stephen wertheim

home book  /  scholarship  /  commentary  /  reviews  /  interviews  /  about

 

 

Stephen Wertheim is a historian of the United States in the world and analyst of contemporary American grand strategy. He is a Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

 

A person in a suit

Description automatically generated with medium confidenceStephen is the author of  Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020), which reveals how U.S. officials and intellectuals, in the lead-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, decided to pursue global military dominance as the effectively permanent project of the United States.

 

Named one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age” by Prospect magazine, Stephen regularly writes about current events. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. He has also appeared on CNN, C-SPAN, Deutsche Welle, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS. 

 

Stephen has published scholarship on a range of subjects and concepts in U.S. foreign policy, including international law, world organization, colonial empire, humanitarian intervention, public opinion, and “isolationism.” His research on the intellectual origins of the League of Nations won the Fischel-Calhoun Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

 

Stephen was previously Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think-tank he co-founded in 2019. He has taught at Catholic University, Columbia University, and Yale Law School, and held a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck, University of London. He also held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and King’s College, University of Cambridge.

 

Stephen received a PhD from Columbia University in 2015. He received an MPhil from Columbia in 2011 and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2007.

 

In his spare time, Stephen thinks up comedy ideas, talks about them, and fails to carry them out.