Bret Stephens

I’m an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. I also have a weekly published conversation on current affairs with my friend, colleague and sparring partner, Gail Collins.

What I Cover

Since joining The Times in 2017, I have written about everything from China’s long-term decline to the enduring relevance of Edmund Burke to my grandmother’s advice about sex to my misgivings about The Times’s 1619 Project. I’m often described as a conservative, though I’ve been a harsh critic of the direction of the Republican Party. I believe in free enterprise, free trade, free speech, and the need to safeguard the institutions of democracy at home and abroad. I also think it’s healthy to be able to change your mind and to say so publicly — as I have about Trump voters and climate change.

My Background

My hometown is Mexico City. I studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago and comparative politics at the London School of Economics. I worked for The Wall Street Journal in Brussels, where I mainly covered European topics, and was editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, where I covered Middle Eastern ones. For many years I was The Journal’s foreign-affairs columnist, for which I won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. I’m the author of “America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.” In 2022, the government of Russia barred me for life.

Journalistic Ethics

Every word I publish in The Times is rigorously fact-checked and edited. I am a national judge of the Livingston Awards but recuse myself whenever work is submitted by colleagues or personal acquaintances. The Times alone pays for my reporting trips. I don’t blurb books unless they are excerpts from columns or commissioned reviews. I sit on a few academic and nonprofit advisory boards, from which I derive no income or other benefit. Work I perform outside The Times is approved by The Times. I’m not on Twitter — sorry, “X” — or any other form of social media. Learn more about The Times’s standards.

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