Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy (FP) is an American magazine of global politics, economics, and ideas, founded in 1970 by the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington and the publisher Warren Demian Manshel and now published by the FP Group, a division of Graham Holdings Company, in Washington, D.C.^{1 • 2} It began as a quarterly journal created to challenge the foreign-policy establishment during the Vietnam War and has since become a daily website and a print magazine, with six print issues a year in recent years and a quarterly print schedule today.^{3 • 4}

Founding and early years

The magazine grew out of a disagreement between two friends. Huntington, a hawk on Vietnam, and Manshel, a dove, had held opposing views on the war since their graduate-school days but shared a concern about the state of American foreign-policy debate, and they conceived the magazine in 1968 or 1969.¹⁰ Their stated goal was to attack entrenched orthodoxies in the Washington debate, and they promised a journal that would be "serious but not scholarly, lively but not glib, and critical without being negative."⁶ In the first issue's introduction, the founders wrote that "an era in American foreign policy, which began in the late 1940's, has ended" and called for new and more constructive controversies about America's goals, means, and responsibilities.¹¹

The first issue carried Richard Holbrooke's article "The Machine That Fails," a plan by the then 29-year-old Foreign Service officer for reorganizing America's national security bureaucracy.⁵ The founders chose John Franklin Campbell, a young U.S. foreign service officer, as the first editor; when Campbell died of thyroid cancer barely a year into the job, the magazine hired Holbrooke, then 31, who later became a major figure in U.S. diplomacy.¹² The early magazine mixed politicians, policymakers, journalists, and academics as writers and used eye-catching formats, including "The Nixon Report Card," which graded President Nixon on subjects such as the Soviet Union, the Middle East, arms control, and trade, written by editorial board member Zbigniew Brzezinski.¹² Manshel financed the venture, which was published by National Affairs, Inc., the nonprofit that also published The Public Interest.¹³

Ownership changes

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace acquired full ownership of the magazine in the 1970s, on the grounds that Manshel had become a government official, a move Manshel later regretted.¹² During the mid-1990s, when Moisés Naím served as editor, the publication broke new ground in examining globalization and what part the United States ought to take in it.¹²

The Washington Post era. The Washington Post Company bought the magazine from the Carnegie Endowment and relaunched it as both a glossy print publication and a daily online magazine at ForeignPolicy.com.⁵ In January 2012 the company made FP the centerpiece of a new operating unit, The FP Group, headed by the longtime contributor David Rothkopf as CEO, with Susan Glasser remaining editor-in-chief; the group planned new businesses in live events, education, books, and research services.¹⁴ The Washington Post Company later became Graham Holdings Company, and FP remains a division of it, with advertising, subscriptions, and an events and analytics business funding the operation.^{2 • 3 • 15}

Format and recognition

FP relaunched from a quarterly academic journal to a bimonthly, full-color magazine, and two and a half years after that relaunch it received the 2003 National Magazine Award for General Excellence for magazines with a circulation under 100,000.¹⁶ Since 2003 it has been nominated for eight National Magazine Awards and has won six, three for its print publication and three for its digital publication, and it is the only independent magazine to have won consecutive digital national magazine awards every year since the category was established in 2009.³ The print magazine now appears quarterly, shipping in January, April, July, and October, and back issues dating to 1970 are sold for $24.95 each.^{4 • 2} The site publishes daily, with newsletters such as World Brief, China Brief, and Situation Report, podcasts, and an FP Analytics research arm.¹⁴

Reputation and bias assessments

Media Bias/Fact Check rates Foreign Policy Least Biased with High factual reporting, noting balanced reporting with a very slight lean right, proper sourcing, and no failed fact checks to date as of its November 2024 update.³ Ad Fontes Media scores it at bias -4.05 on a scale from -42 (left) to +42 (right) and reliability 42.63 on a 0-64 scale, classifying it as reliable analysis and fact reporting.⁷ The coverage-analysis site Divergence, monitoring coverage since March 2026, places FP at center with an average divergence from cross-outlet consensus of 34 out of 100 across 71 scored events, above that site's average of 26, and reports that FP takes a framing no other outlet shares in 56% of the events it covers; across 84 fact checks it matched the cross-outlet consensus 66.7% of the time.¹⁷

Relation to similar publications

Foreign Affairs is the older establishment journal in the same field, published bimonthly since 1922 by the Council on Foreign Relations, and Huntington explicitly positioned FP against it, calling Foreign Affairs "very much an establishment journal" and hoping FP would not be one.¹³ FP's founders argued that a major foreign policy journal had appeared after each great war of the twentieth century: Foreign Affairs as a reaction to post-World War I isolationism, World Politics in the late 1940s for the Cold War, and FP for post-Vietnam America.¹⁸ Commentators commonly distinguish the two by register: Foreign Affairs carries a longer-form, more scholarly tone aimed at long-term policy thinking, while FP blends daily news reporting with commentary.¹⁹

Two similarly named publications are distinct entities. Foreign Policy Analysis is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the International Studies Association published by Oxford Academic, co-edited by Barış Kesgin, Sibel Oktay, and Leslie Wehner, with a 2025 impact factor of 2.0.²⁰ The Foreign Policy Journal is a separate website that was relaunched in 2026 with undisclosed ownership and a focus on U.S. politics, business, and markets; Media Bias/Fact Check notes it no longer resembles the earlier, ideologically oriented publication of the same name.²¹

References

1. About Us, Foreign Policy (2009)
2. Contact Us, Foreign Policy
3. Foreign Policy – Bias and Credibility, Media Bias/Fact Check (updated November 22, 2024)
4. Print magazine eligibility, FP Help Center
5. FP 40th Anniversary, Foreign Policy (2010)
6. The FP Debate: Samuel Huntington's Legacy, Foreign Policy (2009)
7. Foreign Policy Bias and Reliability, Ad Fontes Media
8. Subscribe to Foreign Policy
9. Foreign Policy, JSTOR journal page
10. Huntington, Manshel, and Holbrooke founders' interview, CIA reading room (Foreign Policy, November-December 2008)
11. Fareed Zakaria on What the United States Can Learn From the Past 50 Years, Foreign Policy (2021)
12. How Foreign Policy Magazine Set Out to Change the World, Foreign Policy (2021)
13. New Foreign Policy Magazine To Make Debut This November, The Harvard Crimson (1970)
14. A new path forward for Foreign Policy, Foreign Policy (2012)
15. Foreign Policy — Bias Rating, Ownership & Reliability, Objective News
16. Press Room, Foreign Policy (2004)
17. Foreign Policy bias and coverage analysis, Divergence
18. Foreign Policy: Fighting the Dinosaurs, The Harvard Crimson (1971)
19. What is Foreign Policy Magazine? (Foreign Policy vs Foreign Affairs comparison), Columbia College library guide
20. Foreign Policy Analysis, Oxford Academic / International Studies Association
21. Foreign Policy Journal – Bias and Credibility, Media Bias/Fact Check

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Politics and government › International relations › IR study, geopolitics and chronology › Foreign-policy institutes and journals › Foreign Policy magazine and foreign-policy magazines

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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