Positions
In 1989, NI 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 and liberal 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 even published some right-wing libertarian views regarding freedom, the role of the executive, and foreign intervention.
The magazine 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 Richard Lugar (with the exception of his stance on policy toward Russia) and John Warner.
Read more about this topic: The National Interest
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