Julius Krein is an American writer and editor best known as the founder of American Affairs, a quarterly journal launched in early 2017 that sought to give intellectual coherence to the nationalist and populist currents that surfaced around Donald Trump's rise. Before founding the journal, Krein had worked in finance, and he emerged as one of the more prominent young conservative intellectuals attempting to move the American right away from the free-market orthodoxy and libertarian assumptions that had dominated it since the Reagan era. He argued that the political establishment—on both left and right—had failed to reckon with the economic dislocations of globalization, deindustrialization, and financialization, and that a new governing philosophy was needed to address them.
Krein's central political preoccupation is industrial policy: the idea that the state should take an active, strategic role in shaping economic development, sustaining domestic manufacturing, and orienting productive capacity toward national interests rather than leaving these matters to markets alone. He has criticized what he sees as the hollowing out of the American productive economy, the outsized influence of finance, and an elite consensus that treats growth in aggregate terms while ignoring its uneven distribution across regions and classes. In this he draws on and revives older traditions of economic nationalism and developmental statecraft, positioning himself against the post-Cold War neoliberal settlement.
His trajectory also illustrates the volatility of the intellectual coalition around Trump. Having initially defended Trump as a vehicle for realignment, Krein publicly broke with him, expressing regret over that early support amid controversies during Trump's presidency. Yet he continued to press the underlying policy agenda through American Affairs, which became a venue for heterodox writing across the political spectrum on political economy, technology, and the relationship between state and market. Through the journal and his own essays and commentary, Krein has contributed to a broader rethinking—now shared by figures on both the populist right and parts of the left—of whether market-driven globalization can be reconciled with national cohesion and shared prosperity. His significance lies less in a fully worked-out doctrine than in his role as a catalyst for taking industrial policy and economic nationalism seriously as objects of intellectual debate.