Recent Foreign Affairs authors include Robert O. Keohane, Hillary Clinton, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Ashton Carter, Colin L. Powell, Francis Fukuyama, David Petraeus, Zbigniew Brzezinski, John J. Mearsheimer, Stanley McChrystal, Christopher R. Hill and Joseph Nye.

Its founding charter declared its purpose should be to "afford a continuous conference on international questions affecting the United States, by bringing together experts on statecraft, finance, industry, education, and science.

"[5][6] In its first year, the Council engaged primarily in discourse via meetings and small discussion groups, however, eventually it decided to seek a wider audience and it began publishing Foreign Affairs on 15 September 1922 on a quarterly basis.

Armstrong chose the distinctive light blue color for the cover of the magazine, while his sisters, Margaret and Helen, designed the logo and lettering respectively.

[9] The lead article in the first issue of Foreign Affairs was written by the former secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt's administration, Elihu Root.

John Foster Dulles, then a financial expert attached to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, who would later become secretary of state under Dwight D. Eisenhower, also contributed an article to the inaugural issue of Foreign Affairs on Allied debt following World War I.

Although in the early days of publication the journal did not have many female authors, in the late 1930s American journalist for Time magazine Dorothy Thompson would contribute articles.

Several extremely important articles were published in Foreign Affairs, including the reworking of George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram", which first publicized the doctrine of containment that would form the basis of American Cold War policy.

As of April 2021[update], Foreign Affairs's total readership is 303,000 for the print magazine and it has 1.2 million unique visitors per month for the website.

The magazine's first editor, Archibald Cary Coolidge, asked his Harvard colleague, William L. Langer, a historian and World War I veteran, to run the section.

[citation needed] Beginning with the first issue in 1922, Harry Elmer Barnes authored a reoccurring section titled “Some Recent Books on International Relations”.