"The Carter years", according to Alan Wolfe, in Jerry Sanders' Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (South End Press, 1983), "witnessed the political triumph of a group of dissident national security managers who had never accepted detente and who were prepared to use their expertise and experience to put the United States back on the track of the Cold War." (page 3)

Carter put his best foot forward, but within a very short time the tone of his presidency would change dramatically:

In his inaugural address, Jimmy Carter pledged, "We will move this year toward our ultimate goal - the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this earth." ... [But by June] Carter's early optimism had faded into bellicose pronouncements reminiscent of the worst years of the Cold War. - Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983), page 237.

'Team B' is what happened - the effort, led by CIA Director George HW Bush at the end of the Ford Administration, to undermine Carter's foreign policy. He was pressured from the inside, by the foreign policy elite who had issued the 'Team B report' (which found that the Soviet Union presented a dire threat to the security of the United States) and from the outside (by public opinion that they had intentionally whipped up using mechanisms similar to the 'vast propaganda machine' that Lovett had proudly put into place, under similar circumstances in the Truman years, to garner support for the bellicose foreign policy proposals put forward by the original 'Committee on the Present Danger'). Paul Wolfowitz was a member of 'Team B'. [See Ford/Team B and Truman/Team B]

This was the same 'pincer' approach - squeezing the president simultaneously from the inside and the outside - that had been used in the Acheson-Nitze takeover of Truman foreign policy, which toppled Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson. Not surprising, as it was Nitze who played the key role in the resurrection of the Committee on the Present Danger during the Ford years.

The result was the same. There was a 'collapse of the centrist position within the administration' and an 'abandonment of detente for an all-out return to a Cold War posture'. (p. 241) Carter's Secretary of Defense, Howard Brown, did an abrupt about-face. And Carter himself, despite having the authority of the presidency behind him, would 'fail to take the initiative and surrender time and again to the cold war coalition's hardline demands'. (p. 265)

Where the hardliners lobbied for the reinstatement of Schlesinger as Defense Secretary [the position he held in the Ford Administration], word was out that Carter's transition team wanted archfoe Paul Warnke [assistant Secretary of Defense in the Johnson Administration]. Carter compromised by appointing Harold Brown - no dove to be sure - but still a budget-minded administrator who, when he was Secretary of the Air Force, was known as 'Dr. No' for his abrasive proclivity for rejecting the generals' attempts to increase the size of their arsenals. Since his days at the Pentagon, Brown had served on the Trilateral Commission and in contrast to his two predecessors, Donald Rumsfeldand Schlesinger, had publicly expressed his skepticism of hardline estimates of the Soviet Union's political intentions as well as military strength to carry out any alleged global designs it might secretly harbor. (page 181)

As Brown promised the assembled weaponeers in his [1977] speech, "We now have, and will retain, our options. We will build and improve our forces as necessary. We will not be outgunned. We will not be bullied. We will not be coerced." It is hard to imagine how James Schlesinger would have worded it any differently if the CPD's choice for Secretary of Defense had been called upon to make the speech instead. ... (page 249)

... Seizing the time, the [CPD] stepped up its effort to convince the nation of the 'present danger', and to convince Carter that he was fated to lead the attack against it if he were serious about a second term in office. (page 253)

Meanwhile,

Leslie Gelb, who was purged from the administration by this time looked back on the disastrous outcome .... he had helped to devise and counseled that Administration policy must be more than'simply a patchwork of conflicting views.' Moreover, he added in a tone of urgency, Carter 'must take on the right-wing frontally.' (page 267)

[In 2003 Gelb was president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and critical of the fact that no WMD were to be found in post-invasion Iraq. {1} ]

[For more on 'Team B', see: Ford Administration/Team B, Carter Administration/Team B, and Truman  Administration/Team B.]

The connection between the Carter group and the Trilateral Commission was selected in 1976 as "the best censored news story" of that year. Noam Chomsky:

The Trilateral Commission has issued one major book-length report, namely, The Crisis of Democracy (Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, 1975). Given the intimate connections between the Commission and the Carter Administration, the study is worth careful attention, as an indication of the thinking that may well lie behind its domestic policies, as well as the policies undertaken in other industrial democracies in the coming years.

... The Trilateral Commission was founded at the initiative of David Rockefeller in 1973. Its members are drawn from the three components of the world of capitalist democracy: the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. Among them are the heads of major corporations and banks, partners in corporate law firms, Senators, Professors of international affairs -- the familiar mix in extra-governmental groupings. Along with the 1940s project of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), directed by a committed "trilateralist" and with numerous links to the Commission, the project constitutes the first major effort at global planning since the War-Peace Studies program of the CFR during World War II. [2]

Especially threatening to the philosophy of 'military containment' espoused by the 'Committee on the Present Danger', was the emphasis on human rights that Carter boldly put forward on first taking office - because it threatened to 'redefine the principal axis of global conflict in North-South rather than East-West terms'. [Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983), p. 293]