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Home page  About CSIS A Brief History
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CSIS was launched at the height of the Cold War, dedicated to the simple but urgent goal of finding ways for America to survive as a nation and prosper as a people. During the following four decades, CSIS has grown to become one of the nation’s and the world’s preeminent public policy institutions on U.S. and international security.
From its beginning, CSIS has been committed to bipartisan problem solving. While partisan competition advances ideas, America prospers when policy leaders develop a consensus across the political spectrum. CSIS actively unites leaders from both parties to join in shared problem solving.
2000-2007
2007: CSIS publishes Global Forecast, a volume of essays showcasing CSIS's collective wisdom on the most important security issues facing America in 2008.
2007: Smart Power Commission cochairs Richard L. Armitage and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. lead a panel that provides a diagnosis of America’s declining standing in the world and offers a set of recommendations for the next president of the United States to implement a smart power approach to America’s global engagement
2007: CSIS purchases 1616 Rhode Island Avenue, Washington, D.C., for the future home of the Center.
2007: CSIS supports the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, chaired by General James Jones, USMC (Ret.), which reported to Congress on the readiness of the Iraqi Security Forces.
2007: Ban Ki-moon, the eighth secretary-general of the United Nations, speaks at CSIS during his first visit to Washington as the organization’s leader.
2006: Decision 2008 program is created to foster a consensus-driven approach during the run-up to the elections by providing a platform for constructive and balanced dialogue and debate on the wide range of issues confronting candidates.
2006: CSIS is a partner organization of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), and CSIS experts contributed to its work. Many experts also commented on the ISG report in the days after its release.
2006: CSIS starts a project to assess the degree to which a wide range of policies and practices enacted by government and business over the last five years since 9/11 increased security and diminished the threat of terrorism in the United States.
2006: CSIS and the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) develop a joint multiyear project, the China Balance Sheet, which brings together leading specialists and analysts to provide regular, comprehensive, and objective information and analysis of changes in contemporary China’s internal evolution and global role.
2005: Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff adopts many of the reorganization ideas offered in DHS 2.0, a 2004 report by CSIS and the Heritage Foundation, in his restructuring plan for the department.
2005: Recommendations made by the CSIS Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project results in the creation of an office for reconstruction at the Department of State and a U.S. government training center for reconstruction and stabilization issues at the Naval Postgraduate School.
2005: Recommendations in the CSIS report Barracks and Brothels: Peacekeepers and Human Trafficking in the Balkans help shape provisions in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (HR 972), which addresses the links between peacekeeping and human trafficking.
2005: CSIS conducts the “Steadfast Resolve” simulation exercise as a means to identify challenges to top government officials in responding to a terrorist attack that is harmful, but not catastrophic, and where there is uncertainty about possible follow-on attacks.
2005: Hills Governance Center is launched at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, for the purpose of promoting transparency and accountability across the private, public, and civic sectors. It joins centers in Korea and the Philippines, which were opened in 2003.
2004: The Global Strategy Institute at CSIS is launched to research long-range trends and to provide strategic insights to senior business, academic, and government leaders.
2004: The CSIS “Black Dawn” nuclear terrorism simulation helps to prompt the creation of a new European Union crisis center to deal with terrorist attacks and leads the European Council to reprogram funding toward threat reduction priorities.
2004: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld briefs President George W. Bush on the findings of CSIS’s “Beyond Goldwater-Nichols” project to determine pragmatic solutions for 21st century defense reform.
2003: Co-chaired by Senators Bill Frist and John Kerry, the CSIS Task Force on HIV/AIDS begins phase two in its effort to strengthen U.S. leadership and build consensus around HIV/AIDS policy in the “second-wave” states of China, Russia, India, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.
2003: At the request of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Ambassador Paul Bremer, John Hamre leads a team of CSIS experts to Iraq to assess postwar reconstruction efforts.
2003: Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar and former senator Sam Nunn launch the Initiative for a Renewed Transatlantic Partnership to help U.S. and European decision-makers jointly confront common global challenges.
2002: CSIS releases The Global Retirement Crisis: The Threat to World Stability and What to Do about It. Co-published with Citigroup, the report educates readers on the impending world pension crisis and on ways to reduce the negative economic ramifications of global aging.
2002: CSIS launches the Abshire-Inamori Leadership Academy to develop future leaders with character, creativity, and strategic vision. Kazuo Inamori provides an endowment of $5 million for the academy’s leadership-building effort.
2001: CSIS forms the Terrorism Task Force, led by CSIS scholars, to assist in the development of long-term, national strategies to combat future terrorist attacks against the U.S. homeland. This effort results in the publication of To Prevail: An American Strategy for the Campaign against Terrorism, the first post-9/11 guide to fighting transnational terrorism.
2001: A CSIS report, Computer Exports and National Security in a Global Era: New Tools for a New Century, recommends ending performance-based hardware controls on computers and microprocessors; strengthening nonproliferation controls that focus on end users and projects of concern; and finding new ways to take advantage of information technologies to build U.S. military superiority.
2001: CSIS holds the “Dark Winter” exercise to determine the health and security implications of a smallpox attack in the United States.
2001: U.S. Policy to End Sudan’s War, a report produced by an international task force headed by the CSIS Africa Program and members of Congress, provides policymakers with a pragmatic strategy for bringing a lasting peace to Sudan.
2001: CSIS Strategic Energy Initiative finds that U.S. energy policy lacks global perspective and contains inherent contradictions, making it potentially difficult to meet emerging supply threats.
2000: The U.S. Department of Energy commissions CSIS to examine ways to integrate security better with the scientific missions of the department’s nuclear laboratories, resulting in the publication of Science and Security in the 21st Century.
2000: Deputy Secretary of Defense John J. Hamre is elected president of CSIS.
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1999: In the wake of Asia’s financial crisis, CSIS convenes a congressional task force on global financial stability, co-chaired by Senators William Roth and Joseph Lieberman and Representatives David Drier and Robert Matsui.
1999: Secretary of State Madeline Albright embraces the CSIS report Diplomacy in the Information Age. Co-authored by Richard Burt and Olin Robison, the report calls for strengthening the State Department’s information technology infrastructure and overhauling the personnel management system for diplomats.
1999: Former ambassador Richard Fairbanks is elected president of CSIS.
1999: Former senator Sam Nunn is elected chairman of the CSIS Board of Trustees.
1998: The report of CSIS’s retirement commission, led by Senators Judd Gregg and John Breaux and Representatives Charles Stenholm and Jim Kolbe, becomes the bipartisan benchmark of the Social Security reform debate. Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Robert Kerrey, and others endorse the plan.
1996: CSIS Defense Train Wreck Panel warns of declining readiness and modernization, two years before the executive branch issues a similar warning.
1995: Global Organized Crime Project hosts officials and experts from around the world to pinpoint the need to train state and local officials on how to deal with weapons of mass destruction; $150 million appended to defense appropriations bill.
1993: The CSIS NAFTA and Beyond Commission, led by Paul Volker, is instrumental in Congress’s passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
1993: CSIS St. Petersburg Commission launches a successful effort to open, in 1997, a second International Arbitration Court in Russia.
1992: Nunn-Domenici Strengthening of America Commission recommends consolidating economic policy in a White House Economic Council; President-elect Clinton implements the recommendation, which offers a way to eliminate the deficit and calls for overhauling the tax system to encourage savings and investment. Former representative Jack Kemp later says the plan sparked the tax replacement debate.
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1989: Honolulu-based Pacific Forum merges with CSIS.
1987: Former ambassador Anne Armstrong is elected chairwoman of the CSIS Board of Trustees.
1987: CSIS becomes independent of Georgetown University.
1985: CSIS panel leads to the Goldwater-Nichols legislation to reform the Defense Department and 22 Joint Chiefs of Staff. Five years later, experts attribute the overwhelming success in the Gulf War to the inter-service cooperation (jointness) resulting from this legislation.
1984: Nunn-Warner panel recommends nuclear risk reduction centers; Russia and the United States adopt.
1983: Amos A. Jordan becomes CSIS president, replacing David Abshire, who is nominated to be U.S. ambassador to NATO.
1982: CSIS-promoted Roth-Glenn-Nunn resolution on transatlantic armaments cooperation passes the Senate, 87-1. The “Nunn” programs legislated in 1985 resulted from this effort.
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1978: CSIS introduces policy gaming on terrorism and natural disasters, which results in a segment on ABC’s 20/20 on a hypothetical bombing in Manhattan that is seen by 7 million Americans.
1978: CSIS convenes the first public hearing on Capitol Hill on the Cambodian genocide, sparking major changes in congressional and executive branch perceptions of the tragedy.
1977: Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, is appointed the first CSIS counselor.
1975: National Coal Commission brings together industrialists and environmentalists and produces extraordinary results, including a cover story in Fortune magazine, 400 market-oriented federal regulations, and a Harvard Business School case study.
1973: Japan-U.S. inter-parliamentary maritime caucus forms first CSIS “Quadrangular Forum,” with Bill Brock, Hubert Humphrey, Henri Simonet, Saburo Okita, among others.
1971: CSIS moves to 1800 K Street, N.W., in downtown Washington, D.C., where it resides today.
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1968: CSIS publishes a landmark Persian Gulf study.
1966: CSIS research triggers House hearings on the Sino-Soviet split, chaired by Representative Clement Zablocki, the first public documentation of that historic watershed.
1962: At a CSIS conference on national security, including current counselors Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger, economist Murray Weidenbaum forecasts that dire economic and inflationary consequences would accompany fighting a limited $20-billion war (a prescient forecast of Vietnam).
1962: Admiral Arleigh Burke and David Abshire found the Center for Strategic Studies at Georgetown University.
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