Over and Out.

• Author: Harries, Owen
• Position: Editor retires

WITH THIS issue of The National Interest--the sixty-fourth--I am retiring as its editor. I arrived in Washington, DC in 1983, a displaced Welsh-Australian knowing hardly a soul in the country let alone the city, and having just finished a seven-year spell working for the Australian government. In little over a year, and with only a very modest experience in the editing business to recommend me, I was invited to launch and run an ambitious new foreign policy magazine. As they say, only in America.

The initiators and risk-takers in this venture were Irving Kristol and Michael Joyce, who was then just taking up the position of CEO in the recently formed Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. I am profoundly grateful to both of them for what turned out to be the most enjoyable and rewarding job of my life. Their only concession to caution in placing their bets on someone who was, literally, a rank outsider was to persuade Robert Tucker, a distinguished scholar and commentator in the field of international relations, to become co-editor. He was meant, I believe, to provide what the cricketing English refer to as a "safe pair of hands", should I prove to be too erratic. A co-editor arrangement can be tricky, but this one worked fine during the four years it was in place.

The National Interest was conceived not as a journal but as a magazine, not as an academic publication but as an intellectual one, not as a disinterested voice but as a committed one. Although our main focus of interest was to be foreign policy, we interpreted the subject broadly and were interested in, among other things, the history of ideas, religion, novels and poetry, anthropology, military history and movies. We wanted good clear writing and a minimum of jargon. We dispensed with "peer review" and trusted our own judgment. We tolerated footnotes reluctantly, though we have steadily given ground on this over the years.

In our opening editorial--and indeed in our choice of name--we made it clear that the disposition of the magazine would be a realist one: that is, that it would respect the primacy of self-interest as a motive, and of power as a means, in an international system that lacked a polity. As for our commitment, we were unapologetic cold warriors who firmly believed that America's opponent in that protracted conflict was indeed an evil empire. The year that The National Interest was launched was also the year that Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as Soviet leader, but the...