The Three-Tier Information Architecture

I. Why You Need This Handbook

If you have read Part I and Part II of the Before the Handshake investigation, you already know the architecture. The Council on Foreign Relations does not lobby. It does not advocate. It manufactures the analytical frame inside which the entire American foreign-policy discourse takes place. The frame is written at Pratt House, carried by a small class of CFR-member journalists into the major networks, and from there filters into the cable shows, the Senate floor speeches, the op-ed pages, and finally into the social media discourse that most Americans now experience as the news.

By the time you hear a phrase like "Liberal International Order" or "maximum pressure" or "exploiting fractures" on a cable panel or a Sunday show, it has already traveled three layers. It started in a publication signed by a Council fellow. It was carried into the mainstream by a journalist who is also a Council member or fellow. It is now being deployed by a cable anchor, a Sunday show guest, or a U.S. Senator, and within hours it will be repeated, debated, defended, attacked, or amplified by the entire influencer ecosystem — left, right, and heterodox — most of whom have no idea where the words came from.

This handbook is the diagnostic tool. It is the lens that lets you watch the cascade happen in real time. Once you have it, you will not be able to turn it off. You will see the architecture every time you open your phone.

II. The Three Tiers, At a Glance

The American foreign-policy information environment has three structurally distinct layers. They are not interchangeable. Each one performs a specific function, and each one is downstream of the one above it.

I will walk you through each tier in turn. For each one, I will tell you what it does, who is in it, and how to recognize when you are reading or watching it.

III. Tier One · The Frame

Tier One is small. It is the analytical class that actually writes the vocabulary. Its institutional home is Pratt House at 58 East 68th Street in Manhattan. Its publication is Foreign Affairs magazine. Its doctrinal organ is the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies. Its convening authority is the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force program. Part II of this series documented the building in detail, so I will not repeat that here.

What you need to know for the handbook is that Tier One produces three things, and only three things:

1. The vocabulary. The specific phrases that will, weeks later, be deployed across the rest of the information environment. "Liberal International Order," "weaponized interdependence," "chokepoints," "maximum pressure," "exploiting fractures," "missing middle," "responsible stakeholder," "decoupling," "de-risking," "managed competition." Each phrase has a date, an author, and a publication. Each phrase is then released into circulation and travels downward.
2. The analytical posture. The frame inside which any specific event will be evaluated. The Trump–Xi summit, before it happened, was already framed as a meeting in which "China will have the upper hand." The Iran war, before it was constitutionally debated, was already framed as a "structural constraint" rather than a "policy choice."
3. The institutional credentials. The Senate testimony reference documents. The Task Force reports. The bipartisan co-chair imprimatur. The seal of "this is what the responsible foreign-policy class believes." These are the certifications that make a frame survive contact with the appropriations process.

Tier One does not need a large audience. Tier One has, by some counts, roughly 5,400 members. Foreign Affairs magazine has a circulation under 200,000. The Task Force reports are read by perhaps a few thousand staff-level people on Capitol Hill, in the executive branch, and in the major newsrooms. That is enough. Tier One does not need to persuade the public. Tier One only needs to persuade Tier Two.

How to recognize Tier One when you see it

The byline is your tell. If you are reading something published on cfr.org, in Foreign Affairs, in a Council Special Report, in a Task Force Report, or in an op-ed authored by someone whose institutional affiliation is listed as "Council on Foreign Relations" or "Center for a New American Security" or "Atlantic Council" or "Brookings" or "RAND," you are reading Tier One product directly. The author may also be teaching at Georgetown, Columbia, SAIS, Harvard Kennedy School, or Yale Jackson — those are not separate institutions for our purposes. They are the academic outposts of the same lattice.

Tier One product has a recognizable house style. Measured prose. Sentence-level hedging. Three-part structures. "On the one hand … on the other hand … the question for policymakers is …" Bipartisan vocabulary — never overtly partisan. The reader is addressed as a fellow member of the analytical class, not as a member of the general public. The references are to other Tier One publications, never to Tier Three commentary. This is by design.

IV. Tier Two · The Networks

Tier Two is the carrier layer. It is the major American newsrooms, the cable networks, the Sunday shows, the op-ed pages of the largest national newspapers, and the policy-adjacent media that feeds the Capitol Hill staff and the executive branch deputies. Tier Two has a much larger audience than Tier One — tens of millions across the cable networks, the major papers, and the public-radio system — but it does not generate its own analytical vocabulary. It carries Tier One's vocabulary into broader circulation.

The mechanism is staffing. Tier Two is staffed, at the senior analytical level, by people who are themselves Tier One members. Fareed Zakaria runs his CNN program. He is also on the CFR board of directors. He was previously managing editor of Foreign Affairs. Walter Isaacson runs his books and convenes Aspen. He is a CFR member. David Brooks writes his New York Times column. He is a CFR member. Tom Friedman writes his New York Times column. He is a CFR member. Bret Stephens writes his New York Times column. He is a CFR member. David Ignatius writes his Washington Post column. He is a CFR member. Anne Applebaum writes for The Atlantic. She is a CFR member. Andrea Mitchell anchors at NBC. She is a CFR member. The roster is dozens long, and it covers every major opinion column and foreign-policy correspondent position at every major American newsroom.

The function of Tier Two is to translate Tier One's vocabulary into language that a much larger audience can absorb. The Council fellow writes a piece titled "The Case for Exploiting Iran's Internal Fractures." The Council-member columnist at The Atlantic writes a long essay synthesizing the argument and addressing the educated general reader. The Council-member CNN host books the Council fellow on his Sunday show. The Council-member Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee asks the Council fellow about the framework at the next hearing. By the end of a four-week cycle, the phrase "exploiting fractures" is in the air. By the end of an eight-week cycle, it sounds like common sense.

Tier Two also does something Tier One cannot do. It performs the bipartisan ritual. Tier Two carries the same vocabulary on both the "liberal" outlets (CNN, NYT, WaPo, MSNBC) and the "conservative" outlets (WSJ, Fox News, The Free Press, the National Review). The partisan disagreements at Tier Two are real but cosmetic. They are arguments over how to apply the vocabulary, not over whether the vocabulary itself is the right vocabulary. That is why every cable show on every network on every night ends up using approximately the same analytical phrases — because the phrases are upstream of the partisan divide.

How to recognize Tier Two when you see it

The bylines are major newsrooms. The credentials are network anchors, columnists, or "national security correspondents." The vocabulary is consistent with Tier One but more accessible. The hosts and guests address one another as fellow members of the analytical class. The signature move is to interview Tier One figures as authoritative experts, never as institutional advocates. When a CNN program books a Council fellow to discuss Iran, the fellow is introduced by their academic and government credentials, never by their institutional role as the author of the CFR analytical line. That omission is itself the tell.

V. Tier Three · The Influencers

Tier Three is the layer most readers spend the most time in. It is the podcasts, the YouTube channels, the X feeds, the Substack newsletters, the Rumble channels, the TikTok commentariat, and the broader social-media discourse. It includes the right-leaning influencer ecosystem (Rogan, Carlson, Shapiro, Kelly, Owens, Pool, Beck, Bongino, Kirk before his death, the Daily Wire stable, the Turning Point USA orbit). It includes the left-leaning influencer ecosystem (Cenk Uygur, Sam Seder, David Pakman, Hasan Piker, the broader progressive YouTube space). It includes the heterodox or anti-establishment middle (Greenwald, Taibbi, Maté, Sullivan, the Weinstein brothers, the broader heterodox podcasting world). It includes the explicitly independent journalism layer where my own work sits.

Tier Three is, in audience reach, vastly larger than Tier One and Tier Two combined. Joe Rogan alone has more listeners per episode than the entire combined circulation of Foreign Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations membership roll, and a typical CFR Task Force readership. The influencer space is the dominant information environment for tens of millions of Americans under fifty.

And here is the structural fact that matters. Tier Three is not on the CFR membership roll. Almost no one in the influencer space — left, right, or heterodox — is a Council member, a former fellow, or in the institutional pipeline. The reasons are structural. CFR membership requires nomination by an existing member, sponsorship by at least three more, U.S. citizenship, and a multi-stage vetting process. Article II of the CFR bylaws permits expulsion of any member who reveals what is said at Council meetings. The institution's purpose is closed-door convening of powerful people who do not want their statements on the public record. The influencer model — broadcast everything, optimize for engagement — is structurally incompatible with what CFR membership is for.

So what does Tier Three actually do? Tier Three argues. Loudly, continuously, and at vast scale, Tier Three argues about the vocabulary that was set at Tier One and carried by Tier Two. Most of Tier Three does not know that the vocabulary it is arguing about was written upstream. Most of Tier Three believes it is doing original analysis. It is not.

How to recognize Tier Three when you see it

You are probably reading or watching Tier Three right now. If the medium is a podcast, a YouTube video, a Substack post, an X thread, a Rumble stream, a Telegram channel, or a TikTok, you are in Tier Three. If the host or writer does not have a current or former institutional affiliation with a major newsroom or a Council-network think tank, you are in Tier Three. If the discussion is reacting to events that have already been framed by Tier One and reported by Tier Two — rather than independently surfacing original documents, original sources, or original investigative reporting — you are in Tier Three, regardless of how good or smart the host is.

This is not a put-down. I work in Tier Three. So do most of the most honest journalists currently working in American media. The point is to know what layer you are in, because the layer determines what kind of information you are getting and what its limitations are.

VI. The Vocabulary Cascade

Here is how a single phrase travels through the three tiers. I am going to use one of the phrases documented in Part I of this series — "Liberal International Order" — but the pattern works for any of them.

You can run this analysis on any CFR-canonized phrase. "Maximum pressure" travels the same pipeline. "Weaponized interdependence" travels the same pipeline. "Chokepoints" travels the same pipeline. The mechanism is consistent. The cycle is reliable. The terminal state — vocabulary as common sense — is the institution's product.

VII. Willingly · Unwillingly · The Spectrum

People who carry CFR vocabulary downstream are not all doing so for the same reasons. There is a spectrum, and where someone sits on the spectrum is the most useful single thing you can know about them as an information source. Let me walk you through the spectrum carefully, because this is the part of the handbook that matters most for your daily reading habits.

Let me walk through each category in turn.

Category One · The Unwitting Carrier

This is where most of the influencer space lives by default. The host or writer uses CFR-canonized vocabulary because that is the only shared analytical language available in the discourse they swim in. They reach for "Liberal International Order" or "great power competition" or "decoupling" because those are the phrases the cable shows are using, the Senate hearings are using, the New York Times is using. They have no idea the phrase started at Pratt House. They have no institutional reason to know. They use it the way a fish uses water. This is the default state of the discourse, and it is not a moral failing. It is a structural condition.

Category Two · The Half-Aware Echo

This is where most heterodox and anti-establishment commentators live. The host senses that there is a frame being imposed. They know the vocabulary is suspicious. They can feel the choreography. But they cannot quite locate the source. They suspect Davos, they suspect Soros, they suspect the WEF, they suspect Bilderberg, they suspect "the globalists" — and they are gesturing in the right direction, but they have not done the institutional bookkeeping to identify Pratt House specifically. They are critics of the frame without being precise about the architecture of the frame. This is the largest and most interesting category in the dissident space, and it is where most of the productive intellectual work is happening right now.

Category Three · The Conscious Conduit

This is the category most people in the dissident space worry about and the category I want to handle most carefully. The Conscious Conduit is someone who knows exactly where the vocabulary comes from — because they are themselves embedded in the lattice, or because they have done the homework, or because they have institutional incentives to amplify the frame — and who carries the vocabulary downstream deliberately. The CFR-member journalist class lives here. So do a small number of nominally-independent commentators who turn out, on close inspection, to be heavily networked into Atlantic Council, Hoover, the Tikvah Fund, or the broader institutional ecosystem documented in Part II.

I am not going to name specific Tier Three figures in this category, because the standard of evidence required for that kind of named accusation is higher than what can be sustained in a handbook. What I will tell you is what the diagnostic looks like, and you can apply it yourself. The Conscious Conduit will: receive their vocabulary updates ahead of the public news cycle, frequently appear on CFR-network programs, frequently cite CFR fellows as authoritative experts without disclosing the institutional relationship, take heavy institutional advertising or donor money from the same corporate ecosystem that funds CFR, and never investigate the institutional layer itself.

Category Four · The Counter-Frame

This is the rarest category and the one most worth supporting. The Counter-Frame commentator recognizes the vocabulary, names the source institution, traces the cascade, and publishes the documentation. This is what the Before the Handshake investigation is — an explicit Category Four operation. There are perhaps a few dozen genuinely independent investigative journalists, scholars, and commentators currently working in this category. They are systematically de-platformed, de-banked, demonetized, and harassed because the architecture's institutional defenses recognize them as the only existential threat in the Tier Three space. Most readers of this handbook will already know who they are.

VIII. How To Tell · The Reader's Toolkit

Here is the practical part. The diagnostic questions. The next time you read an article, watch a video, listen to a podcast, or scroll a thread about American foreign policy, run it against these tests. Within five minutes you should know which tier you are in and roughly where on the spectrum the source sits.

IX. The Counter-Frame Layer

Independent investigative journalism — Category Four, Counter-Frame — is the only part of the information environment that operates fully outside the CFR architecture. This is what makes it valuable. It is also what makes it structurally vulnerable, because the institutional defenses of the lattice recognize Category Four operations as the only meaningful threat to the cascade. Tier One does not worry about Tier Three. Tier One worries about the small subset of Tier Three that is doing the institutional bookkeeping.

This is the part of the handbook that is hardest to write because it is the part where I have to disclose that I am one of the people I am writing about. I run an independent investigative operation. I am writing this handbook out of that operation. The structural facts I am describing apply to me as much as to anyone else, and my readers are entitled to know that.

What I can tell you is what Counter-Frame work looks like in practice. It looks like this handbook. It looks like Part I and Part II of this series. It looks like the SWIFT Code series, the Turkey Doctrine, the SPLC Thread, INSIDE JOB. It looks like document-level investigation — opening the file, naming the names, tracing the money, walking the architecture. The product is slow. It is expensive to produce. It does not optimize for engagement. It does optimize for accuracy and for permanent reference value. If a piece of independent investigative work is still useful five years from now, the work was Category Four. If it is not, it was not.

You can support this work directly. The links are below. The institutional architecture cannot be dismantled by any single investigation. But it can be made legible — and once it is legible to enough readers, the cascade stops working the way it was designed to work.

X. Using This Handbook

This handbook is built to be permanent reference material. The URL will remain stable. The content will be updated as the institutional architecture shifts and as new vocabulary enters circulation. The four diagrams will be revised as the membership composition of CFR changes, as new institutions enter the lattice, and as the influencer ecosystem evolves.

Use it in three ways:

1. As a one-time read, to install the framework in your reading habits. Once the three tiers and the spectrum are in your head, they will stay there.
2. As a permanent reference, to come back to when you encounter a specific phrase or a specific commentator and want to identify what tier and what spectrum position you are looking at. Bookmark this page. Send the link to people you want to think more carefully about their reading habits.
3. As a teaching resource, to share with people newer to this material. The diagrams are meant to be shareable. The diagnostic toolkit is meant to be used. If you are an educator, a parent, an organizer, or a researcher, lift this material freely. Attribution is appreciated. Comprehension is the point.

The architecture documented in Part I and Part II of this series is one hundred and four years old. It was built deliberately, in plain sight, by named people, with documented money, on a documented timeline. It has been doing what it was built to do, in unbroken continuity, since 1921. The most powerful response to an architecture that depends on the public's inability to read it is to teach the public to read it.

That is what this handbook is for. Now you can read it.

XI. The Receipts · Trump 1 vs Trump 2 vs Obama vs Biden

The architecture I have described in Sections I through X is abstract. It needs receipts. This final section is the receipts. Names, roles, dates, CFR status, side by side, four administrations deep. Read across the rows and you will see the institutional pipeline in operation. Read down the columns and you will see what changes — and what does not — when the White House changes hands.

A note on methodology before we begin. CFR membership is a layered concept, as explained in earlier sections of this handbook. I distinguish in the rosters below between five statuses: Confirmed Member (full Life Member or fellow with documented public record), Former Member (term member whose five-year clock expired, or member whose status lapsed), CFR-Adjacent (heavy CFR speaking history, Foreign Affairs publications, or lattice-institution affiliations short of confirmed full membership), Not CFR (no public record of CFR affiliation), and Unverified (claimed by some sources but not confirmable in primary documentation). Where I am uncertain, I will tell you so. Use this material the way a journalist uses a source list: not as gospel, but as a starting point for your own verification.

The Obama administration · 2009–2017 · The CFR Baseline

Before we compare the two Trump administrations, we need a baseline. The Obama administration was, at the senior foreign-policy level, almost entirely staffed by CFR members, Trilateral Commission members, or both. This is the institutional norm against which everything else should be measured. Note in particular the rotational pipeline visible in the right-hand column — almost every name on this list returned to CFR or its lattice institutions after leaving government, and many returned to government again under Biden.

Read that list again. Then read it a third time. Every senior foreign-policy seat in the Obama administration was occupied by a confirmed CFR member or a CFR-adjacent institutional voice. There are no exceptions worth noting at the cabinet or deputy level. This is what the institutional norm looks like. This is the architecture working at full saturation.

Note also the right-hand column. Nine of the names above — Hagel, Donilon, Carter, Flournoy, Brainard, Blinken, Sullivan, Burns, Haines, Mayorkas, Yellen — went to CFR-network landing pads after Obama, and most of them came back to senior positions under Biden. The pipeline runs in both directions.

The Biden administration · 2021–2025 · The Obama Pipeline, Reinstalled

I will spend less time on Biden because the Biden roster is functionally a continuation of the Obama roster with one shift up in seniority. The same people. The same institutional pipeline. The same lattice. Quick reference:

Eleven names. Eleven confirmed members. The Biden administration is the Obama administration with a four-year delay. This is the institutional baseline against which the two Trump administrations should be evaluated.

The Trump first administration · 2017–2021 · The Hybrid

Now we get to the interesting comparison. The first Trump administration is widely remembered as a populist insurgency against the Washington establishment. The personnel record tells a more complicated story. At the senior foreign-policy level, the first Trump administration was significantly more CFR-staffed than its rhetoric suggested. The populist wing held the communications, immigration, and trade-protectionist seats. The CFR network held State, Defense, the NSC, and the intelligence community.

The Trump second administration · 2025–present · The Pattern Breaks

This is where the structural reading becomes important. The second Trump administration represents the first time in roughly forty years that a senior cabinet has been staffed predominantly by non-CFR personnel at the foreign-policy and national-security level. Not entirely. Treasury, as I documented earlier in this handbook and in Part I of the series, went to a confirmed CFR member with a Soros pedigree. Tulsi Gabbard's CFR term membership expired in 2019 but is part of her institutional history. Rubio's status is contested. But the pattern of saturation — the pattern visible in Obama, Biden, and even in significant parts of Trump 1 — is broken.

The Side-by-Side · What Changes When CFR Saturation Drops

The roster data above is the receipts. Now the structural reading. The two side-by-side panels below distill what the change in CFR saturation actually produces in observable policy behavior — not in rhetoric, in behavior.

What This Means for the Architecture

The reading is straightforward and you should hold it in mind as you watch the rest of the second term unfold.

First: the architecture documented in Part II of this series did not vanish in January 2025. The Council on Foreign Relations still exists. Pratt House still convenes. The Greenberg Center still publishes. The Task Force machine still produces bipartisan reports. Foreign Affairs still arrives quarterly. The May 2026 publication cadence documented in Part I demonstrates that the institutional voice has lost none of its operating cadence. What has changed is the staffing pipeline running into the cabinet seats.

Second: the architecture has responded to the staffing change by routing around it. The Treasury seat went to Bessent — a confirmed CFR member with a Soros pedigree. The Treasury Secretary now operates as the senior foreign-policy figure in the cabinet on China, Russia sanctions, Argentina policy, and the trade war. The architecture's institutional center of gravity has moved from State and the NSC, where it traditionally sits, to Treasury, where it can still operate without depending on populist personnel in the other seats.

Third: the architecture has compensated for the loss of internal staffing by intensifying its external publication cadence. Twenty-four articles in eleven business days, May 2026, was not an accident. When CFR cannot place its analytical voice inside the cabinet, it places it in front of the cabinet — through the Sunday shows, through the op-ed pages, through Senate testimony, through Task Force reports, through the steady downward flow of vocabulary documented in this handbook's cascade diagram.

Fourth: the populist wing has won the visible cabinet seats but has not yet built an alternative analytical architecture. There is no populist Pratt House. There is no MAGA Foreign Affairs magazine. There is no nationalist Task Force machine. When the second Trump administration needs an analytical frame for a complicated policy question, the only frames available are the ones produced by the lattice. This is the structural vulnerability of the populist victory in 2024. The personnel got into the building. The frame is still being written by the institution that built the building.

Fifth: General Flynn's case from January 2017 is the cautionary tale every populist appointment in the second term should be holding in mind. Flynn was the original Trump 1 National Security Adviser. He was not a CFR member. He was removed within twenty-four days. The mechanisms that removed him — surveillance, leaks, prosecutorial pressure — are still in place. The same lattice that removed Flynn is operating today. The fact that Trump 2 has been able to staff non-CFR personnel at most senior seats does not mean the architecture has accepted the change. It means the architecture is, in some respects, still pricing it.

Use this comparison as a working framework, not as a final verdict. The second Trump administration is, as of the publication date of this handbook, fifteen months old. The architecture's response to it is still developing. The personnel rosters will shift. The publication cadence will shift. The relationship between Pratt House and the second Trump cabinet will be the most consequential political story of the next three years, and you can watch it unfold in real time, name by name, vocabulary phrase by vocabulary phrase, using the diagnostic tools this handbook has given you.

One last thing. The names in the rosters above are the leadership class. They are not the only people who matter. Below the cabinet, at the deputy and assistant-secretary levels, the institutional staffing pattern looks very different. Many of those positions remain held by career civil servants and lattice-institution alumni who continue to function regardless of which party holds the White House. That is the activist-workforce layer my SWIFT Code series documents. The cabinet is the visible roster. The deputies are the operating system. Both matter. Both should be watched.

Now go look at your phone. Watch a Sunday show. Read a column. Listen to a podcast. Apply the toolkit. Use the receipts. The architecture is operating in plain sight. Now you can read it.