A discussion about foreign policy and the 2024 presidential election.
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 analyzes contemporary problems in American strategy and diplomacy. Wertheim is also a visiting lecturer at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020), which reveals how U.S. leaders, in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, decided to pursue global military dominance as an effectively perpetual project. Wertheim has published scholarly research on a range of subjects and concepts in U.S. foreign policy, including humanitarian intervention, international law, international organization, colonial empire, public opinion, and “isolationism.”
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, 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 appeared on C-SPAN, Deutsche Welle, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS. His commentary may be viewed here.
During the 2022-23 academic year, Wertheim was a distinguished lecturer in history at Catholic University and a visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School. 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 from Columbia University in 2015 and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2007.
A discussion about foreign policy and the 2024 presidential election.
A conversation about the origins of “isolationism,” the United States’ relative interests in the Middle East, Europe and Asia, Ukraine and Taiwan, and an “America first” policy for the Democratic party, among other subjects.
Sophia Besch sits down with Chris Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim to discuss why meaningful change in U.S. foreign policy is so difficult to achieve—and what it would take for the next American president to make such a change happen.
Over the past decade, leaders across the political spectrum have rejected the conceptual framework known as “engagement” that had guided U.S. policy toward China since the mid-1990s. Stephen Wertheim outlines the benefits of identifying a positive framework for U.S.-China relations and explores four conceptual frameworks for America's China strategy for the 2030s.
The era of unrivaled American primacy, in the shadow of the Soviet collapse, may be over. But a new era of responsible American leadership can begin.
U.S.-China relations have deteriorated to the point that war is a possible outcome. What strategic options exist for the next U.S. president on China? And what pathways exist towards more positive bilateral relations by 2035?
It has become difficult to imagine how Washington and Beijing might turn their relationship, which is so crucial to the future of world order, toward calmer waters. If there is to be any hope of doing so, however, policy experts need some realistic vision of what those calmer waters might look like.
Since World War II, many U.S. leaders have attempted to change the country’s foreign policy, and their efforts have often fallen short. Inertia is a powerful force.
The United States faces a looming crisis on the Korean Peninsula. Diplomacy has broken down, and the United States has focused mainly on strengthening its alliances with South Korea and Japan as the Kim regime grows more threatening. What options does the United States have to prevent war on the Peninsula?