But the university really doesn’t like professors to take strongly what it regards as partisan positions. We had always said that we were decidedly centrists, we weren’t going to take strong ideological positions, or the magazine as a whole wouldn’t represent a strong ideological position, but I think with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, that position has become a little bit problematic.Įven as a political scientist and a Stanford senior fellow, we have academic freedom to say whatever we want. The other thing that I think we’ve tried to do in the last couple of years is to shift a little bit our political emphasis. has become something very hard to explain to anybody. So we said that we were going to try to explain the world to the United States, which is what other foreign policy-oriented magazines do, but also, importantly, to try to explain the United States to the rest of the world.Īnd I must say that in the 15 years that have passed, that job has become even harder-because in many respects, to me at least, the U.S. And that lack of understanding and communication was one of the reasons we created the magazine. We founded The American Interest in 2005 in the wake of the Iraq War because it seemed to us that a huge gap had opened up between the way that Americans saw the world and the way that other people in other parts of the world were looking at things. Adam really put this whole enterprise on a terrific basis and Jeff has expanded the reach with all of the events that they’ve been doing in Washington and now online. I’d like to thank Jeff in particular, I think he’s done a spectacular job as the editor. It’s really a pleasure to be able to do this event. And since then we’ve had the privilege to operate under the editorial leadership of Francis Fukuyama, which has been both a privilege and a pleasure.įrancis Fukuyama: Thank you very much, Charles and Jeff.

Our first issue came out in August 2005 under our founding editor, Adam Garfinkle. I should mention, this is the 15 th anniversary of The American Interest. Charles Davidson for TAI: Welcome to you all.

Francis fukuyama political decay