The story is told of a traveler in the ancient world who came across three woodcutters in a forest clearing. Asked about their labors, one said, “We’re chopping wood.” Another said, “We’re making lumber from the famous Cedars of Lebanon.” And the third said, “We’re helping King Solomon build his Temple in Jerusalem.”
Policy journals are a bit like that. At the most prosaic level, they are regular collections of articles offering advice on public policy. From a more elevated perspective, they are an important part of a healthy national security ecosystem, offering independent ground on which official policymakers and outside experts can trade ideas and sharpen their thinking. And in their dreams, the journals are beacons of the Enlightenment, collective exercises in public reason that provide citizens with the intellectual tools necessary to exercise their democratic responsibilities properly.
Policy journals come in various sizes and flavors, but all good ones are marked by three features: honest argumentation, clear writing, and diversity of thought. Their core function is to create an open safe space for serious technocratic discussion, ensuring that necessary voices get heard and important issues get debated, unpolluted by political, ideological, material, or bureaucratic interest. They are different from both professional outlets (such as scholarly journals) and general interest outlets (such as newspapers and magazines), because they address the concerns of the former in the style of the latter. They publish not assertions but arguments; their goal is not to command or convert but to inform and persuade. By subjecting official policy to independent interrogation, and by forcing academic specialists to tackle practical issues while shedding their jargon and writing for a general audience, policy journals check and improve government actions and make real conversation over national security policy accessible to all.
In the Beginning
When President Woodrow Wilson took the United States into World War I, the country did not have national security institutions up to the task. The War Department was in sorry shape and the administration had to raise a modern mass army from scratch. The State Department was almost as weak and clearly unsuited to plan a postwar world on Wilsonian lines. So in the fall of 1917, the White House set up an independent study group, the Inquiry, to do that job. A hundred and fifty historians, social scientists, lawyers, journalists, and other area experts were assembled and turned loose on every possible detail of the postwar peace settlement, with the whole operation reporting directly to Wilson and Colonel House. The Inquiry was a turning point in the relationship between the American government and the academy, and among other things, it provided the staff work behind the Fourteen Points, the chief statement of American war aims.1Michael C. Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Wanting Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton: PUP, 2019), pp. 27-30.
After the guns fell silent, however, the members of the Inquiry watched in growing frustration and despair as Wilson misplayed his hand at Versailles, the U.S. Senate voted down American participation in the League of Nations, and the country turned from international engagement to isolationism. So instead of disbanding and dispersing once the Peace Conference was done, they decided to reconstitute themselves in a new configuration, and in 1921 they formed the Council on Foreign Relations, a private gentleman’s club devoted to the serious discussion of American foreign policy. And the following year, to supplement the members’ off-the-record discussions and make the fruits of those discussions available to a broad general audience, the Council decided to start a quarterly journal, Foreign Affairs.2George Gavrilis, The Council on Foreign Relations: A Short History (NY: CFR, 2021)
Its manifesto, written by Editor Archibald Cary Coolidge, announced that, “The articles in Foreign Affairs will deal with questions of international interest today. They will cover a broad range of subjects, not only political but historical and economic…. Its articles will not represent any consensus of beliefs. What is demanded of them is that they shall be competent and well informed, representing honest opinions seriously held and convincingly expressed.” The philosophy behind the enterprise was captured in the lead piece by Elihu Root, former Secretary of War, Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and dean of the foreign policy Establishment:
When foreign affairs were ruled by autocracies or oligarchies the danger of war was in sinister purpose. When foreign affairs are ruled by democracies the danger of war will be in mistaken beliefs. The world will be the gainer by the change, for, while there is no human way to prevent a king from having a bad heart, there is a human way to prevent a people from having an erroneous opinion. That way is to furnish the whole people, as a part of their ordinary education, with correct information about their relations to other peoples, about the limitations upon their own rights, about their duties to respect the rights of others, about what has happened and is happening in international affairs, and about the effects upon national life of the things that are done or refused as between nations; so that the people themselves will have the means to test misinformation and appeals to prejudice and passion based upon error.3Elihu Root, “A Requisite for Popular Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs (September 1922). He continued: “It so happens that our own people in the United States have been peculiarly without that kind of education in foreign affairs. Not only have we been very busy over the development of our own country and our own institutions, but our comparatively isolated position has prevented the foreign relations of the old world from becoming matters of immediate vital interest to the American people, and they have not been interested in the subject.”
The journal launched with an initial circulation of 3700, rising to over 13,000 by the end of the decade, and made a splash from the start. As Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes told a dinner in late 1923,
It is an especial privilege to appear before the members of the Council on Foreign Relations because of their notable endeavor to facilitate an intelligent appreciation by our people of policies and action in the field of foreign affairs. Not only have you provided a forum, but in establishing a quarterly review under highly competent direction you have made one of the most helpful contributions to a better understanding of our foreign relations that has ever been made by private enterprise.4“Notes from dinner with Charles Evans Hughes, December, 1923,” CFR Archives, Princeton University.
Future secretaries would often be as effusive in their praise—at least when trying to get published. They would usually take a different tone once their own policies came under scrutiny. Coolidge died in 1928 and was succeeded by his deputy, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who remained at the helm for four and a half decades and created a distinct character for the magazine, captured well by George Kennan in his obituary:
A forum for the opinions of others, expressing no opinion of its own. A place for fact, for thought, for calmly reasoned argument, with no room in its columns for polemic, for anger, for personal attack. A literary tone that would be quiet and serious, but never pretentious. Importance, as the main criterion in the selection of material—whether the importance was to come from the significance and originality of the subject matter or from the authority of the author. But no concessions to any would-be contributor, humble or great, when it came to clarity of thought, significance of content, and moderation of language.5George F. Kennan, “Hamilton Fish Armstrong, 1893-1973,” Foreign Affairs (July 1973).
Members of the British delegation at Versailles, meanwhile, having been nearly as dispirited by the conference as their American colleagues, formed their own organization, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in 1920, and launched their own journal, International Affairs, two years later. In 1959, the International Institute for Strategic Studies started publishing Survival. Foreign Policy began appearing in 1970, The Washington Quarterly in 1978, The National Interest in 1985, and The Journal of Democracy in 1990. By the early twenty first century, a version of Armstrong’s model had been informally adopted by dozens of journals around the globe. Some are general, some are specialized; some are old, some are new; but all take part in related conversations, attempting to bring some degree of intellectual self-discipline to national and international security policy somewhere.6A parallel movement saw the emergence of related specialized journals within the academy, such as International Organization (1947), World Politics (1948), International Security (1976), and Security Studies (1991).
What Editors Do
Policy journals are produced by four groups of people, each with a distinct role and function—sponsors, editors, board members, and authors. Like all small magazines, these journals lose money, so they need some form of financial support to survive. Sometimes this assistance comes directly from a wealthy donor, but usually it comes from a nonprofit institution that houses the publication. Institutional sponsors provide financial and administrative support, shielding the journal from market pressures without meddling in their editorial operations, thus enabling the editorial team to put substance first.7Talking about his experiences at Slate in the 1990s, Jacob Weisberg notes the qualities of a good journalistic sponsor, which applies to policy journals as well as other media: “Michael Kinsley helped teach Bill Gates what it meant to be a good owner of a media business: that you could never interfere, you could never pursue your private agenda—basically, that if you wanted to be taken seriously, you couldn’t be Marty Peretz [of The New Republic]. Bill got that very quickly. He could be really annoyed by stuff Slate would write, including around the Microsoft antitrust case. But he understood that he couldn’t say anything, and couldn’t try to influence us, even if we overcompensated to try to prove how independent we were.” Gideon Rose, ed., How I Got Here: Lives in Public Service (New York: Foreign Affairs, 2021), p. 100.
Editors make decisions about the journal’s content and presentation, deciding who and what gets published and preparing manuscripts for publication. Editorial boards help the editors by providing moral support, practical advice, and informal peer review. Boards tie the journals to larger technocratic communities and help enforce professional standards of quality and conduct; board members contribute their time and effort as a form of community service. Authors, finally, provide manuscripts, which become articles, which convey ideas and information back and forth across the official-unofficial divide, bridging the gap between insiders and outsiders to mutual benefit.
Sponsors, boards, and authors are all crucial parts of the operation, but a journal’s character ultimately rests on the choices made by its editors, so their role is worth exploring in detail. During my time at Foreign Affairs, we boiled down Armstrong’s editorial model into a simple formula, with every piece needing an important subject, an authoritative author, a clear argument, and accessible presentation. Important was defined as having significant effects on the lives of significant numbers of people—that is, no trivia or navel-gazing or vapor. Authority could come from several sources, including position, knowledge, or experience. Arguments had to take the reader somewhere and conclude with recommendations for action by somebody. And accessibility meant writing for a broad general audience. The ideal manuscript, in other words, is an intellectually rigorous argument about an important practical issue, written clearly by someone who knows what they’re talking about. Unfortunately, few authors can produce such an article unaided. And so, the editors’ job involves not only deciding what manuscripts to publish, but also putting manuscripts into publishable form.
This is the function of the editing process, during which editors work with authors to help them communicate their message effectively. In regular magazines, the authors are professional writers. In policy journals, most are policymakers or academics, neither of whom are accustomed to writing clear, compelling prose—because their guilds do not value public communication and have actually developed elaborate systems of jargon and circumlocution to prevent it. So policy journal editors are responsible for clarifying and streamlining authors’ writing as well as their arguments, making sure each piece is a worthwhile contribution to professional discussion that can be understood and engaged by non-specialist readers. Conversations with authors during this process can be difficult, but since no piece gets published without both sides signing off, there are strong incentives to negotiate a mutually acceptable outcome.
Everyone involved hopes the resulting articles will persuade powerful people to do big things differently. Like hitting a long shot at the track, that happens once in a while, but you would be pretty foolish to bet on it. Tracing a direct link between any specific piece and a major policy shift is difficult. A more realistic hope is that an article can launch a compelling idea or voice into the professional conversation. Policymakers would often tell us, for example, they found smart outside voices intellectually stimulating, and authors often told us that publication led to consequences for them personally—invitations to speak or consult, media appearances, sometimes even job offers.
When the process works well, the articles add up to more than the sum of their individual parts, engaging one another in an ongoing conversation about how to deal with the world. I would tell prospective authors to think of a four-part outline:
- Describe a problem and explain why the reader should care.
- Present the ideal solution to said problem. (This is as far as most academics get.)
- Explain why this great idea is not already national policy. (This is as far as most policymakers get.)
- Explain, given all the above, what policy changes are both desirable and feasible, and who has to do what to bring them about.8If there are no significant gains to be had from switching policies—if the author concludes that existing arrangements remain the best, or least bad, solution to the problem in question—the manuscript’s intellectual and practical value remains the same but its journalistic value drops. “Stay the course!” can be an excellent recommendation, but it becomes interesting only when somebody else suggests changing it.
Well-trained professionals can pretty much recite in unison the first three steps for any major issue within their specialty. After all, that is their shared professional knowledge and understanding—recognizing the box and knowing how to think within it. The meat of the article thus comes in the final section, where tradeoffs and judgment calls abound, reasonable people can disagree, and the real technocratic battles get fought.
Throughout the editorial process, the editor’s choices should reflect not subjective preferences but the collective wisdom of the journal’s broader community. The editor’s role is to serve the community by playing gatekeeper and moderator of its professional debate. If each article is worthy of serious attention, then collecting them together will yield a comprehensive menu of plausible policy options available for all citizens to ponder and debate, not only the bigshots in the Situation Room.
It is hard to live up to the Armstrong ideal. Even Foreign Affairs has not done so fully, either in his day or later. Journals with less history and status and shallower institutional roots have less room to flout conventions, resist external pressure, and speak truth to power. But the ideal is still worth clinging to because it keeps the journals honest. People trying to promote frank, serious debate on public policy will always find themselves in conflict with those who put other agendas first, such as material, partisan, organizational, or personal interest. Journals face inevitable tradeoffs and have to make constant compromises. Dreaming of life in editorial heaven—where interesting, provocative manuscripts arrive in perfect condition and are published to great acclaim and engagement—helps sustain and inspire staff through their actual lives here on earth, during which they struggle to find and publish material worth reading and despair of getting anybody anywhere to think differently about anything.
That Was Then
Two decades ago, that is where I would have stopped. Policy journals have a distinct role in the national security ecosystem, serving the field by maintaining professional standards in discussion, framing issues intelligently, providing historical and intellectual context, and ensuring a full range of views are presented for debate. When the journals play that role well, they inform national policy, subject it to independent scrutiny, and offer constructive advice, all of which is ultimately reflected in improved national performance. This flattering narrative appeared to be supported by facts on the ground. During the history of the policy journal, the United States had won the Second World War, won the Cold War, and built a globe-spanning alliance system that was ending history by introducing what it grandly called the liberal international order. American primacy was peaking, and it did not seem unreasonable for the unofficial outside policy consultants to share at least some of the credit.9Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, “American Primacy in Perspective,” Foreign Affairs (2002).
Then came the twenty-first century, and the story changed. Policy journals kept doing their thing, as well as they had before and arguably better. Their collective total paid circulations increased and thanks to the digital publishing revolution, their content now reached millions of readers instantaneously. Nevertheless, the quality of public debate more generally has steadily declined and the outcomes of American policy went from bad to worse.10Fareed Zakaria, “The Self-Destruction of American Power,” Foreign Affairs (2019). As partisanship increased, the space for open-ended discussion shrank. More and more people came to think of policy answers as something known from the beginning, taken for granted as part of one’s identity or affiliation, rather than as something perpetually evolving through deliberative discussion. Groups bonded over self-interested grievances rather than commitment to a larger public good. Psychology undermined reason, with biases, emotions, and mental shortcuts resulting in lousy reasoning, poor decisions, and bad policy.
The journals did not cause the decline in American public discourse, and in fact have been largely unaffected by it themselves, with solid technocratic debate continuing in their pages and pixels. Increasingly, however, Root’s patrician notion that the journals could serve as educators of the public at large, giving “the people themselves … the means to test misinformation and appeals to prejudice and passion based upon error,” seems naïve. Like other creatures of the liberal Enlightenment, these days policy journals find themselves at odd with the spirit of the age and can only hope the broader cultural tides eventually shift direction once again, bringing public reason back into vogue and giving their efforts larger relevance and impact. And along the way, it now seems clear, they need to conceive of their mission in more challenging terms.
Buddhists talk of two arrows. The first, life shoots at you—all the trials and tribulations of the world. The second, you shoot at yourself, by your unhinged responses to trouble. The first arrow comes to everybody, but the second comes only to the unenlightened, who cannot exercise psychological self-control.11Sallatha Sutta, SN 36.6. The traditional policy journal model has done a decent job of helping the United States dodge the first arrow, the actual problems sent by the world. It has done less well in handling the second arrow, the additional problems Americans have created for themselves through mental indiscipline.
Much national security policy debate, for example, concerns dealing with opponents trying to harm you. How should one respond to a terrorist attack on the United States, say, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine? These are difficult, complex questions involving big tradeoffs and much uncertainty—but we rarely see them that way. A well-established cognitive bias called the fundamental attribution error leads people to assume their own behavior is determined by the situation while their opponents’ behavior is a matter of volition. Our enemies are perversely choosing to be vicious, in other words, while we have no choice but to respond in kind. Emotions such as anger, meanwhile, inevitably triggered by violent confrontations, are known to narrow moral perspective and decrease empathy. As a result, humans are hard-wired to favor or shun different kinds of policy responses from the start, regardless of the logic and evidence marshalled behind them. Policy journals need to actively resist that tendency, providing a broad range of content that forces readers to consider alternative viewpoints, challenge their priors, and resist premature cognitive closure.
Would it actually matter? Can collective reason inform national policy and transform it into something more than the accidental result of the pulling and hauling of interest groups, bureaucracies, and political factions? Who knows. But the effort is worth making, because the stakes are too high to give up in despair. In theory, today’s unsettled environment at home and abroad makes policy journals more vital than ever. To live up to their potential, however, they will need to do even better than they have in the past, going beyond maintaining a high quality of routine policy discussion. They must help the country dodge not only the first arrow but the second as well, exposing cognitive biases, resisting passing fads and hysterias, and providing self-awareness and institutional memory. For what the sorry record of American policy in the twenty-first century has revealed is that not all national challenges come from the outside.
About the Author
Gideon Rose is Mary and David Boies Distinguished Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2000-2021, he was managing editor and then editor of Foreign Affairs. He served as assistant director for near east and south asian affairs on the national security council staff and is the author of How Wars End.
Notes
- 1Michael C. Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Wanting Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton: PUP, 2019), pp. 27-30.
- 2George Gavrilis, The Council on Foreign Relations: A Short History (NY: CFR, 2021)
- 3Elihu Root, “A Requisite for Popular Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs (September 1922). He continued: “It so happens that our own people in the United States have been peculiarly without that kind of education in foreign affairs. Not only have we been very busy over the development of our own country and our own institutions, but our comparatively isolated position has prevented the foreign relations of the old world from becoming matters of immediate vital interest to the American people, and they have not been interested in the subject.”
- 4“Notes from dinner with Charles Evans Hughes, December, 1923,” CFR Archives, Princeton University.
- 5George F. Kennan, “Hamilton Fish Armstrong, 1893-1973,” Foreign Affairs (July 1973).
- 6A parallel movement saw the emergence of related specialized journals within the academy, such as International Organization (1947), World Politics (1948), International Security (1976), and Security Studies (1991).
- 7Talking about his experiences at Slate in the 1990s, Jacob Weisberg notes the qualities of a good journalistic sponsor, which applies to policy journals as well as other media: “Michael Kinsley helped teach Bill Gates what it meant to be a good owner of a media business: that you could never interfere, you could never pursue your private agenda—basically, that if you wanted to be taken seriously, you couldn’t be Marty Peretz [of The New Republic]. Bill got that very quickly. He could be really annoyed by stuff Slate would write, including around the Microsoft antitrust case. But he understood that he couldn’t say anything, and couldn’t try to influence us, even if we overcompensated to try to prove how independent we were.” Gideon Rose, ed., How I Got Here: Lives in Public Service (New York: Foreign Affairs, 2021), p. 100.
- 8If there are no significant gains to be had from switching policies—if the author concludes that existing arrangements remain the best, or least bad, solution to the problem in question—the manuscript’s intellectual and practical value remains the same but its journalistic value drops. “Stay the course!” can be an excellent recommendation, but it becomes interesting only when somebody else suggests changing it.
- 9Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, “American Primacy in Perspective,” Foreign Affairs (2002).
- 10Fareed Zakaria, “The Self-Destruction of American Power,” Foreign Affairs (2019).
- 11Sallatha Sutta, SN 36.6.
