In that context, now is not the time for incrementalism or business as usual at the Council. It is time to meet the moment and treat the rupture of the existing order both as a challenge and as an opportunity. Nostalgia is not a strategy; nor is hope. We have an obligation to make clear-eyed, fact-based, independent, nonpartisan assessments of the costs and benefits of alternative ways the United States could engage the world, and to draw lessons from the eighty years of postwar experience and the grand experiment we are undergoing to envisage a new, practicable pathway forward.
In the 2025 fiscal year, that challenge began to shape the questions we took on as a think tank, convener, educator, publisher, and membership organization. It also influenced how we operate, including our focus on impact, collaboration, and partnerships. The annual report offers a comprehensive breakdown of those efforts, but I focus this essay on just a few illustrative examples.
As a convener, the Council is, in my view, unmatched. Between our general meetings, term member meetings, national meetings, roundtables, corporate and CEO programming, sessions for young professionals, and briefings with networks of religious leaders, local journalists, and local and state officials, the Council continues to be the go-to forum for serious, interactive discussion of important policy issues. From the Council’s New York and Washington, DC, offices to key cities around the country, and even to the David M. Rubenstein Family Giant Panda Habitat at the National Zoo, we continue to convene key players from a wide range of perspectives to analyze and debate the foremost foreign policy challenges facing the United States. Highlights this year included events with former and current U.S. Trade Representatives Robert E. Lighthizer and Jamieson L. Greer, respectively, then Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Ukrainian Head of the Office of the President Andriy Yermak, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and dozens of heads of state and government and foreign ministers, among many others. The breadth, depth, and quality of conversations at the Council is second to none.
Although convenings with our members have and will always be a cornerstone of the Council’s effort to shape the foreign policy discourse, broadening the Council’s reach—especially as political sentiment outside the Acela corridor continues to reshape U.S. foreign policy—is more essential than ever. Our effort to meet the moment in that domain was typified this year by the Council’s Election 2024 initiative, a cross-cutting project launched with the support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In the fall, the Council partnered with four universities in pivotal swing states to host in-depth, nonpartisan conversations on the United States’ role in the world and the foreign policy issues at stake in the 2024 presidential election. Distinguished and bipartisan panelists, including Council fellows and CFR members, engaged with communities on the trade-offs presented by different policy options, both locally and globally, and provided context on the international issues, choices, and challenges facing the next president.
The impetus for the Election 2024 initiative—that this moment demands rigorous, accessible, nonpartisan conversations on the direction of U.S. foreign policy—is one we intend to scale. It can be difficult to measure impact when it comes to our mission of educating the public, but traction is certainly one proxy. In that vein, investments in the Council’s digital properties enabled us to reach a record audience, both in the United States and globally, with videos highlighting some of our fellows going viral and reaching millions of viewers.
Our increased emphasis on digital content, data visualization, and timely analysis from the Council’s deep bench of experts is bearing fruit—including on social media, where the Council’s reach on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok grew by an order of magnitude. Media mentions of Council scholars and Foreign Affairs content rose significantly as well, with Council fellows increasingly sought out to provide context to better understand the deluge of breaking news each week.
We likewise expanded the Council’s efforts to reach opinion leaders and new constituents around the country with an emphasis on the West Coast—where innovative firms and technologists are becoming increasingly central to U.S. foreign policy thanks to major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous and unmanned systems, and other emerging technologies that are essential to the United States’ continued economic and military competitiveness. We have added a cohort of up-and-coming technologists to our networks of thousands of local and state officials (including through our continued partnership with the Rodel Institute), local journalists, religious leaders, and educators who engage with the Council to inform their work.
Partnerships are another critical way to scale the Council’s reach and impact at all levels. This year, we collaborated with Endless Frontiers, the Munich Security Conference, Open to Debate, PBS, the University of California San Diego’s 21st Century China Center, the World Economic Forum, and other organizations to bolster the scope and impact of the Council’s work. Partnerships are also at the crux of the Council’s Education Program, which joined forces with Arizona State University (ASU) and Coursera to expand the distribution of our global literacy resources.
Upstream of all those efforts is the Council’s intellectual core—the David Rockefeller Studies Program—the Council’s think tank. Its mandate is to produce insightful, intellectually rigorous, fact-based analysis on U.S. foreign policy. This year, the Council focused on strengthening collaboration to leverage the breadth and depth of functional and regional expertise across the Council, including nineteen new world-class fellows who joined this fiscal year. Together, we are making progress across the Council’s cross-cutting initiatives: RealEcon, China Strategy, Climate Realism, and a forthcoming initiative on technology and national security. This past year, Council scholars also launched the Special Initiative on Securing Ukraine’s Future, as well as a Task Force on Economic Security and study groups on the defense industrial base. Those projects are fully integrated with the rest of the Council to ensure that we are taking full advantage of the Council’s reach and the strengths of its membership.
That includes being an indispensable source of expertise for policymakers and legislators in Washington, DC, and elsewhere. In the 2025 fiscal year alone, Council scholars met directly with hundreds of offices on Capitol Hill, dozens of individual representatives and senators, and scores of executive branch officials from every department in the foreign policy apparatus.
Then, of course, there is Foreign Affairs—one of the Council’s most valuable assets for framing the foreign policy discourse. Throughout the year, under the thoughtful stewardship of Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Foreign Affairs again proved itself to be a foundational, editorially independent pillar of the Council’s effort to meet the moment. The foremost scholars in our field, from every hemisphere and political affiliation, continue to converge in the pages of the magazine to hash out the future of U.S. economic statecraft; China’s domestic and foreign policies; the path toward peace in the Gaza Strip, Sudan, and Ukraine; AI governance; and the rapidly evolving tactics of modern warfare. Now more than ever, nothing substitutes for the kind of hard-edged analysis that fills the pages (and the app) of Foreign Affairs.
In closing, I am proud to report that the Council is firing on all cylinders. But this is no time to be complacent. Every indication is that the coming fiscal year will prove to be just as tumultuous and consequential as the last. This disruption can be disorienting but presents a defining moment for the Council. In the 1920s, the Council was founded at such a moment, in the aftermath of World War I and the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations, to address the challenges of isolationism. In the 1940s, the Council stepped up to help develop the blueprints for what would become NATO and the Marshall Plan. In the 1960s, at the heart of the Cold War, the Council was at the center of developing the country’s nuclear strategy. And in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, the Council helped develop the concept of geoeconomics, the convergence of geopolitics and international economic policy. This is another such moment, an inflection point in the ongoing evolution of the United States’ role in the world.
Our goal is neither to cling to the old order nor to cave to the latest trends. It is to double down on our principles of nonpartisan, independent, intellectually rigorous, fact-based research and analysis to help inform the next phase of U.S. engagement with the world. The Council is well positioned to take on that challenge, convening experts with a range of perspectives and drawing on its members—leaders in government and nongovernmental organizations, academia and think tanks, business and finance, law and consulting, science and technology, and the media and the arts.
It is a privilege to be part of this community and to lead the Council at this critical time. Thank you for your steadfast support.
Sincerely,
Michael Froman
President