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Ravi Agrawal has edited Foreign Policy through a pandemic, a war in Ukraine, and now a widening conflict in Iran that has tested long-standing assumptions about America’s role in the world.

After more than a decade in television, Agrawal joined Foreign Policy in 2018 as managing editor and became editor in chief two years later. Since 2020, he has expanded the magazine’s international reach while maintaining its focus on expert-driven analysis.

Born in London and raised in Kolkata, Agrawal describes himself as an “insider outsider.” That global perspective has shaped his thinking about foreign affairs journalism at a time when US foreign policy is becoming more inward-looking and international news is often framed through its implications for Washington. When we spoke, he argued that important stories should not be filtered through a US lens. “If a story is important in another part of the world,” he said, “it is important in and of itself.”

In March, that philosophy informed Foreign Policy’s decision to lift its paywall for forty-eight hours on coverage of the Iran conflict. The publication’s reliance on subscriptions and belief that rigorous, nonpartisan foreign affairs journalism is worth paying for made it a choice to put the public interest ahead of its business model. “Given how live the debate over the war was,” Agrawal said, “we wanted a broader global group to be able to access these pieces.”

He spoke about covering the world beyond Washington, Foreign Policy’s evolving audience, the challenges facing international journalism, and what the next generation of journalists will need to navigate an increasingly fragmented and dangerous landscape. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

MO: You’ve edited Foreign Policy through multiple administrations and global crises. What feels fundamentally different about the job today compared with five or ten years ago?

RA: We’re a nonpartisan magazine. We were very critical of the Biden administration, whether it was the withdrawal from Afghanistan or the way it handled the Middle East after October 7. And we have also been very critical of the Trump administration for the way it has handled those very same issues, the Middle East, the war in Iran, and the upending of the transatlantic relationship. The key for us is to publish a broad range of expert-driven analysis and arguments, and to do so without fear or favor.

Historically, Foreign Policy was built around a relatively stable foreign policy establishment audience. Has that audience changed in recent years?

We still have the audience we’ve always had, but we’ve expanded it. Today, about half of our subscribers are in the United States and half are spread across the rest of the world, largely in English-speaking countries such as India, Canada, the UK, Australia, Singapore, and Germany. Since I became editor, we’ve launched newsletters focused on different regions, including Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. We want writers based in the places they’re covering, bringing perspectives informed by those regions, rather than just Washington. 

We’re rooted in journalism, but also in expertise. We publish policymakers, academics, and practitioners alongside journalists. What matters less to me is where someone falls on an ideological spectrum and more whether they’re grounding their work in expertise, lived experience, or deep study.

One assumption that shaped foreign affairs journalism for decades was that the US would remain deeply engaged in the world. How has the second Trump administration changed how you think about coverage?

At Foreign Policy, we have always felt that if a story is important in another part of the world, it is important in and of itself. If India and Pakistan are fighting a war, that is interesting in and of itself—you have two countries among the top six in the world by population going to war. That analysis does not need to end with “and this matters for Washington, because dot-dot-dot.”

With that caveat, there is no doubt that under the Trump administration the United States is approaching the world differently. It has dramatically cut foreign aid. There is a greater sense that engagement with the United States is transactional, and less emphasis on values-driven alignments or multilateralism. Gone are the assumptions that the United States will profess its values and expect other countries to follow along.

At the start of the war in Iran, Foreign Policy temporarily lifted its paywall on Iran coverage. What drove that decision, and what does it reveal about how you think about the magazine’s public service role?

With the Iran war, we were very proud of the depth and range of our coverage. It was not just directly on Iran or Israel or the United States, but included a range of other players in the Gulf and globally. We had made the case that while the parties in this conflict were each suffering, some of the biggest sufferers were in the Global South and in Asia. A country like the Philippines, Pakistan, or India gets the vast majority of its energy and commodities from the Gulf—a higher price of crude, a more expensive dollar, and limited fiscal room to subsidize energy for their people. 

We brought in a lot of new readers who registered to read for free and generated a lot of traffic. I won’t lie: our hope is that some of those people will one day subscribe. Foreign Policy is a fairly expensive subscription, but given the turmoil our industry faces, we charge a high fee because we think we are valuable and need to sustain our work in the right way, not through advertising or traffic dependent on the algorithms of big tech companies. We want direct relationships with our readers.

There has been growing criticism of how Western media frames conflicts differently depending on geography, race, or strategic importance. Have those conversations changed editorial practices at Foreign Policy?

We are cognizant of the broader critique of Western media, and that at least some part of that critique may apply to us as well. We are not perfect, and we are constantly learning. We also believe there are many global issues that deserve sustained coverage beyond the conflicts that dominate headlines. In our magazine, you’ll find lengthy discussions of Sudan, Ethiopia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia alongside coverage of Iran and Ukraine.

We’ve worked hard to avoid parachute journalism by building a presence in the regions we cover and actively seeking contributors from places where we need more coverage and expertise. We recognize there’s much more we could be doing.

Looking ahead, what will the next generation of foreign affairs journalists need to understand that previous generations took for granted?

First, journalism is a much more dangerous profession today than it was twenty or fifty years ago. News organizations have to take far greater precautions, whether they’re reporting from conflict zones or from countries where press freedoms are under threat.

The second thing is that international journalists have to be extremely skeptical of the government line. Every government will have its own version of events, as we are seeing with the Iran war right now. It’s especially important to diversify sources, test claims, and understand what different actors are saying and why.

We’re entering a world in which the global order is under strain. Countries don’t always follow the rules and norms they once did, and many actors operate with a degree of impunity that wasn’t as common before. Trusting your sources is harder than it has ever been. International journalists, in particular, have to resist centering nationalism and instead focus on understanding what all sides are saying—and locating, within that, what the truth and reality might be.

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