Foreign Affairs at 70

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992

William G. Hyland leaves the editorship of Foreign Affairs with this issue.

A copy of that first issue was sent to a representative of the Red Cross in Russia, who passed it to Karl Radek, one of the leading Bolsheviks, who in turn gave it to Lenin himself. The first Bolshevik leader annotated and underlined passages in the journal, mainly economic statistics. Radek eventually returned the annotated copy to the Council?s library in New York City. Seventy years later it was shown to Mikhail Gorbachev, who remarked upon the ill fate that eventually befell Radek?shot in 1938.

We chose not to remind Gorbachev that Foreign Affairs had also published articles by Trotsky, then in exile, and Nikolai Bukharin, before he was purged. In 1959 Armstrong published an article by Nikita Khrushchev, entitled "On Peaceful Coexistence," and in Spring 1992 Foreign Affairs published an essay by the first foreign minister of the post?communist Russian Republic, Andrei Kozyrev.

For all the attention to the Soviet Union the clear focus of the journal?s initial decade was on broad questions of the struggle for European security. Preoccupation with reparations and war debts received major coverage. Amid all the pious hopes for a more peaceful world in the early pages of Foreign Affairs, Coolidge warned in October 1925 that sooner or later German demands would have to be accommodated. That first decade of the journal was, in fact, a tragic decade, ending with the Great Depression that drove America further into isolation and opened the way for Adolf Hitler in Europe.

III

Hamilton Fish Armstrong succeeded to the editorship after Coolidge?s death in 1928. His view of Europe was optimistic, but the journal conveyed a consistent foreboding about Asia. Several articles, some by Japanese authors, warned of Japan?s discontent with the postwar settlement and its humiliation by the restrictive American immigration laws. Once the Manchurian crisis broke in 1931?32, Foreign Affairs gave Henry L. Stimson, secretary of state for President Hoover, a forum for explaining his policy of nonrecognition of territorial gains from aggression. A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard, warned against interpreting the Kellogg?Briand pact as a basis for intervention.

By the end of the journal?s first full decade, in the fall of 1932, the hopes of the mid?1920s had expired and the world faced the grim realities of the Depression and the arrival of fascism and militarism in both Europe and Asia. Walter Lippmann, writing in the tenth anniversary issue of Foreign Affairs, summed up the failure of liberal internationalism:

Ten years ago, when this journal was founded, mankind had just been made acutely conscious of the need of more dependable international government. At Paris, in the winter of 1919, drastic reforms in the organization of international society were instituted and certain ideals were proclaimed towards which, it was hoped and believed, mankind would advance. . . . In the perspective of a tumultuous decade it is possible now to examine that philosophy and with the hindsight of experience to see how ephemeral were many of the cardinal ideas with which men tried to promote a better international order.

A plaintive footnote to history came in this same issue, an accounting by Leo Pasvolsky that showed the United States was still owed about $20 billion in war debt, a debt never to be repaid.

The United States was becoming a "hermit nation," in Gay?s phrase. Congress escaped further into isolation with the passage of several neutrality laws between 1935 and 1937. For all the popular sentiment in favor of such legislation, the editor of Foreign Affairs, along with his co?author, Allen Dulles, then a practicing lawyer, concluded that laws on neutrality were not enough:

As a guaranty that we shall be able to keep out of war it is entirely inadequate. . . . International trouble?makers are trying to convince themselves that the United States will never do more than give lip service to the cause of peace, that it would not be a factor to be reckoned with unless it were directly attacked. They believe that they can count on a passivity which, as history and current observation show, is quite alien to the American temper. The question is, how can we make them aware of this, and do it effectively and in time?