Stephen Wertheim

Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a historian of U.S. foreign policy and an analyst of contemporary problems in American grand strategy. During the 2022-23 academic year, he is a distinguished lecturer in history at Catholic University and a visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School.

Wertheim is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020), which reveals how U.S. leaders decided, in the lead-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, to pursue global military dominance as an effectively perpetual project. He has published scholarly research on a range of subjects in U.S. foreign policy since the late nineteenth century, including humanitarian intervention, international law, international organization, colonial empire, and global public opinion.

Wertheim regularly comments on current events and was named one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age” by Prospect magazine. His essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. His TV and radio appearances include C-SPAN, Deutsche Welle, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS. His commentary may be viewed here.
 
Before coming to Carnegie, Wertheim was director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank he co-founded in 2019. He also held faculty positions in history at Columbia University and Birkbeck, University of London, and postdoctoral research fellowships at Princeton University and King’s College, University of Cambridge. 

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