Foreign Affairs

Foreign Affairs is published by the nonprofit Council on Foreign Relations, and provides 14 percent of the organization’s overall funding through subscriptions, advertising and events. The magazine accepts advertising and sponsorship from corporations and governments. Its revenue for fiscal year 2015, which ended in June, was $8.8 million. The CFR has been accused of being "a front for J. P. Morgan and Company," while its litany of high-profile, high-powered members ‒ including David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton ‒ have been accused of aiming "to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole." Membership dues provide 10 percent ‒ $6.3 million ‒ of the CFR’s budget.

Since its creation in 1922, Foreign Affairs has been published six times per year. The magazine was an initiative of Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) members and is still managed by that organization. CFR’s notable members included former US secretaries of state such as Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, and senior managers of major American corporations and media companies. Since issue number one, Foreign Affairs has primarily focused on American foreign policy and global affairs. In March 2015, Foreign Affairs reported a record-high circulation of 177,428 for the second half of 2014. The magazine’s website, ForeignAffairs.com, has 2.4 million monthly page views, over 1 million unique visitors a month and 213,000 newsletter subscribers.

In 2010, Rose was promoted from managing editor to editor of Foreign Affairs, also known as the Peter G. Peterson Chair. He served as associate director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, providing expertise on security and terrorism. He began at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as a senior fellow and deputy director of national security studies in 1995. Rose is a member of one of the oldest and most successful real estate dynasties in New York. The family has donated some of its vast fortune to Yale University, the Natural History Museum, Lincoln Center and many other institutions, most of which are in New York.

Foreign Affairs named Tepperman as managing editor in January 2011, thus beginning his second stint with the publication. Then-managing editor Fareed Zakaria hired Tepperman as a deputy managing editor in 1998, before he left the journal in 2006 to become a deputy editor at Newsweek. He went on to work as managing editor for the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultant company.

Prior to his return to Foreign Affairs, Tepperman was a correspondent for the Atlantic and a guest columnist for the International Herald Tribune. His career in foreign policy began as a speechwriter for Morris B. Abram, a former US ambassador to the United Nations.

Vogt became a deputy managing editor in January 2014, after serving as the managing editor of World Policy Journal and on the editorial staff of the New Yorker. He has a multimedia background, having been an associate producer on documentary films for PBS’ Frontline and the business manager of Palace Records, an independent record label founded by singer-songwriter Will Oldham.

In its November/December 2003 issue, Foreign Affairs published a review of Peter Kornbluh’s ‘The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability’, which documented the US government’s complicity with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet during his campaign of "murder, torture, and terrorism" that began in 1973. Kenneth Maxwell, CFR’s chief Latin America expert, wrote the critique, entitled ‘The Other 9/11: The United States and Chile, 1973’. While the article was "a measured essay on American intervention in Chile in the 1970s," according to the Nation’s Scott Sherman, Maxwell "directed his ire" at then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials.

Kissinger has had a long association with the Council on Foreign Relations, including sitting on the board of directors, and his friends include some of CFR’s biggest donors, the New York Times reported.

In response, William Rogers ‒ who worked in Kissinger’s State Department and was then vice chair of the former secretary’s international consulting firm ‒ wrote a "smoldering" letter to the editor that denied the accusations made by Maxwell and Kornbluh.

In the same issue, Maxwell responded, further detailing Kissinger’s and Rogers’ knowledge of Operation Condor, "a hemispheric-wide association to murder people, especially former officials" in Latin America. Rogers issued a rebuttal, which Maxwell wrote a response to ‒ but it never appeared in the pages of Foreign Affairs.

"High-ranking sources at the council say that Kissinger and Rogers applied enormous pressure, directly and indirectly, on Foreign Affairs editor James Hoge — and on the council itself — to close off the debate," Sherman wrote. In May 2014, Maxwell resigned in protest from CFR and the publication he had written for over the course of the previous 11 years.

’’There is a question of principle at stake here,’’ Maxwell wrote in his resignation letter. ’’It was made abundantly clear to me, as you know, that there was intense pressure on you, on Foreign Affairs and on my employer, the Council on Foreign Relations, from Henry Kissinger and others, to close off this debate about accountability and Mr. Kissinger’s role in Chile in the 1970’s.’’

A new edition was released in 2013, which included a new afterword that "tells the story of The Pinochet File itself: Henry Kissinger’s attempt to undercut the book’s reception generated a major scandal that led to high—level resignations at the Council on Foreign Relations, illustrating the continued ability of the book to speak truth to power."

Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko ‒ who was once again campaigning for that position ‒ wrote an article in the May/June 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs called ‘Containing Russia’ that lambasted Ukraine’s eastern neighbor for eight pages, leaving "no stone in the Russian-bashing repertory unturned," US-Russian relations expert Dr. Gilbert Doctorow later wrote in a La Libre blog post.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov wrote a rebuttal piece, which he later pulled, complaining of censorship and accusing the editors of cutting 40 percent of the article. In a statement, he wrote that the publication fundamentally altered "a considerable part of [the article’s] original meaning" and that he was faced with "an utterly artificial and unacceptable demand by the Editors."

Lavrov subsequently published his article on the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. The journal’s editor, James Hoge, refuted the foreign minister’s claims of censorship. "We have rejected all suggestions of censorship and explained in some detail the process we went through with Minister Lavrov, which is no different from what we do with any other author," Hoge told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. "And his charges of censorship, which came up after the piece had been accepted and he was prepared to see it published was a total surprise to us and is kind of baffling." He added that there was a back-and-forth between the author and the journal’s staff regarding editorial changes, but that Lavrov had approved all of the edits.

Hoge said that the row began when the journal told the Russian Embassy in Washington that the article ‒ like all Foreign Affairs pieces ‒ would need a subheading. It was at that point that Lavrov withdrew his essay.

Doctorow compared the edited version of Lavrov’s article with what the Foreign Ministry released. He found that "the editors focused [Lavrov’s] text on the issue of containment and jettisoned not so much duplicative material as explanatory material," he wrote. "This deleted text placed current Russian foreign policy in the context of the country’s negative experiences with ideology in the 20th century and its aversion to America’s transformational policies today. The deleted passages mostly show Russia in a moderate and utterly reasonable state of mind, as a country seeking accommodation with the United States but coming up against containment policies. Some of the remarks introduced as substantiation of the basic arguments would have been offensive to American neoconservatives."