Trilateralism aimed to replace American hegemony with a shared global leadership by the United States, Japan and Western Europe (the trilateral regions). It emphasised the need for coordinated macroeconomic policies by the leading countries, opposed protectionism, and looked to find a more accomodating relationship between the rich industrialised countries and the developing countries.

Trilateralism emerged as an elite reaction against Nixon and Kissinger's focus on managing the Cold War, rather than on what trilateralists argued were the new imperatives of managing interdependence, especially in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. The Trilateral Commission was initially founded and funded by David Rockefeller, and its first policy director was Zbiginiew Brzezinski.

My dissertation looks at the rise of trilateralism as a dominant idea in the American foreign policy elite of the 1970s, and its implementation as foreign policy by the Carter administration. Many prominent Trilateral Commission members were appointed to key posts under Carter, including the director of the Commission Zbiginiew Brzezinski (as Carter's National Security Advisor), the Vice-President, the Secretary of State and the President himself.

However, whereas much of the focus on the Trilateral Commission has emphasised its alleged ability to pull the strings on world order, I will focus on the mixed record of trilateralism and Carter's foreign policy. The shift in American policy towards a harder line to the Soviet Union and to neoliberalism in the economic realm in the last two years of the Carter administration transformed America's relations with the world, with trilateralists split in their views and support for these changes.