John Gleb was an America in the World Consortium Pre-Doctoral Fellow cross-training at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs in Washington, D.C. John is also a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where he earned his M.A. in May 2020.

He received his B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, from which he graduated with High Honors and Highest Distinction in 2017. As an undergraduate he served in the leadership for the refounded campus chapter of the Alexander Hamilton Society. At UT, he is a Graduate Student Fellow at the Clements Center and has appeared as a guest on The Slavic Connexion, a podcast affiliated with the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies. 

John’s research focuses on the rise of the American national security state and on the relationship between foreign and domestic politics in the United States. He is especially interested in the concept of political consensus, a yearning for which has decisively shaped the worldview and activities of American foreign policymakers since the turn of the twentieth century.

His dissertation will examine attempts to forge a foreign policy consensus both inside and outside the halls of government between 1900-1950. Thanks to those early consensus-building campaigns, the national security state that emerged during the Cold War would consist of more than just a cluster of institutions: as John will show, it also encompassed (and continues to encompass) a system of shared values and ideas from which those institutions had to draw power in order to compensate for their formal weakness.