Foreign Affairs

• 1. Introduction

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  Foreign Affairs published its very first issue on the 15th of September 1922, and the lead article was not written by an academic or a journalist. It was written by Elihu Root, a former secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt, who argued that the United States had grown into a world power and that ordinary Americans needed to understand what that meant. Root's opening salvo set a tone the magazine has never entirely abandoned: sober, high-stakes, and aimed at people who make decisions that affect millions. The journal is published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank focused on U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. Over a century of continuous publication, it has become the arena where doctrines are floated, strategies contested, and the architecture of American foreign policy debated in public. George Kennan published the article that gave the Cold War its organizing principle here. Samuel Huntington predicted a generation of civilizational conflict in its pages. Eleven U.S. secretaries of state have contributed essays. What does it mean for a journal to shape policy rather than merely describe it? And how did a quarterly magazine launched by a small circle of diplomats and lawyers come to attract a readership of more than 300,000 in print alone?

• 2. Council Origins

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  The Council on Foreign Relations was founded in the summer of 1921, and its founding charter was unusually candid about its ambitions. The Council's stated purpose was to "afford a continuous conference on international questions affecting the United States, by bringing together experts on statecraft, finance, industry, education, and science." Its early membership was a tight circle of diplomats, financiers, scholars, and lawyers. In that first year, the Council worked mainly through meetings and small discussion groups. The decision to publish a magazine grew out of the recognition that a closed seminar could only reach so many ears. Within months, Foreign Affairs was born. John Foster Dulles, then a financial expert attached to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace and later secretary of state under Dwight D. Eisenhower, contributed to that first issue. His subject was Allied debt following World War I, a question with enormous practical stakes at the time. The journal was also a successor to older publications: the Journal of International Relations, which ran from 1910 to 1922, had itself grown out of the Journal of Race Development, which ran from 1911 to 1919. That earlier title reflected anxieties about race tensions and so-called race "mixing" at a moment when empires were beginning to fracture. Foreign Affairs inherited that genealogy but shed the framing, orienting itself toward power, policy, and diplomacy rather than the racial theories that had preoccupied an earlier generation of Anglo-American internationalists.

• 3. Building the Blue Cover

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  Professor Archibald Cary Coolidge of Harvard University became the journal's first editor, though he had a notable condition: he refused to leave Boston for New York. The Council resolved the problem by appointing Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a Princeton alumnus and a European correspondent of the New York Evening Post, as managing editor. Armstrong ran the New York office and handled the day-to-day machinery of getting issues out. He also made one lasting aesthetic choice: he picked the distinctive light blue color for the cover that became the magazine's visual signature. Armstrong's sisters contributed to the design as well; Margaret designed the logo and Helen designed the lettering. Armstrong himself would go on to serve as editor from 1928 to 1972, a span of more than four decades, one of the longest editorial tenures in American journalism. Coolidge's Harvard connections shaped the book review operation from the start. He recruited his colleague William L. Langer, a historian and World War I veteran, to run the review section. In the early years, Langer wrote all the reviews himself. The Foreign Affairs office would ship roughly one hundred books to Langer a month before each issue's deadline, and within two weeks he would return the completed reviews. Harry Elmer Barnes also contributed from the first issue, authoring a recurring section titled "Some Recent Books on International Relations." By 1924, Barnes carried the title of Bibliographical Editor.

• 4. Cold War Crucible

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  The journal reached its greatest stature after World War II, when American foreign policy became one of the central preoccupations of the country and the world. George F. Kennan's so-called X Article, published in 1947, introduced the doctrine of containment to a public audience. The article was a reworking of Kennan's earlier "Long Telegram" and laid out the intellectual framework that would guide American policy toward the Soviet Union for decades. W. E. B. Du Bois had already appeared in the magazine's pages in 1925, when Foreign Affairs published a series of articles under the collective title "Worlds of Color." Du Bois, a personal friend of Armstrong, wrote primarily about race and imperialism. Louis Halle, a member of the U.S. Policy Planning Staff, published an influential piece in 1950 titled "On a Certain Impatience with Latin America." Halle's article built the anticommunist intellectual framework used to justify American Cold War policy toward Latin America. He argued that the postwar effort to encourage democracy in the region had ended, and he expressed frustration over what he described as Latin America's failure to achieve autonomy. That reasoning was later invoked to justify U.S. efforts to overthrow the left-leaning Guatemalan government. The intersection of Foreign Affairs scholarship and live geopolitical action was rarely more visible. Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who wrote for Time magazine, also contributed articles in the late 1930s, a period when the magazine was still developing its model of allowing credentialed outsiders rather than just diplomats to shape the conversation.

• 5. Civilizations and Controversies

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  Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue and set off one of the magazine's most sustained debates. Huntington argued that "the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic," and that "the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." The article has remained one of the most cited and contested essays in the field ever since. A decade later, the November/December 2003 issue became the site of a different kind of conflict. Kenneth Maxwell's review of Peter Kornbluh's book The Pinochet File sparked a dispute over editorial independence. Maxwell later claimed that prominent Council members, acting at Henry Kissinger's behest, pressured then-editor James Hoge to give the final word in a subsequent exchange not to Maxwell but to William D. Rogers, a close associate of Kissinger. Maxwell argued this broke with established Foreign Affairs policy. In the May-June 2007 issue, then-Ukrainian opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko published an article titled "Containing Russia," accusing Russia under Vladimir Putin of expansionism and calling on Europe to resist. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov wrote a response but withdrew it, citing what he described as "censorship" by the Foreign Affairs editorial board. Tymoshenko's party won the 2007 elections, and she returned to the office of Prime Minister.

• 6. Reach and Influence

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  In 1996, then-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott offered a candid assessment: "Virtually everyone I know in the foreign policy-national security area of the Government is attentive to Foreign Affairs." That kind of institutional reach is harder to quantify than a circulation figure, but the numbers are not small. The print magazine has a total readership of 303,000, and the website draws 1.2 million unique visitors per month. The journal ranks second out of 166 publications in the International Relations category of the Journal Citation Reports, with a 2023 impact factor of 6.3. The magazine went through a significant redesign beginning with the January/February 2013 issue. Every cover would now carry a photograph, and each issue would feature an extended interview with a prominent newsmaker. The stated goal was to extend the magazine's reach beyond the foreign policy establishment, widening the tent without abandoning the core audience. Foreign Affairs launched its current website, ForeignAffairs.com, in 2009, adding both daily articles and bi-monthly anthologies to the traditional print schedule. The book review section, one of the magazine's original features, still reviews fifty or more books per issue, now organized into subject categories overseen by named specialists including G. John Ikenberry on political and legal affairs, Barry Eichengreen on economic and environmental matters, and Lawrence D. Freedman on military and technological topics.