Stephen Wertheim

Deputy Director of Research and Policy

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

Stephen Wertheim is a historian of the United States in the world. He is Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute. He is also a Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.

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Wertheim specializes in U.S. foreign relations and international order from the late nineteenth century to the present. In his book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Oct. 2020), he reveals how U.S. leaders first made the decision to pursue military dominance, an objective that for most of American history had looked unnecessary at best and imperialistic at worst.

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Wertheim regularly writes essays on current affairs. His pieces have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. In 2020, Prospect magazine named him one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age.”

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Wertheim has published scholarly articles on a range of subjects, including grand strategy, international law, world organization, colonial empire, and humanitarian intervention. His research on the intellectual origins of the League of Nations won the Fischel-Calhoun Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

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He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University; a permanent Lecturer in History at Birkbeck, University of London; a Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, University of Cambridge; and a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Values and Public Policy at Princeton University.

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He received a PhD with distinction from Columbia University in 2015. He also received an MPhil from Columbia in 2011 and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2007.

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