Stephen Wertheim Keynote Speaker

Dr. Stephen Wertheim charts the past, present, and future of U.S. global power to provide orientation in turbulent times. He is an award-winning diplomatic historian, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, and a lecturer at Yale Law School.

Named one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age” by Prospect magazine, Dr. Wertheim is a leading voice on U.S. grand strategy, known for translating bold ideas into actionable insights. His op-eds have appeared in the Financial Times, Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post, and his essays in the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, New York Review of Books, and New Yorker. In these writings, Dr. Wertheim has, among other subjects, explained President Trump’s worldview, criticized U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iran, proposed new strategies toward China and Taiwan, and envisioned a post-American NATO.

Dr. Wertheim has published extensive scholarship on American foreign policy from the nineteenth century to the present — from U.S. rule of the Philippines to humanitarian interventions after the Cold War, from the origins of the United Nations to the enlargement of NATO. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020), a Foreign Affairs book of the year. Set during World War II, the book reveals how American officials and intellectuals decided to pursue global military primacy as a perpetual postwar project.

Dr. Wertheim co-founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where he served as director of grand strategy, and previously taught at Catholic University, Columbia University, and Princeton University. He received a PhD from Columbia University in 2015 and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2007.