Publications

Trialogue/Annual Meeting Publications
The Trilateral Commission occasionally publishes reports on annual meetings and other reports in a many-authored format. The latest of these are Challenges to Trilateral Cooperation, a report on the 2006 Trilateral Commission Plenary Meeting in Tokyo, and Global Governance: Enhancing Trilateral Cooperation, a report on the 2003 Trilateral Commission Plenary Meeting in Seoul. These publications appear in the Trialogue series. Some presentations from other recent annual meetings may be found on links from the Recent Activity listing on this web site.

Task Force Reports/Project Work
Usually one to two Task Force Reports are published each year in a series also known as the Triangle Papers. The latest report to the Trilateral Commission stems from papers delivered at the 2007 plenary meeting in Brussels: Energy Security and Climate Change by John Deutch, Anne Lauvergeon, and Widhyawan Prawiraatmadja. Two previous reports were based on papers delivered at the 2006 Tokyo plenary meeting: Engaging with Russia: The Next Phase by Roderic Lyne, Strobe Talbott, and Koji Watanabe and Nuclear Proliferation: Risk and Responsibility by Graham Allison, Hervé de Carmoy, Thérèse Delpech, and Chung Min Lee. Other recent reports to the Trilateral Commission are The New Challenges to International, National and Human Security Policy by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Carl Bildt and Kazuo Ogura (2004); The "Democracy Deficit" in the Global Economy: Enhancing the Legitimacy and Accountability of Global Institutions by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., and others (2003); and Addressing the New International Terrorism: Prevention, Intervention and Multilateral Cooperation , by Joseph S Nye, Jr., Yukio Satoh and Paul Wilkinson (2003). Current project work is focused on addressing the challenges of globalization.

A Trilateral Commission Task Force project typically involves a team of authors from our three regions working together for a year or so on a report which is discussed in draft form in the annual meeting and then published. Such a report permits more intensive consideration of a particular set of issues (more intensive than a single session at an annual meeting). It allows us to draw many other persons into our work, including persons from non-Trilateral countries—sometimes as authors or commentators in an annual meeting, more often as consultants along the way as the authors prepare their reports. These reports allow the careful preparation of joint policy recommendations by a Trilateral team, and the published reports are circulated widely.

Over the years these projects have covered a wide range of topics, a reflection of the broad purposes we see for the partnership among the Trilateral countries. Some reports have focused on a particular country or region—such as the 1994 report on An Emerging China in a World of Interdependence, the 1995 report on Engaging Russia, the 1997 report on Community-Building with Pacific Asia, the 1998 report on Advancing Common Purposes in the Broad Middle East, the 2000 report on The New Central Asia: In Search of Stability, and the 2001 report on East Asia and the International System. Some reports have focused on aspects of managing the international economy or political/security challenges. The 1996 report on Maintaining Energy Security in a Global Context blends issues of international economic management with crucial security and broad political challenges. The 1996 report on Globalization and Trilateral Labor Markets: Evidence and Implications cuts across domestic and international concerns. The Commission’s need to re-examine its basic framework and approach to the broad international system led to the 1997 set of essays entitled Managing the International System Over the Next Ten Years and a 1999 report was 21st Century Strategies of the Trilateral Countries: In Concert or Conflict?.

The topics for projects are chosen by the chairmen, deputy chairmen, and directors, with the advice of the Executive Committee and others. Authors are then invited, sometimes from the Commission membership. The authors do not relocate to the offices of the Commission while preparing their report. They remain in their existing institutional settings, and the Commission enables them to meet with each other and various consultants along the way. The reports are to the Trilateral Commission, not of the Commission. The membership of the Commission is too diverse to achieve detailed agreement quickly on a controversial set of issues; and on a few occasions a summary of discussion in the annual meeting has been added to a report to detail the controversy it created.

Trilateral publications are available by clicking this link.