Foreign policy by bumper sticker.

• Author: Burt, Richard
• Position: The Realist - Essay

The world today is quite different from the one of thirty years ago, when The National Interest published its first issue. Since then, immensely important changes, both at home and abroad, have taken place that continue to confound American political elites.

Among the most significant was the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union, a state which TNTs founding editors described as "the single greatest threat to America's interests," saying it would "continue to [be] so for the foreseeable future." Yet the USSR ceased to exist in 1991, just six years after the magazine's start.

This is certainly not a reflection on The National Interests founding editors, Owen Harries and Robert Tucker, both of whom set a very high bar indeed for their successors. No one, including inside the Soviet Union itself, anticipated how and when it would fall--to use Ronald Reagan's language--into the ash heap of history. Conventional wisdom on both the left and right was that the Soviet Union would remain a viable enterprise.

Despite the disintegration of America's long-term superpower rival, more than two decades later the world remains perilous and unpredictable. In fact, in some ways today's international environment is even more threatening than that of the late Cold War period--to begin with, Mikhail Gorbachev is not governing Russia. Or China, for that matter. At the same time, Europe is once again a theater for military confrontation, and the crisis in Ukraine is driving an emotionally charged rivalry over a country where Moscow sees threats to its essential interests.

More importantly, thirty years ago, both sides were prepared to live with the geopolitical status quo even if neither was fully satisfied with it. Contrary to conventional wisdom at the time, the Soviet Union had already passed its prime by 1985 and was increasingly on the defensive internationally. On the American side, notwithstanding then president Ronald Reagan's rhetoric, Washington was not aggressively promoting regime change in the USSR.

Today, while there is legitimate debate about how far President Vladimir Putin is prepared to go in increasing Moscow's influence in the post-Soviet space and the world arena, he and his associates regularly acknowledge their revisionist aspirations. While the Obama administration denies any intent to promote regime change in Russia, Putin and his colleagues have strong suspicions to the contrary. Indeed, he and many other leaders outside the West argue that by seeking to promote their values worldwide, the United States and its allies are themselves the revisionists and threaten both their nations' interests and their legitimacy.

For its part, China, preoccupied primarily with stability, domestic reform and economic growth, was not yet a major geopolitical presence. That has changed. Today, Beijing is steadily expanding its military capabilities, regional assertiveness and geo-political reach in ways both large and small that increasingly challenge the U.S.-led international order. Despite domestic and international setbacks, China is already the economic superpower that the Soviet Union never was. Great forces of history are working at cross-purposes on the Eurasian landmass.

The same holds true in the Middle East. Thirty years ago, Iraq and Iran, two of the region's leading military powers, were locked in a deadly war that would end in a stalemate. Today, as the result of America's imprudent military intervention, Iraq, now heavily influenced by Tehran, is battling the suicidal extremists of the Islamic State; Iran itself has emerged as a growing power and nuclear threshold state.

Nevertheless, while the international political and economic environments are vastly different today than when The National Interest first appeared, the fundamental objective of the magazine, defined by the original editors, remains appropriate. As the editors explained, "We find ourselves...