The National Interest
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about a journal. See national interest for the generic term.
| The National Interest | |
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 Spring 2005 cover |
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| Type | Bi-monthly Journal |
| Format | Scholarly Journal |
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| Owner | The Nixon Center (before 2001: National Affairs, Inc.) |
| Editor | Nikolas Gvosdev |
| Founded | |
| Headquarters | Washington, DC |
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| Website: http://www.nationalinterest.org | |
The National Interest is a prominent American bi-monthly international affairs journal, founded in 1985 by Irving Kristol and currently published by the Nixon Center. The National Interest is not restricted in content to “foreign policy” in the narrow, technical sense but attempts to pay attention to broad ideas and the way in which cultural and social differences, technological innovations, history, and religion impact the behavior of states. It is often critical of positions taken by the rival journal, Foreign Affairs.
In 1989, The National Interest published Francis Fukuyama’s famous and controversial article, The End of History? In covering the fall of Soviet Communism, The National Interest featured contributors included not only specialists like Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest but also Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow. The magazine was one of the first to devote attention to questions such as geo-economics and in more recent issues has explored concepts such as "superpower fatigue" and "developmental realism."
The magazine has an international readership, and its articles are excerpted in newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Financial Times, the Australian, the International Herald Tribune, Korea’s Shin Dong-A, the London Spectator, and Austria’s Europaische Rundschau, as well as on online sites such as Inosmi.ru.
In 2005, a number of members of The National Interest's editorial board led by Fukuyama, claiming to be upset by the Nixon Center's changes to editorial policy, decided to leave the journal and create a rival publication, The American Interest. While the magazine still has contributions from neoconservative and liberal authors, it has in recent issues articulated growing opposition to a number of Bush Administration policies, including skepticism about democracy promotion and the feasibility of taking military action against Iran. The magazine also tends to support continued engagement with China and Russia despite non-democratic practices at home and challenges to U.S. policies abroad. Articles by a number of long-time conservative thinkers--Robert Tucker and Graham Fuller among them--have questioned the conservative credentials of the administration, and the magazine has tended to gravitate toward positions taken by Senator Chuck Hagel, to a lesser extent Dick Lugar (with the exception of his stance on policy toward Russia) and John Warner.
In 2006, the magazine adopted a new, glossier cover format, based around a central image and tagline, making it look more like the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs or Foreign Policy than Foreign Affairs or Commentary, which have only text on their covers. The magazine also added daily online content to its website.
While more expensive on a per-page basis, in 2006 and early 2007, The National Interest is typically shorter (~100 pp.) and cheaper ($7.00/issue) than Foreign Affairs and, to a lesser extent, The American Interest. Articles in The National Interest are substantially shorter than those in, for example, Foreign Affairs. In the January/February 2007 issues of the magazines, no article in The National Interest exceeded 10 pages, while all eight items in the essays section of Foreign Affairs exceeded 10 pages, with some exceeding 20 pages in length.
[edit] Editors
The Advisory Council is chaired by James Schlesinger. The magazine's honorary chairman is Henry Kissinger. Dimitri K. Simes is the Publisher, while Paul J. Saunders is the Associate Publisher.
The advisory council members include: Morton Abramowitz, Graham Allison, Conrad Black, John Mearsheimer, Daniel Pipes, and Dov Zakheim. The contributing editors include: Aluf Benn, Ian Bremmer, Ted Galen Carpenter, Alexis Debat, John Hulsman, Alexey Pushkov, David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Ray Takeyh.
The journal's chief editor is Nikolas Gvosdev.
