The National Interest

The National Interest (TNI) is an American bi-monthly international affairs magazine published by the Center for the National Interest. It is associated with the realist school of foreign policy thought. It was founded in 1985 by Irving Kristol and until 2001 was edited by Anglo-Australian Owen Harries. 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.

Positions

In 1989, TNI published Francis Fukuyama's controversial article, "The End of History?". In covering the fall of the Soviet Union, The National Interest's 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 geoeconomics and has explored concepts such as "superpower fatigue" and "developmental realism".

In 2005, 10 of the 14 members of NI's editorial board, led by Fukuyama and upset by the Nixon Center's changes to editorial policy, decided to leave the journal and create a rival publication, The American Interest. This split was seen as representative of a larger schism among Republicans and the end of an uneasy alliance between neoconservatives and realists that had characterized the Reagan years. In recent issues articles broadly critical of the direction of foreign policy under the George W. Bush administration have been published by senior members of the old Republican party establishment, most recently Brent Scowcroft and James Baker.

While The National Interest still has contributions from neoconservative authors, it articulated growing opposition to a number of Bush Administration policies, including skepticism about democracy promotion and the feasibility of taking military action against Iran; in recent years, NI has published some ultra-conservative views regarding freedom, the role of the executive, and foreign intervention.

The magazine tends to support continued engagement with China and Russia. 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 Richard Lugar (with the exception of his stance on policy toward Russia) and John Warner, all Republicans.

Readership and design

TNI has an international readership, and excerpts from its articles have been published in the New York Times, Financial Times, The Australian, International Herald Tribune, Shin Dong-A, The Spectator, and Austria's Europäische Rundschau, as well as on online sites such as the Russian InoSMI.ru.

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 as opposed to the staid, text-only covers of Foreign Affairs or Commentary. The magazine also added daily online content to its website.

Editors

Since July 2013, the magazine's editor is Jacob Heilbrunn. Harry Kazianis is Executive Editor. Zachary Keck serves as Managing Editor. Other notable editors include John Allen Gay, Robert Golan-Vilella, Rebecca M. Miller and Akhilesh Pillalamarri. The Advisory Council was chaired by James Schlesinger until his death in 2014. The magazine's honorary chairman is Henry Kissinger. Dimitri K. Simes is the Publisher, while Paul J. Saunders is the Associate Publisher.

Among the members of the magazine's advisory council are Morton Abramowitz, Graham Allison, John Mearsheimer, and Dov Zakheim. The contributing editors are Andrew J. Bacevich, Ian Bremmer, Ted Galen Carpenter, Bruce Hoffman, Andrew Kohut, Paul R. Pillar, and Kenneth M. Pollack. Anatol Lieven and former editor Nikolas Gvosdev serve as Senior Editors.^[1]

Alexis Debat resigned as a contributing editor in September 2007 after revelations appeared in the French and American press that he had fabricated interviews with leading U.S. political figures for the French magazine Politique Internationale.

See also

• The American Interest, founded in 2005 by former members of the NI editorial board
• National Affairs
• Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy

References

External links

• Official website