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 international order and writes widely about contemporary problems in American grand strategy.
He has published scholarly research on U.S. ideas and projects of diplomatic engagement, international law, world organization, colonial empire, and humanitarian intervention. In his book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020), he reveals how U.S. leaders made a decision early in World War II to pursue global military dominance long into the future.
In 2020, Prospect magazine named him one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age.” His essays on contemporary issues have appeared in 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 writing may be viewed here.

Wertheim is currently a visiting faculty fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School. Before coming to Carnegie, he was director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which 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 from Harvard University in 2007.