World Policy Journal
Volume XVII, No 3, Fall 2000

 

As Much as I Dare
By Karl E. Meyer

 

A nettled writer once defined an editor as a skilled professional employed to separate the wheat from the chaff, who then makes sure the chaff is printed. Readers too may share that frustration as more and more serious publications go byte-size, using mishmash typography and celebrity profiles in a frantic attempt to compete with the Internet. Yet some editors have kept their faith in solid text articles, some even persist in the exhilarating quest for that elusive grail, the perfect issue, combining the timeless and the topical, relying on the tested baits of substance and literacy. Among those in this select company, by common consent, is James Chace, who after seven years now steps down as editor of World Policy Journal.

His performance has just elicited a rare and fitting compliment. The U. S. Senate recently asked the Congressional Research Service to a carry out a review of the best articles on America's changing role in the post-Cold War era. The CRS selected 43 articles from the past six years it considered path breaking. Heading the list were nine contributions to World Policy Journal, compared with seven in Foreign Affairs, and six in Foreign Policy. Since this journal has neither the staff nor the sizable financial backing of our two competitors, the CRS finding was all the more tribute to James's stewardship. He has persistently held to the standards of significance, clear writing, and sound scholarship in publishing essays that define - and challenge - American thinking on foreign affairs.

Those standards will remain lodestars under a new administration. I am pleased to add that James Chace will continue his association with WPJ as editor-at-large. He will take time from teaching at Bard College to scout new themes and fresh contributors, and we count on him to help steer this journal from the reefs of bad writing and slovenly thinking. There is other good news. Nicholas X. Rizopoulos remains as consulting editor, bringing to our pages ideas that germinate in his invaluable Foreign Policy Roundtable, which he conducts at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City. As before, our managing editor, Linda Wrigley, will tighten and weed our copy while serving as the day-to-day presence in our new rooftop quarters at 66 Fifth Avenue, which we share with our sponsor, the World Policy Institute and its director, Stephen Schlesinger, all within the big tent of New School University.

As new editor, I share James's conviction that no moats can be erected around the United States to keep the world at bay: the statute of limitations long ago annulled the old saw that Providence takes particular care of dogs, drunks, and Americans. Like him, I believe that in pressing our views, there is no requirement to be boring. I am a Midwesterner by birth, bred in the east, schooled at Wisconsin and Princeton, trained in foreign reportage and commentary at the Washington Post and the New York Times, seasoned as a fellow or visiting professor at Yale, Princeton, Oxford, and Berlin's Institute for Advanced Studies. I bring to bear a voracious curiosity, and the belief that fashionable catchphrases about foreign affairs - domino theories, ancient hatreds, Red tides, the Vietnam syndrome, the indispensable superpower - should be handled cautiously, with tongs. Montaigne (alas, no longer much in fashion) made the best case for turning to a veteran, in whatever field: "I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older."

A word about Andrew Reding, a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute, who spotted and translated a Mexican article describing the training of police recruits. Reding, who monitors hemisphere politics from his base on Sanibel Island, Florida (where he is also a part-time councilman), has an intuitive rapport with his subject. In a fall 1996 article, "The Next Mexican Revolution," he detailed Vincente Fox's challenge to Mexico's authoritarian political culture, epitomized by one-party control of the all-powerful presidency. He concluded with a forecast that the system's nemesis would almost surely be the opposition leader and insurgent governor of Guanajuato, Vincente Fox-who indeed had just brought off the seemingly impossible feat of amending the constitution to qualify as a presidential candidate. (The prior requirement was that to be eligible, both parents of a candidate had to be Mexican-born; Fox's mother was born in Spain.) When his term begins on December 1, President-elect Fox will face another formidable feat, as described in this journal, of redeeming the republic's law enforcement culture.

Readers may notice two articles by authors named Feifer. The perpetrators are indeed related. This is Gregory Feifer's third WPJ report from Russia, where he writes for the Moscow Times, and where he has lived since completing his graduate work at Harvard in 1998. It happens that his father, George Feifer, who attended Harvard, Columbia's Harriman Institute, and Moscow State University, is known for his books on the Soviet era, among them Message from Moscow (1969), Solzhenitsyn (1972), and Moscow Farewell (1976), so that this dynastic sequence seems evidence of authorial DNA. More recently, George Feifer has been drawn to Asian themes, notably as a historian of the battle of Okinawa, and his present project is to look afresh at Commodore Perry's famous voyage that in 1853 opened Japan to American trade.

Finally, for the record, these are the World Policy Journal articles cited by the Congressional Research Service, as noted above: Sidney Blumenthal, "The Return of the Repressed: Anti-Internationalism and the American Right" (fall 1995); David P. Calleo, "A New Era of Overstretch? American Policy in Europe and Asia" (spring 1998); Hugh DeSantis, "Mutualism: An American Strategy for the Next Century" (winter 1998/99); Paul Kennedy, "The Next American Century?" (spring 1999); Christopher Layne, "Rethinking American Grand Strategy: Hegemony or Balance of Power in the Twenty-first Century?" (summer 1998); Charles William Maynes, "`Principled' Hegemony" (fall 1997) and "America's Fading Commitments" (summer 1999); William Pfaff, "The Coming Clash of Europe with America" (winter 1998/99); and Joel H. Rosenthal, "Henry Stimson's Clue: Is Progressive Internationalism on the Wane?" (fall 1997).