Join us for an interactive discussion with leading scholar-practitioners on how the U.S. foreign policy landscape is evolving, where the opportunities and challenges lie and what it takes to launch a public-facing career in international affairs.
Expect a candid, fast-paced conversation that blends substantive debate with practical, tactical advice. Bring your questions. Meet practitioners. Join a growing community committed not just to analyzing foreign policy—but to shaping what comes next.
Brought to you by the new Foreign Policy, Strategy and Statecraft Program and Career Services and Alumni Relations, this event is built for students who want to tackle big questions in American statecraft and build their skills to shape real-world policy. We’ll preview additional FPSS opportunities coming later this year to cultivate rigorous analytical tools, engage with experienced thought leaders and test ideas in practice.
About the Speakers
Dr. Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He analyzes America’s role in the world—past and present—in order to address current problems in U.S. strategy and diplomacy. In the 2025-26 academic year, he is a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School.
A historian, Wertheim has published scholarly research on a range of subjects and concepts in U.S. foreign policy since the late nineteenth century. 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, which reveals how the United States decided to pursue global military dominance as an effectively perpetual project.
Named one of “the world’s 50 top thinkers for the Covid-19 age” by Prospect magazine, Wertheim regularly comments on current events. His essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Washington Post. He has given interviews on CNN, C-SPAN, Deutsche Welle, MSNBC, NPR and PBS.
In recent years, Wertheim has taught at Catholic University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Yale Law School and held a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck, University of London. Before coming to Carnegie, he was director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank he co-founded in 2019. He received a PhD from Columbia University in 2015 and an AB summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2007, all in history.
Katherine Thompson is a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Her research focuses on US defense and foreign policy decision making and process, congressional war powers, and US alliance structures.
Prior to joining Cato, Katherine was the Deputy Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary of War for Policy and performed the duties of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, overseeing US defense policy for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. She also spent over six years working on Capitol Hill, serving as National Security Advisor to Senator Mike Lee (R‑UT) and Foreign Policy Advisor to Senator Josh Hawley (R‑MO).
Her work has appeared in the Federalist and National Review. She is a candidate for an M.A. in War, History, and Diplomacy from King’s College London, and holds a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from the King’s College NYC.