Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A historian of U.S. foreign policy, he analyzes contemporary problems in American strategy and diplomacy.

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 the United States decided to pursue global military dominance as an effectively perpetual project.

Named one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age” by Prospect magazine, Wertheim regularly comments on current events. His essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He has also been interviewed on C-SPAN, Deutsche Welle, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS. All his commentary may be viewed here.

 In recent years, Wertheim was a distinguished lecturer at Catholic University, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, and a visiting lecturer at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He previously 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. 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 received a PhD in history from Columbia University in 2015 and an AB summa cum laude in history from Harvard University in 2007.