Foreign Affairs in the context of "X Article"

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⭐ Core Definition: Foreign Affairs

Foreign Affairs is an American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. Founded on 15 September 1922, the print magazine is published every two months, while the website publishes articles daily and anthologies every other month.

Foreign Affairs is considered one of the United States' most influential foreign-policy magazines. It has published many seminal articles, including George Kennan's "X Article" (1947) and Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations" (1993).

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👉 Foreign Affairs in the context of X Article

"The Sources of Soviet Conduct", commonly "X Article", is an article written by George F. Kennan and published under the pseudonym "X" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. It introduced the term "containment" to widespread use and advocated the strategic use of that concept against the Soviet Union. It expanded on ideas expressed by Kennan in a confidential February 1946 telegram, formally identified by Kennan's State Department number, "511", but informally dubbed the "long telegram" for its size.

Kennan composed the long telegram in response to inquiries about the implications of a February 1946 speech by Joseph Stalin. Though the speech was in line with previous statements by Stalin, it provoked fear in the American press and public; Time magazine called it "the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day". The long telegram explained Soviet motivations by recounting the history of Russian rulers as well as the ideology of Marxism–Leninism. It argued that the Soviet leaders used the ideology to characterize the external world as hostile, allowing them to justify their continued hold on power despite a lack of popular support. Washington bureaucrats quickly read the confidential message and accepted it as the best explanation of Soviet behavior. The reception elevated Kennan's reputation within the State Department as one of the government's foremost Soviet experts.

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Foreign Affairs in the context of Clash of Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations is a thesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world. The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. It was proposed in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled The Clash of Civilizations?, in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

The phrase itself was earlier used by Albert Camus in 1946, by Girilal Jain in his analysis of the Ayodhya dispute in 1988, by Bernard Lewis in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled The Roots of Muslim Rage and by Mahdi El Mandjra in his book La première guerre civilisationnelle published in 1992. Even earlier, the phrase appears in a 1926 book regarding the Middle East by Basil Mathews: Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations. This expression derives from clash of cultures, already used during the colonial period and the Belle Époque.

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Foreign Affairs in the context of Containment

Containment was a geopolitical strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States during the Cold War to prevent the spread of communism after the end of World War II. The name was loosely related to the term cordon sanitaire, which was containment of the Soviet Union in the interwar period.

Containment represented a middle-ground position between détente (relaxation of relations) and rollback (actively replacing a regime). The basis of the doctrine was articulated in a 1946 cable by U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan during the post-World War II term of U.S. President Harry S. Truman. As a description of U.S. foreign policy, the word originated in a report Kennan submitted to US Defense Secretary James Forrestal in 1947, which was later used in a Foreign Affairs article.

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Foreign Affairs in the context of Council on Foreign Relations

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an American think tank focused on U.S. foreign policy and international relations. Founded in 1921, it is an independent and nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with longstanding ties to political, corporate, and media elites. CFR is based in New York City, with an additional office in Washington, D.C. Its membership has included senior politicians, secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, lawyers, professors, corporate directors, CEOs, and prominent media figures.

CFR meetings convene government officials, global business leaders, and prominent members of the intelligence and foreign-policy communities to discuss international issues. CFR publishes the bi-monthly journal Foreign Affairs since 1922. It also runs the David Rockefeller Studies Program, which makes recommendations to presidential administrations and the diplomatic community, testifies before Congress, interacts with the media, and publishes research on foreign policy issues.

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