Jonathan Esty

Jonathan Esty is a PhD candidate and Predoctoral Fellow supported by the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy. He is writing his doctoral dissertation on the history of US foreign policy and grand strategy in the 1990s. Jonathan focuses on (non)interventions in Iraqi Kurdistan, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, and how these choices shaped world order. His chapter “Wagging the Dog? Blair, Clinton, and the Special Relationship in the Kosovo Crisis” will be published in an edited volume from Georgetown University Press.

Before his PhD, Jonathan worked as lead researcher for the author Fareed Zakaria on his books Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present (2024) and Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World (2020). He consulted for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s nonprofit in inaugurating the International Strategy Forum, a gathering of next-generation leaders in policymaking and emerging technology. With support from Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics, Jonathan is launching a project to use historical grand strategy games to digitally simulate the past for teaching, scholarship, and wargaming.

Jonathan has contributed research to his advisor Frank Gavin’s The Taming of Scarcity and The Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era (2024). He taught US history to Hong Kong undergraduates as a Yale-China Fellow from 2017-19. Jonathan earned his History BA from Yale, where he was part of the Grand Strategy Program. His senior thesis on Henry Kissinger’s Kurdish policy was advised by John Lewis Gaddis and won the Robert D. Gries History Prize.