News & Announcements

The United States and China should manage competition and cooperation at the same time by identifying and working on areas of shared interest, the Harvard professor who has been hunting for solutions to the "Thucydides Trap" has said.

Following the breakdown of  the Trump-Kim Summit in Hanoi, Belfer Center Korea experts Matthew Bunn, Nicholas Burns, Martin Malin, Joseph Nye, Gary Samore, Wendy Sherman, and Jon Wolfsthal react to the collapse of the talks and suggest steps the United States should take now.

In advance of the Trump-Kim Summit in Hanoi February 27-28, Belfer Center experts offer a reality check on the negotiation over nuclear issues.

Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard Kennedy School, said in an interview with Bloomberg that China is rivaling the U.S. in virtually every domain. Because of the dynamic between these two powers, Allison warned that the future will be "extremely dangerous."

The historic summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore this month (June 12) has drawn both skepticism and optimism from experts. A panel of senior American and South Korean diplomats with experience negotiating with North Korea weighed in at an event hosted by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs’ Korea Working Group on Tuesday (June 19).

Belfer Center experts offer insight and analysis of the Trump-Kim summit through statements and interviews.

Belfer Center expert looks at potential progress, fallout from the North, South Korea meeting

The last time that America almost risked a pre-emptive strike on North Korea the gamble offered a spectacular pay-off. Ashton Carter, a leading architect of that plan, recalls that his scheme for bombing the Yongbyon nuclear facility in 1994 assumed that in one or two days the entirety of the regime’s nuclear programme could be levelled and entombed in rubble. Mr Carter, who went on to become defence secretary in the Obama administration, now thinks that an American first strike would only put “a significant dent” in North Korea’s arsenal of nuclear devices and bombmaking sites. “The difference today is that the North Koreans are very good at hiding, burying and moving around their nuclear infrastructure,” says Mr Carter, now at Harvard University.

Former Deputy Secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall is joining Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a Senior Fellow, the Center announced today. Sherwood-Randall, who has served in the White House and Departments of Energy and Defense, is returning to the Center where she worked in the 1990s to help establish two pioneering projects – the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project with Graham Allison, who this month stepped down as the Center’s director, and the Preventive Defense Project with Ash Carter, the former Secretary of Defense who is the new Belfer Center director.