How to Read Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy Without a Subscription
Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy are essential reading for international relations, and both are metered. Here is how to read their long-form essays in full for free.
Paywall behaviour last tested
If you study international relations, work in government or simply follow world events closely, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy are hard to avoid. Both publish long, argument-driven essays by academics, diplomats and former officials, and both put those essays behind a meter. This guide covers how each paywall behaves and how to read a full essay when you have used up your free allowance.
Foreign Affairs: a metered paywall on long essays
Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, gives non-subscribers a small number of free articles each month. After that, essays are cut off after the opening section with a prompt to subscribe. Its essays regularly run past 4,000 words, so being stopped a few hundred words in is especially frustrating.
The paywall is enforced in the browser. The complete essay is delivered in the page so that it can be indexed by search engines and cited by other publications, and a script hides the rest once the meter is exhausted. In our latest test, a 1,900-word Foreign Affairs essay came through the reader in full, with all 18 sections of the argument intact.
Foreign Policy: metered with a subscriber tier
Foreign Policy uses the same model with a more generous starting allowance, plus an "FP Subscriber" tier for its briefings, newsletters and some analysis. Standard articles and the daily briefing are metered. A 1,400-word World Brief loaded completely in our test.
Read a Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy essay in full
- Copy the essay link from foreignaffairs.com or foreignpolicy.com.
- Paste it into the box on Skip the Paywall and press Read Article.
- The essay appears in a clean reader view with the title, author and full text. Footnotes that are rendered as ordinary links are preserved.
The reader fetches the page the way a search crawler does and extracts the article with a readability parser. Because it never runs the metering script, the monthly allowance is never touched.
Citing these essays in academic work
If you are reading for research, note that the reader shows the web version of an essay. Foreign Affairs also publishes a print edition with different page numbers, and the print archive is behind a proper login. For citations, use the web URL and the publication date shown in the reader, or check the original page for the issue reference.
Other policy and opinion magazines that work
We have tested a number of comparable titles with the same method. At the time of writing, The New Republic, The Nation, Slate and New York Magazine all deliver full articles through the reader. The Economist does not: its paywall is enforced on the server and non-subscribers, including crawlers, receive only the first few paragraphs. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls covers why.
Support the publications
Both magazines are relatively inexpensive, and Foreign Affairs in particular offers steep academic discounts. If their essays are part of your weekly reading, a subscription is a small cost and comes with the archive going back decades.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from Foreign Affairs and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
How many free articles does Foreign Affairs give per month?
Foreign Affairs offers a small monthly allowance to non-subscribers, tracked by cookie. The exact number has changed over time and is not published.
Does the reader work on Foreign Policy newsletters and briefings?
Briefings published as web articles, such as World Brief and Situation Report, work normally. Email-only newsletters are not web pages and cannot be fetched.
Can I read the Foreign Affairs print archive this way?
No. The archive of past issues requires a subscriber login and is served differently from ordinary article pages. Essays published on the website in the normal way do work.