Trilateralism: "Partnership" for What?

Richard H. Ullman

From Foreign Affairs, October 1976

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Summary:  "Trilateralism"-nature abhors labels but men insist on them-is the latest attempt both to describe and to prescribe for the relationship between the United States and the other principal democratic, industrialized, market-economy states. Under the aegis of the so-called Trilateral Commission-an organization of influential private citizens from these countries-it has been the focus of a well-organized effort over the past four years to propose a set of solutions to many of the principal common problems of international society. Trilateralism has explicitly been embraced by the Democratic candidate for the presidency as a central theme of his foreign policy. Recently it has also become a staple of Secretary of State Kissinger's speeches. Its connotations of symmetry and order-the triangle is one of the most aesthetically satisfying of geometrical forms -contrast strikingly with the pervasive lack of evident order in human affairs.

Richard H. Ullman, Director of the 1980s Project of the Council on Foreign Relations and Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University, is the author of Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917-1921 (3 vols.) and other works.

"Trilateralism"-nature abhors labels but men insist on them-is the latest attempt both to describe and to prescribe for the relationship between the United States and the other principal democratic, industrialized, market-economy states. Under the aegis of the so-called Trilateral Commission-an organization of influential private citizens from these countries-it has been the focus of a well-organized effort over the past four years to propose a set of solutions to many of the principal common problems of international society. Trilateralism has explicitly been embraced by the Democratic candidate for the presidency as a central theme of his foreign policy. Recently it has also become a staple of Secretary of State Kissinger's speeches. Its connotations of symmetry and order-the triangle is one of the most aesthetically satisfying of geometrical forms -contrast strikingly with the pervasive lack of evident order in human affairs.

The three points of the triangle are, of course, the United States (or, in deference to sensitivities north of the 49th parallel, North America), Western Europe, and Japan. They are also the loci of the bulk of the world's present wealth and of its present capacity for production. Their very listing evokes images of a rich man's club-which, for many purposes, they constitute. That they do raises questions both of equity and efficacy: the existing global distribution of wealth and power is clearly "unfair," yet it may seem less unfair if the trilateral grouping were to serve as the engine of progress and enrichment for those less fortunate. That it can so serve-indeed, that it must be made to do so-is one of the central assumptions of the Trilateral Commission and its adherents.1

II

Between two points of the triangle-the United States and Western Europe-the connecting line has been both firm and thick since 1947-48, when the perceived need to organize against the menace of a Soviet Union then in the process of extending its control over Eastern Europe led to an American interest and involvement in the affairs of Western Europe qualitatively different from that of the prewar era. The rationale that joined together the several nations of Western Europe and that linked them all to the United States was their mutual possession of a common core of liberal, democratic values to which the collectivist, totalitarian values of Stalin's Russia were unalterably opposed. The fact that liberal democracy was a new and perhaps fragile transplant to a German Federal Republic-itself largely a creation of the Anglo-French-American occupation regime-and that during the 1930s liberal democracy had been severely shaken as a political creed throughout the rest of Western Europe and even in the United Kingdom, served only to reinforce the postwar view that special measures were necessary to assure that it would survive and prosper. Those special measures included massive American economic assistance under the Marshall Plan and a standing peacetime alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Like the American sponsorship of liberal democracy in Germany, these measures aimed also at protecting the European states against internal threats-attempts by the ...

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