Thomas Wright
Director - Center on the United States and Europe
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Project on International Order and Strategy
Thomas Wright is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. He is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He is the author of “All Measures Short of War: The Contest For the 21st Century and the Future of American Power” which was published by Yale University Press in May 2017. His second book, "Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order," will be published by St Martin's Press in 2021. Wright also works on U.S. foreign policy, great power competition, the European Union, Brexit, and economic interdependence.
Wright has a doctorate from Georgetown University, a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge University, and a bachelor's and master's from University College Dublin. He has also held a pre-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He was previously executive director of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a lecturer at the University of Chicago's Harris School for Public Policy.
Thomas Wright is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. He is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He is the author of “All Measures Short of War: The Contest For the 21st Century and the Future of American Power” which was published by Yale University Press in May 2017. His second book, “Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order,” will be published by St Martin’s Press in 2021. Wright also works on U.S. foreign policy, great power competition, the European Union, Brexit, and economic interdependence.
Wright has a doctorate from Georgetown University, a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge University, and a bachelor’s and master’s from University College Dublin. He has also held a pre-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He was previously executive director of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Harris School for Public Policy.
Aftershocks is both a riveting journalistic account of one of the strangest years on record and a comprehensive analysis of the pandemic’s ongoing impact on the foundational institutions and ideas that have shaped the modern world. This is the first crisis in decades without a glimmer of American leadership and it shows—there has been no international cooperation on a quintessential global challenge. Every country has followed its own path — nationalizing supplies, shutting their borders, and largely ignoring the rest of the world. The international order the United States constructed seven decades ago is in tatters, and the world is adrift.
Reviving travel in the COVID-19 era: Assessing the challenges
Aftershocks: Pandemic politics and the end of the old international order
The long game: China’s grand strategy to displace American order
Three weeks ago, a lot of the conservative British press was saying it was the total collapse of the relationship and the worst ever. I guess tomorrow they’ll say it’s a huge breakthrough. I don’t think either is true. [...] Aukus really shows what the UK has to contribute and it’s effective because it is in the high-end technology area that the UK has specialised in. There’s an alignment there and it has something big to contribute. That’s a very positive thing. [...] Talk of an Anglosphere or anything like that as an organising principle for the relationship or for US foreign policy is very ill-advised. I don’t think that’s helpful or accurate in terms of where things are headed. [...] There are very significant challenges [to a US-UK free trade deal] and I don’t think those are going to be wiped away.
Biden’s overarching message [in an address to the U.N. General Assembly] . . . was that strategic competition with China will not in any way diminish America’s commitment to working with other nations to tackle shared existential threats like climate change and pandemics. [The challenge for the U.S. president is to find a way of tackling shared threats in an era of great power rivalry and nationalism...] He will try to work with China but he also needs a back-up plan if that fails to materialise. Today’s speech was a first step in that direction.
The security initiative [AUKUS] is a major step forward for Biden’s Asia policy, but it also turbocharges a narrative in the EU that they are being taken for granted.
They’re [the British] making choices [to back Biden's prioritization of competition with China], and the choices have consequences.
[The people claiming that there is some sort of unified theory of Blob-dom are not thinking clearly. For one thing, even within Brookings there is a wide range of opinion on Afghanistan. Wright supported the withdrawal, for instance — which would seem to make him a traitor to the Blob, even though he is, by any definition, in the Blob himself.] My impression is that people who talk about the Blob have not read or inquired into what the people in the think tanks have actually said about the topic. They don’t know what they’re talking about. [But...] if they want to say that Biden is doing something that Richard Haass disagrees with, then that’s true, he is.
[Republicans will] try to avoid those tough questions [on the Afghanistan withdrawal and its aftermath] and tell themselves a story that Trump would’ve done it differently, it just would’ve been done better. The reality is that’s pretty unlikely. [... The restrainers] got what they wanted on this occasion, but the costs of the strategy are undeniable — it was extremely difficult and came at a very high price. The restrainers have been saying for a while that if you pull back, the sky won’t fall in. Now I think there’s a greater awareness that it’s a very difficult strategy to pursue.
