Foreign Policy Winter 2021

Kelebogile Zvobgo is the founder and director of the International Justice Lab at William & Mary and a Ph.D. candidate in political science and international relations at the University of Southern California. C. Raja Mohan is the director of the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies, a contributing editor on international affairs for the Indian Express, and a former member of India’s National Security Advisory Board. Heather Hurlburt is the director of the New Models of Policy Change project at New America. She previously led the National Security Network and held senior positions in the Clinton administration. Janine di Giovanni is an author, foreign correspondent, and senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her latest book is The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches From Syria. Landry Signé…

FIFTY YEARS AGO THIS WINTER, a Harvard professor named Samuel P. Huntington and a wealthy diplomat and investment banker named Warren Demian Manshel decided to start a new journal. The United States, they worried, was on the brink of a crisis—a whole set of them, in fact. The grand strategy it had followed with such success since the end of World War II had taken a terrible turn, driving the country into a slow-motion meat grinder called Vietnam. In the last few years, the United States had suffered one humiliating defeat after another, not so much on the bright green battlefields of Indochina—though there were plenty of those — but in nearly every other arena. The war had consumed, and then hamstrung, one of the century’s most successful presidents, ripping…

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JONATHAN TEPPERMAN AND FAREED ZAKARIA TO MARK THE OCCASION of FOREIGN POLICY’s 60th birthday, FP’s Jonathan Tepperman sat down recently with Fareed Zakaria—the author, CNN host, and one of today’s leading thinkers on international affairs—to discuss the moment of the magazine’s creation, the many similarities between then and now, what the last 60 years have taught us about U.S. strategy, and where the country should go from here. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and concision. JONATHAN TEPPERMAN: FOREIGN POLICY was founded as a journal in the winter of 1970-1971. Reading through the first issue today, one can’t help but be struck by the parallels to the present moment. In that issue’s introduction, FP’s founders, Samuel P. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel, write about how “an era…

FALL 1980 | 10 YEARS Intellectual Insecurity Although successive editors have reiterated FOREIGN POLICY’s commitment—stated in its first issue—to publish writers at all points on the political spectrum, it is symptomatic of a larger national insecurity that the magazine has at times been under attack for allowing certain views into print. This insecurity, both cultural and intellectual, reflects significant shifts in the global distribution of power, shifts that did not benefit the United States. Charles William Maynes and Richard H. Ullman FALL 1990 | 20 YEARS America Turns Inward In 1970, national divisions over the Vietnam War were at their peak, and the main goal of any sensible U.S. foreign policy was to end that war before the damage to America’s image and stability became irreversible. Today, the task of U.S. foreign policy is not extricating…

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2001 Cultural Renaissance In his celebrated 1948 essay, “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,” T.S. Eliot predicted that in the future, humanity would experience a renaissance of local and regional cultures. At the time, his prophecy seemed quite daring. However, globalization will likely make it a reality in the 21st century, and we must be happy about this. —Mario Vargas Llosa SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 Global Disruption Globalization is bringing more choices and new opportunities for prosperity. It is making us more familiar with global diversity. However, millions of people around the world experience globalization not as an agent of progress but as a disruptive force, almost hurricanelike in its ability to destroy lives, jobs, and traditions. —Kofi A. Annan JULY/AUGUST 2004 Boom and Bust Globalization has been a boon to the U.S. economy, but America’s spending addiction now threatens to…

WHEN SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON and Warren Demian Manshel, the founders of FOREIGN POLICY, asked me to write for their inaugural issue in 1970, university campuses were riven by students who feared being drafted to fight and possibly die in a misbegotten war in Vietnam. The central claim in my essay was that “No More Vietnams!” would become a new foreign-policy mantra. While some 2 million Americans had been sent to fight in Korea in the 1950s and more than 300,000 U.S. troops were still bogged down in Vietnam when I wrote, I offered my bet that the next decade would see no equivalents. What I did not imagine, however, was how dramatic the decline in combat deaths would be. An estimated 33,000 Americans died fighting in Korea and 47,000 in…