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Jeffrey A. Engel

Founding Director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and Podcast Host, "The Past, the Promise, The Presidency"

Frequent media commentator on political and international affairs for CNN, NPR, the BBC and others, and contributor to the Washington Post, New York Times, Dallas Morning News
Jeff is a prolific author with thirteen books on American foreign policy and the presidency, including works on George H.W. Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His expertise lends credibility to his discussions on historical reflections of global events, international relations, and the modern relevance of lessons drawn from presidential leadership.

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Jeffrey A. Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, Professor in the William P. Clements Department of History, and a Senior Fellow of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies.

Trained at Cornell University, Oxford University, and Yale University, he received his PhD in American History for the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001. He has previously taught at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Texas A&M University, where he was the Kruse ’52 Professor and received recognition for teaching at the college, university, and system levels. In 2019, SMU’s Resident Life Students named him their campus-wide Hope Professor of the Year.

Engel has authored and edited a total of thirteen books on American foreign policy and the American presidency, the latest including When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War and the co-authored Impeachment: An American History.

In 2025 Engel will be the Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Diplomatische Akademie Wien (Vienna School of International Studies).

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Jeffrey Engel: Discusses his new book, "When the World Seemed New"

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America at 250: a Founder’s Report Card. It’s been two and a half centuries since minutemen opened fire on redcoats at Lexington and Concord in a moment typically considered the start of America’s war for independence. Over that time the country they helped forge grew from a piddling player on the international system to the world’s most dominant force since imperial Rome, even as barriers to citizenship at home expanded across race, ethnicity, and gender. Ours is not the America of 1775.

What would those early revolutionaries make of us today? Would we pass muster in the areas they thought mattered most? Would George Washington appreciate our virtue? Might Thomas Jefferson approve of our expansion of civil rights? Would Benjamin Franklin endorse our sense of science, John Adams our respect for the rule of law, and Abigail Adams our treatment of women as equal citizens? Anyone who tells you “the founders thought” shouldn’t be listened to. They were as diverse in perspective and opinion as we today. But consistencies abounded within their thinking, enough to ask how we’d fare if that first generation graded ours today.

Victory Was Not Inevitable. World War II’s end seems inevitable. Comparing the population, industrial potential, and economic might of the Axis vs. the Allied powers makes the latter’s triumph appears obvious in retrospect. It had more people, more stuff, and more money—by a significant order of magnitude. These numbers matter but only tell half the story. They offer insight into the way the Allies, and the United States especially, crafted a victory strategy based upon industrial might and machinery rather than lives and blood. Yet blood was still required.

Looking anew, 80 years later, at monumental events like D-Day reveal this tension. The invasion took years to plan and involved more than a million Allied personnel. Think of the logistic involved in giving every invading soldier shoelaces or a canteen, before even noting the complexity of building thousands of landing craft, naval vessels for transport and protection, thousands of planes overhead, and so on. But also note that those numbers don’t reveal the sheer human bravery and devotion to duty that victory still required. Canteens can’t take a beach. Shoelaces can’t scale a cliff. The story of D-Day, and the story of the Allied victory in WW2, is thus one that must be told as a national strategic triumph for planners, industrialists, unions, farmers, and Rosie the Riveters. But its also a reminder that history is not just about data and numbers, but about individual lives, losses, and devotion to a cause greater than our own, showing now only what we’ve done together as Americans, but what Americans can do when pulling together.

What Would FDR Say Today. George Washington set precedents. Lincoln preserved the union. But only Franklin D. Roosevelt won the nation’s highest office four times. Only Roosevelt faced an economic crisis so severe it remains our benchmark for calamity. Only Roosevelt saw a world on the brink, knowing that his leadership was all that stood between isolationism and war. Known to subsequent generations by his easily-recalled initials, FDR, he defined American politics for a generation and for generations to come. He’s not here with us now. If he were, what would he say and do?

The Untold Story of the Cold War’s End, and Why We Are All Lucky to Have Survived. The Cold War shouldn’t have ended peacefully. Rarely if ever throughout world history has a great power collapsed without an ensuing great power war. Never before had the world faced an empire’s collapse with 20,000 nuclear weapons in the mix. The story of the Cold War’s surprisingly peaceful end is both remarkable, and largely unknown. The Berlin Wall opened by accident, for example. Nuclear war nearly occurred several times as well, beyond the public’s eye. German reunification, meanwhile, terrified past witnesses to that nation’s violent past yet also set the tone for the international system we still inhabit today. Examining our surprising survival reveals what really matters in times of crisis: the character of our leaders…and luck.

Putin and the Presidents. US-Russian relations are at a new post-Cold War low. But those tensions go far beyond the current crisis over Ukraine. Russian-American antagonisms stem instead from long-standing geopolitical differences — different worldviews, really — held by American and Russian leaders since the Cold War’s End. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev set the stage for change, but only one man has been a constant in their critical bilateral relationship since: Vladimir Putin. His personal story reveals much of why the world is at war with Russia today, a story told through the evolution of his relationship with the U.S. Presidents he’s known: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.