Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He analyzes America’s role in the world—past and present—in order to address current problems in U.S. strategy and diplomacy. In the 2025-26 academic year, he is a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School.

A historian, Wertheim has published scholarly research on a range of subjects and concepts in U.S. foreign policy since the late nineteenth century. 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, and The Washington Post. He has given interviews on CNN, C-SPAN, Deutsche Welle, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS.

All of his scholarship and commentary may be viewed here.

In recent years, Wertheim has taught at Catholic University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Yale Law School, and held a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck, University of London. Before coming to Carnegie, he was director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank he co-founded in 2019.

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