In the 1990s, NR had to adjust to the post-Cold War environment. The loss of the Soviet Union as a "moral other" coincided with a crackup on the right. The end of the Cold War accelerated existing antipathies by removing a clear, shared policy goal. Once the sole conservative magazine of significance, NR was challenged by Chronicles, the voice of the intellectual Old Right that provided ideological ballast to Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge. A second challenge came from Rupert Murdoch’s The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative weekly that represented a Washington-centric stance. Other rivals, including The American Spectator, AM radio, and nascent websites, promoted a more luridly partisan approach to politics.
How did the once-flagship magazine navigate the loss of its figurehead, the Cold War, and its premier status? The magazine shifted toward a harder anti-immigration position but also some cultural libertarianism and reframed aspects of the Cold War in a domestic context, casting liberal elites as new totalitarians. However, NR fundamentally declined in stature and function. It was ideologically fatigued and less relevant in a diversifying and more saturated media environment. This change in fortune highlighted larger shifts in the right-wing ecosystem, marking a transformation in intellectual, political, and power networks on the American right away from a more coherent intellectual movement, not to be overstated, toward a more diffuse and unwieldy partisan bloc with a neoconservative-inflected Beltway establishment appended on.