QI’s Stephen Wertheim Named “One of the World’s Top 50 Thinkers”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 17, 2020

CONTACT: Jessica Rosenblum, Quincy Institute, 202.800.4662/ [email protected]

Prospect Magazine has named Stephen Wertheim, Co-Founder and Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, as one of the world’s fifty top thinkers reshaping our times in 2020.

Since 2004, Prospect, a UK magazine, has been identifying leading minds of the moment based on their real-world relevance. This year’s list includes the economists Stephanie Kelton and Thomas Piketty, intellectuals like Ross Douthat and Cornell West, and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Prospect has selected Wertheim because it deems him “the most interesting expert rethinking U.S. foreign policy” today. The magazine notes that his vision for U.S. engagement in the world, while still controversial in Washington’s foreign policy community, is gaining in salience. “With polls finding younger Americans support Wertheim’s anti-war stance,” the magazine writes, “his ideas could soon become mainstream.”

In 2019 Wertheim helped to launch the Quincy Institute, a think tank dedicated to promoting  ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace. 

In October, Wertheim will publish a book entitled Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. In an impassioned narrative, Wertheim will reveal how U.S. leaders made the decision to pursue global military domination in the early years of World War II. This decision, he argues, was the point of origin of today’s endless wars. 

And in a lead essay in the March/April 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs, Wertheim argues that America’s quest for military dominance “has not merely failed to provide security as it is narrowly defined. It has also damaged the environment, undercut the economic interests of most Americans, and destabilized democracy.”

“Stephen has been compelling and prolific in calling out America’s foreign policy malpractice,” said Lora Lumpe, CEO of the Quincy Institute. “He is a strong and trenchant voice challenging the incompatibility of America’s longstanding strategy of global military domination with the critical need to pivot our economy and foreign policy to challenge the most pressing threats to our nation and the planet.”

In addition to writing essays in major outlets in the United States, Stephen has published scholarly articles on a range of subjects in U.S. foreign policy, including grand strategy, international law, world organization, colonial empire, and humanitarian intervention. 

Visit Prospect Magazine to read more about Stephen and vote to select Prospect’s top 10 thinkers for 2020.

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