Council on Foreign Relations

President’s Welcome

Welcome to www.cfr.org, the website of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It is designed to be an online resource for everyone in these turbulent times who wants to learn more about the complex international issues challenging policymakers and citizens alike.

Thinking about and discussing pressing foreign-policy issues is a long-established tradition at CFR, a nonpartisan and independent membership organization. As you can learn by reading our mission statement, CFR has promoted understanding of foreign policy and America’s role in the world since its founding in 1921. It does this in a variety of ways: by convening meetings at which government officials, global leaders, and CFR members debate major foreign-policy issues; by operating a think tank that is home to the world’s most prominent scholars of international affairs; by sponsoring Task Forces and commissioning books and reports; and by publishing Foreign Affairs, the leading journal of global politics.

We see our site as a way to further that mission. Our goal is to make www.cfr.org the single best website for users searching for information and insights about international politics. Users will, of course, find materials produced at the Council on Foreign Relations: transcripts of on-the-record meetings, books by scholars, Background Q & A’s by our site’s editorial staff, op-eds, and journal articles by CFR fellows, and much more.

But that is only half of the story. Unlike most other think-tank sites, www.cfr.org is not limited to “our” material. Our site is your guide to the best information and analysis, regardless of whether it is produced here at the Council on Foreign Relations or another institution. Website researchers, working with CFR’s library and fellows, scour the Internet for material from other think tanks, government agencies, educational institutions, and nongovernmental organizations in order to deliver the widest range of high-quality information and insight.

Look at our homepage. That is your portal to the wealth of resources on www.cfr.org. It features packages of material tied to the most pressing issues of the day. You will find everything you need to understand a fast-moving international event:

• links to primary documents: treaties, UN resolutions, speeches, communiques, etc.
• links to background material: probing interviews with experts; brief “explainers” reported and written by the editorial staff of CFR.org that delve deeply into an issue; and reports from the Council on Foreign Relations, other institutions, and government agencies.
• links to news coverage from media sources around the world.

Looking for information on a specific topic? Material on the site is organized by region, by issue, and by publication type, and all of these categories are cross-indexed. Click on By Region, By Issue, or By Publication Type (the tabs at the top of this page, or in the left-hand column on the homepage) to quickly narrow your search. Or you can search the entire database using our site search engine.

The site also provides a comprehensive account of the history and activities of CFR in New York, at its Washington, DC, office, and throughout the country. A new section of the site gathers material and resources specifically for use by college educators. We plan to add more features in the months ahead, in the hope that using www.cfr.org will become part of your regular web habit. In the meantime, please let us know what you think of www.cfr.org and how we can continue to make improvements.