Conditions of Peace
In 1910, Andrew Carnegie endowed a foundation with $10 million — roughly $330 million in today’s money — and gave it a name that contained a thesis: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace1.
Carnegie’s endowment would not merely advocate for peace. It would fund the institutions that defined what peace looked like, and the infrastructure through which peace was delivered.
Carnegie’s name was already circulating in the network that would build the architecture. In 1904, Julius Wolf — who proposed the international gold clearing mechanism at the Brussels Monetary Conference of 1892 used by the BIS at its 1930 founding2 — founded an organisation to coordinate trade between European countries3.
Not a customs union, but shared trade standards, arbitration panels, cross-border clearing systems, and expert committees operating outside elected parliaments.
The founding charter cited Carnegie’s call to the German Kaiser for a ‘United States of Europe’ as part of the same current.
Carnegie supplied the framing, while Wolf built the machinery. Six years later, Carnegie gave the principle a permanent endowment.
If peace is a natural state that war interrupts, then institutions exist to restore it. If peace is an institutional product, then whoever designs the institution sets the terms on which peace is offered — and the commitments attached to those terms.
Carnegie’s foundation backed the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 19284, in which sixty-two nations formally renounced war as an instrument of national policy. The pact did not prevent war, but it established a principle: peace requires architecture, and the architecture must be designed before the war ends, so the terms are ready when the moment arrives.
That principle would be applied repeatedly throughout the century that followed — not by preventing wars, but by determining what the post-war order looked like.
The design function
The institutions that would perform this function were created nine years later, in the aftermath of the First World War.
At the Paris Peace Conference of 19195, the British and American delegations recognised that the post-war order could not be designed in real time during negotiations. The frameworks needed to be prepared in advance, by specialists working outside the pressures of diplomatic urgency.
The solution was two institutions, founded in parallel: the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London6 (1920), commonly known as Chatham House, and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1921). Both drew their founding membership from the same Paris conference delegations. Both were designed to bring together bankers, economists, diplomats, and policymakers outside government — to develop long-range strategic frameworks and to ensure that when the next crisis arrived, the policy response would already be written.
Their function was not to comment on the international order, but to design the conditions on which the international order would be rebuilt after each major conflict. They have performed that function continuously for over a century, across three major domains.
The monetary framework
In December 1929, weeks after the Wall Street crash, Chatham House set up a study group on ‘The International Functions of Gold’. It ran through 1930 and 1931, producing The International Gold Problem — a collection of papers and discussions by economists and central bankers on the fragility of the gold standard.
Two further reports followed: Monetary Policy and the Depression (1933) and The Future of Monetary Policy (1935). Together, the three reports made the case for abandoning the gold standard, coordinating central bank policy across borders, and using government spending and monetary tools to manage economic downturns.
In 1936, John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The book was received as revolutionary. Its core arguments — that the gold standard was inadequate, that central banks needed to coordinate, that governments should intervene during recessions — had all appeared in Chatham House reports over the preceding five years.
The study groups identified the problems and proposed the direction. Keynes built the public-facing theoretical framework — and received the credit.
Eight years later, the framework was implemented. In 1944, forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods to design the post-war monetary system. The conference was formally titled ‘Planning for the Peace’7. Its declaration stated that ‘the economic health of every country is a proper matter of concern to all its neighbours, near and distant’8. The output — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and a fixed exchange rate system anchored by the US dollar — was the monetary architecture of the post-war peace.
The Council on Foreign Relations performed the same function on the American side. Its War and Peace Studies project, launched in 19399 — before the United States had entered the war — ran study groups in close coordination with the State Department, producing detailed papers on what the post-war economic and political order should look like. Many of the CFR’s ideas and personnel were folded directly into the State Department’s own planning.
The institutions that emerged from Bretton Woods and the subsequent San Francisco Conference — the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations — were designed in CFR study groups during the war, then presented at international conferences as the terms of the peace.
The CFR study groups were not working from scratch. Most of what they proposed had already been laid out in a report submitted to the British and French governments in January 1938 by Paul van Zeeland, the former Belgian Prime Minister.
Van Zeeland’s report specified fixed but adjustable exchange rates, a common fund for countries in financial difficulty, a freeze on tariffs followed by gradual reduction, and the Bank for International Settlements as the managing body.
The tariff framework became GATT. The exchange rates became Bretton Woods. The common fund became the IMF. When French planners in wartime exile drafted their own proposals in 1943, they cited Van Zeeland by name.
The governance method
The monetary framework designed the post-war financial order. But a framework is only as powerful as the mechanism that enforces it. The next stage was to embed that mechanism into the machinery of government itself.
In 1961, Robert McNamara — a CFR member and former Ford Motor Company executive — became Secretary of Defence and introduced the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System to the Pentagon. PPBS was not simply a new accounting method. It broke every programme into measurable inputs and trackable outputs, with each output feeding back as the input for the next stage.
Resource allocation was driven by systems analysis rather than political judgement. What had been a management tool became a governing logic, and funding became conditional on meeting objectives defined outside the political process.
Kennedy resisted its expansion beyond the Pentagon. He grew sceptical of systems analysis during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when McNamara’s models recommended precision strikes on Soviet installations in Cuba based on incomplete intelligence — recommendations that, had they been followed, would likely have triggered a nuclear exchange.
Kennedy began to distance himself from the broader rollout, and refused to support a National Information Center, which would have centralised governmental sources of information. In November 1963, he was assassinated.
Under Lyndon Johnson, the restraint was removed. In 1965, Johnson extended PPBS to every executive agency — education, health, welfare, environmental policy. What had been a Pentagon experiment became the operating system of the entire US federal government. The World Bank then exported the methodology to borrowing countries through conditional lending: structural adjustment programmes that made development finance contingent on performance indicators defined by the lender.
PPBS started at the Pentagon, spread across government, then spread globally. The methodology that would later make climate frameworks and stranded asset classifications enforceable was already in place.
On 23 May 1972, the methodology met the environmental agenda. Nixon signed the US-USSR Agreement on Environmental Protection — a shared framework for environmental cooperation and policy writing between the two superpowers. The systems-based governance that PPBS had embedded in US federal agencies was now being offered as the template for bilateral environmental cooperation.
The agreement coincided with the founding of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, and was part of a broader shift that also produced the United Nations Environment Programme and the Global Environmental Monitoring System. The environment became the shared objective that justified systems-based governance across both blocs.
What had been a Cold War instrument became a planetary one — the shift from national sovereignty to governance by systems and metrics, now operating at the international level, under the banner of protecting the planet.
The environmental framework
The connection between the governance method and the environmental agenda was not just institutional. It was operational. In 1975 — three years after its founding under the US-USSR environmental cooperation agreement — the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis published the first paper proposing carbon pricing as a policy tool. The institution created to apply systems analysis across both Cold War blocs produced the concept that would eventually become the financial architecture of climate governance.
By 1977, the offset mechanism was embedded in the US Clean Air Act. By 1985, Tom Tietenberg had published the emissions trading framework that formalised the market logic.
In the late 1980s, Michael Grubb at Chatham House authored research that fed into the 1992 report ‘Combating Global Warming’, which laid out a framework for putting a price on carbon emissions through cap-and-trade mechanisms at a global scale. The central argument was that carbon dioxide emissions impose costs on the global commons, and that those costs must be priced into economic activity through market-based instruments.
In practical terms, the plan was to monetise air and water — to create a new class of tradeable financial instruments derived from the right to emit greenhouse gases.
The man who turned this framework into a functioning market was Richard Sandor. He co-authored the 1992 UNCTAD report that designed the global carbon trading architecture, then founded a company to trade emissions the following year — and was trading SO2 allowances through his own firm before the ink on the policy framework had dried. He wrote UNCTAD’s more detailed implementation rules in 1994, proposed a pilot emissions trading system in 1996, and in 1997 hosted the launch event at which Maurice Strong — secretary-general of the 1992 Earth Summit — announced the next phase.
The framework fed into the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, and ultimately the Paris Agreement. But its most consequential descendant was financial, not environmental.
Between 2014 and 2018, seven private forums were held at Waddesdon Manor — Jacob Rothschild’s estate in Buckinghamshire — developing the concept of climate-related financial risk. The argument was that fossil fuel reserves would become ‘stranded assets’ as climate policy tightened, and that financial institutions needed to reprice them before the regulations arrived.
The Waddesdon forums fed the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), which fed the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), which calibrates capital requirements through the Bank for International Settlements and Basel 3.1. The mechanism is straightforward. The TCFD defines what climate risks banks must disclose. The NGFS turns those disclosures into expectations for regulators. Basel 3.1 converts the expectations into capital requirements — rules that determine how much it costs a bank to hold fossil fuel assets on its books.
By the time the framework reached the regulatory architecture, the Waddesdon origin was invisible. The forum proceedings themselves acknowledged that democratic legislation was the proper route, but they proceeded through regulation regardless.
The effect was to remove a layer of European sovereignty.
Once fossil fuel reserves are classified as stranded assets and embedded in bank capital requirements, European banks cannot finance domestic oil and gas development at competitive rates — regardless of what any elected government decides. The regulatory architecture makes the decision before the parliament meets.
And once domestic energy development is financially unviable, Europe becomes structurally dependent on imported energy — which is the precondition that makes the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor necessary.
The chain runs from an IIASA carbon pricing paper in 1975 to a pipeline terminating at Haifa in the 2020s. At every link — IIASA, the Clean Air Act, Tietenberg, Grubb, Sandor, UNCTAD, Waddesdon, TCFD, Basel 3.1 — the framework was presented as rational, inevitable, and beneficial at the time it was forged.
In the process, it is driving the deindustrialisation of Europe’s largest economy10.
The energy and trade framework
The next iteration is happening now.
IMEC — the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor — was announced at the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023, explicitly positioned as the Western and Indian counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Six months earlier, China had brokered a historic détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran11 — an alternative architecture of peace designed in Beijing, not Washington or London.
The current war is not merely destroying the Strait of Hormuz as a competing energy route. It is destroying the Chinese-brokered peace between Riyadh and Tehran, and replacing it with an American-Israeli-Gulf architecture that routes through IMEC.
In January 2026, Chatham House published ‘Why Renewables and Electrification Hold the Keys to EU Energy Security’, arguing that Europe’s reliance on imported fossil fuels is a source of economic and political vulnerability — and that the green energy transition is the answer, as a matter of security, not just climate.
A month later, the war with Iran began, and the recommendation became an immediate priority.
The Council on Foreign Relations published ‘Strait-jacket’ in March 2026, documenting the bypass routes through Saudi Arabia and the UAE as the only functioning alternatives to the closed Strait of Hormuz — both operated by countries that signed the IMEC agreement. The CFR’s dollar dominance backgrounder, updated the same month, describes a future in which the dollar ‘slowly comes to share influence with other currencies’. A separate CFR report proposes a formal mechanism to discourage countries from holding too many dollars.
The CFR can describe dollar decline without alarm because it is not defending the currency. It is defending the settlement architecture that any successor currency would still run on.
The Atlantic Council, through its N7 Initiative, has published a series of reports making the case for IMEC across trade, energy, and digital infrastructure. Its November 2025 report described IMEC as ‘a strategic platform where infrastructure, energy, and digital networks become tools of statecraft’. On 8 April 2026, it hosts a panel titled ‘IMEC During a Time of War’ — discussing alternatives to Hormuz on the same day that Trump’s deadline to destroy Iran’s power plants expires.
The competition between these corridors is real. But the framework through which all of them operate — the BIS settlement architecture, the Basel capital standards, the climate risk models, the disclosure requirements, the compliance metrics — is shared.
A multipolar world order is not defined by the poles. It is defined by the standards they all run on. This is why Chatham House, the CFR, and the Atlantic Council have fully embraced multipolarity.
They do not need to control any government. They need only remain the institutions that write the standards every government — regardless of which pole it belongs to — measures, reports, and settles against.
The pattern is identical to the 1930s and the 1980s. The frameworks were published before the crisis. The crisis made the frameworks urgent. The institutions that designed them are now positioned as the rational, expert voices explaining why the transition is necessary. And the transition, in each case, removes a layer of sovereignty and replaces it with institutional architecture designed in private.
Whether the frameworks were prepared in anticipation of crises or in coordination with them, the function is the same: the conditions of peace are written before the peace arrives, by institutions that are never on the ballot.
The transmission gap
Carnegie defined the doctrine: peace as something that must be developed. The CFR and Chatham House perform the design function — they produce the frameworks, monetary, environmental, energy, trade, financial, that determine the conditions of peace. Each framework is published before the crisis that makes it urgent. Each framework is presented as rational, inevitable, and beneficial. But each framework removes a sliver of sovereignty.
A Chatham House report does not, by itself, cause a pipeline to be laid or a sovereign to sign an agreement. Somebody has to carry the framework from the think tank to the foreign ministry, turning policy papers into diplomatic commitments. Somebody has to sit at the same table as the WHO Director-General, the Gates Foundation president, sovereign representatives, and central bankers — and connect them under a framing that authorises all of them to act together.
This is the transmission function. For three decades, it was performed by an institution operating under a framing so unassailable that no government could refuse it access: the International Peace Institute12, working under the banner of health and peace.
In 1968, the World Order Models Project13 launched at a conference in New Delhi — the same city where IMEC would be announced fifty-five years later. The project, directed on the American side by Princeton’s Richard Falk14, argued that war, ecological crisis, resource depletion, and overpopulation were interconnected threats that required reform of the global political order. Its core values — peace, social justice, economic well-being, and ecological preservation — map precisely onto the domains through which the architecture described in this essay now operates.
The IPI was founded two years later, in 1970, with the support of the UN Secretary-General. Based in New York with direct access to the United Nations system, its mandate was to provide strategic analysis and policy recommendations for multilateral action — which in practice gave it the authority to convene sovereign representatives, international organisations, and private foundations in a way that few institutions outside the UN itself could match.
In 1971, Falk published ‘This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival’15. The CFR’s own journal, Foreign Affairs, later named it one of the six most influential books of the century in the ‘political and legal’ category. The institution that designed the Western order had endorsed the intellectual framework for transforming it — and the institution that would carry that framework to sovereign governments had been founded the year before.
The 1986 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion16 declared peace a prerequisite for health. If peace is merely helpful for health, then health programmes can proceed without it. If peace is a prerequisite, then the institutions that define and govern peace acquire authority over the health agenda — and, by extension, over everything the health agenda touches: climate, development, finance, food security, migration, and all seventeen Sustainable Development Goals.
The logic works like a chain.
In economics, there is a framework called input-output analysis, where every sector’s output is another sector’s input. The same applies here.
Peace is a precondition for health. Health is a precondition for development. Development is a precondition for climate resilience. Each link extends governance authority from one domain to the next — and the methodology that makes the chain enforceable is the same one McNamara embedded in the Pentagon in 1961.
PPBS provided the conditional funding logic: meet the targets or lose the money.
The Ottawa Charter provided the language that connects every domain to health. Together, they produce a system in which authority over any single domain — peace, health, climate — becomes authority over all of them.
This grammar was not new. ‘Planning for the Peace’ was the title of the Bretton Woods conference. ‘War and Peace Studies’ was the name of the CFR project that designed the post-war order. In each case, the word ‘peace’ dissolved the boundary between its own domain and every domain it claimed to determine.
The institutional template was first deployed in 1956, when NATO’s Committee of Three expanded the definition of ‘security’ to include all its social, economic, and political determinants — giving the alliance jurisdiction over domains far beyond its original military mandate, without amending a single treaty.
The Ottawa Charter applied the same grammar to health thirty years later. The technique is always the same: redefine the core concept to include its determinants, and the institution acquires authority over everything the determinants touch.
Beneath every domain, the enforcement mechanism is typically financial. PPBS was at its core a budgeting system. Structural adjustment was conditional lending. The stranded assets classification is a capital requirement. Impact investing is private capital earning returns on social objectives. Programmable currency is finance at the level of individual transactions.
Peace, health, and the environment are the ‘ethical’ framings that authorise the financial mechanism to operate — the goods no one can argue against, which make conditionality politically acceptable. But the conditionality itself is generally financial. Every layer documented in this essay — from Carnegie’s endowment to Basel 3.1 — is a financial instrument wearing a different label.
The IPI adopted this framing and used it to build a convening function that brought sovereign representatives, international health organisations, development banks, and private foundations to the same table.
The contacts assembled through that channel — cultivated through forums like Sir Bani Yas, and converted into the diplomatic relationships that produced the Abraham Accords and the IMEC corridor — became the signatories of the infrastructure the think tanks had designed.
One side designs the framework. The other side gets it in front of the people who sign. For thirty years, that second job was done by an institution working under a label no government could say no to: health and peace17.
A peace initiative that designs its terms before the war, assembles its signatories during the war, and delivers its framework the moment the war ends is not working for peace. It is a war clearinghouse — converting conflict into binding architecture, one crisis at a time.
That clearinghouse is currently operational in three theatres — Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran — with notably different standards applied to each. But the variation is not a flaw in the system — it is the system.
"That clearinghouse is currently operational in three theatres — Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran — with notably different standards applied to each. But the variation is not a flaw in the system — it is the system."
This kind of makes me think that just as massive vote fraud was used to install Biden as president in 2020, thus facilitating the Ukraine war, other strategies were then used in 2024 to make sure Trump was installed as president (but still with lots of RINOs in Congress to limit the penetration of many aspects of the MAGA agenda), so that now the financial cabal globalists have just put a big tick in another box as they progress their plans.
Relatively speaking, I am so dumb and ignorant, and i do not understand all the strands outlined in ESC's detailed research into all these domains of action that have been carefully concealed from us for so long - but the "big picture" is pretty clear.
Incredible research, thank you!