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September 08, 2005
Paying back with Interest
You know what I love? Policy journals. I really can't get enough of 'em. So it's great news for me that Adam Garfinkle, onetime editor of The National Interest and current State Department speechwriter, has a new one called The American Interest.
You really can't beat the mag's editorial board, which is chaired by Francis Fukuyama and includes Zbigniew Brzezinski*, Walter Russell Mead, and James Q. Wilson (who totally wrote my AP Government textbook from back in the day!), to name just a few. They've also got a "global advisory council," which i guess means the editors who aren't themselves American, and this has Niall Ferguson and Bernard Henri-Levy among many others.
A quick perusal of the masthead shows an impressively diverse collection of thinkers, but it's difficult to shake the feeling that the publication will have a conservative slant. There's certainly no question where Garfinkle is coming from, and Fukuyama is pretty far to the right, despite his criticisms of neoconservatism and of the Iraq war. Also, it can't be coincidence that the new journal pops up within a couple months of The Public Interest closing up shop.
If the first issue is any indication, AI will suffer at least a little from being unsure about whether it's supposed to be a magazine or a policy journal. Nonetheless, with a surprisingly comprehensive spectrum of opinions represented, and features like the Toolbox (this time around it was a memo to the president on seven things he can do today to improve port security), I know I'll be looking forward to the next issue.
*Full disclosure: I can't spell Zbigniew Brzezinski off the top of my head.
Posted by matt at September 8, 2005 09:32 AM
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