Bret Stephens is the foreign affairs columnist of The Wall Street Journal, as well as the deputy editor responsible for the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal Asia and Europe. He is a member of the paper’s editorial board and a regular panelist on The Journal Editorial Report, a weekly political talk show carried nationally by the Fox News Channel.
Mr. Stephens began his career at Commentary magazine and joined the Journal as an op-ed editor in New York in 1998. He later worked for the paper as an editorial writer in Brussels. In January 2002 he was named editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, a position he assumed at the age of 28. At the Post, he was responsible for its news, editorial, digital and international editions. He also wrote a weekly column and oversaw the most extensive redesign of the paper in its then-70 year history.
Mr. Stephens returned to the Journal in late 2004. In January 2005 he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, where he had previously been a media fellow. He has won numerous journalistic awards, including the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, the Frank Knox Award for coverage of military affairs, the Bastiat prize for coverage of economic issues, and the South Asian Journalists Association award for his coverage of the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir. He has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer prize.
Mr. Stephens has reported stories from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, Mexico, South Africa and Indonesia, among other countries, and interviewed dozens of world leaders, including Benazir Bhutto, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Vaclav Havel and every Israeli Prime Minister since Shimon Peres. He has appeared on Charlie Rose, Fareed Zakaria GPS, the Brian Lehrer Show, the BBC and NPR, and he has been the subject of profiles and stories in Die Zeit (Germany), Il Foglio (Italy), the Marker (Israel), the Boston Globe and the New York Observer.
In 2009, the Atlantic Monthly named Mr. Stephens to its list of the most influential pundits in the United States. The magazine noted that “Stephens can make the conservative case for a hawkish foreign policy and American unilateralism so convincingly that he has persuaded more than a few liberals to join his side. In prose that is sophisticated but disarmingly casual, he favors objective moral calculus over the pure self-interest espoused by most on the foreign-policy right.”
Mr. Stephens was raised in Mexico City and educated at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. He lives in New York City with his wife and their three children.