In this eighteenth session of the Strategic Forum, former senior American and South Korean government officials and other leading experts will discuss current developments in the Korean Peninsula and North Korea policy, the future of the U.S.-South Korean alliance, and a strategic vision for Northeast Asia. The session is hosted by the Korea Program in association with The Sejong Institute, a top South Korean think tank.

In this seventeenth session of the Strategic Forum, former senior American and South Korean government officials and other leading experts will discuss current developments in the Korean Peninsula and North Korea policy, the future of the U.S.-South Korean alliance, and a strategic vision for Northeast Asia. The session is hosted by the Korea Program in association with The Sejong Institute, a top South Korean think tank.

The report from this session is avaiable here to download.

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Drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience in the Pentagon and White House, Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe and the Middle East.

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Dr. Green is also a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, and a distinguished scholar at the Asia Pacific Institute in Tokyo. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Strategy Group, the America Australia Leadership Dialogue, the advisory boards of Radio Free Asia, Center for a New American Security, and the editorial boards of the Washington Quarterly and the Journal of Unification Studies in Korea. He also serves as a trustee at The Asia Foundation, senior adviser at the Asia Group, and as an associate of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Dr. Green has authored numerous books and articles on East Asian security, including most recently, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 . He received his master’s and doctoral degrees from SAIS and did additional graduate and postgraduate research at Tokyo University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Kenyon College with highest honors. He holds a black belt in Iaido (sword) and has won international prizes on the great highland bagpipe.

Books will be available for sale at the event

Asia’s transformation presents both challenges and opportunities at international, regional, and domestic levels. One key to a peaceful, prosperous Asia in the 21^st century is good relations between the United States and China. But other challenges exist: nuclear proliferation, maritime security, violent conflict, environmental degradation, natural disasters, food security, cyber-security, and social and gender inequality, among others. Social transformation is outpacing political and institutional reform in many Asian countries, and the widening gap between state and society is a potent force for change. How will Asians address these challenges over the next one to two decades? What role will Asian women play in this transformation? How should the United States respond? The panelists and the discussant have contributed answers to these and other questions regarding Asia’s future in the latest iteration of The Asia Foundation’s quadrennial investigation and dissemination of Asian views of America’s role in Asia, including policy recommendations for the Trump administration. Stanford’s Southeast Asia Program director Don Emmerson will chair the session.

Chheang Vannarith

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This panel discussion is co-sponsored by The Asia Pacific Research Center and The Asia Foundation with support from The Carnegie Corporation of New York

Indonesia has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention and does not offer legal pathways for the permanent integration of refugees into its society. Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar across the Andaman Sea to Aceh in 2015 did, nevertheless, receive “hospitality” in the form of a humanitarian welcome by local non-state actors. Indonesian authorities have argued that this “Aceh model” deserves emulation by other countries experiencing emergency in-migrations. Since the crisis, academics and policymakers in Indonesia and elsewhere have debated the merits of the model compared with state-funded refugee-protection schemes.

Dr. Missbach will examine the reactions of the Indonesian hosts towards the Rohingya through the conceptual lens of “hospitality.” The diverging motivations of the different stakeholders and groups who provided hospitality, she will argue, were not always as altruistic as claimed. By documenting the tensions inherent in hospitality practices, Dr. Missbach will reveal a subtle instrumentalization of hospitality by non-state actors for non-refugee related purposes, and thus question the effectiveness of such ad hoc approaches when it comes to ensuring basic refugee rights. Privately offered hospitality alone, traditional or religious, cannot resolve migration crises in ways that respect those rights. Accordingly, in Indonesia and Southeast Asia generally, the state should take more responsibility for helping refugees seeking safety.

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Abstract 

Scholars have credited a model of state-led capitalism called the developmental state with producing the first wave of the East Asian economic miracle. Using historical evidence based on original archival research, this talk offers a geopolitical explanation for the origins of the developmental state. In contrast to previous studies that have emphasized colonial legacies or domestic political factors, I argue that the developmental state was the legacy of the rivalry between the United States and Communist China during the Cold War. Responding to the acute tensions in Northeast Asia in the early postwar years, the United States supported emergency economic controls in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to enforce political stability. In response to the belief that the Communist threat would persist over the long term, the U.S. strengthened its clients by laying the foundations of a capitalist, export-oriented economy under bureaucratic guidance. The result of these interventions was a distinctive model of state-directed capitalism that scholars would later characterize as a developmental state.

I verify this claim by examining the rivalry between the United States and the Chinese Communists and demonstrating that American threat perceptions caused the U.S. to promote unorthodox economic policies among its clients in Northeast Asia. In particular, I examine U.S. relations with the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan, where American efforts to create a bulwark against Communism led to the creation of an elite economic bureaucracy for administering U.S. economic aid. In contrast, the United States decided not to create a developmental state in the Philippines because the Philippine state was not threatened by the Chinese Communists. Instead, the Philippines faced a domestic insurgency that was weaker and comparatively short-lived. As a result, the U.S. pursued a limited goal of maintaining economic stability instead of promoting rapid industrialization. These findings shed new light on the legacy of statism in American foreign economic policy and highlight the importance of geopolitics in international development.

Bio

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James Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He specializes in International Relations with a focus on U.S. foreign policy in East Asia and relations across the Taiwan Strait. James also serves as the Senior Editor for Taiwan Security Research, an academic website that aggregates news and commentary on the economic and political dimensions of Taiwan's security.

This event is co-sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), both part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.