Rethinking the National Interest : American Realism for a New World

By : Condoleezza Rice - From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2008

Listen to this essay on CFR.org

What is the national interest? This is a question that I took up in 2000 in these pages. That was a time that we as a nation revealingly called "the post-Cold War era." We knew better where we had been than where we were going. Yet monumental changes were unfolding -- changes that were recognized at the time but whose implications were largely unclear.