Stephen Wertheim is a historian and analyst of America’s role in the world. He is the Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think-tank he co-founded in 2019 after holding faculty positions at Columbia University and Birkbeck, University of London.

Stephen is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020). The book reveals how, in the lead-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. officials and intellectuals made a decision to pursue global military dominance as a perpetual project. Stephen has also published academic articles on ideas of U.S. foreign relations from the nineteenth century to the present, examining such subjects as security policy, international law, world organization, and humanitarian intervention.

Stephen regularly writes about current events. 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,” a designation that looks more and more dubious each time he loses his phone around the house.He was previously a Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and held postdoctoral fellowships at King’s College, University of Cambridge, and Princeton University. Stephen received a PhD in History from Columbia University in 2015 and an AB summa cum laude in History from Harvard University in 2007.