The September/October edition of Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), marks the 100th anniversary of the journal. A review of the articles found in this edition indicates that, as it was in 1922, Foreign Affairs (FA) is a publication that, like its parent organization, the CFR, is dedicated to the idea of more power to internationalist organizations and less to individual nations, including our own.
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, the present editor of FA, cites what the first editor — Archibald Cary Coolidge — had to say about the journal’s purpose a century ago. The articles do “not represent any consensus of beliefs,” Coolidge said then, but they do represent his pledge to “tolerate wide differences of opinion … seriously held and convincingly expressed.” Coolidge stressed that FA “does not accept responsibility for the views expressed in any article, signed or unsigned, which appears in its pages. What it does accept is the responsibility for giving them a chance to appear there.”
Kurtz-Phelan added that the journal intends to fulfill that “commitment” to providing space for a variety of viewpoints on foreign affairs.
While it is true that FA prints articles that hold some differing viewpoints, the fact is that there is an overarching theme to the journal, as has been the case since the magazine’s inception. There are certain views that do not grace the pages of FA, such as “America First.” One will never see any articles advocating that the United States leave the United Nations, for example.
Perhaps a closer look at Archibald Coolidge, FA’s first editor, will shed some light on the guiding principles of the publication. Coolidge — a distant relative of President Calvin Coolidge and a great-great grandson of Thomas Jefferson — once argued that the acquisition of colonies by the United States in the early 20th century was simply an outcome of the evolution of the American experience. William Jennings Bryan, however, argued during his 1900 presidential campaign that the acquisition of colonies was going to change the character of the American experience. Bryan later fought against the desires of many in the administration of Woodrow Wilson to embroil us in the First World War, which was the logical “evolution,” if you will, of America, supposedly still a republic, taking its place in the world as an empire. Those who know their world history know that Rome’s acquisition of an empire eventually destroyed its republic.
Archibald Coolidge was a member of the “Inquiry Study Group,” founded by President Woodrow Wilson, which developed into the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR was launched, along with Coolidge’s Foreign Affairs magazine, out of the disappointment that the U.S. Senate, and the American people, had rejected joining the League of Nations after World War I.
The CFR and Foreign Affairs did not abandon the goal of the United States joining a world government organization, and they were in the vanguard of the formation of the United Nations in 1945. CFR member Alger Hiss, who was later revealed as a spy for Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, was actually the acting secretary-general of the UN when it was formed in San Francisco, California.
A glance at the articles in the present issue reveals that this push for world governance — with the idea that some problems are just too big for sovereign nation-states — still permeates the journal. For example, an article by William MacAskill, a professor from Oxford, listed issues that “conspire to threaten the end of humanity.” Not surprisingly, the issues listed are climate change, nuclear war, engineered pandemics, and uncontrolled artificial intelligence.
Climate change is a bugaboo that one sees in pretty much every issue of FA, and the solution is always the same — more internationalist regulations.
What I found interesting in MacAskill’s list, however, was his mention of “engineered pandemics.” He did not mention the Covid-19 pandemic, nor did he explore the possibility that the Communist Chinese deliberately created this deadly virus. Instead he mentioned a 2021 U.S. State Department report that both North Korea and Russia maintain on offensive bioweapons program. This is likely true, but why neglect to mention the Chinese Communist Party? To be fair, later in the article, he did mention that China’s strongman, Xi Jinping, “withheld information about it from the public.”
MacAskill did advocate “innovations in international governance” in order to stave off the risks of World War III. He concluded his article with a statement that is common in FA: “Contemplating large-scale political change is daunting, but past innovations in governance, such as the UN system and the EU, provide reasons for hope.”
Interestingly, however, Xi is called a “leader,” as is the first dictator of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, in another article. Another article asserts that Great Britain and France should have “bloodied Hitler’s nose” in 1938, instead of giving into him at Munich. Actually, that would have probably meant war in 1938, rather than 1939.
Another person mentioned in this issue was W.E.B. DuBois, a regular contributor to FA. He was also a member of the Communist Party. DuBois once wrote in FA that through “capitalism, the United States … had created a global system for upholding white supremacy.”
The 100th anniversary edition also continued its anti-Donald Trump remarks, arguing that “he abused presidential power on a scale unprecedented in U.S. history.” This is patently absurd — Woodrow Wilson’s administration, for example, prosecuted thousands of Americans simply for opposing the country’s entrance into World War I. One man was sent to prison for making a movie — 1776 — in which the British were, naturally, the bad guys. The argument was that this was a violation of the Sedition Act, as the British were now our allies.
President Abraham Lincoln jailed members of Congress and newspaper editors for opposing his war on the seceded Southern states during the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt interned thousands of American citizens during World War II, simply because of their Japanese ancestry.
Yet, Foreign Affairs printed the statement that Trump “abused presidential power on a scale unprecedented in U.S. history.” In that same article, “All Democracy is Global,” Larry Diamond, a fellow in International Studies at Stanford University, argued that “the Electoral College, the representational structure of the Senate, the Senate filibuster, the brazen gerrymandering of House districts, and lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court have all made it possible for a political minority to exert prolonged outsize influence.” Of course, the “nonpartisan” FA just listed major targets of the U.S. Democratic Party, which they believe would give them control of the U.S. government for the future, a future in which they could implement their far-left agenda.
Diamond expects Republicans to simply accept a permanent minority status, evidently, as he called for “an unequivocal commitment” by Republicans to accept future election outcomes.
Some argue that Foreign Affairs is not a left-wing publication and that it is just an academic journal, presenting a variety of views. While that is what they have argued for a century, there is one thing that has remained constant since 1922 — they believe in less sovereignty for our country and in more power for international organizations.
And this is not just for our country. Diamond adds that the United States “needs a more muscular and imaginative approach to spreading [democracy].”
