Henry L. Stimson Lectures on World Affairs: Governing the World To Come

Charles Kupchan is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and professor of international affairs at Georgetown University in the Walsh School of Foreign Service and Department of Government.

From 2014 to 2017, Kupchan served as special assistant to the president and senior director for European affairs on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) in the Barack Obama administration. He was also director for European affairs on the NSC during the first Bill Clinton administration. Before joining the Clinton NSC, he worked in the U.S. Department of State on the policy planning staff. Previously, he was an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University.

Kupchan is the author of Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World (2020), No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (2012), How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace (2010), The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century (2002), Power in Transition: The Peaceful Change of International Order (2001), Civic Engagement in the Atlantic Community (1999), Atlantic Security: Contending Visions (1998), Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe (1995), The Vulnerability of Empire (1994), The Persian Gulf and the West (1987), and numerous articles on international and strategic affairs.

Kupchan has served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs, Columbia University’s Institute for War and Peace Studies, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Centre d’Étude et de Recherches Internationales in Paris, and the Institute for International Policy Studies in Tokyo. From 2006 to 2007, he was the Henry A. Kissinger scholar at the Library of Congress and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. From 2013 to 2014, he was a senior fellow at the Transatlantic Academy.

Kupchan received his BA from Harvard University and MPhil and DPhil from Oxford University.

The Stimson Lecture Series is held in honor of Henry L. Stimson, Yale College 1889, an attorney and statesman whose government service culminated with his tenure as secretary of war during World War II. Since 1998, the MacMillan Center and the Yale University Press have collaborated to bring distinguished diplomats and foreign policy experts to the Center to lecture on their books that are published by the Yale Press.