Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he analyzes U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy as a historian. His book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, a Foreign Affairs book of the year, examines how the U.S. pursued global military dominance as a long-term strategy. His scholarly work spans U.S. foreign policy from the late nineteenth century to today.
President Trump is often interpreted as seeking to pull back from America's globe-spanning defense commitments and military deployments. Similarly, some say Trump is dividing the world into spheres of influence, asserting American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere while ceding overseas regions to China and Russia. But a “sphere of influence for me but not for thee” is a longstanding U.S. position — and Trump appears little different. This talk argues that Trump is attempting to reinvigorate U.S. military dominance on a global scale, but to recast it in America First terms. He retains the hard-power elements of America’s pursuit of primacy since the end of the Cold War, but introduces new purposes, justifications, and instruments that together mark a major qualitative evolution in American grand strategy.
Wertheim is a prominent commentator on current events, named one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age” by Prospect magazine. His essays appear in outlets like The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and he has been interviewed on C-SPAN, NPR, and PBS. Before Carnegie, he co-founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, serving as its director of grand strategy.
Wertheim has held academic positions at Columbia, Yale, Princeton, and the University of London, and postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton and Cambridge. He earned a PhD in history from Columbia University in 2015 and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2007.
