Fifty years ago, in the first issue of Foreign Policy, a who’s who of who was and would be graced the pages of a neatly conceived journal. Imagined by two “old friends,” Samuel P. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel, with the goal of stimulating “rational discussion of the new directions required in American foreign policy,” the magazine laid down a marker in 1970: “[A]n era in American foreign policy, which began in the late 1940’s, has ended.”
If that sounds familiar, keep reading: Paul C. Warnke and Leslie H. Gelb fretted that the “Defense Department budget has become the prime target in the search for the billions of dollars necessary to solve our corrosive social problems.” Paul Seabury and Alvin Drischler told us that the “American debate over foreign commitments … has only begun.” Graham Allison pondered an “undeniable trend away from the settled assumptions shared by postwar American leaders,” and Richard Holbrooke hoped to infuse “meaning” into the “President’s promise of a new foreign policy for the seventies.”
