For much of its history, the United States refrained from entangling itself in European-style power politics…until it didn’t. While scholars are left fumbling to explain what ignited this quest towards becoming the leading armed superpower, U.S. foreign policy and international order historian Stephen Wertheim challenges the myth that the U.S. was reluctantly pushed into the role by the rest of the world. Through his book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, he reveals how U.S. leaders decided early in World War II to pursue global military dominance long into the future.

In the Council’s final installment of this year’s International Perspectives series, Wertheim will discuss how a desire for global military dominance during World War II laid the foundation for the U.S.’s rise to armed supremacy— from the recently-ended war in Afghanistan to the current deployment of troops across Eastern Europe and beyond. Drawing from his book, Tomorrow, the World, Wertheim will outline the intellectual path taken by U.S. foreign policy elites over decades that led to the curated world we live in today.

 
Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting faculty fellow at the Center for Global Challenges at Yale Law School. Prior to his time at Carnegie, Wertheim was director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecrafts, which he co-founded in 2019. Wertheim was also named one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age” in 2020 by Prospect magazine. He holds an A.B. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.