THREAD: Now that U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has named or nominated senior members of his foreign policy and national security team, it might be useful to survey what all they have written or said in the recent past:
1. Tony Blinken has been named Secretary of State. Here is a wide-ranging conversation that touches upon a lot of global issues from last July: hudson.org/research/16210…
2. Wendy Sherman is set to be Deputy Secretary of State. Here she is on Trump's foreign policy from July 2020: belfercenter.org/publication/to…
3. Toria Nuland is to be Under Secretary for Policy at the State Department. A former Ambassador to NATO, here she is on "How to Heal NATO" from late 2019: foreignpolicy.com/podcasts/and-n…
4. Over to the National Security Council staff. Jake Sullivan has been named National Security Adviser. Here he writes on American exceptionalism in January/February 2019: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
5. Here is Sullivan and Kurt Campbell (reported to be named Indo-Pacific coordinator at the White House) on competition with China: foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…
6. Deputy National Security Adviser-to-be Jon Finer is a former journalist. Here he is on intervention in Yemen. foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/09/fro…
8. Among many others named to the NSC staff, Tarun Chhabra has been named senior director for technology. Here he is on the China challenge from February 2019: brookings.edu/research/the-c…
9. Turning to intelligence, Avril Haines has been nominated to be Director of National Intelligence. Here she is talking (with surprising detail) about North Korea in October 2017:
10. Bill Burns, a diplomat and head of the Carnegie Endowment, has been named Director of the CIA. He wrote on U.S. foreign policy last year: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
11. Burns also co-authored this essay on transforming U.S. diplomacy with Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who has been nominated as U.S. Ambassador to the UN. foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite…
12. Turning to the Pentagon, retired general Lloyd Austin has been nominated to be Secretary of Defense. Here's an interview he gave upon retirement from the U.S. Army. army.mil/article/198441…
13. Kathleen Hicks is set to be Deputy Secretary of Defense. Here she is on the subject of maritime domain awareness in Europe: csis.org/analysis/conte…
14. Colin Kahl is expected to be confirmed as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He wrote a year ago on Trump's Middle East policy: foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/04/tru…
15. Foreign policy won't just involve the White House, State Department, Pentagon, and intelligence. Economic and technology roles will be just as important.
16. Janet Yellen is the nominee for U.S. Treasury Secretary. Here she is talking about trade and technology competition with China: cnn.com/2020/01/13/eco…
17. Commerce Secretary nominee Gina Raimondo - previously Governor of Rhode Island - hasn't written or spoken recently on trade policy per se. But curiously, this features on her personal web site: ginaraimondo.com/meet-gina/
18. Finally, John Kerry has been named Special Envoy for Climate, a cabinet-level position. This is one of the last things he wrote before being named to the job: nytimes.com/2020/10/26/opi…
CORRECTION: One of those links was to the wrong article. This was the Campbell / Doshi piece I had meant to link to, not the one on COVID-19 (although that's worth reading too!).
19. I’ll add a few more as new names get announced. Laura Rosenberger will be Senior Director for China at the White House. Here she is discussing Chinese influence in Europe with Juli Smith (another Biden advisor): securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/chinas-europea…
20. Cara Abercrombie as Senior Director for Defense on the NSC staff. In early 2019, she wrote about improving the potential for US-India defense cooperation: nbr.org/publication/re…
21. I should add another piece coauthored by Kurt Campbell, this time with Ely Ratner, who is reportedly heading to the Pentagon. foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…
In case anyone's interested, I have a new article looking at the challenges faced by incoming national security principals in the Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, and Trump administrations: hindustantimes.com/opinion/all-th…
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If the reports are correct about the national security and foreign policy principals that Biden will name this week, a few items of potential interest in the following thread. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Transcript of a wide-ranging conversation this summer between Blinken and Walter Russell Mead at the Hudson Institute: hudson.org/research/16210…
There's a lot in the India-U.S. joint statement released today, and it's useful as a stocktaking exercise. But beyond the headlines, a few small but important items that captured developments over the past 12 months:
"The Ministers welcomed the establishment of a permanent presence of the U.S. International Development Finance Cooperation (DFC) in India this year."
"The Ministers welcomed the convening of the Military Cooperation Group (MCG) later this year to review bilateral military-to-military engagement including joint exercises, training and expert exchanges."
Chairman NSCAI and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "AI...enables everything else. Progress in science will be fundamentally accelerated...The profound effect on health is yet to be seen...This is the time to get AI right...The China competition becomes very important."
Schmidt: China has a concerted plan to lead in AI. Russia is using AI for military purposes. America alone is not going to make it. The values that Chinese infrastructure are built on are different. The combination of the people and the energy make India the critical partner.
It turns out that a recent popular history of the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, written by no less than the chair of the History Department at Yale University...
...which claims that the Ottomans "made our modern world" and influenced "nearly every major event" of the era "from China to Mexico" (claims reproduced faithfully in outlets such as the Washington Post)...
...but described by professional historians as full of "bizarre ideas," a "tissue of falsehoods, half-truths and absurd speculations," an "example of how global history should not be written"...
Replug: New paper on 🇮🇳🇦🇺 security partnership. But I also wanted to highlight some work by others on the emerging trilateral relationships involving those two. lowyinstitute.org/publications/a…
This paper has been some years in the making, and benefited considerably from 4 visits to Australia between 2016 & 2019 (thanks to @PerthUSAsia@NSC_ANU@LowyInstitute) as well as informative interactions with both Australian and Indian defence officials. A few highlights below:
Strategic relations between India & Australia were modest between 1944 and 2000, due to:
1. Cold War (and 🇦🇺 🇵🇰 ties) 2. India's nuclear programme 3. Weak social links 4. Weak economic and trade relations