Understanding Foreign Policy Commentary

Drawing on original research, this book introduces the concept of the Foreign Policy Commentariat and explains the significance of the foreign policy commentary articulated in the pages of Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs magazines. This commentary, presented as distinct from academic analyses, is conceptualized as a discourse that reproduces certain unproblematized understandings of how foreign policy and international relations function.

Using intersectional gender and postcolonial approaches, the book examines commentary about the Obama, first Trump, and Biden administrations. Applying these critical approaches reveals the particular forms of knowledge and relationships of power reproduced through foreign policy commentary. Through challenging supposedly universal foreign policy concepts, these intersecting theories highlight how foreign policy commentary perpetuates a vaguely realist worldview which, we argue, employs theoretical concepts as facts rather than analytical tools.

As its empirical analysis concludes at the end of the Biden administration, the book also documents the seeming retreat of a post-WWII US foreign policy consensus.

Daniel Mobley is an associate lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on (historical) US foreign policy, critical security studies, International Relations theory, and the concept of US isolationism. He is especially interested in the constitutive functions of security discourses.

Joe Gazeley is an F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral research fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is an interdisciplinary researcher situated between International Relations and History. His research focuses on foreign policy, both as a practice within the postcolonial relationship between Africa and France, and as a field, as debated and understood by academics, policymakers and the public.