Professional Affiliation

Independent Historian

Expert Bio

Stephan Kieninger is a historian and an independent researcher. His most recent book, which he researched during a previous fellowship at the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies, is The Diplomacy of Detente. Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz (Routledge, 2018).

He holds a PhD in Modern History from Mannheim University and had previously been a postdoc at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a Senior Researcher at the Federal German Archives.

He is also the author of Dynamic Detente. The United States and Europe 1964–1975 (Rowman & Littlefield 2016) and has received fellowships from the German Historical Institute, the Hoover Institution and the German Academic Exchange Service.

His research at the Wilson Center takes Strobe Talbott's NATO-Russia diplomacy as a prism for the Clinton Administration's statecraft based on newly available archival sources from the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany and NATO.

Expertise

• Cold War
• Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding
• Energy
• History
• Security and Defense
• U.S. Politics
• Europe
• North America
• Russia and Eurasia

Wilson Center Project

Strobe Talbott. Bill Clinton’s Russia Man

Project Summary

In studying Strobe Talbott’s role as President Clinton’s closest NATO and Russia adviser, my project is an effort to examine the emergence of the post-Cold War order in Europe: Why and how did NATO enlarge? Why did it go out of area to end the war in Bosnia? How did NATO manage to enlarge and to establish a partnership with Russia at the same time? How was it possible to maintain the NATO-Russia partnership during the Kosovo War and to make Russia a part of the solution? In parallel to enlargement, NATO was building a strategic relationship with Russia trying to integrate the country into the community of nations. On Clinton’s behalf, Talbott helped to steer both processes pursuing a policy of two tracks. The aim was to open up NATO, but slowly, cautiously and combined with an expanded effort to engage Russia.

Major Publications

• Dynamic Detente. The United States and Europe, 1964-1975 (Lanham: Rowmand & Littlefield, 2016)
• The Diplomacy of Detente. Cooperative Security Polcies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz (London: Routledge, 2018)
• Opening NATO and Engaging Russia. NATO’s Two Tracks and the Establishment of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, Daniel S. Hamilton and Kristina Spohr (Eds), Open Door: NATO and Euro-Atlantic Security After the Cold War (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2019)

Previous Terms

Fellow, September 7, 2021 — August 26, 2022