Taking Stock of U.S. Strategy in Asia

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. We're joined for a tour of the horizon of the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific with one of the very best in the field, Randall Schriver. We've worked together on and off over, it just occurred to me, Randy, over three decades.

Randall Schriver (0:35)

Yeah.

Mike Green (0:35)

You've been there for a lot of history. I think you were 12, I was 10

But you've been there for a lot of American statecraft in different parts of the US government, think tank community in the middle of a lot of important decisions. Lots to get to. Randy is currently the chair of the board of the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security. He served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the first Trump administration from January 2018 to December 2019

He founded the Project 2049 Institute, which a lot of listeners will know for its work on East Asian security, especially around Taiwan. He was president and CEO. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Pacific Affairs. In the Bush administration from 2001, 2003, he served as Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Advisor to the then Deputy Secretary of State, a big mentor for me as well, Rich Armitage. We first met when Randy was working in the Pentagon for Kurt Campbell and Joe Nye and Bill Perry and others. He was in the Pentagon in the Clinton administration, 94 to 98, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He was the senior official responsible for day-to-day management of US bilateral defense relations with the People's Liberation Army and bilateral security military relationships with Taiwan. I was brought in in the middle of that, just in case Randy messed up things of the PLA to make sure that the US-Japan alliance was ready and waiting. So, lots of history, lots of insights. Really excited to have you, and Randy is coming out to Sydney for our Sydney International Strategy Forum in September, and that will be great fun. So, thanks, Randy.

Randall Schriver (2:10)

Great. Well, thanks for having me, Mike, and I look forward to the conversation tonight and seeing you soon in Sydney.

Mike Green (2:16)

So, we always begin with the how did you get here part? And why don't you tell us, you're from the West Coast, so you probably had a little bit of Asia on your mind, what put you in the direction of security of Asia, of China, Taiwan?

Randall Schriver (2:28)

Yeah. So, really my China origin story goes back to college when I was failing out as a pre-med student. There was a mutual agreement between the faculty and myself, and I was not going to become a physician, and I actually had to take summer courses to make up credit between my freshman and sophomore year. And by luck or by providence, my father was on sabbatical in Washington, DC, so I took a summer course at Georgetown University, a place you're very familiar with, an IR course.

And I returned to Williams College now in good academic standing, and I sought out this professor who couldn't pick me out of a crowd of two, and I said, hey, this IR stuff's kind of interesting to me. Do you have any advice? And he said, take Chinese language. And if he had said, take Swahili, I'm sure I would have done that, but this was 1986 So, Mike, you'll both appreciate this and probably be saddened by this a little bit. My Chinese one-on-one class was four students. The Japanese one-on-one was 40 It was literally 10 times.

We remember the mid-80s, the trajectory that Japan was on or thought to be on, and China was still pretty backwater. But I got recruited into the Navy, Navy Intelligence because I spoke a little Chinese, which three years of undergraduate Chinese language, you know, is not really sufficient to be translating documents, but it was such an unusual thing and a distinguishing thing at that time. So, I got recruited into Navy Intelligence, and of course, the first thing they did was send me to the Middle East for Desert Shield, Desert Storm. But after my active duty time, I did get into the Reserve Attaché system, working on China, did some recall duty to Embassy Beijing, and then I ended up after graduate school working for Kurt Campbell and another guy you know well, Carl Eichenberry, on the China-Taiwan desk. So, that sort of married the Chinese language, Chinese interests and security issues for the first time fully together.