History of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy journal
Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy began in 1972 as an exclusive intelligence aid to senior government, defense, intelligence, and industry officials, particularly in countries which were unable to access first tier intelligence resources. Its initial user list including several heads of state, heads of government, and service chiefs.
By 2026, even in a time when widespread access to “information” was available through the internet, leaders in some 170 countries were still reliant on the resources of Defense & Foreign Affairs, including those in the major intelligence countries: the great powers.
A key to Defense & Foreign Affairs’ history was its incessant focus on all areas of the world. There were no “main targets”; a broad intelligence collection operation, based on assets around the world, enable the group to not only focus on countries considered of no interest to the great powers, but also to develop an appreciation of strategic context and the broad sense of direction as to where trends were leading.
Unparalleled Strategic Leadership
There were many instances where access to unique sources meant that Defense & Foreign Affairs drew sudden interest from the major powers, when, for example, it disclosed on April 10, 1972, that Egyptian President Anwar as-Sadat was the eject Soviet officials from Egypt “within six months”. The report drew sharp criticism from the US CIA, but Sadat, in fact, removed the Soviets out within four months, as a prelude to the October 1973 war with Israel.
Defense & Foreign Affairs outlined proposals in 1973 for a space-based energy-derived ABM system.
Around the same period, D&FA discovered that the delicate US sale of Grumman F-14A Tomcat fighters to Iran was being held up because the company was being held to ransom by two middlemen who demanded payoffs. The disclosure of the information freed the logjam as the Shah of Iran reacted to bring the project back online.
But the real value of D&FA came to be seen in its ability to determine strategic trends by an understanding of broad civil-military indicators, such as the fact that the USSR would collapse by 1990-91 due to a range of factors not being adequately tracked by the major powers. Or that Iraq would invade Kuwait in 1990. Or the projection in 2007 that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would begin its collapse in 2025, a process now in evidence.
It carried unique — and ultimately verified — information on Libya's WMD programs over the decade before Qadhafi's revelation of them. It carried uniquely-sourced intelligence and analysis from 1991 onwards about the evolution of the North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, intelligence which still bears today on the current global security situation. It also carried unique intelligence and analysis on the nuclear programs in India, Pakistan, Iraq, and so on.
Its coverage has been extensive in many areas in which it has taken a pioneering and unique approach. In the 1980s, for example, it looked at the emergence of India as a strategic power, and in the 1990s looked at the growing strategic importance of West African energy resources.
D&FA forecast that a goal, or result, of the US Trump Administration would be, in its second term, to abolish or bypass all the US’s old alliance structures with profound impact on the defense procurement choices of many of its allies, and neutral nations, in the out-years. It was unique in forecasting the prospect of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US, and pinpointing the sources of the planning on this transformative event.
Significantly, D&FA has been the world leader in tracking the broader context of conflict trends, particularly including political and psycho-political warfare. Its studies on the evolution of the concept of total war, a process which began with D&FA co-founder Dr Stefan Possony’s 1938 book, Tomorrow’s War, have also been unique, leading to the first major assessments of the People’s Republic of China’s doctrines on fighting war against the US and its allies was to depend very much on a conflict which would avoid direct military confrontation.
D&FA has consistently delivered “uncomfortable” assessments, largely based on its political and ideological neutrality. Founder Gregory Copley has been quoted as saying: “We’re not in the good or bad business; where in the ‘what is’ business.”
That continues today.
54 Years On
In 2026, due to popular demand, it was decided to make Defense & Foreign Affairs available online and to a wider, but still exclusive and professional, audience.
It is still, today, one of the few services which carries locally-based input into analysis of major strategic competition and realities in Africa, particularly reporting on the impact on Red Sea security, for example, of the civil wars in Ethiopia, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa.
It also brought to light the strategic competition between the great powers of oil and trade transit from the Indo-Pacific to the Euro-Atlantic, which has now come to a head with the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis.
Its studies of PRC penetration of the Caribbean are now critical to any broad understanding of how the 2026 Cuba crisis will resolve, or evolve.
It has been unique in reporting and analysis of the origins of current state-sponsored and transnational terrorism and links to transnational crime, the strategic build-up of North Korea and Iran, and analyzing significant developments in the Middle East, ahead of the breaking incidents.
Indeed, from 1972 onward, it pioneered analysis of terrorism, and was one of the first publications to routinely study terrorism, particularly from the standpoint of psychological strategy and psywar.
One of the most-repeated comments on D&FA’s independent and neutral approach to intelligence collection and analysis is that it is “unique”, and uniquely reliable. US President Ronald Reagan’s national security advisor, Don Regan, wrote to D&FA to say that its products were “essential to the running of the White House”. That showed how far, even at that time, had evolved from its initial mission of providing balanced strategic trend analysis to governments without access to the major resources of the superpowers.
The information, today, is clearly valuable to a wider range of interested professionals. The forecasting which D&FA undertakes helps, for example, in creating an understanding of market demands for energy, raw materials, and manufactured goods. This is because D&FA analysis looks at the total context.
It recognizes that the world is not linear, nor stovepiped; everything affects everything else. Including the reality that technology’s impact on human behavior interacts with global population movements, including urbanization.
D&FA’s studies on urbanisation, perhaps the first serious sociological questioning since the 1918 publication of Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, have been critical in forecasting the current evolution of social divisions. And their impact on economics, national security, and politics.