Stephen Kotkin

Historian, author, and geopolitical analyst. Stephen Kotkin is the Kleinheinz Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs emeritus at Princeton. His work focuses on Russian and Soviet history, authoritarianism, geopolitics, and great-power competition.

America Remains Dominant If It Stops Defeating Itself

Stephen Kotkin argues that the United States remains the world’s dominant power, not a late-stage empire in British-style decline, but that it risks weakening itself through overextended commitments, depleted military capacity, damaged alliances, and domestic institutional decay. In a Hoover Institution Uncommon Knowledge interview with Peter Robinson, Kotkin applies that argument to Iran, China, Ukraine, and America’s internal politics: Washington can still deter rivals and lead allies, he says, if it stops treating postwar exceptional dominance as the normal measure of American power.

Hoover InstitutionMay 29, 202620 min read