Foreign Affairs at 70

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992

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

After the victory it was fear of losing the peace that began to preoccupy Western statesmen. Mr. Armstrong, still the editor of Foreign Affairs, had witnessed the Versailles experience at firsthand and warned against a repetition:

The generation which had fought and won [World War I] after comprehending so much in detail, committed the sin of comprehending nothing in the large; and, after performing so many brave and unselfish deeds, committed the sin of failing to insist that they be carried to their logical end. . . . Will the children now go and sin likewise?. . . We from the last generation can tell them, however, how it was done last time, and we can pray that this time they will not miss the chance to use their victory.

Unfortunately the use of victory was stymied by the beginning of the Cold War, though this was not clearly perceived outside the narrow circles of official Washington. And a new dimension of conflict arose to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs for decades to come: the control of atomic weapons.

The hope that this terrible new weaponry could somehow be restricted by an international covenant was emphasized, for example, by Caryl P. Haskins, who wrote in 1946 that "international control of atomic energy is the surpassingly important objective of this nation?s foreign policy." Allen Dulles, veteran of World War II intelligence, argued in a similar vein, though more skeptically, in January 1947 in his article "Disarmament in the Atomic Age." And Stimson wrote that "the riven atom, uncontrolled, can only be a growing menace to us all." The other side of these pleas was an evolving body of theory on how these awesome weapons might be used in warfare, and more soberly, how they might constitute a deterrent against war itself.

A defining moment of the postwar era came in 1947, with the decision of the Truman administration to launch the Marshall Plan and institute the Truman Doctrine. Washington was shifting to the offensive in an effort to counter the inroads of Soviet power in Europe. The policy reflected the analysis and prescriptions of George F. Kennan, who elucidated what came to be known as the policy of containment. This concept surfaced in a Foreign Affairs article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in July 1947. Since Mr. Kennan was at that time a member of the State Department?s policy planning staff, he preferred to publish under a pseudonym, "X." His identity was quickly revealed by The New York Times, but for many years the Foreign Affairs editors refused to confirm the name of the author.

The article was a landmark for Foreign Affairs: no other article has been as widely read or extensively quoted. Over the years Mr. Kennan came to believe that his concept had been misinterpreted and misapplied as a doctrine of miliary containment of the Soviet Union, whereas he meant to stress a geopolitical concept. In his memoirs published in 1967 he noted that "it was a doctrine that lost much of its rationale with the death of Stalin and with the development of the Soviet?Chinese conflict. I emphatically deny the paternity of any efforts to invoke that doctrine today in the situation to which it has, and can have, no proper relevance."

Kennan was hardly alone in his appreciation of the Soviet threat. In that very same issue of Foreign Affairs the British diplomatic historian, Sir Charles K. Webster, surveying the historical process of peacemaking, wrote about the problem of dealing with Russia and the Soviet Union:

Today peace depends on finding the method by which the Soviet Union, with these bitter memories and with a different scale of values from that of her western Allies, can be induced to accept cooperation rather than conflict. If the experience of 1914?15 is of any value, it goes to show that only a continuation of resistance to undue Russian demands combined with an acceptance of the special claims which history has taught Russia justly to consider fundamental is likely to yield satisfactory results.

Judicious advice gave way to the urgency of the crisis in Europe. The editor of Foreign Affairs, having returned from his annual visit to Europe, reminded his readers that while America worried about the atomic bomb and strategic doctrines, Europe?s preoccupation was plain and simple:

When you are as worried as Europe is about the bare essentials of existence, you are not much interested in ideas. As for the atom bomb, it is comprehended in Europe even less than in America.