CFR Board of Directors Appoints Gideon Rose Next Editor of Foreign Affairs

Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs for a decade, has been appointed by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Board of Directors to be the next editor of the magazine. He will assume the post October 1, succeeding James F. Hoge Jr., who after eighteen years is stepping down to pursue new opportunities in communications and international affairs. Rose will be the sixth editor in the magazine’s eighty-eight-year history.

The appointment followed an extensive search process headed by CFR Board member and Harvard University professor Martin S. Feldstein, who also chairs the Foreign Affairs Advisory Board.

CFR Co-Chairs Carla A. Hills and Robert E. Rubin said, "We, along with the entire Board of Directors, are highly pleased with this outstanding appointment. Gideon is ideally suited to build on Jim Hoge’s extraordinary accomplishments."

In his current role as managing editor, Rose helps select and edit articles while overseeing the magazine’s editorial staff and production. Since last year, he has also supervised ForeignAffairs.com, which offers a variety of original online content in addition to the material from the print edition.  "Thanks to Jim Hoge’s leadership, Foreign Affairs is now read and respected more widely than ever before," Rose said. "The challenge in the years to come is to start from that existing strong position and thrive in a new global environment and a new publishing environment. We have to become as successful on the Web as we are in print, and as central to debate in the ‘post-American world’ as we have been throughout the ’American century.’"

Rose brings to the job a strong background in academia, government, and journalism. Trained as a classicist at Yale, he received a PhD in government at Harvard and has taught American foreign policy at Princeton and Columbia. He served as associate director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the staff of the National Security Council from 1994 to 1995, and as CFR deputy director of national security studies from 1995 to 2000. He has written widely on American foreign and security policy, and his book on how American wars end will be published by Simon & Schuster this October.

"Gideon will assume the editorship of Foreign Affairs with a wealth of knowledge about international affairs and U.S. foreign policy,” says Hoge. "Gideon also will bring passionate commitment to the magazine’s mission, which he has creatively served as my partner for the last decade."

During Hoge’s term as editor and Peter G. Peterson chair, Foreign Affairs grew steadily in editorial influence. Among the more than one thousand articles published under Hoge’s editorship were such landmark essays as Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?” in 1993, Paul Krugman’s “Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession” in 1994, and the 2001 “Tiananmen Papers,” which revealed for the first time how China’s leaders decided to crush the 1989 student protests. And, in 2006, Foreign Affairs provided another extraordinary account based on captured Iraqi documents—“Saddam’s Delusions”—which documented life inside the Iraqi dictator’s bunker during the 2003 war.

Circulation and advertising revenue also grew during Hoge’s tenure. Foreign Affairs expanded to six issues a year, increased its paid circulation from 102,000 to 160,000 copies, and introduced several foreign editions. Since 2001, advertising revenue has nearly tripled.

Members of the search committee were:

Martin S. Feldstein—Chair
Professor of Economics, Harvard University

Lionel Barber
Editor, Financial Times

Stephen W. Bosworth
Dean, the Fletcher School, Tufts University

Jessica Einhorn
Dean, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Gary L. Ginsberg
Executive Vice President, Time Warner

Peter L. Osnos
Founder and Editor-at-Large, PublicAffairs Books

David Remnick
Editor, New Yorker

Mary Elise Sarotte
Professor of International Relations, University of Southern California

Mark Whitaker
Senior Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief, NBC News

Ex officio members:

Carla A. Hills
Co-Chair, Council on Foreign Relations

Robert E. Rubin
Co-Chair, Council on Foreign Relations

Richard E. Salomon
Vice Chair, Council on Foreign Relations

Richard N. Haass
President, Council on Foreign Relations

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Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations since 1922, is an independent magazine of analysis and commentary on foreign policy and international affairs. In recent biannual surveys, Foreign Affairs has been ranked the most influential media source for U.S. opinion leaders by the independent research firm Erdos & Morgan.