Nikolas Gvosdev

Who is Nikolas Gvosdev?

Nikolas N. Gvosdev is a Russian-American international relations scholar. He is the former Editor of the bi-monthly foreign policy journal, The National Interest. He was appointed to the post in 2005, after having been the journal's Executive Editor and the founding Editor of the journal's now-defunct separate web edition, In The National Interest. Upon leaving the editorship in 2008, he was succeeded by Justine Rosenthal; he remains associated with the journal as a contributing editor.

Gvosdev received his D.Phil. as a Rhodes Scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford. He writes widely as a specialist on US foreign policy as well as international politics as they affect Russia and its neighbors. He also edits the weblog, The Washington Realist. Gvosdev lived in Washington DC and served as Senior Fellow for strategic studies at the Nixon Center, and as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University and George Washington University until 2007. In 2008 he moved to Newport, RI and started teaching at the Naval War College. He is married with one son.

Along with Dimitri K. Simes, Anatol Lieven, and John Hulsman, Gvosdev is seen as one of the proponents of the "new realism" in foreign policy—one that acknowledges a greater role for values than traditional realpolitik as espoused by Henry Kissinger but nonetheless puts a stress on setting priorities. He has also been one of the strongest proponents for engagement with Russia and has tended to view Vladimir Putin's government in a more positive light than most American commentators, characterizing his regime as "managed pluralism" rather than as an outright authoritarian state. Along with Ray Takeyh, he was an early skeptic of the proposition that the spread of democracy in the Middle East would bring pro-American governments to power.