Jonathan Esty

Jonathan Esty is a PhD candidate and AJI Predoctoral Fellow at the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. His doctoral research focuses on (non)interventions in Iraqi Kurdistan, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, and how these choices shaped post-Cold War world order. His dissertation, titled “Paradise Lost: Humanitarian Intervention and Grand Strategy in America’s Unipolar Moment,” argues that 1990s atrocity prevention amounted to “intervention by invitation”—demanded from below by those facing genocide and allies fearing chaos, rather than imposed from above by a hegemon. Answering those appeals proved genuinely strategic as well as genuinely humanitarian.

His chapter—“Wagging the Dog? Blair, Clinton, and the Special Relationship in the Kosovo Crisis”—was published in 2026 in Transatlantic Storms in Anglo-American Relations, an edited volume from Georgetown University Press recently cited in The Economist. He worked in the Clinton Presidential Library and British National Archives, and interviewed former Prime Minister Tony Blair, among others.

Before his PhD, Jonathan worked as lead researcher for Fareed Zakaria on his NYT-bestselling books Age of Revolutions (2024) and Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World (2020). As a consultant for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s philanthropy, he helped launch the International Strategy Forum, a gathering of next-generation leaders in policymaking and emerging technology.

Jonathan earned his History BA from Yale, where he joined the Grand Strategy Program. His senior thesis on Kissinger’s Kurdish strategy was advised by John Lewis Gaddis and won the Robert D. Gries History Prize.