Foreign Affairs
This article is about a journal. See foreign affairs (disambiguation) for other uses.Foreign Affairs is an
American journal of
international relations published by the
Council on Foreign Relations, a private sector group established in
New York City in 1921 with the goal of keeping the United States involved in world affairs.
The Council on Foreign Relations was founded in 1921 and was originally composed of 75 members of mainly academic and professional backgrounds. In its first year, the Council sought discourse mainly in meetings at their headquarters in New York City. However the members of the Council wished to seek a wider audience and in 1922 began publishing
Foreign Affairs. The Council named Professor
Archibald Cary Coolidge of
Harvard University as the journal's first
editor. As Coolidge was unwilling to move from
Boston to New York,
Hamilton Fish Armstrong a
Princeton alumnus and a European correspondent of the
New York Evening Post (now known as the
New York Post) was appointed as a co-editor and was sent to work in New York to handle the mechanical work of publishing the journal. Armstrong chose the light blue color to be the cover of the journal and had his two sisters, Margeret and Helen, designed the logo (the man on the horse on the upper left hand side of each cover) and the lettering respectively.
The journal
Foreign Affairs continued the
Journal of International Relations (which ran from 1910 to 1922), which in turn continued the
Journal of Race Development (which ran from 1911 to 1919) (Weber).
Pre-World War II
The lead article in the first issue of
Foreign Affairs was written by former
Secretary of State under
Theodore Roosevelt's Administration
Elihu Root. In the initial article Root wrote that the United States had become a
World power and as such that the general population needed to be better informed about international matters.
John Foster Dulles, then a lawyer from New York who would later become
Secretary of State under
Dwight D. Eisenhower, also wrote an article on the initial issue of
Foreign Affairs regarding the difficulties surrounding war reparations placed on Germany after the
First World War. [
1]
Foreign Affairs published a series of articles in 1925 by prominent
African-American intellectual
W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois, a personal friend of Armstrong, wrote mainly about race issues and imperialism. Although in the early days of publication the journal did not have many female authors, in the late 1930s American journalist for
Time Magazine Dorothy Thompson would contribute articles. [
2]
Cold War Era
The journal rose to its greatest prominence after
World War II when
foreign relations became central to
United States politics, and the United States became a powerful actor on the global scene. Several extremely important articles were published in
Foreign Affairs, including the reworking of
George F. Kennan's "
Long Telegram", which first publicized the doctrine of
containment that would form the basis of American
Cold War policy.
Eleven different
Secretaries of State have written essays in
Foreign Affairs.Post-Cold War Era
Since the end of the Cold War, and especially after
September 11, 2001, the journal's readership has grown significantly. It was in
Foreign Affairs that
Samuel P. Huntington published his influential "
Clash of Civilizations" article.
In November/December 2003 issue of
Foreign Affairs,
Kenneth Maxwell wrote a review of
Peter Kornbluh's book
The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, which gave rise to a controversy about
Henry Kissinger's relationship to the regime of Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet and to
Operation Condor. Maxwell claims that key
Council on Foreign Relations members, acting at Kissinger's behest, put pressure on
Foreign Affairs editor,
James Hoge, to give the last word in a subsequent exchange about the review to
William D. Rogers, a close associate of Kissinger's, rather than to Maxwell; this went against established
Foreign Affairs policy.
The immediate past managing editor of
Foreign Affairs was
Fareed Zakaria, now the editor of
Newsweek International. The current managing editor is
Gideon Rose, an expert on international conflict and the Middle East.
Since its inception,
Foreign Affairs has had a fairly long book review section. The section originated after Coolidge asked his colleague at Harvard
William L. Langer, a historian and
World War I veteran, to run the section. Langer initially had full control over the section and did the reviews entirely by himself. A month before the reviews were due the office in New York would ship approximately one hundred books to Langer to be reviewed and within approximately two weeks he would return the reviews for the section. By the late 1930s, the review section had been broken down into several subsections. In the magazine's current incarnation (as of April 2006), a few longer reviews, usually written by well-known figures in the field of foreign policy, begin the section, followed by a subsection titled "Recent Books on International Relations" with shorter half-page long reviews written by eminent academics. The section's final page shows the top fifteen best selling books on U.S. foreign policy and international affairs according to Barnes and Noble's online book sales. [
3]
*Weber, Eugen. "Half-Brother to the World" [Review of
A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History by Thomas Bender, Hill and Wang, 2006],
The American Scholar, Vol. 75, No. 3, (Sum. 2006), pp. 123-126.
*
Foreign Affairs Official Site
*
Council on Foreign Relations Official Site
