Gideon Rose ‘85 served as the editor-in-chief of Foreign Affairs from 2010-2021 and managing editor from 2000 to 2010. He is now the Mary and David Boies Distinguished Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. While at Yale, he served as one of the first editors-in-chief of the Yale Political Monthly.
What do you see as the value and function of a publication like Foreign Affairs?
The basic idea of a policy journal, a category that Foreign Affairs created in 1921, started out as follows. When Wilson took the US into World War One, we were woefully unprepared, not just in terms of the military, but also in terms of diplomacy. The State Department could not possibly plan a peace along Wilsonian lines. And so Wilson created this special organization called The Inquiry. It brought together 150 historians and journalists and bankers and lawyers to staff the peace process for the postwar conference that they knew was coming.
They all went over to Versailles with Wilson, and Wilson fucks up Versailles. As Versailles ends, these guys say to themselves, “Oh, my God. On the one hand, this was a royal disappointment, because we don’t have a good peace, nobody is going to join the league, and now our country is heading into isolation. But on the other hand, wow, this was a really good, interesting, fun, valuable exercise. We shouldn’t just disperse. Let’s try to keep the conversation going.” And they did what people of their class did at the time, and they decided to form a gentleman’s club devoted to the serious discussion of American foreign policy. Thus was born the Council on Foreign Relations.
After a little while, they thought, “We have to do outreach. How do we educate the public at large?” And so they created Foreign Affairs in 1922. The first editor was Cary Coolidge. His managing editor was Hamilton Armstrong. Coolidge died in 1928. Armstrong took over and then ran the publication all the way into the 70s –– the first half century. He had an incredible influence. His model was a forum for discussion that is serious intellectually, but open to different viewpoints politically, and written in accessible language that anybody can understand. And the feeling was that this is an important part of democracy.
One-hundred years later, I think we’ve actually done a very good job at perfecting Armstrong’s model. Technocrats love it because it provides a place where government experts and academic experts and independent voices can come together to discuss things in a calm, clear way. It’s a classic liberal Enlightenment concept: rational individuals exposed to proper information and multiple points of view, having a reasonable discussion, and considering different options, which will, as a matter of faith, then yield better policies for the country and the world as a result.
I think the people in the policy journal world are doing as good a job as ever has been done. And yet, the government and the polity writ large is more divorced from serious technocratic thinking than it’s ever been in my lifetime. Because the whole world and society around these little journals has gone crazy.
How should technocrats respond to populism and anti-establishment trends? Do these old frameworks and institutions have to be reinvented?
I was on jury duty once, and the judge’s instructions were really impressive. He said, “Your job is very simple. It’s to make a ruling based on these specific things that I am asking of you with regard to the specific bits of evidence you heard in the courtroom. Do your job well. And if you do your job well and I do my job well, justice is produced by the system, not by you individually.” I have come to think of what we do along those lines.
Our job is to provide a good forum, to do the best we can to resist cognitive closure in any way, to polish our presentation so that it can reach as wide an audience as powerfully as possible. And as Tom Lehrer said about Wernher von Braun, “Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down.” “That’s not my department,” said Wernher von Braun. Our job is to put out the magazines, to sponsor good discussion, to walk the Enlightenment walk and not just talk the talk. And one hopes that the broader cultural trends swing back, but all you can control is what you do. The best way to fight the populists is to be a good liberal, and hope that the obvious virtues of your own approach, for which you are an ambassador, will prevail in the long run.
If you look at what’s happening in Ukraine, it turns out that there are hidden strengths in democracies and being a good guy. When the bad guy does something like invade Ukraine, people realize, “Holy shit, we don’t want that.” You can rediscover the mundane virtues of systems that can seem boring and inefficient and ineffective when they’re contrasted with a guy who comes up with a gun to your head and says, “Give me your country.”
Has Putin achieved the impossible by uniting not just the European Union and NATO, but an entire coalition of Western democracies? Could this invasion backfire for Putin over the longer term?
The first weeks of the invasion have been bad for Russia –– very bad. Bad for Ukraine –– very bad. But very good for us. The aggressiveness, the viciousness, and the recklessness of the assault surprised everybody outside the US government. It galvanized a reenergized Western alliance in ways that all the jawboning in the world couldn’t have. It’s been a hysterical surprise to watch the German 180º flip. I mean, it’s just astonishing. Nobody called that.
The Biden administration has played this beautifully so far by not stepping on the storyline. If your opponent is screwing up, don’t get in the way. In effect, Biden’s team has done a good version of what Obama’s administration infelicitously called “leading from behind” by letting the Europeans seem like they are coming to their own conclusions. Putin will have chosen a hot war in Ukraine and gotten a new Cold War with the West.
However, the biggest difference I can see now between “Cold War One” and “Cold War Two” is that during Cold War One, all the major economic powers were on our side. But that’s not true now. What’s interesting is who’s in the other camp. China, India, much of the Middle East. These are very significant economic powers, who can, to some extent, blunt the impact of the sanctions and the exclusion that the old Western alliance is going to impose.
We seem to be heading into a new Cold War with a dominant world system run by us and our allies, just like the old days, from which Russia is excluded. Although Russia will be allowed to sell energy, much like Libya in the ‘80s, and ‘90s, just on a much larger scale. But then, at the same time, there’ll be a secondary, semi-illicit international system centered in Asia around China, in which the Russians will be able to be players.
What’s going to happen with China is the most interesting angle on this. There is no reason to believe that China will fundamentally join the anti-Russian alliance or penalize Russia significantly. But they also don’t want to get completely crosswise with everybody else. So the likelihood is they’ll do enough to keep us from penalizing them. That puts Russia more under the Chinese thumb than they were. The result is a splintered world –– in the global economy, in global geopolitics. But there will be semi-permeable membranes.
The underbelly of Eurasia –– from the Middle East, through India, to China –– is not interested in being completely dependent on Western global institutions that can cancel you. The countries that are not part of the 141 nations that condemned the Ukraine invasion at the UN are going, “I don’t like what Russia did, but I don’t want to be in a world in which anybody can be completely canceled like that.” If you’re a potential bad actor, or just an independent actor, and you’re not really a full-scale member of the alliance, you don’t want your freedom of action potentially curtailed.
At the dawn of this new Cold War that you describe, US foreign policy has pivoted to some extent away from the Middle East and toward Russia and China. But you have a background in Middle Eastern policy from the National Security Council. Do you think that pivot away from the Middle East is wise?
Yes. Getting older is bad physically, but kind of fun intellectually. Because you see lots of stuff happen. And you realize that you can retrospectively judge various things.
The world for a long period of time was going to be dependent on fossil fuels. And the largest source of global reserves lay underneath not particularly nice countries in the Middle East. The question of how to keep the Middle East gas station open for the world was a pressing one. But now, the contribution of fossil fuels to climate change has only become clearer, and the timeframe in which the Middle Eastern energy resources will be necessary has come down a few decades.
So from my perspective, you did a lot of dumb things in the Middle East, but they were at least partly driven by the assumption that you had to stabilize it. And you tried various different ways to do so. From peace processes, to wars, to proxies, to whatever. And now several decades later, we can see that none of those things worked.
The region is still important, but dwindling in importance, and it won’t be nearly as important in a couple more decades. So I don’t see any particular reason to do much more with the Middle East now other than to play a modest balancing game that protects our core interests, without getting too deeply involved in local politics. I think the Iran deal was a little bit out of the business of direct management of Gulf security, and I would support that it was idiotic to leave it. It was working just fine for what it did. And generally, I’ve lost my zeal for domestic reform, I’ve lost my belief that we can do anything significant to affect the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All these are heartbreaking realizations. But you know, there are some areas of the world are not yet ripe for development. And unfortunately, the Middle East has proven that over the last few decades. So you can’t walk away entirely. But you don’t have to be the central player, and you don’t have to see it as the giant source of all threats. If I were, in Tony [Blinken]’s shoes, or Jake [Sullivan]’s, I’d say, “Okay, what is the least cost strategy for not having this region bother us as much as possible?” Don’t expect any upside, just limit the downsides.
You said that President Biden has managed to successfully lead from behind on Ukraine. His administration’s handling of the Afghanistan exit was not viewed as favorably by many. How would you rate the Biden administration on foreign policy so far?
Going in, I was very high on the team. This is the collectively the smartest, most serious-minded, most well-intentioned, most psychologically healthy, most emotionally aware and sensible group of people running American foreign policy in my lifetime. I know pretty much all of them. I’m friends with many of them.
So if we had just skipped to this winter, I would say, “Oh, the Biden administration is doing great on foreign policy, and I’m proud to associate myself with everything they’re doing.” But the first year had some more stumbles, with Afghanistan being the most notable. Last week, I bumped into an administration official. And I said, “Okay, you’re doing this so well, why did you fuck up Afghanistan so much? What’s the difference?” And he said, “Nobody expected Ghani to bug out at the absolute first sign of trouble.” Even the Taliban didn’t expect it. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese did not expect to run to Saigon at the end as quickly as they did. They were surprised by the collapse. Everybody thought the Afghan government would hold out a little longer and make the retreat less chaotic.
Zelensky is proving to be the opposite. Nobody expected this former comic actor to become a global sex symbol, to become the heroic face of resistance. The Ukrainian leadership has performed as far above replacement as the Afghan leadership performed below. And one of the things that this tells you is that you can’t always predict things because there are individuals who matter. You put Ashraf Ghani in Zelensky’s position and you put Zelensky in Gandhi’s position and maybe things look a little bit different each way.
That said, there’s no way of looking at the Afghan thing without saying, “Why didn’t you have better plans prepared for contingencies?” It was embarrassing and atrocious. The scariest part was that it was such an exact replay of Vietnam. It forced me into deep soul searching about what our field can accomplish. We replayed every single mistake from Vietnam. And came to the exact same conclusion. And if there’s one thing my generation in the field learned with our mother’s milk, it was how not to do another Vietnam. So to watch this play out was deeply soul crushing to me as a technocratic professional because it suggested there was no long-term learning that could’ve occurred because if there had been, it would have been on this fucking issue.
In the Biden administration’s defense, the domestic politics of American policy was seen as the overwhelming priority by the administration during its first year. And I think correctly so. They were desperately trying not to do anything significant on foreign policy. The story was domestic, the story was COVID, the story was the economy, the story was immigration.
It is likely that the rest of the Biden administration’s foreign policy tenure will be more successful. The one caveat is that I am worried by growing anti-Chinese sentiment in the country at large and the extent to which it’s possible to generate a new “yellow peril.” Watching the anti-Muslim furor sweep over the country after 9/11 was scary because it showed you what could happen when you combine real security issues with an easily and obviously “otherable” target. It’s been scary to see how rapidly anti-China sentiment has picked up in the last several years. It’s crucial that we separate out the real issues of US-China policy, and the ongoing and enduring geopolitical rivalry that we are likely to have with China for the next several decades, from any kind of emotional or simplistic anti-Chinese sentiment or hysteria. There’s no reason we are destined to be in a hot war with China and no reason that we can’t at least try to address the real challenges that we have with them as technocratic professionals and sensible wonks, rather than heatedly emotional amateurs. The extent to which you already see a closing of debate on China, in the public and in Congress, and the extent to which the administration has contributed to that in some ways, and not necessarily pushed back on it, worries me. I think slipping into an overly hawkish, overly nonconstructive, anti-China bashing mode would be a grave danger mistake, which we will pay for in lost opportunities.
I would say that a former Yale Political Monthly editor Fareed Zakaria has written the best guide to how useless our old thinking is in approaching the new world. That’s Post Pandemic World, which is a superb book. Basically, it tells your generation that pretty much everything now is up for grabs. And that’s much scarier than the world that I grew up in. But it’s also, in some ways, much more interesting and challenging. We have to come up with a whole new set of answers with a whole new set of players and a domestic environment that’s much nastier than anything we had back in the day. How the hell we move forward? I certainly don’t know. Nobody knows. And you guys have the fun and nerve-wracking challenge of figuring it out.
Tell us about the Yale Political Monthly.
After the ‘60s came the ‘70s, and there was a dearth of good, serious political discourse from the center right. A bunch of magazines emerged to put forward non-leftist ideas. It ran all the way from crazy institutions like the Dartmouth Review to centrist foreign policy journals to the YPM. Bob Kagan and my brother Joe Rose started the modern version of YPM. We didn’t trace our lineage back all the way to 1947. We saw it as “Bob and Joe starting something.”
The magazine was very small and very dependent on the editors and their close circle of friends for all the work. We had a big shot board of names that we just sort of hoped nobody would ever check up on. We never used them for anything, except for validation. And they probably didn’t even read it. But we sent them copies once in a while.
We tried to give ourselves a veneer of seriousness. My father paid for a Foreign Affairs ad and a Foreign Policy Association ad. And so the back cover was an ad for Foreign Affairs, and the inside front cover was an ad for the Foreign Policy Association’s Great Decision series. And then we just used the images afterwards for every single issue without being paid, and probably completely illegally, just because it made us look classier. It’s very funny that I ended up becoming the editor of Foreign Affairs. We literally stuck that ad in the back.
I remember trying very hard to get advertising money, which is always what you want. I was the worst salesman in the world. But I dutifully went around and hit up every business in the local area. And I finally found this guy at a barber shop named Shear Madness, who was clearly high and was smoking a joint or a bong when I was there. I explained what we were doing, and I got him to sign up for a series of ads. I think he never actually paid because he came to his senses.
I recruited some buddies, Calvin Sims, who’s now the CNN standards person. We got a little gang and I did all the editing myself, but my brother had trained me and I had two deputies, [CNN host] Fareed Zakaria and [former Slate editor-in-chief] Jacob Weisberg.
Wow, that’s quite a team.
We published in the spring of my sophomore year a piece on the Non-Alignment Movement by this guy, Fareed Zakaria. I had no idea who he was. I literally wrote: “Fareed Zakaria, grew up in India.” I think that was his first byline. We were not politically correct in those days.
The fall of my junior year, I got this call, saying, “Hi. This is Fareed Zakaria, I’d like to take you to lunch at Mory’s.” So we went to lunch at Mory’s. And I say, “It’s nice to meet you.” He said, “Well, I’ve been thinking. I’m head of the Political Union. But that’s a one-year position. And it’s going to be over, and I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. And I decided that I would be editor of the magazine.” To which my response was, “Well, I’m very glad you decided that, who the fuck are you?” So, all you need to know about Fareed Zakaria is two things. One, that he would say something like that, and two, that he would end up as the editor of the magazine.
Jacob and Fareed and I have remained close friends ever since and still regularly see each other. Fareed got editor-in-chief over Jacob because Jacob from his beginnings has always been a journalist. He would define himself that way. Fareed and I don’t think of ourselves as journalists. We think of ourselves as God knows what –– whatever pretentious thing you could imagine. I describe myself as a half-wonk, half-academic who happens to be a good editor. But journalist is not our primary identity, and I didn’t think of the magazine as a place for journalism so much as I thought about it as a place like what we’ve tried to do with Foreign Affairs now –– a high-end discussion forum for serious people to address topics of public interest in a clear, literate way.
I used to joke that if the truck bearing the copies from the press had gotten into a terrible accident on the highway coming from the printer, and blown up in a giant fireball with the entire run being destroyed, 90-95% of the value of the YPM magazine would still have been achieved. Because even though we thought that the value was all the great debate that we were sponsoring and the wonderful data, it was really the training that the people involved received. If we hadn’t believed it was important, we would never have put all the fucking time and energy and late nights and endless passion into it that we did. And if we hadn’t done that, we would never have developed the skills and learned the shit that we did that allowed us to become serious people later on.