American Diplomacy Publisher Bart Moon provides in this essay some history and perspective on the journal as well as a statement of our purpose and some information about our writers and our readers. We will post it permanently in a new “About Us” tab on the masthead. -Ed.
About American Diplomacy
By Bart Moon
In 1996 a group of retired American diplomats residing in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle area of North Carolina conceived and launched American Diplomacy, an electronic journal of commentary and analysis on international issues, available free to all users of the world wide web. They did so with the cooperation of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which provided web site hosting facilities, and with the encouragement and advice of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies and the UNC Curriculum for Peace, War, and Defense.
Our goal was to draw on the expertise of actual practitioners of diplomacy as well as the analytical skills of outstanding academicians to educate readers regarding current international issues in a responsible, nonpartisan manner not readily available elsewhere. Also, through the publication of the memoirs of retired and active Foreign Service personnel we hoped to promote greater public understanding of the rigors and rewards of foreign service life and of the role of diplomats in shaping and carrying out American foreign policy. It was our further hope that the journal might interest youthful readers in considering the Foreign Service as a career.
In support of this effort the founders of American Diplomacy created American Diplomacy Publishers (ADP), a North Carolina-chartered nonprofit educational corporation granted 501(c)(3) tax-free status by the Internal Revenue Service. ADP's board of directors was drawn originally from the community of retired Foreign Service officers residing in North Carolina and in the Washington, DC, area, as well as scholars from the faculties of UNC and Duke University. In the intervening years others in the Triangle, bringing military and business experience, have joined the board. Board members receive no pay; in fact, each member is required to make an annual financial contribution to the ADP treasury. Moreover, neither the authors whose articles appear in American Diplomacy nor the editing and publication staff of the journal receive any pay.
Since its founding American Diplomacy has published many hundreds of articles by noted foreign affairs experts including Admiral Stansfield Turner, ambassadors Hermann Eilts, Robert Strausz-Hupe, Peter Bridges, Edward Marks, J.R. Bullington, Ronald Palmer, Luis Santiago Sanz, and Francis Underhill. We have also featured essays by scholars such as John Lewis Gaddis, Ole Holsti, Michael Hunt, Robert Hinde, Madeline Hinde, Alex Roland, and Robin Dorff. All of these articles remain retrievable to readers in our electronic archives which can be accessed at americandiplomacy.org
Visits to articles appearing on the American Diplomacy web site have increased steadily, now totaling more than 200,000 per year. Moreover, the journal's value as an educational resource has been recognized by America's most prestigious universities, e.g., Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and many others, all of whom have established links from their web sites to ours in order to make our material easily available to their faculties and students. Because of emails from readers wishing to be notified when we post new articles on our site, we can boast not only that our audience extends throughout the United States, but also that there are eager readers of American Diplomacy in 62 countries spanning the globe.
It is a source of pride with us that we are able to present to the world a refereed, high quality, serious publication at very low cost. As noted above the staff that edits and publishes the journal consists of unpaid volunteers working from computers in their homes. Only our webmaster is paid for her work. Moreover, ADP has taken steps to expand its activities by sponsoring alone, or in collaboration with other organizations, special events in the Triangle related to international affairs as another way to promote wider public knowledge of and appreciation for the role of the Foreign Service as the principal front-line defender of America's foreign policy interests.
