Conclusion

Abstract

This study has tried to show that, despite their relative public obscurity and lack of self-advertising in the mass media, Chatham House and the CFR have played key roles in, and between, their respective national establishments. They have provided leading forums for experts and policymakers from several walks of institutional life, including the press, elite universities, the embassies and foreign policy bureaucracies, and the business and financial communities, to meet, to discuss and to conduct detailed study and investigation, and assist in the making of foreign policy and the crystallisation and mobilisation of elite, attentive and, on occasion, mass public opinion. Formed in the aftermath of the First World War, they built the organisational foundations and cemented intraforeign policy establishment ties that made them ‘natural’ candidates for mobilisation by their state before their countries had even entered hostilities in the Second World War. They played fundamentally important roles in the creation of the foundations of the postwar international order, with the Anglo-American alliance at its very heart.