What is the political bent of the publication "Foreign Relations"?

[wuushew]

In researching material for the litany of immigration threads I found this article.

Summary: Most people think overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing the globe. In fact, the opposite is true. As countries get richer, their populations age and their birthrates plummet. And this is not just a problem of rich countries: the developing world is also getting older fast. Falling birthrates might seem beneficial, but the economic and social price is too steep to pay. The right policies could help turn the tide, but only if enacted before it's too late.

Phillip Longman is Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of the forthcoming The Empty Cradle (Basic Books, 2004), from which this article is adapted.


http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501faessay83307-p0/phillip-longman/the-global-baby-bust.html

That article is typical pro-market perpetual growth nonsense that the right embraces as mythology. Should I be critical of only the author or the CFR itself which describes itself as non-partisan?

[niyad]

1. can we say ultra-reich-wing?

[Sherman A1]

2. Oh I don't know

They had a good piece on drilling in ANWAR being pretty much a waste of time as I recall a couple of years ago. I read Foreign Affairs, some things I find interesting, some I don't. I don't mind reading views that while I may not agree with, are at least somewhat thoughtful.

[Igel]

3. It tends to be pragmatic;

sometimes that attracts far more conservatives. But anybody can submit.

Arguments and presentations in FA, or any other journal, stand or fall on their own merits, regardless of the writer or publisher. Dismissing arguments because of their source is ad hominem, and formally a fallacy (although sometimes a writer has proven to be so consistently wrong in the past that he deserves no further time). Specialization makes the fallacy more palatable: you can't know what facts are true and which are false, and you're not already familiar with the assumptions used.

Nonetheless, you don't need special knowledge in many cases, especially in subjects that are neither highly technical or highly formal--so mathematical topology, higher-order logics, or quantum physics are bad places to try this. If it's not too technical, you can parse the argument and deduce the underlying assumptions, or turn up crucial steps that hinge either on the truth of a fact, or the completeness of the fact. Either way, you've found a weakness to exploit. Sometimes it's not necessary to disprove an assumption; sometimes it's simply an unreasonable one, and the burden of proof lies with the writer to justify it.

[salin]

4. That was my perspective when I read it fairly regularly in the mid 80s.

Centrist/pragmatic/internationalist/slightly right leaning - with a pragmatic bent/sometimes more centrist with a tad left tinge in an article from hear to there. Seemed to be more scholarly than politically ideological.

[Odin2005]

5. I haven't read many articles...

but it seems to be open to most opinions, definitely not a Globalist/Corporatist/Neocon circle jerk. The book The Clash of Civilizations by Sam Huntington started out as an article in that magazine and the book had a balanced analysis of the world as it stood in the mid 90's, indeed, he cautioned against Western Universalist "End of History" notions spewed by Fukuyama and the Neocons and speculated that the world would become organized of civilizational lines and that conflicts would result from cultural misunderstandings, especially between the West and Islam. It appears he was right.