About The National Interest
The National Interest is an award-winning online publication focusing on defense issues, national security, military affairs and hardware, foreign policy, and U.S. politics.
Transparency Statement:
The National Interest is owned and operated by the Center for the National Interest. All The National Interest content should be considered opinion or analysis unless marked otherwise.
Corrections Policy: All corrections are noted at the bottom of any content that is in need of revision due to a mistake. Please email any corrections to [email protected].
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Our Mission
The National Interest (TNI) has served as an important forum for debates about American foreign policy and political realism since it was launched as a quarterly journal in 1985.
Its founding editors, the Australian scholar and diplomat Owen Harries and the American scholar Robert W. Tucker, were careful to stipulate in an introductory note to the new magazine that it was not about international affairs or world politics or international affairs. Instead, it was devoted, they wrote, to the “content, conduct, and making of American foreign policy, and the ideas that inform all three.” A flavor of its early approach may be gleaned from an essay by its publisher Irving Kristol who observed in the opening issue that “an era of American foreign policy—the era of liberal internationalism—is coming to an end.” Kristol continued, “In the years ahead, the United States will be far less inhibited in its use of military power, with or without the approval of its allies.”
In its early years, the magazine reflected debates about the ongoing Cold War within the foreign policy establishment. Yet it was only with the fall of the Berlin Wall, as Harries later observed, that TNI came into its own, starting with the bombshell publication in the summer of 1989 of Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?”
Harries and Tucker published a symposium in that very issue that included one from Kristol who tartly declared, “I don’t believe a word of it.” The opening shots of a prolonged debate over America’s purpose after the end of the Cold War had been fired and, incidentally, the magazine had discovered its own mission—to provoke and promote debate, particularly between neoconservatives, on the one hand, and realists, on the other. A galaxy of prominent authors weighed in, ranging from Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to former U.N. ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, from former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski to Fareed Zakaria. It is also the case that the magazine helped to foster a new generation of young editors such as Gideon Rose, who became editor of Foreign Affairs, and Michael Lind, a well-known public intellectual.
In 2001, the publication was acquired by The Nixon Center, which later became the Center for the National Interest. From that year onward, TNI’s editors have included Adam Garfinkle, Nikolas Gvosdev, Justine Rosenthal and Robert W. Merry. The current, and longest-serving editor since the formative Harries era, is Jacob Heilbrunn. He has interviewed the magazine’s late chairman Henry Kissinger, solicited essays from a wide variety of younger writers, and above all, sought to maintain its quest to define and explicate, as far as possible, America’s true national interests.