Paul van Hooft

In my work at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, I focus on how the reemergence of competitive great power politics shape European security in various ways that include changing the role of the United States in Europe, reshaping the role of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence and conventional deterrence options for small and middle powers, as well as the recasting the importance of the Indo-Pacific for the global supply chains that European countries like the Netherlands occupy a central place in.

​

My academic research focuses on the future role of the United States in the world as its competition with China intensifies and the impact of U.S. strategic (non)adjustment on European security. I am particularly interested in questions of great power retrenchment and overextension, dilemmas of extended deterrence, and European autonomy.

​

From 2018 to 2020 I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Security Studies Program (SSP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with the first year as a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow. I was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) from 2016 to 2018. My projects looked at the changing U.S. outlook on European  strategic autonomy, including alternative European deterrence arrangements, 

​

I received my doctorate in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam in 2015 for the dissertation The Future in the Past: Victory, Defeat and Grand Strategy in the US, UK, France and Germany. My dissertation focused on the effect of the experiences of World War Two on post-war strategic ideas and institutions. For its ambitious scope and comprehensive, multi-method approach, it was awarded the 2016 thesis prize from the Dutch and Flemish political science associations.

 

Over the past decade-and-a-half I have taught and designed multiple graduate and undergraduate courses, and supervised multiple graduate and undergraduate theses, at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University. My courses focused on grand strategy and US-European relations.

​