Foreign Policy

U.S. establishment/center-left internationalist

Background

Founded in late 1970 by Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel as a quarterly journal challenging Cold War and Vietnam-era foreign policy orthodoxy, it aimed to be 'serious but not scholarly, lively but not glib.' The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace took over publishing in the late 1990s and relaunched it as a glossy bimonthly magazine in 2000. The Washington Post Company acquired it in 2008, and it has been part of Graham Holdings (the Post's former parent, renamed after selling the newspaper to Jeff Bezos in 2013) ever since, operating under the Slate Group/FP Group umbrella alongside Slate. It has won multiple National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and built a reputation for elite-oriented analysis, long-form journalism, and forums featuring policymakers and scholars. Editorially it reflects a mainstream, liberal-internationalist worldview favoring alliances, multilateralism, and a rules-based global order, which has made it a consistent critic of 'America First' unilateralism. Ravi Agrawal has served as editor in chief since 2020, continuing the outlet's traditional emphasis on expert commentary over partisan advocacy while its news analysis increasingly scrutinizes the current administration's departures from postwar U.S. foreign policy consensus.

Sources

1. Foreign Policy - Wikipedia
2. Graham Holdings - Wikipedia
3. How Foreign Policy Magazine Set Out to Change the World
4. About Us – Foreign Policy
5. The Grand Strategy Behind Trump's Foreign Policy
6. Ravi Agrawal – Foreign Policy

Profile compiled 2026-09-25; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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