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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.

History

The Council on Foreign Relations was founded in 1921 and was originally composed of 75 members of mainly academic and professional backgrounds. For the first year the Council sought discourse mainly in meetings at their headquarters in New York City. However the members of the Council wished to 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, design the logo (the man on the horse on the upper left hand side of each cover) and the lettering respectively.

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 Foriegn Affairs regarding the difficulties surrounding war reparations placed on Germany after the First World War.

Foreign Affairs was also unique in being one of only few prominent publications to allow, in a series of five issues in 1925, prominent African-American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois, a personal friend of Armstrong, wrote mainly about race issues and imperialism. Though from 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.

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.

In September 2004 after Foreign Affairs had published an article by Wang Zhongwen, a Chinese economist, critical of North Korea and calling for a change in North Korean-Chinese relations. The Chinese authorities reacted by closing down Foreign Affair's operations in China.

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.

Book review

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 however this process was changed with the review section broken down into several subsections. As of March 2005 with a few longer reviews beginning the section, usually written by well-known figures in the field of foreign policy. Then this is followed by a subsection titled "Recent Books on International Relations" with shorter half-page long reviews written by staff writers and broken down into further subsections to account for geographical regions and other issues. Lastly the section's final page shows the top fifteen best selling books on American foreign policy and international affairs.

External links

• Foreign Affairs Official Site
• Council on Foreign Relations Official Site

• Political journals
• International relations