Dr. George D. Schwab
President Emeritus
George D. Schwab, co-founded the National Committee on American Foreign Policy in 1974 and served as its president from 1993-2014. In the fall of 2001 the National Committee received a private endowment designed to honor the work of Professor Schwab which led to the creation of the George D. Schwab Foreign Policy Briefings. Speakers at the briefings range from heads of state, foreign ministers, ambassadors, officials of international organizations, and other foreign policy practitioners and experts. They are held throughout the year to give members and guests the opportunity to extend and enhance the understanding of issues that affect the national interests of the United States.
George D. Schwab earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University and taught there until he joined the faculty of the Department of History at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1960. He is now professor emeritus of history (City College and the Graduate Center).
George D. Schwab is the author, editor, and translator of numerous books and articles. The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936 (1970, 2nd ed. 1989) has been translated into Japanese (1980) Italian (1986) and Chinese (2011). Professor Schwab’s translation (with Erna Hilfstein) of an introduction to Carl Schmitt’s The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes appeared in 1996. A second printing of his translation of an introduction to Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1996. Two printings of his translation of an introduction to Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty were issued by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press in 1985 and 1988 and the University of Chicago Press reissued it with a new foreward in 2005. His most recent publications include “The National Committee on American Foreign Policy’s Focus on Russia,” The Harriman Economic and Business Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 2000), and Carl Schmitt, A Note on a Qualitative Authoritarian Bourgeois Liberal (2000). He coauthored Journey to Belfast and London with William J. Flynn, published by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy in February 1999. Dr. Schwab has also edited and contributed chapters to books on the cold war titled United States Foreign Policy at the Crossroads; Eurocommunism: The Ideological and Political-Theoretical Foundations; Ideology and Foreign Policy; and Détente in Historical Perspective.
A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Professor Schwab received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in May 1998. He serves on several committees of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Latvian President’s Commission of International Historians. In 2002 he received the Order of the Three Stars, Latvia’s highest honor, in a ceremony held in Riga.