15 Facts About Paul Kennedy

Paul Michael Kennedy was born on 17 June 1945 and is a British historian specialising in the history of international relations, economic power and grand strategy.

Paul Kennedy has published prominent books on the history of British foreign policy and great power struggles.

Paul Kennedy emphasises the changing economic power base that undergirds military and naval strength, noting how declining economic power leads to reduced military and diplomatic weight.

Paul Kennedy was a member of the History Department at the University of East Anglia between 1970 and 1983.

Paul Kennedy is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a former visiting fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.

Paul Kennedy is the Director of International Security Studies and along with John Lewis Gaddis and Charles Hill, teaches the Studies in Grand Strategy course there.

In 2012, Professor Paul Kennedy began teaching a course at Yale entitled "Military History of the West Since 1500", elaborating on his presentation of military history as inextricably intertwined with economic power and technological progress.

Paul Kennedy is on the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals and writes for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many foreign-language newspapers and magazines.

Paul Kennedy was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1989 and the American Philosophical Society in 1991.

Paul Kennedy was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2001 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003.

Paul Kennedy was named the US Naval War College's Hattendorf Prize Laureate for 2014.

Paul Kennedy's book reached a wide audience of policy makers when it suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union were presently experiencing the same historical dynamics that previously affected Spain, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, and Germany, and that the United States must come to grips with its own "imperial overstretch".

However, the Cold War ended two years after Paul Kennedy's book appeared, validating his thesis regarding the Soviet Union, but leaving the United States as the sole superpower and, apparently, at the peak of its economy.

In explaining why neutral Britain went to war with Germany, Paul Kennedy recognised it was critical for war that Germany become economically more powerful than Britain, but he downplays the disputes over economic trade imperialism, the Baghdad Railway, confrontations in Eastern Europe, high-charged political rhetoric and domestic pressure-groups.

Paul Kennedy argues that by far the main reason was London's fear that a repeat of 1870, when Prussia and the German states smashed France, would mean that Germany, with a powerful army and navy, would control the English Channel and northwest France.