Benjamin Schwarz was formerly the national and literary editor of The Atlantic and the executive editor of World Policy Journal. From 2014 through 2017, he was the national editor of the American Conservative magazine. Prior to that, Schwarz was for seven years a foreign policy and national security analyst at the RAND Corporation. At RAND he wrote a widely cited and highly critical assessment of American counterinsurgency doctrine and practice. Before his stint at RAND, Schwarz was a staff member of the Brookings Institution.
In 2002 and in 2011-2013 he was a visiting scholar at the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA.
Schwarz earned a B.A., magna cum laude, and an M.A. in history from Yale, where he held the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities. Schwarz was a Fulbright Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford.