stephen wertheim

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Stephen Wertheim is a historian of U.S. foreign relations and an analyst of current problems in American strategy and diplomacy. He is a Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School.

Wertheim has published scholarly research on a range of subjects and concepts in U.S. foreign policy from the late nineteenth century to the present. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020), a Foreign Affairs book of the year, which reveals how U.S. officials and intellectuals decided to pursue global military dominance as the effectively permanent project.

Named one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers” by Prospect magazine, Wertheim 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 given interviews on CNN, C-SPAN, Deutsche Welle, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS. 

Wertheim was previously Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think-tank he co-founded in 2019. In recent years, he taught at Catholic University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Yale Law School, and held a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck, University of London. He received a PhD from Columbia University in 2015, an MPhil from Columbia in 2011, and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2007, all in history.

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