Stephen Wertheim

Stephen Wertheim is a Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and 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 international order and an analyst of contemporary American grand strategy.

Wertheim has published scholarship on U.S. projects of international engagement across the twentieth century. In Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020), named a Foreign Affairs book of the year, he examines how the United States suddenly abandoned its hemispheric defense perimeter and decided to become the world’s dominant military power.

Wertheim frequently writes about current challenges in U.S. foreign policy. His essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Prospect magazine named him one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the COVID-19 age.”
Wertheim has previously taught at Columbia University and Birkbeck, University of London. He also served as Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He received an A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University, followed by an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University.