Asia & the Pacific

"Belfer Center Newsmakers" highlights members of the Belfer Center community who have been featured recently in the news.

Former Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd is a senior fellow with the Belfer Center and the Inaugural Director of the Asia Society Policy Institute. A longtime China scholar, Mr. Rudd headed a major project at the Belfer Center during the past year on alternative futures for U.S.-China relations over the next decade. In April, he released a report titled U.S.-China 21: The Future of U.S.-China Relations Under Xi Jinping. In this Q&A, we ask Mr. Rudd about his report and the future of U.S.-China relations.

More than 2500 years ago, Thucydides, the Athenian historian and general, wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War. In his oft-quoted summary, he concludes: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” In a forthcoming article, Graham Allison writes that “the defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the U.S. can escape Thucydides’ Trap.”

See a sampling of recent books from the Belfer Center

Farah Pandith, America’s first special representative to Muslim communities, joined the Belfer Center this fall as a Fisher Family Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project and as a senior fellow with the Middle East Initiative. Jairam Ramesh, a member of Parliament from Andhra Pradesh, India, and a leader in international climate negotiations, joined the Belfer Center this fall as a 2014 Fisher Family Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project.

During the past year, the Belfer Center and Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation have continued building on their years of work aimed at improving U.S.-China cooperation and exploring opportunities and challenges related to China.

International Security is America’s leading journal of security affairs. It provides sophisticated analyses of contemporary security issues and discusses their conceptual and historical foundations. The journal is edited at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and published quarterly by the MIT Press.

Fifty years ago this October, as the Cuban Missile Crisis intensified, the world stood   on the brink of a nuclear war. During 13 terrifying days in October 1962, people around the globe watched as President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev searched for a way to move their countries—and the world—away from the nuclear cliff.

The Belfer Center commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October by encouraging fresh thinking on lessons learned from that dangerous confrontation—and how those lessons can be applied to crises encountered today.