Asia & the Pacific

From the annexation of the Philippines in 1898, to looming confrontation with Iran today, On Point news analyst Jack Beatty on U.S. leadership, vested military interests, and unintended military entanglements.

Stephen Walt elaborates on what he is expecting for 2024:  the Israel-Gaza conflict widening, the 75th anniversary of NATO, the possible re-election of Donald Trump, and the election results from other populous democracies, to name a few.

Episode 92 examines conflict delegations and the roles of intermediary actors within proxy conflict. Our guests introduce the idea of intermediaries and pull from academic and practical experience to set the stage.  Along with other historical examples, they examine the role Pakistan played as a key go-between from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan through the American withdrawal in 2021. They offer lessons for working through intermediaries in ongoing conflicts and highlight pitfalls found within these complex geopolitical relationships. 

It remains one of the most tantalizing questions of John F. Kennedy's legacy: if he had survived his trip to Dallas in November 1963, would he have withdrawn U.S. military advisers from Vietnam? The possibility that Kennedy would have avoided the epic mistake of plunging the U.S. into a land war in Southeast Asia continues to stir debate among historians.  Professor Fredrik Logevall is interviewed.

The Cold War started earlier than we think — and maybe never ended at all. Historian Calder Walton says understanding the US-Soviet conflict prepares us for this era of tensions with Russia and China.

A Better Peace welcomes Nate Moir to discuss his book, Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare, which analyses Fall's life to understand what drove his thinking and understanding of the situation. He joins host John Nagl to explain how Fall was consistently ahead of the conventional wisdom.

Daniel Schrag and Henry Lee discuss the policies China could enact in the near-term to ease its transition to a low-carbon economy, the subject of their book Foundations for a Low-Carbon Energy System in China (Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

The economist and HKS professor is passionate about solving what may be humanity's most important and perplexing problem: How to untangle fossil fuels from the global economy.

Stephen Walt provides A realist POV on the war in Ukraine, competition with China, COVID, and more in the second part of an interview with Foreign Policy Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal.

On April 6, 2022,  the Belfer Center's Future of Diplomacy Project and Indo-Pacific Security Project as well as the Center for Public Leadership hosted a hybrid seminar with Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, former National Security Advisor of India and former Foreign Secretary in India’s Ministry of External Affairs, and Ambassador Richard Verma, former U.S. Ambassador to India and Belfer Center Senior Fellow, on India’s foreign policy and U.S.-India relations in a changing world order. The discussion explored why India abstained from recent U.N. votes deploring Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, what that means for U.S.-India relations, both bilateral and through the Quad, and how the war in Ukraine will affect geopolitics in Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific. Gopal Nadadur, MPA/ID candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School moderated this conversation.