Foreign Policy: Fighting the Dinosaurs

IN 1921, a group of internationally minded businessmen, disturbed at the wave of isolationism sweeping the United States in the post-war era, joined to form the Council on Foreign Relations. Their chief weapon in the fight against isolationism was their magazine, Foreign Affairs, a quarterly containing articles by leading scholars on the world situation.

Foreign Affairs will celebrate its fiftieth birthday next year, and will undergo a change of editors at the same time. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a 1916 graduate of Princeton who holds an honorary doctorate from Harvard, will be replaced, after forty-eight years in his post, by William P. Bundy, Yale '39, the former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs, now a consultant to M.I.T.'s Center for International Studies. This change of management at the upper level is indicative of the criticism most frequently made of Foreign Affairs: that its only function is to serve as an apologist for the foreign policy establishment. Currently, the magazine's editorial board includes such well known State Department names as MacGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, John J. McCloy, and President Nixon's national security advisor, Henry Kissinger '50.

With its preponderance of present and former government officials, Foreign Affairs is, predictably, not overly critical of government policy. Recent issues have featured such articles as a defense by William Bundy of American policy in Indochina over the past five years, a piece by Steven J. Kelman '70 attacking American college students for their ignorance of the intricacies of international politics, and an explanation of U.S. foreign policy by Richard Nixon.

IN 1970, a group of internationally minded members of the academic and journalistic communities, disturbed at their lack of influence in the government, produced the first issue of foreign Policy magazine, a quarterly whose purpose is "to affect the actions, or at least the thinking, of those in government, academia, business, or elsewhere who shape our foreign policy."

Nowhere within the covers of Foreign Policy is there any direct statement that the magazine is dedicated to opposing Foreign Affairs and its stranglehold on policy. But one official of Foreign Policy makes his distaste for the competition very clear: " Foreign Policy is a direct alternative. Foreign Affairs is the voice of all the people who've been wrong in the past. It's a bad magazine run by bad people, a bunch of dinosaurs who've been around for years." Some other editors, however, insist that Foreign Policy is complementary to Foreign Affairs, not a direct competitor.

That an alternative to Foreign Affairs would be founded at some point seems logical to any observer of the magazine. But the actual beginning of competition came about, not from the anger and outrage of liberals at Foreign Affairs, but from the desire of two old grad-school roommates to get back on speaking terms with each other.

SAMUEL P. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshell were close friends in the early fifties, when they were both candidates for the Ph.D. in government at Harvard. Manshell, now a New York businessman and publisher, has been an outspoken critic of the Vietnam war for years, and was an influential leader of the McCarthy campaign in 1968. Huntington, now Thomas Professor of Government at Harvard, was a foreign policy advisor to Hubert Humphrey's presidential campaign and a supporter of the government's program in Indochina. According to mutual friends, the two men disagreed so sharply over the war that they stopped speaking to each other for several years.

After the 1968 campaign, Manshell, already the publisher of The Public Interest -the intellectual journal edited by Irving Kristol-decided to branch out into the field of foreign policy. Manshell wanted to found the strongest possible organ he could, one which would have an impact on the actual shaping of policy, and which would change the course of government thinking. As he puts it, "I don't think that anybody has a monopoly on wisdom, certainly not Washington. I'm interested in making the people who agree with me influential in Washington."

Once he decided to found a new magazine, Manshell's first move was to recruit his old roommate as co-editor. Huntington, who by that time had come to feel that the U.S. military presence in Vietnam must be ended somehow, although he did not agree with Manshell's dovishness, consented. Although he was firmly entrenched in the foreign policy establishment, Huntington was uneasy with Foreign Affairs. "No journal can escape its origins and its history," he said recently. "A new journal is in a better position to meet the needs of the '70's." As Huntington sees it, a major foreign policy journal has been spawned in the aftermath of every great war in this century: Foreign Affairs is a reaction to post-World War I isolationism, World Politics, a more academic publication dealing with the cold war, founded in the late '40's, and Foreign Policy, which explores the alternatives open to post-Vietnam America.

HAVING decided to start a journal of their own, Manshell and Huntington began putting together a staff in the spring of last year. Huntington used his extensive contacts in the academic world to assemble an impressive editorial board, including such experts as Stanley Hoffmann, James C. Thomson, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Joseph S. Nyc. When several of the academics refused the position of managing editor, it was given to John F. Campbell '61, a career Foreign Service officer. Paradoxically, Campbell was working at the time on a grant from the Council for Foreign Relations finishing his book, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory. Campbell took a leave of absence from the Foreign Service, where he was attached to the embassy in Ethiopia, and began work on the magazine. Through his influence, David Halberstam, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and former CRIMSON editor, was added to the masthead.

Campbell is adamant about making his magazine different from Foreign Affairs. "There are several things that we don't want to duplicate," he says. "We are mostly a magazine about U.S. foreign policy-providing an informed critique by people outside government, not articles by foreign ministers which nine times out of ten you suspect they didn't even write themselves. These are people willing to stick their necks out more than in a scholarly journal." Campbell sees Foreign Policy as a vehicle for including young and unpublished people, as well as old names in the foreign policy discussion.

Campbell's feelings about the difference between the new quarterly and Foreign Affairs are shared by most of the Foreign Policy editorial board, and summarized by James C. Thomson, lecturer in History at Harvard: "All of us have felt in the past that the other major journal in the field, Foreign Affairs, has been unbelievably pompous, sleepy, and filled with articles ghost-written by heads of many states, including this one."

With all these intentions for providing an exciting, viable alternative to the establishment magazine, how well have Manshell, Campbell, Huntington, and company succeeded? Two issues of Foreign Policy have already come out, and one more is in the works. Since last October, circulation has grown from zero to just under six thousand, with about five thousand subscriptions. The physical format of the magazine, a long thin paperback, distinguishes it from its competitor. The editors have succeeded in introducing some fresh blood into their columns, although the first two issues have included such old warhorses as John Kenneth Galbraith, Stanley Hoffmann, and Huntington.

THERE is a definite pragmatic bias in Foreign Policy articles. They all tend to argue a case, a series of recommendations for immediate policy actions rather than vague speculation about international problems, and they all deal directly with American foreign policy, not with the internal problems of other countries. But Foreign Policy to this point has reflected one prevailing bias, a sort of liberalism which argues for solutions within the current governmental structure, and the magazine is preoccupied with the problem of manipulating the government internally.

Although its circulation has risen sharply among intellectuals and liberals, Foreign Policy has not yet had any concrete effect on the decision-making process of government or reflected its workings the way Foreign Affairs so often does. It may be for this reason that a spokesman for Foreign Affairs, contacted at the office of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, reported that Foreign Affairs looks with favor on the new magazine. "Our position," the spokesman says, "is the more voices, the better."