About Bret Stephens

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 2010 Bastiat Award for his writings on economics, the 2008 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, and the 2008 Frank Knox Award for his coverage of military affairs. Stephens won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, having twice been nominated. In awarding the prize, the Pulitzer board cited “his incisive columns on American foreign policy and domestic politics, often enlivened by a contrarian twist.”

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 dozen 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.