Speaker Biographies
Frederick Z. Brown is research fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where he founded the Southeast Asia Studies Program in 1991 and was associate director from 1995–2005. From 1958–84, he was a Department of State Foreign Service officer with postings in France, Thailand, the Soviet Union, and Cyprus. He served twice in Vietnam, first as deputy senior advisor to the U.S. military in Vinh Long province (1968–70), and then as consul general in Danang (1971–73). In Washington, he was country director for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (1977–78) and deputy spokesman of the Department, 1976-77. Mr. Brown was a professional staff member for East Asia and the Pacific on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from1984–87. He was also a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1988–89.
Raymond Burghardt is the director of East-West Seminars at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Before joining the East-West Center, he was U.S. ambassador to Vietnam from 2001–04. He was the director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) from 1999–2001, and in February 2006 the AIT board of trustees named him chairman of the board. He previously served as American consul general in Shanghai (1997–99), as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassies in Manila (1993–96) and Seoul (1990–93), and as a political counselor in Beijing (1987–89). His previous positions also have included an assignment on the National Security Council staff as senior director of Latin American Affairs, and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia before joining the Foreign Service.
Christopher Griffin is a research associate in Asian Studies at AEI, where he is researching competing strategies among the great powers for influence in Southeast Asia and the reemergence of Japan as a “normal” power. Before coming to AEI in January 2005, he was a research assistant at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Since May 2006, Griffin has been an associate editor at Armed Forces Journal, where he writes on defense-industrial cooperation and military blogs.
Joshua Kurlantzick is a visiting scholar in the Carnegie Endowment’s China Program. Also a special correspondent for The New Republic and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, Kurlantzick assesses China’s relationship with the developing world, including Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In his new book, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World (Yale University Press, 2007), Kurlantzick focuses on how China uses its soft power—culture, investment, academia, foreign aid, and public diplomacy—to influence other countries in the developing world. Additionally, Kurlantzick is currently a fellow at the University of Southern California School of Public Diplomacy and the Pacific Council on International Policy.
Alexander Vuving is a research fellow in the International Security Program of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He studies security strategies of Asian states in an age of China’s rise, and is writing a book manuscript that grows out of his dissertation on Vietnam since the mid-1980s, including topics such as Vietnam’s sources of grand strategy and mechanisms of strategic change. His current research interests include the sources and the making of grand strategy and world order, grand strategies of the great powers in the post–Cold War era, Asian security, and a reformulation of realism that also draws on insights from constructivism and liberalism.
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