Tod Lindberg

Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He writes widely on U.S. foreign policy and national security, as well as on American politics and philosophical topics. His main policy focus in recent years has been on improving international cooperation for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities.

Lindberg is the author of The Heroic Heart: Greatness Ancient and Modern (Encounter Books, 2015), a philosophical investigation of changing ideas about heroism and its connection to political order and change, and The Political Teachings of Jesus, a philosophical study of Jesus’s Gospel teaching about worldly affairs (HarperCollins, 2007; paperback edition, HarperOne, 2008). He is co-author with Lee Feinstein of Means to an End: U.S. Interest in the International Criminal Court (Brookings Press, 2009). He is the editor of Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (Routledge, 2005) and co-editor with Derek Chollet and David Shorr of Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide (Routledge, 2007).

He is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and has written for scholarly and popular publications from Telos and the Review of Metaphysics to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. He is adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he teaches a graduate course on ethics and decision-making in international politics.

He established Hoover’s Washington, D.C. office in 2001 and remains based primarily there. From 1999 until 2013, he was editor of Policy Review. Previously, he served in senior editorial positions at the Washington Times and was the founding executive editor of the National Interest and an editor at the Public Interest.

More recently, Lindberg served as lead of the expert group on international norms and institutions of the 2008 Genocide Prevention Task Force convened by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and co-chaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen. He also served as coordinator for the task group on Preventing and Responding to Genocide and Major Human Rights Abuses for the United States Institute of Peace’s 2005 Task Force on the United Nations (the Gingrich-Mitchell task force). He is a member of the American Bar Association’s Working Group on Crimes against Humanity. He is currently working with his long-time collaborator Lee Feinstein on a major report for the Holocaust Museum on transatlantic cooperation on atrocity prevention.

Lindberg is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Advisory Council of the Stanley Foundation, and the Advisory Board of the Chicago Council Survey.

He studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago with Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow, among others. He and his wife Tina live in Washington, D.C., and Palo Alto, California. They have two grown daughters.