James Graham Wilson is a Supervisory Historian at the U.S. Department of State, specializing in Cold War history. Since 2011, he has worked in the Department’s Office of the Historian, where he has compiled ten volumes in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series—four of which have been declassified and published as of April 2025. In addition to his editorial work, he has served on temporary assignments within the Department and has supported both active and retired policymakers in various capacities. Wilson earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2011 and holds a B.A. from Vassar College (2003). The full FRUS series is available at history.state.gov.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I think the most exciting research in the field of diplomatic history is using archival evidence to tackle specific moments of contingency throughout time and space. I am drawn to Francis Gavin’s idea of developing a historical sensibility as a discipline, and his encouragement of policymakers to think historically. Especially in the age of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), we’ve all got a universe of evidence at our fingertips, and the emphasis is going to be on questions and follow-up questions. That is a scaled-up version of what has always interested me. Whether it is diplomatic history or international relations, it is exciting to me to think of how everyone can engage with the past in a way that improves their professional and personal lives.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Since 2011, I have had the tremendous opportunity to work on the Foreign Relations of the United States series. This means I spent my days going through still-classified U.S. government documents thirty years and older. This has certainly changed my understanding of the world. I appreciate the magnitude and sheer number of difficult problems that policymakers encounter.

If I had to narrow it down to a person or thing, I would say that going through an unredacted folder covering the life of the United States national security advisor is a lot different than what I was doing in graduate school. There I was typically looking for one thing. For instance: what was that person reading about the Soviet Union? And there may be a paper or a briefing for one day, and that paper has been declassified. And then that paper or briefing is something I can draw on to try and develop a point about a change over time. However, from the perspective of the person who had the job — say, Brent Scowcroft, since I have been working on the George H.W. Bush administration these past few weeks — each day was dealing with a series of problems, nearly all of which were scary, and probably none of which were solvable.

Your book traces Paul Nitze’s influence on U.S. national security policy across several decades. What drew you to Nitze as a subject, and what is his legacy in Cold War historiography?

I was drawn to Nitze because of his longevity in influencing U.S. national security policies. I can trace the exact moment back to ten years ago, when I attended a seminar at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. where Frank Costigliola was discussing the diaries of George Kennan, who continues to generate tremendous attention for his role in shaping U.S. policies during the Cold War. And at various moments when Costigliola was describing what Kennan thought and wrote about U.S. policies at the height of Vietnam – or, say the Euromissiles debates in the late 1970s and early 1980s – I thought to myself: yes, but Paul Nitze was actually in the government working to support the president on these matters. It did not mean that he, Nitze, got everything right. But he was in the arena working the issues. That is harder to do than what Kennan did, which from 1950 onward was basically to criticize – however elegantly – those figures in power. How did Nitze achieve this? How did he stay relevant for so long? These are some of the questions I wanted to address.

How did Nitze’s strategic thinking evolve over time, and in what ways did he remain consistent in his approach to national security?

Central to his strategy thinking was the notion that the United States had to preserve overwhelming strength — a “preponderance of power,” as he called it. He came to this view while drafting the Pacific War Report for the Strategic Bombing Survey after Imperial Japan surrendered in 1945. He concluded that Japan had attacked the United States in December 1941........

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