After a quiet start, the National Interest steadily gained prestige and influence. Oddly, though we could be fairly characterised as a “Cold War magazine” when we began (in our first issue, we asserted quite firmly that “the Soviet Union constitutes the greatest single threat to America’s interests, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future”), we performed rather better after the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union. We took up the questions of the nature of the post-Cold War era, and of the appropriate American foreign policy for it, more quickly and in more lively fashion than most others. Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” (1989) gave us a flying start, and we have continued to be pace-setters in the discussion of the character of the new era.