Foreign Affairs

While campaigning for the highest office in the land, presidential hopefuls and their advisers have turned to Foreign Affairs to publish essays laying out how they see the world. Here is a collection of those articles, grouped by election year. View all the collections back to 1924.

2012: Obama vs. Romney

Including Aaron L. Friedberg, a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president; Michèle Flournoy, co-founder of the Center for a New American Security; Janine Davidson, professor at George Mason University; and Jim Lindsay, senior vice president and director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations

2008: Obama vs. McCain

Including Barack Obama, John Edwards, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Bill Richardson, then candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination; and Mitt Romney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, John McCain, and Michael D. Huckabee, then candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.

2004: Kerry vs. Bush

Including Madeleine K. Albright, then head of Albright Stonebridge Group; Colin L. Powell, then U.S. secretary of state; and Samuel R. Berger, then chair of Stonebridge International.

2000: Gore vs. Bush

Including Condoleezza Rice and Robert B. Zoellick, then foreign policy advisers to George W. Bush, Republican nominee for president; and W. Bowman Cutter, Joan Spero, and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, then economic policy advisers to Al Gore, Democratic nominee for president.

Visit ForeignAffairs.com to view the complete collection going back to 1924.

What Independent Observation Can (and Can’t) Do

When Tunisia and Egypt hold elections this fall, international election monitors will face pressure to validate the results as a proof that the Arab Spring is yielding democratic dividends. They must resist that pressure — both to maintain their independence and convince Egyptians and Tunisians of it. Susan D. Hyde of Yale University and Judith G. Kelley of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University explain.

How the Election will Change Turkish Politics

The ruling AKP won Turkey’s recent legislative elections, but lost the supermajority it has enjoyed since 2002. This will force the party will to seek consensus on domestic policy, but may allow it to harden its eastward-leaning foreign policy, writes Soner Cagaptay, the Director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University.

Also, take a look at our syllabus of must-reads on Turkish foreign policy here.