How I Got My Career in Foreign Policy: Sadanand Dhume
Dhume studied sociology at Delhi University, then journalism at Columbia where he says he learned “the value of brevity and clarity,” and international relations at Princeton where he gained “the appetite for the…
Source: Council on Foreign Relations · August 13, 2026 at 9:14 AM · AI-assisted report
Opinion
WASHINGTON, 13 AUGUST 2026 —
Dhume studied sociology at Delhi University, then journalism at Columbia where he says he learned “the value of brevity and clarity,” and international relations at Princeton where he gained “the appetite for the complexity of issues such as economic development and religious extremism.” The combination shaped his style once he joined the Far Eastern Economic Review as India bureau chief in the late 1990s.
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At FEER he covered topics other editors dismissed as “obscure or unsexy,” such as power-sector reform in Odisha. “I went to one of India’s poorest states to look at privatisation of electricity distribution companies,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations.
The magazine’s willingness to let reporters choose their own beats gave Dhume “a luxury that was already rare then and is rarer now.” FEER’s blend of politics and economics also exposed him to the breadth of South and Southeast Asia, a foundation for his later work in Indonesia.
After FEER closed, Dhume wrote a book on the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia, My Friend the Fanatic, sparked by the 2002 Bali bombings. He then turned to opinion writing, launching a biweekly column in the Wall Street Journal’s Asian edition in 2007. The column, edited in Hong Kong, brought his analysis to a wider American readership when US editions occasionally republished it.
“It was how my work first became part of the public conversation on India and South Asia in the United States,” he said.
The transition to think-tank research began in 2010 when Dhume joined the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “The Indian economy was booming and Washington realised you couldn’t understand Asia without India,” he said.
His move from journalism to policy analysis showed, according to Dhume, that “the two worlds are closer than many people think,” provided the writer is willing to trade the columnist’s immediate feedback loop for the slower, deeper work of policy papers and books.
Writing a book, Dhume found, requires unlearning habits learned in journalism. “An 850-word column is my natural game,” he said. “I expect instant gratification, immediate edits and next-day publication.” A 100,000-word book inverts that ratio: years of work with no guaranteed audience until the final pages. Yet the journalist’s discipline—testing ideas in short form, gathering reader reactions—helped him structure the book.
The trade-off is stark, according to Dhume: “With a column, ten thousand angry people yell at you the day after; with a book, you might never hear from most of your readers.”
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