He is the author of more than a dozen books and more than 300 essays and articles on topics of 20th century history, Russian and American politics, and international security.

He currently serves as founder and president of the Center on Global Interests in Washington, D.C. Nikolai Zlobin was born in Moscow on March 1, 1958, to a family of academics.

His father was Vasiliy Ivanovich Zlobin (1919–2008), a World War II veteran and a distinguished professor of history at Moscow State University, where he taught from 1951 until 2008.

Zlobin grew up in the famous “instructors’ building" that housed Moscow State University professors, located at the intersection of Leninsky and Lomonosovsky prospects.

During this time he completed research for a book that would become the first non-American assessment of U.S. President Harry S. Truman, whom Zlobin largely credited with shaping the Cold-War world.

[2][3] In 2000, Zlobin published the first archival study on the preparation of Winston Churchill's 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, which effectively announced the start of the Cold War.

After his article, "The Mafiacracy Takes Over," was published in The New York Times in 1994, Zlobin's father reportedly called and told his son, "I love you, but don't come back.

[9] Initially launched at American University, it developed into an editorial project linking U.S. and Russian scholars and secured the support of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, headed at the time by former Reagan adviser Jeane Kirkpatrick.

[10] From 2000 to 2004, Zlobin was founder and Editor-in-Chief of Washington ProFile, an independent digest of American news and analysis delivered to international readers on a minimal budget.

Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, then an associate professor at Stanford University, who called the news outlet “the perfect kind of low-tech democracy assistance.

[19] The first book was an immediate bestseller in Russia and was praised by The New York Times’ then-Moscow Bureau Chief Ellen Barry, who described the author as “suggesting, in his soft way, that Russian leaders would benefit from understanding what Americans are like.”[19] In an atypical show of interest toward a foreign-language work, The New York Times also translated and published select excerpts from the book on its website.

The theory subsequently caught the attention of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, at the time Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, who called it a compelling new argument in international relations.

Following the 2011 Libyan war, during which the UN Security Council approved a Western military intervention in Libya, Zlobin observed that the traditional concept of state sovereignty that emerged from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia was gradually becoming obsolete.

Citing the growing number of military and humanitarian interventions carried out in foreign countries, Zlobin posited the end of Westphalian sovereignty, characterized by the principle of non-intervention, that had until then governed the international system.

He has written widely about corruption within the country's political and business elite and has said that the absence of an effective judicial system is the main threat to Russian stability.