Countering Asia's Axis of Authoritarianism

Mike Green (0:00)

Welcome to The Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Mike Green of the United States Studies Centre in Sydney and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Welcome back to The Asia Chessboard. I'm Mike Green. I'm joined by Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens today.

We're going to talk about the nature of totalitarian leadership, North Korea, China, Russia. This is a critical way to think about the Chessboard, a strategic competition, globally and especially in the Indo-Pacific.

The most seminal work on Cold War Grand Strategy, written by George Kennan early in the Cold War from the embassy in Moscow and then in Washington was not about the nature of the international system, it was about the nature of Soviet totalitarianism. That was the starting point for the bedrock that served us for the entirety of the Cold War as we thought about containment. Today, as we look at in some ways even more complicated strategic competition with China, with the intractable problem of North Korea, we have a lot of people who talk about the system. We have a lot of people who talk about military balance of power. We don't have that many scholars who really unpack the nature of the authoritarian leadership and the leadership dynamics and sustainability and decision-making of the adversaries we are confronting. That's why I'm so delighted that Sheena could join us. She is doing the most cutting-edge work in that area. She's currently associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin, University of Texas at Austin. She directs the Asia Policy Program and serves as editor-in-chief of the very well-regarded Texas National Security Review. She's on leave right now to serve as visiting associate professor of research in Indo-Pacific Security at the US Army War College at the Strategic Studies Institute. I should emphasize that her views are her own in our podcast. She's not speaking for the Army or the Army War College. She's also a non-resident scholar with the Asia Program at Carnegie. She works broadly on security, foreign policy, but her, I think, most widely read work is trying to unpack and understand the nature of authoritarian politics and foreign policy, which is going to only become more important. Sheena, welcome. Now, I've been really looking forward to having you on because I always begin with our guests on the origin story. How did you get into, in this case, Asian security authoritarian leadership analysis? Usually, my guests will have some story. They were going to be a violinist or a surgeon or an expert in French literature. You're the first person I've had on whose origin story begins like me with the Scottish arts. I was a competitive piper. You were a highly successful competitive highland dancer on the West Coast. How did you go from that to this particular pursuit? I'm sure there's not a direct line and maybe the highland dancing has nothing to do with it at all, but I just have been looking forward to mentioning that.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens (3:04)

Yeah. Well, first, it's great to be on with you. I'm a big admirer of the podcast. It's terrific to be in Sydney and I've really been looking forward to this conversation today.

Yes, I did Scottish Highland dancing for years growing up as a girl. My mom's family is all from the north of Scotland in a relatively small town, Wick up in Caithness, if anyone is familiar with Scottish geography. But probably the origin story is a little bit adjacent to that in that, when I was in third grade, my parents adopted my sister from Korea. I had a personal and a familial interest in Korea for a long time before it ever became an academic and an intellectual interest. But the other trend or inflection point I think is that, I did go to college thinking I would study medicine and creative writing.

Then three weeks before I went to college, I went to Stanford, 9-11 happened. I was really confused because I had grown up in this moment, the post-Cold War moment where the United States was the sole superpower and 19 people with box cutters could turn the American sense of security upside down overnight. That was just really puzzling and I was lucky at Stanford to be at a terrific place where there were a lot of good people who'd worked in government, who are committed to public service, who are committed to asking rigorous questions about what had just happened in the United States and what we should and shouldn't learn from it. That was just a great place to make this jump into international relations and national security and start understanding what was going on. Then this family interest drew me back to East Asia, Scottish dancing notwithstanding.