Foreign Affairs at 70

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992

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

The whole postwar period has been marked by the ending of colonial or quasi?colonial positions no longer compatible with the ethos of the last 40 years or with the felt power and awakened sentiment of the local and regional nations concerned. In that sense, the Soviet Empire is itself by far the greatest anomaly of all; in the next generation its weakening and possible eventual breakup may become the greatest single source of turbulence the world faces.

One theme that ran through this period was the importance of national economic strength. For Bundy national security and international influence, in the long term, depended as much on relative economic resources and performance, as on comparative military strength. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were ignoring the importance of economic strength, with harmful portent.

Throughout came the perennial tensions between the president and Congress over foreign policy. Bundy wrote:

Over and over again, in this period, Congress has intervened to modify, dictate or obstruct foreign policy actions. . . . One?s view of a particular congressional intervention is heavily influenced by personal preference; each of us could pick out many examples (differing to taste) where Congress has acted usefully. But a great many today would surely agree, at a minimum, that the present system is extraordinarily cumbersome and fragmented.

Bundy argued that greater attention should be paid to foreign service and civil service professionals in government. Despite this emphasis on professionalism, Bundy reiterated the theme that had inspired Foreign Affairs from the beginning: "In the end it is public opinion that defines, and in our democracy must define, the limits of foreign policy and often its specifics."

Finally, in 1984, Bundy forewarned readers of the difficulties they would face after the end of the Cold War: "We have to resign ourselves to the fact that the wartime and postwar consensus was a condition that could only survive so long as the dominant fact of world politics was a major hostile power threatening clearly vital interests already familiar to us."

Less than a year after this summation Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in the Soviet Union and began a series of initiatives that sooner, rather than later, would bring an end to the Cold War, an end to Soviet communism and, finally, an end to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

VI

In 1984 the editorship of Foreign Affairs changed for the third time: the new editor was William G. Hyland, veteran of successive administration staffs in the State Department and White House, assisted by executive editor Peter Grose, a former correspondent and editorial writer of The New York Times. The years that followed have proved to be a truly revolutionary period in the international politics of the century.

It would be presumptuous to claim that this revolution was foreseen in all its complexities in the pages of Foreign Affairs, but there were ample foreshadowings.