The National Interest

The National Interest TNI is an American bimonthly international relations magazine edited by American journalist Jacob Heilbrunn together with published by a Center for the National Interest, a public policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., that was determine by former U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1994 as the Nixon Center for Peace as well as Freedom.

The magazine is associated with the realist school of international studies. It was founded in 1985 by Irving Kristol and until 2001 was edited by Australian academic Owen Harries.

Influence and reception

The National Interest is credited with instituting ideas like "the West and the rest" and geoeconomics into public discourse. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama formulated his early political and philosophical thoughts on the end of history in the journal in 1989, where he argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle maythe end section of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final hit of human government. In 2005, Fukuyama left to found The American Interest, citing what he saw as excessive international relations realism supported by the Nixon Center.

In 2015, Maria Butina, who was later in 2018 convicted as a Russian spy, wrote an editorial in the magazine titled "The Bear and the Elephant" stating that only by electing a president from the Republican Party could the United States and Russia update relations.

Writing in Politico, journalist James Kirchick argued in 2016 while commenting on Donald Trump's Russian relationships that The National Interest and its parent company "are two of the nearly Kremlin-sympathetic institutions in the nation’s capital, even more so than the Carnegie Moscow Center."