By Mark Anderson
Born in the aftermath of World War I, the infamous Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is a deeply embedded, policy-molding institute and “school for statesmen.” It was created to solidify and expand globalist propaganda, mainly due to the failure to establish the League of Nations.
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Today’s CFR “fellows,” drawn from the most plutocratic strata of the private-academic sector, become tomorrow’s ambassadors, cabinet officials, and top policy “experts.” It’s perhaps the most influential think tank in the world.
A CFR program on June 5 saw longtime New York Times foreign policy reporter David Sanger take part in a program in memory of Leslie Gelb, former CFR president emeritus.
Sanger conceded that foreign relations with China and Russia have drastically worsened in a relatively brief time period, when, not long ago, China, Russia, and the United States had strong common interests.
“When we had an agreement on climate [that] President [Barack] Obama struck with Xi Jinping, when we thought we had an agreement together on Iran’s nuclear program, we always emphasized all of the commonality of interests,” Sanger told host and current CFR President Michael Froman. “In fact, it’s a really prime example of how the world has changed in just seven or eight years that when we did sit down with the Iranians in 2014 and 2015 … the Chinese and the Russians were sitting on the American and European side of the table staring at the Iranians.”
But “when they took a vote earlier today in Vienna to censure Iran for its noncompliance with the international inspectors over the past two years, only two countries voted to protect Iran—China and Russia,” Sanger added. “If we got those negotiations together again now, and we won’t anytime soon, I think it’s pretty fair to say that China and Russia would be sitting on the other side of the table.”
Sanger recalled a key news assignment: “I was in the boat behind the yacht where George W. Bush and his wife Laura were floating down the Neva River [with Russia’s leadership] in St. Petersburg in 2002.” He called that event “the great single example of the high point of the U.S. relationship with Russia.”
Then, Sanger took an oblique shot at President Joe Biden, suggesting Biden’s foreign policy in this realm has failed. “Bush and [Vladimir] Putin had two dozen meetings together,” Sanger told Froman. “President Biden has had one, and I will be willing to wager that, no matter how the election turns out in November [2024], the number will still stay one. Aboard that yacht … they talked about Russia joining the European Union and maybe one day NATO.”
Addressing a largely Democrat Party-leaning audience amid some neocons, in terms of foreign policy style, Sanger added: “We didn’t react strongly enough when seven years later [Russia] annexed Crimea.”
What Sanger did not say was Russia’s annexation of Crimea occurred in 2014 when State Department official Victoria Nuland—whose husband, globalist Robert Kagan, is an ideological ally of the CFR—was instrumental in overthrowing Ukraine’s pro-Russian government. This set into motion a chain of events that ultimately prompted Putin to send armed forces into Ukraine to assert Russia’s national interests.
