Which Countries are Middle Powers – And Why are They Important to the Global Order? Part 2

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The growing geopolitical tensions in the international system, in particular  between the United States and China and also with Russia, have led to a chorus of voices urging on middle powers to greater efforts in maintaining  and even strengthening a rules-based order. Roland Paris in a major Chatham House Brief titled: “Can Middle Powers Save the Liberal World Order?” pointed at various urgent calls from international experts:

Gideon Rachman, a Financial Times columnist, has proposed a ‘middle-powers alliance’ to ‘preserve a world based around rules and rights, rather than power and force’. Two eminent American foreign-policy experts, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, have also called on US allies to ‘leverage their collective economic and military might to save the liberal world order’.

The urgency and calls for middle power action rose perceptively, of course, with ‘America First’  from the Trump Presidency and from the failure of the leading powers – the United States and China – to organize global governance efforts to tackle the global pandemic. Indeed the global pandemic has seemingly ‘lit a fire’ under experts and officials issuing a rising chorus of calls for greater middle power action in the face of leading power failure. An  evident instance is a recent article from  Foreign Affairs from our colleague Bruce Jones from Brookings titled:“Can middle powers lead the world out of the pandemic? Because the United States and China have shown that they can’t”.

In Part 1 of this Post series we attempted to identify which states experts were referring to when they issued the call for middle power action. We ended up with a variety of categories. There were the traditional states, Canada, Australia and maybe South Korea and Singapore. There were states that fell within the top 20 economic powers  – way too many states but lots of familiar powers. And then there were all those states , identified by Jeffrey Robertson in his insightful article: “Middle-power definitions: confusion reigns supreme” in the Australian Journal of International Affairs (2017. 71(4): 355-370, with an interest in and “capacity (material resources, diplomatic influence, creativity, etc.)resources, diplomatic influence, creativity, etc.) to work proactively in concert with similar states to contribute to the development and strengthening of institutions for the governance of the global commons.” And in fact there seemed to be a bit of a marriage between middle powers and multilateralism in the newly created “Alliance for Multilateralism” created by the foreign ministers of France and Germany that umbrellaed at its creation some 40 states.

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Which Countries are Middle Powers – And Why are They Important to the Global Order? Part 1

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I had a debate very recently with my China-West Dialogue (CWD) colleague, Colin Bradford. In a memo we were working on for CWD, he described the two major trade agreements, CPTPP and RCEP. He then added:

 

These two trade agreements show that middle powers are able to take multilateral actions on their own that make an impact.(*)  

But which countries do we see achieving that? And behind that, why have analysts and policy makers become significantly more interested these middle powers in the Trump era recently past?

Counting the Middle Powers

The debate begins with the ‘Who’. Though Colin and I were generally agreed on the content of the article, we went around in circles over which countries we could, and should, identify as middle powers. Now, I was more than ready to forgive Colin his vague characterization of middle powers and then broad inclusion of the same – after all he is an economist – but soon thereafter I stumbled over a rather recent article by Bruce Jones, also of Brookings. and a well known international relations analyst. The article found in FA and titled, “Can Middle Powers Lead the World Out of the Pandemic? Because the United States and China Have Shown They Can’t” tackled the question of the current middle power membership. Given the subject matter of the article, Bruce was called upon to identify in some manner, the states that captured the current set of middle powers:

The concept of “middle powers” is imprecise and somewhat inchoate, but it generally refers to countries that are among the top 20 or so economies in the world, lack large-scale military power (or choose not to play a leading role in defense), and are energetic in diplomatic or multilateral affairs. These countries were seeking to fill part of the international leadership void even before the crisis, particularly when it came to buttressing the rickety multilateral system.

So, there we were. I had no difficulty acknowledging that the term was “imprecise and inchoate” but as for the rest of the features identified by Bruce, well, not so sure. Increasingly, I came to suspect that this was likely to be one of those classic international relations definitions – unclear and contested.

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China-West Relations: Reading the Dynamics and Getting the Mix Right

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China-US relations are at a critical juncture in fashioning global order relations in the 2020s.  As Joe Biden approaches inauguration day, there is increasing speculation on what approach he will take toward China.  Theories abound.  There are those in foreign policy circles who are seen as “restorationists” (see Thomas Wright at TheAtlantic for these terms) who tend to have a greater focus on the cooperation component of the relationship.  There are “reformists” who have come to the conclusion that competition and rivalry must define the path for US-China relations.  There are those who see China as the culprit in job loss, technology theft, trade imbalances, the pandemic, climate change and other hits on American pre-eminence.  And there are many with cultural, societal and business ties to China who hope for a period of predictability, and hopefully opportunity.

Clear-eyed self-interest and deep understanding of the new political dynamics need to guide Biden foreign policy. For Biden and his team, it is not just a question how to reframe US international relations after Trump, but how to shape them in response to changed circumstances, domestic constraints, and new defining elements in the global landscape. 

For starters, Asia is more pressing than Europe, the Indo-Pacific region more demanding than the trans-Atlantic, China is more important than Russia, social and environmental issues are more compelling than trade and financial policies, and domestic pressures everywhere mean that international policies are now constrained by and tethered to internal conditions affecting ordinary people.  Global inter-connectivity may be vividly evident, but domestic politics are dominant in defining strategic thrusts.

Biden and his team seem to “get” most of these circumstances, constraints and defining elements.  But, it is not clear that the incoming Administration has yet stared down the underlying political dynamics that will define geopolitical relations among leading powers, especially how to approach China in ways that makes sense to the other significant global players, that will be effective with China and with domestic political constraints. For this, the various “schools of thought” contending with each other to define the overall narrative for US relations with China, each by themselves are less helpful than combining them to address the complexity and importance of this most crucial relationship.

The starting point has to be a clear understanding that China does indeed have strategic interests in meeting US dominance in the Pacific. Additionally, China does use the state and public resources to advance its economic dynamism, does use techniques for internal control which violate international norms on human rights, and does have the scale, scope and dynamism to be a challenger to US predominance, a rival in the Pacific and a competitor in the global economy.  There is no doubt that this is the reality of China today.  The hardening of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule in the last four years is real and worrisome. 

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Washington’s Unfounded Fear of Biden Collaboration with China

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The Washington Beltway remains in a ‘tizzy’ over the direction of Biden foreign policy. Will Biden commit to the bipartisan ‘full-throated’ competition with China. Here, Ryan Hass of Brookings describes that continuing nervousness on the part of the foreign policy establishment over a possible Biden strategy : 

 

There are a variety of causes for these concerns. Some security-focused experts worry that the Biden administration will prioritize cooperation with China on climate issues above other strategic concerns. Others fear that by signaling interest in cooperation, the United States will show lack of resolve for long-term great power competition with China. Proponents of viewing the U.S.-China relationship as an entrenched ideological struggle worry that cooperation could dilute the focus on what they describe as each side’s irreconcilable ambitions. Some have shared concerns that Beijing will withhold cooperation on climate issues unless it receives American concessions in other areas of the relationship, for example, on Hong Kong or Xinjiang. Others worry that the Chinese are wily negotiators who will hoodwink their earnest American counterparts if given the opportunity. Still others argue that engaging the Chinese as peers on climate issues provides undeserved validation of China on the world stage and legitimation of the Chinese Communist Party at home.

Besides Ryan Haas at Brookings, concern about Biden’s China policy has also been raised by his colleague,  Thomas Wright. In TheAtlantic. Tom has suggested in a recent article that Biden’s choice of John Kerry as special presidential envoy on climate change may well create problems for the new Administration on the critical China file.  

Competition with China will likely be the most difficult foreign-policy issue that President-elect Joe Biden will face. What he decides to lead with and the precise mix of areas in which he engages and confronts Beijing are critically important. This is why Biden’s choice of John Kerry as a special presidential envoy on climate change might create a problem for the incoming president on China policy.

In discussions with Biden colleagues, Wright comments that they expressed concern over Kerry diplomacy. Kerry’s single-minded focus on climate change could, according to these colleagues, bring climate policy progress but sacrifice other security-related US-China matters. As Tom described his conversations with these Biden folk:

A former Obama administration official told me, “China’s diplomacy is a constant search for leverage, and Kerry will deliver a load of it in a wheelbarrow right to their front door every day.

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Exploring the Many Recent International Arrangements – Multilateralism, Plurilateralism, Alliances, Bipolarity and More

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Multilateralism, plurilateralism,  bipolarity, multipolarity, alliances and alignments have all become subjects of serious inquiry in policy and political communities. The discussion and questioning of various international governing arrangements has grown ever louder with the final year, as it turns out, of the Trump Presidency. And, now, also, with the successor to Trump, President-elect, Joe Biden.

The outgoing President scorned long standing alliances and alignments and trumpeted (no pun intended) ‘America First’ attacking these traditional relationships. He fawned over authoritarian leaders and spurned allied ones. Rather than multilateral trade action, he targeted Chinese trade practices imposing broad-based tariffs that brought costs to American producers and consumers. All these many actions seemed determined to undermine the rules-based order.

Meanwhile, Biden, in marked contrast to Trump, announced soon after his election, the return of US global order leadership. This seemed to reflect what colleague Thomas Wright (2020) described in The Atlantic as a ‘restorationist approach’ to American foreign policy.  President-elect Biden presenting his national security team on November 24th declared (2020):

And it’s a team that reflects the fact that America is back, ready to lead the world, not retreat from it. Once again, sit at the head of the table.

What arrangements do Biden and his team envisage – what relationships do they target? Will they seek to: revitalize alliances, encourage multilateralism, avoid rising bipolar tensions between the United States and China and tackle the many global governance challenges. Is the Biden foreign policy willing to relax relations and lower tensions with China and broadly take the steps that reestablish American leadership and to refocus on a multilateral rules-based order? 

Over the next few posts I hope to delve and deliver, with friends, the many forms of global order relations – multilateralism, plurilateralism, multipolarity, alliances, alignments and more. The hope is to reflect on the diversity of these arrangements, determine their individual and collective effectiveness and to examine these arrangements in the context of a new US Administration and its goals. And we hope to uncover those structures and arrangements most likely to stabilize the international system and further global governance efforts.

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The Link Between Domestic Politics and Global Governance

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Colin Bradford is the Guest Blogger for this Post. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Brookings in Washington. He is a also a Principal of the Vision20 and a Co-Chair of the China-West Dialogue all with Yves Tiberghien, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia and Alan S Alexandroff Director the Global Summitry Project of Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto and the Blog Master here at RisingBRICSAM

The underlying political driver of the current tensions in the global order is the actual or potential failure of economies to deliver social outcomes that are politically sustainable.  This is not just a phenomenon that brought about Brexit and Boris Johnson in the UK or Trump in the US – now apparently unelected.  This has been, and is, the drama of developing economies for decades. The failure to deliver social outcomes that are politically sustainable is  the source of social unrest now in Eastern Europe, the fear of the Communist Party of China, and the discontent of Europeans with the strictures of the EU.  It is global and deep seated; sweeping and systemic.

Populist nationalism is on the rise and authoritarianism is increasing as a result. The easy road for politicians to take today is to appeal to national strength and rally their publics around the flag.  The hard road to take is seize on this moment of hyper-interconnectivity revealed by the COVID 19 crisis and realize that strong multilateral cooperation and coordination is essential for global health and economic recovery in the short run and systemic transformation in the medium and long run.

The urgent necessity is for governments, societies and firms to realize that there is no going back to normal, that systemic crises require systemic change and that social priorities and people-centered policies are vital to restoring confidence in markets and governance.

But to systemically transform the social order reinforcement, resonance and support from the global system of international institutions is the new global governance priority.  Multilateralism needs to be revived to create innovative responses to these new domestic social priorities.  Strengthening the WHO, the ILO, the OECD and the multilateral regional development banks is necessary so that they can become the drivers of the international system as front-line innovators, taking on the dominant norm setting roles that the IMF, World Bank and WTO assumed during the Bretton Woods era.

The fact that social priorities are primordial domestic priorities does not mean the international institutions have no role to play.  To the contrary, key roles of international institutions are essential now through peer reviews, sharing best practice, and widening the array of policy options for national governments to engage in selective borrowing for internal application based on national criteria, culture and practice.   The funding international institutions provide provokes dialogues with governments and societies about priorities and challenges which enable countries to take advantage of global knowledge frontiers embodied in the experience of international institutions. Returning to knowledge-based policy making in national practice, which is sorely needed now, can be facilitated by these interactions between global institutions and national governments.

New forms of multilateralism and a new global order need to support transformation in the social order. This force field also operates in reverse.  Social transformation would strengthen societies as a whole such that the new social order would support the global order by: reducing ‘my-country-first’ nationalism, unilateralism, and dampen geopolitical tensions. The social order and the global order would be in constructive symbiosis instead, as currently, in rather destructive dynamics of a bipolar competitive era.

The new nexus between economics, society and the global order would create positive synergies toward better futures and greater systemic sustainability.

Image Credit: TechCrunch

The March of Global Order

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This Post is a collaboration with Yves Tiberghien Professor of Political Science at UBC and RisingBRICSAM blogger Alan Alexandroff.both Principals at the Vision20. It underscores that key actors in Asia, Europe and elsewhere are not waiting on the United States to return to global collaboration and multilateral action.

Out of Asia there is a major push on various global governance fronts. The world is not waiting for the United States. And in fact Joe Biden, the President Elect and his people are going to have to think ‘hard’ about whether they are prepared to be ‘left behind’ in the march forward of various multilateral gatherings. Are the demands of domestic politics and the Democratic Party’s distaste for ‘free trade arrangements’ going to leave the Biden Administration lukewarm to rejoining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership or CPTPP? Lukewarm leaves the United States on the outside of efforts to integrate trade and investment in Asia and beyond.

While the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a limited integration of trade and investment, nevertheless the RCEP is the largest regional agreement concluded in Asia. The Pact covers 2.2 billion people and 15 countries . It includes China and other major economic actors including Japan and South Korea. As the NYTimes (2020) points out:

The pact will most likely formalize, rather than remake, business among the signatory countries. Its so-called rules of origin will set common standards to determine whether a final product qualifies for duty-free treatment, potentially making it simpler for companies to set up supply chains in several different countries.

While the RCEP lacks significant and needed steps to further liberalization and common regulation in key areas such as services trade, e-commerce, intellectual property protection and the elimination of manufacturing subsidies it is a key advance for the Asian region. As pointed out by Yves Tiberghien (2020) in a just published EastAsiaForum post:

RCEP will advance the acceleration of regional economic integration in Asia, and pushes back on Trump’s strategy of decoupling of US allies from China. While Southeast Asian countries, Japan, South Korea, and Australia may all be wary of China at the moment and seek diversity in their trade relations, they simply cannot sustain their prosperity without stabilisation of trade relations with China. Asia is criss-crossed by ever intensifying value chains, and China’s still an integral part of that. Vietnam and other ASEAN countries are rising as manufacturing hubs, but that’s a process accompanied by increased imports of intermediary goods from China.

But RCEP is also of global significance. The agreement, signed off in the middle of a pandemic and US–China trade war, reminds the world, first, that East Asia countries, unlike the Americas and Europe, have broadly succeeded in controlling COVID-19. That success, across different types of political regime, with a similar respect for science, expertise, and trust in government, was accompanied by general acceptance of mask-wearing and community rules.

Second, it also reminds the world that the biggest trading group in the world economy is doubling down on the rules-based multilateral system. Research by Homi Kharas shows that most of the increase in the global middle class until 2030 will take place in China and Asia.

 

RCEP also embeds the first trilateral agreement between China, South Korea and Japan, itself a huge deal. The common interests of these three countries have over-ridden tense geopolitical relations across the Asia Pacific. RCEP underscores the pragmatic efforts of Japan to balance its strong security stance on the South China Sea and in the East China Sea with stability in the bilateral relationship with China. After the completion of the CPTPP, the EU–Japan partnership, and the US–Japan agreement, this marks the completion of the Abe trade agenda (even though Japan would have preferred India to join RCEP). …

As well, RCEP brings significant institutionalization to Japan’s economic relations with China, including a new chapter on e-commerce (with a ban on data localisation requirements), rules on government procurement, and rules on intellectual property rights that go beyond WTO rules. The same calculations drive Australia’s readiness to sign RCEP in the midst of a bitter, but hopefully short-lived, trade fight with China.

The coming Biden Administration needs to rethink its reluctance to rejoin the CPTPP. If it fails to do this it could be on the outside of growing multilateral economic integration and possibly more.

Image Credit: Vietnam News Agency, via Associated Press.

Declaring Engagement Dead!

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Opinion and analysis writing often seems to come forward in ‘waves’. It is almost never just one piece but a veritable series of similar narrations that seeks to identify the trends.  This wave-like writing certainly is evident when it comes to US foreign policy making and in particular the rising tensions between the two leading powers – the United States and China. There was a first wave of  ‘New Cold War’ articles, that as I suggested along with some of my V20 colleagues seemingly impacted partisans of both Parties in the United States. Then, there was the wave US-China trade war tensions. And now we see the current wave in the ‘Rising US-China’ tensions and the return to a view that this may indeed be a new sorta ‘Cold War’ and dire predictions of decoupling between the two leading economies and the ‘deer in the headlights’ of US allies trying to avoid choices between the two.

This newest wave of US-China tensions has been orchestrated in part by the Trump Administration with speeches from senior officials William Barr, the Attorney General,  Robert C. O’Brien, National Security Advisor,  Christopher Wray, the Director of the FBI, Mark Esper Secretary of Defense and, finally with the icing on the cake the speech by  Michael Pompeo the  current Secretary of State at a highly significant location – the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum at Yorba Lind, California.

It is interesting that these declarative words all began with the Donald Trump’s actions – the chaos, the denigration of multilateralism, the strong-arming of allies and the threats to end key alliance relations of the liberal order – NATO, US- Japan and US-Korea security treaties. While these initiatives and threats heralded Trump’s America First policy they have been superseded most recently with the targeting of China. It reflects, one suspects, the ‘Hail Mary’ approach that Trump seems to have chosen with falling numbers on his reelection. It is China ‘all the time’, by these officials, attacks on the Communist Party of China and even the targeting of regime change by these US officials.  Additionally, and I don’t think prematurely US foreign policy analysts are at the same time attempting to anticipate a foreign policy under a Biden Administration. But we’ll save that examination for another moment.

Meanwhile the language is barely restrained . As my CSIS colleagues Scott Kennedy and Matthew Goodman conclude in a recent post:

Through a series of speeches and tough actions, the Trump administration has clearly signaled that it views a Xi Jinping-led China as an existential threat to the West, and hence, is trying to mobilize its friends and allies to form a united front against Beijing.

Here is William Barr, the Attorney General of the United States describing China and its current ambitions in a speech he delivered on July 16th:

… that is, the United States’ response to the global ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party.  The CCP rules with an iron fist over one of the great ancient civilizations of the world.  It seeks to leverage the immense power, productivity, and ingenuity of the Chinese people to overthrow the rules-based international system and to make the world safe for dictatorship.

The objective is according to Barr, clear:

The People’s Republic of China is now engaged in an economic blitzkrieg—an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government (indeed, whole-of-society) campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower.

And, the dire views of Barr are only amplified, indeed ‘accelerated’ a now favored term in this ‘Age of the pandemic’ by Mike Pompeo:

But I have faith we can do it. I have faith because we’ve done it before. We know how this goes. I have faith because the CCP is repeating some of the same mistakes that the Soviet Union made – alienating potential allies, breaking trust at home and abroad, rejecting property rights and predictable rule of law.

And as pointed up above the location of the Pompeo speech was no accident. It is the Nixon library – the archive of the President that set in motion along with his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, the dramatic alteration of US policy toward Mao’s China – one of the seminal diplomatic events of any President in the post WWII period. And why deliver the speech there? Well, to pronounce that policy a dramatic mistake:

As time went on, American policymakers increasingly presumed that as China became more prosperous, it would open up, it would become freer at home, and indeed present less of a threat abroad, it’d be friendlier. It all seemed, I am sure, so inevitable.  But that age of inevitability is over. The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce.

This puts the end of the decades long engagement. ‘Engagement is dead’.

But is it?

Image Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times

What Comes Next for the Global Order?

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Much hurried prediction, or more correctly, should I say speculation has been expressed by IR experts over the  impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the current global order. One of IR’s leading lights, Richard Haass, President of CFR has been ‘front and center’  in painting a post Covid global order. It’s not very pretty, nor much of an order. In an April article in Foreign Affairs  he describes the future global order in quite ‘downbeat’ terms:

Yet the world that will emerge from the crisis will be recognizable. Waning American leadership, faltering global cooperation, great-power discord: all of these characterized the international environment before the appearance of COVID-19, and the pandemic has brought them into sharper-than-ever relief. They are likely to be even more prominent features of the world that follows.

He suggest further that even were Biden to be elected the effort to  bring a more traditional global governance system would be stymied:

Even if a foreign policy “traditionalist” such as former Vice President Joseph Biden wins the November presidential election, resistance from Congress and the public will prevent the full-scale return of an expansive U.S. role in the world. And no other country, not China or anyone else, has both the desire and the ability to fill the void the United States has created.

Given this rather grim near future I was caught by the Foreign Policy article by Oona Hathaway and her Yale Law School colleague, Scott Shapiro:

The crisis offers the opportunity to transform the global order from one dominated by a single state, or a small number of them, to a more equal system of global governance. It’s time to stop waiting for a hegemon to come to the rescue and instead try to address more of our global problems through independently organized global clubs.

So, no more hegemon – no US; no China. Instead moving forward and in a position to tackle global governance challenges will be ‘global clubs’.  The characteristics of such club membership – that is excluding members who fail to adhere to the agreed rules – make such clubs reasonable, in fact highly useful  where great power leadership has receded. As the authors suggest:

The idea of decentralizing global governance to shifting alliances of like-minded nations is not entirely new. Much of international law already operates on precisely this principle of shared interests and decentralized enforcement. But unmooring global governance from reliance on a hegemonic actor, and from the global institutions we’ve known since the end of World War II, could become reality in part because of the conditions created by the pandemic.

As they conclude: 

The club rules are enforced not by a hegemon but by members directly by denying the benefits of membership to bad actors. One advantage of such decentralized governance is that any state can start a club. It doesn’t take a hegemon; it just takes a good idea.

These global clubs certainly bring a shift in global governance leadership and policymaking. Their global club thinking may be just the ‘tonic’ needed for what we’ve identified – that is the Vision20 principals, Colin Bradford, Yves Tiberghien and myself – as ‘effective multilateralism. We have described effective multilateralism, at least with  respect to the G20 leaders as “the elective, targeted, and purposeful actions with varied coalitions. We believe encouraging effective multilateralism is a vital tool in meeting the challenges the G20 and the international system face.” 

What Hathaway and Shapiro have offered possibly is a logic for organizing such coalitions. While we have witnessed various multilateralism initiatives, note the ‘Alliance for Multilateralism‘ offered up initially by the foreign ministers of France and Germany. What we haven’t seen is action.

Now is the time.

Image Credit: picture-alliance/AP/photo/T. Camus

Trying to Understand Xi’s China: Kerry Brown in Episode 28: ‘Shaking the Global Order: Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump.

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Most international relations specialists would concur, the most consequential relationship, now, and for the foreseeable future, in the Global Order is that between China and the West. Yes, I do not say the U.S. Instead it is the much vaguer term, the West. That does not mean that many do not see this as primarily a U.S.-China rivalry. But for others this not a retelling of the Cold War.

For instance the Vision 20 principals: Colin Bradford, Brookings, Yves Tiberghien, University of British Columbia and myself, here at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto recently  launched the CWD Project, or the China and the West Dialogue Project.

Our first collective effort, assisted mightily by Professor Kevin Gallagher, Director, Global Development Policy Center, Boston University, is to hold a first preliminary workshop on March 20th at Boston University. That first preliminary workshop is designed to examine the relationship the changing Global Order. We see this an inquiry into the complex set of relationships with Europe, North America, China and other actors in Asia. A number of former officials, China experts and international relations experts will gather to examine the current relationships and the way forward.

Among the China experts we are so very pleased to welcome to the CWD is Professor Kerry Brown. His insights into China policy making and politics are well known. I was therefore pleased to welcome him here to the Global Summitry’s podcast series to talk about China’s political  leaders and the policies to the West. Come listen to Episode 28 in the series, ‘Shaking the Global Order: Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump’.

Kerry has served in both the public and the academic sectors. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. Kerry Brown is currently Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute, Kings College London. Before that 2012-2015 Kerry was Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Kerry has written a great deal about Chinese politics and its foreign policy. Recent works include: “China’s World: What does China want?”; “China’s Dream: The culture of Chinese Communism and the secret sources of its power”; and “The world according to Xi: Everything you need to know about the new China”.