Jonathan Esty

Esty is writing his doctoral dissertation on the history of US foreign policy and grand strategy in the 1990s. He 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 beginning his International Relations PhD at SAIS, Esty worked as lead researcher for the author Fareed Zakaria’s book projects on global geopolitics. He also consults for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, in its work launching the International Strategy Forum in the US and Asia-Pacific. Esty taught for two years in Hong Kong as a Yale-China Fellow. He graduated from Yale with a History BA in 2017.