Fall 2025, Volume 40 Number 1

Fall 2025 Centerpiece cover showing illustration of soldiers pointing guns at men holding roses.

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The Fall 2025 issue of Centerpiece highlights recent activities at the Weatherhead Center, including events, publications, awards, and more. Executive Director Erin Goodman shares fall semester updates in the "Message from the Executive Director" column. Our first feature, "The Crisis of Pax Americana," is the transcript from our fall Manshel Lecture with Walter Russell Mead, where he breaks down why the post-1945 world order is shifting—and where we go from here. Our second feature is "Dispatches," our fall collection of essays written by four undergraduates about their summer research abroad. We also provide two updates on our newest research clusters—the first on global climate policy and the second on global LGBTQI+ human rights. Both have kicked off the semester with vigor, and there is more to come. In our student programs update, we share the stellar research our Graduate Student Associates are doing—those who are further along in their studies are working on dissertations and job papers, and we share their abstracts here. Finally, we mourn the loss of George Hoguet, a cherished man who has had multiple connections to the Weatherhead Center over the years.

Letter

Message from the Executive Director

During the Manshel Lecture on American Foreign Policy on November 12, University of Florida professor and Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead reminded the packed audience at the Harvard Faculty Club of an old engineering adage: “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is"...

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Feature

The Crisis of Pax Americana with Walter Russell Mead

This is one of those very interesting moments in world history—not a very happy moment, but an interesting one—when the framework that Americans, with some help from some of our important allies, helped to set up after the end of World War II.

We revised it in the 1970s, when the Bretton Woods currency system collapsed, and Nixon and Kissinger reshored it and introduced a kind of trilateralism to try to boost American power from Western Europe and Japan. And after the fall of the Soviet Union, we doubled down on it. And the idea was that the kind of Western world order that had gotten us through the Cold War would be expanded in the post-Cold War era...

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Two men in suits sit on blue armchairs, engaged in conversation near a podium, with water glasses and a bottle on the table between them.

Feature

Dispatches: Undergraduate Researchers in the Field

Every spring, a select group of Harvard College students receive travel grants from Weatherhead to support their thesis field research on topics related to international affairs. The Center has encouraged these Undergraduate Associates to take advantage of its research community by connecting with graduate students, faculty, postdocs, and visiting scholars. Four Undergraduate Associates write of their experiences last summer...

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