Zach Dorfman

Former Senior Fellow, Ethics, Technology, and U.S. Foreign Policy and Fellow, "The Living Legacy of the First World War"

Zach Dorfman is a national security reporter and former Carnegie Council Senior Fellow.

His work has appeared in Politico, The Atlantic, Atavist Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Nation, among other publications.

He was one of the winners of the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting in 2018.

Previously, he was a full-time senior editor at Ethics & International Affairs, the quarterly journal of the Carnegie Council, where he commissioned features, essays, and reviews on issues of war and peace, the environment, international institutions, foreign policy, and more.

Featured Work

MAY 19, 2014 Article

The Long Shadow: David Reynolds on World War I

David Reynolds discusses the different ways the carnage of World War I is memorialized in Europe and its different long-term effects on Western and Eastern ...

1917 Poster, U.S. Food Administration, from the <a href="http://docsteach.org/documents/512621/detail?menu=closed&mode=search&sortBy=era&q=world+war+poster&commit=Go&page=1">National Archives</a>.

APR 17, 2014 Article

Jingo Unchained: What World War I Wrought

When we think about the centenary of World War I in 2014, we should consider first and foremost what it has meant for the life of ...

July 1917: U.S. Secretary of War, blindfolded, draws the first number in the draft lottery.

MAR 24, 2014 Article

The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Jonathan Hansen on World War I (Part II)

"What does it mean to be patriotic in a nation founded on a set of putative universal principles and composed primarily of immigrants and their ...

From the cover of "The Lost Promise of Patriotism"

MAR 17, 2014 Article

The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Jonathan Hansen on World War I (Part I)

Jonathan Hansen refers to a group of American scholars, public intellectuals, and social reformers—such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Eugene V. Debs, Jane ...

"The American Way of Poverty" and "The Unwinding"

DEC 10, 2013 Article

Ill Fares the Invisible Hand

According to census data from 2012, there are 46.5 million Americans currently living in poverty. That is more than one in seven Americans, or roughly 15 percent of ...

AUG 19, 2013 Article

In Memoriam: Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013)

Carnegie Council's Zach Dorfman reflects on Jean Bethke Elshtain, his graduate adviser at the University of Chicago: "She carried herself with an understated grace and ...

The Undivided Past

APR 11, 2013 Article

Book Review: "The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences"

"The Undivided Past" aims to show that "the most resonant forms of human solidarity," as author David Cannadine elegantly puts it, are unstable and often ...

The Least of all Possible Evils

DEC 3, 2012 Article

Hard Questions for Humanitarians

Do international laws intended to constrain war and uphold human rights unwittingly legitimate violence? Zach Dorfman of Carnegie Council reviews Eyal Weizman's book, "The Least ...

Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age

MAY 22, 2012 Article

What We Talk About When We Talk About Isolationism

Today, American supremacy is assumed rather than argued for: in an age of tremendous political division, it is a bipartisan first principle of foreign policy. ...

A protester in Cairo, February 2011. <br>CREDIT: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramyraoof/5416807660/" target="_blank">RamyRaoof</a>

FEB 8, 2012 Article

The Varieties of Protest Experience: How Accountability Gaps Link the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street

Can the recent eruption of protests be interpreted as a single phenomenon, even though spread out across great distances and separated by barriers of language ...