Few American diplomats can match the years of experience in multiple Southeast Asian countries that Ambassador Scot Marciel has accumulated during his career in the US Foreign Service. The book he is writing at Stanford will interpret the region and its relations with the United States historically and now. Policy questions from the manuscript that the webinar will address include: Can America’s relations with Thailand be reinvigorated, and if so, how? Why have US-Vietnam relations prospered, and with what prospects going forward? Realistically, what can be expected from relations between the US and Indonesia? How should the recent coup in Myanmar be understood and how does it challenge US foreign policy? More broadly, in the near term, what priority ends and means should inform US engagement with Southeast Asia? In exploring answers to these and other questions, Amb. Marciel will interact with a second distinguished speaker, Catharin Dalpino, who is uniquely well qualified to discuss these matters based on her extensive experience in US policymaking positions, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations related to Southeast Asia.

Scot Marciel is a career US Foreign Service Officer. He served as America’s Ambassador to Myanmar in 2016-2020 when thousands of ethnic Rohingya were killed, expelled, or emigrated from the country—a challenging time for its democratic transition and for US-Myanmar relations. Earlier assignments included tours as Ambassador to Indonesia, Ambassador for ASEAN Affairs, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, he worked as an editor of publications at the National Center for Export-Import Studies at Georgetown University. Ambassador Marciel’s more than 35 years of experience as a diplomat in Asia and around the world have also included assignments in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. His degrees are an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a BA in International Relations from the University of California, Davis.

Catharin Dalpino’s remarkable career has encompassed academe, government, and NGOs. At Georgetown University she taught Southeast Asian Studies and launched and led the university’s Thai Studies Program. Other institutions in which she has lectured, researched, administered, or advised include The Asia Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, George Washington University, and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and has held positions at the World Bank and the United Nations in Geneva. The author of many articles and three books on US-Asian relations, she has testified on that topic before the Senate and the House of Representatives more than a dozen times. Her degrees are an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from Barnard College.

Donald K. Emmerson, in addition to heading the Southeast Asia Program, is affiliated with Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and its Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Recent writings relevant to US-Southeast Asia relations include articles in December 2020 in The Diplomat and East Asia Forum and an edited volume, The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century (2020). Before moving to Stanford in 1999, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he headed its Center for Southeast Asian Studies.  He has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Australian National University, among other institutions. His degrees are from Yale (PhD) and Princeton (BA).

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U.S. relations with China evolved into outright rivalry during the Trump administration. In this talk, Thomas Wright will look at whether this rivalry will continue and evolve during a Biden administration. To answer this question, he will look at the roots of strategic competition between the two countries and various strands of thinking within the Biden team. The most likely outcome is that the competition will evolve into a clash of governance systems and the emergence of two interdependent blocs where ideological differences become a significant driver of geopolitics. Cooperation is possible but it will be significantly shaped by conditions of rivalry.

Thomas Wright is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. He is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He is the author of “All Measures Short of War: The Contest For the 21st Century and the Future of American Power” which was published by Yale University Press in May 2017. His second book "Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order" will be published by St Martin's Press in 2021. Wright also works on U.S. foreign policy, great power competition, the European Union, Brexit, and economic interdependence.

Wright has a doctorate from Georgetown University, a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge University, and a bachelor's and master's from University College Dublin. He has also held a pre-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He was previously executive director of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a lecturer at the University of Chicago's Harris School for Public Policy.

 

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This event is part of the 2021 Winter/Spring Colloquia series, Biden’s America, Xi’s China: What’s Now & What’s Next?, sponsored by APARC's China Program.

 

This event is part of Shorenstein APARC's winter webinar series "Asian Politics and Policy in a Time of Uncertainty."

In the 2010s, amid signs of rising illiberalism around the world, Indonesia seemed exceptional—an established democracy bucking the trend.  In 2019, however, at a conference in Canberra, experts on Indonesia from Australia, Asia, and the United States argued otherwise. Their variously skeptical views were recently published in a book alarmingly entitled Democracy in Indonesia: From Stagnation to Recession?  In this webinar, a co-editor of the volume will discuss its subtitle with an analyst of Indonesian politics who did not contribute to the book.

Panelists:

Eve Warburton is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include democratic representation, identity, and the political economy of policymaking in young democracies, with a focus on Southeast Asia and especially Indonesia. In addition to Democracy in Indonesia (2020), her work has appeared in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Democratization, Electoral Studies, Pacific Affairs, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and as chapters in several books. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Reclaiming What's Ours: The Business and Politics of Resource Nationalism in Indonesia. She received her doctorate in international studies from the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia and Pacific Affairs in 2018.  Her master’s and undergraduate degrees are respectively from Columbia University and the University of Sydney.

Tom Pepinsky is Tisch University Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His fields are comparative politics and international political economy, with a focus on emerging markets and a special interest in Southeast Asia. His work on Indonesia includes, as co-editor, Piety and Public Opinion: Understanding Indonesian Islam (2018). He has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, and World Politics, among other venues, including an online platform, New Mandala: New Perspectives on Southeast Asia. He is an active co-founder of the Southeast Asia Research Group (seareg.org), which showcases new research by young scholars on Southeast Asian politics, and he serves on the steering committee of the Association for Analytical Learning on Islam and Muslim Societies (aalims.org).  His PhD in political science is from Yale University.

Southeast Asia Program Director Don Emmerson, who has also worked on Indonesia, will moderate the discussion.

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Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the Communist Party of China (CCP) has been vexed by a simple question: What is it fighting for? As the country began to adopt market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, CCP theorists were forced into contortions providing ideological justifications for policies that appeared overtly capitalist. Deng Xiaoping’s concept of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” came to be seen as a theoretical fig leaf rather than a description of an egalitarian economic system, and by the 2000s, a consensus emerged that the CCP had completely abandoned any pretense of pursuing the Marxist vision it purported to hold. With the rise of Xi Jinping, however, the Party talks with renewed vigor about Marxism-Leninism and the goal of achieving actual, existing socialism. Has the CCP re-discovered communism?  In this talk, CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies Jude Blanchette will discuss the abandoned and existing legacies of Mao Zedong, Marxism-Leninism, and the CCP’s vision of socialism.
 

Jude Blanchette holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).  Previously, he was engagement director at The Conference Board’s China Center for Economics and Business in Beijing, where he researched China’s political environment with a focus on the workings of the Communist Party of China and its impact on foreign companies and investors.  Prior to working at The Conference Board, Blanchette was the assistant director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego.  Blanchette has written for a range of publications, including Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, and his Chinese translations have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. His book, China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

 

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This event is part of the 2021 Winter/Spring Colloquia series, Biden’s America, Xi’s China: What’s Now & What’s Next?, sponsored by APARC's China Program.

 

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.

As US-China competition intensifies, experts debate the degree to which the current strategic environment resembles that of the Cold War. Those that argue against the analogy often highlight how China is deeply integrated into the US-led world order. They also point out that, while tense, US-China relations have not turned overtly adversarial. But there is another, less optimistic reason the comparison is unhelpful: deterring and defeating Chinese aggression is harder now than it was against the Soviet Union. In this talk, Dr. Mastro analyzes how technology, geography, relative resources and the alliance system complicate U.S. efforts to enhance the credibility of its deterrence posture and, in a crisis, form any sort of coalition.

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Within FSI, she works primarily in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) as well. She is also a fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an inaugural Wilson Center China Fellow.

Mastro is an international security expert with a focus on Chinese military and security policy issues, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. Her research addresses critical questions at the intersection of interstate conflict, great power relations, and the challenge of rising powers. She has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, International Security, International Studies Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Survival, and Asian Security, and is the author of The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019).

She also continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she works as a Strategic Planner at INDOPACOM. Prior to her appointment at Stanford in August 2020, Mastro was an assistant professor of security studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

 

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This event is part of the 2021 Winter/Spring Colloquia series, Biden’s America, Xi’s China: What’s Now & What’s Next?, sponsored by APARC's China Program.

 

This event is being held virtually via Zoom. Please register for the webinar via the following link: https://bit.ly/3nNdqhW

With President Biden’s inauguration, a new era of US-Japan relations starts on January 20. Now that the cozy personal relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Abe is in the rearview mirror, what can we expect in the Biden-Suga era? While the Biden administration is widely expected to drop Trump’s America First foreign policy and return to multilateralism and alliance-based diplomacy, its foreign policy priorities in the Asia-Pacific are still largely unknown. What role will the US-Japan alliance play in the new geo-political landscape in the region, and how would it handle the growing influence of China and build partnerships with other players in the region? This panel, featuring a leading expert on US politics and US-Japan relations, Fumiaki Kubo (University of Tokyo), and a rising star in the Liberal Democratic Party and an alum of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rui Matsukawa (House of Councilors), examines these questions, moderated by the Director of APARC Japan Program, Kiyoteru Tsutsui.

SPEAKERS

Fumiaki Kubo (University of Tokyo) 

Fumiaki Kubo has been the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of American Government and History at the Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, the University of Tokyo since 2003. He is affiliated with the Nakasone Peace Institute as the Executive Research Director, the Japan Institute for International Affairs as a Senior Adjunct Fellow, the 21^st Century Public Policy Institute as the Director of the US Studies Project, as well as with the Tokyo Foundation as a Senior Research Scholar. He studied at Cornell University in 1984-1986, at the Johns Hopkins University in 1991-1993, and at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland in 1998-99. He was also an Invited Professor at SciencesPo in Paris in the spring of 2009, and a Japan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2014. Kubo received his B.A. in 1979 and Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Tokyo. He is the author of many books which include: Modern American Politics (with Hitoshi Abe), Ideology and Foreign Policy After Iraq in the United States ( editor ), A Study on the Infrastructure of American Politics( editor ). In 1989, he received the Sakurada-Kai Gold Award for the Study of Politics and the Keio Gijuku Award. Kubo was the President of the Japanese Association for American Studies from 2016 to 2018.

Rui Matsukawa (House of Councilors)

Rui Matsukawa is a Member of the House of Councilors (Liberal Democratic Party), and her current responsibilities include Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Defense, Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Cabinet Office. She graduated from the University of Tokyo, Faculty of Law and earned an MS in Foreign Service from Georgetown. She joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1993, where she won the Southern Bluefin Tuna Case at the International Court of Justice, negotiated free trade agreements with Thailand, Philippines, and other countries, and worked on the negotiations for disarmament as a first Secretary of the Japan Delegation to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. She was in charge of analysis of China and the Korean Peninsula in the Intelligence and Analysis Service. She also promoted cooperation between Japan, China, and South Korea as Counsellor of the Embassy of Japan in Korea. In 2014, Ms. Matsukawa established WAW! (World Assembly for Women) to promote women’s empowerment and gender mainstreaming as the first Director of the Gender Mainstreaming Division in the Foreign Policy Bureau. In 2016, she left MOFA, and was elected to represent Osaka in the House of Councilors.

MODERATOR 

Kiyoteru Tsutsui (Stanford University) 

Kiyoteru Tsutsui is Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he is also Director of the Japan Program, a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Professor of Sociology. He is the author of Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-editor of Corporate Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2021).