About the event: For almost four decades, the United States has tried to stop North Korea’s attempts to build nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. Based on more than 300 interviews with officials in Washington, Seoul and Beijing, as well as his own encounters with North Korean government officials over two decades, Joel Wit’s new book, Flashpoint: The Inside Story of How America Failed to Disarm North Korea, tells the up until now untold story of how six American presidents failed to stop Pyongyang. The book uncovers the policy debates, diplomatic gambits, military planning and covert operations that shaped the struggle to halt North Korea’s Manhattan project. He points to Barack Obama and Donald Trump as the two presidents most responsible for that failure. As a result, North Korea’s nuclear armed missiles can now threaten American cities.

About the speaker: Joel S. Wit is a Distinguished Fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center and former director of the 38North program.  As a State Department official, he helped negotiate the 1994 U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework and was in charge of its implementation until he left government in 2002.  He held countless talks with North Korean officials over the next 15 years. Wit served as a Senior Fellow at the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins from 2017-2018 and at the Henry L. Stimson Center until 2022. He is a co-author (with Robert Gallucci and Daniel Poneman) of Going Critical: The First North Korea Nuclear Crisis.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: A fundamental premise of the nuclear revolution theory (TNR) is the claim of assured destruction—the ability of a state to retaliate with a nuclear second-strike that leads to the destruction of the adversary’s sociopolitical-economic-industrial infrastructure, denying it the ability to survive as a viable modern nation-state. However, as we enter an era of renewed strategic great power competition, emerging technological advances have reanimated questions about the continued relevance of TNR. Can a state employing emerging technologies significantly undermine the assured destruction capabilities of its adversary? Using insights and techniques from Self-Organized Criticality theory, Dr. Sankaran analytically reexamines and models the requirements for assured destruction. He demonstrates that the networked structure of critical infrastructures continues to make advanced industrial states extremely vulnerable to assured destruction—at a fraction of Cold War arsenal requirements. Dr. Sankaran argues that advanced industrial nation-states remain vulnerable to assured destruction retaliatory strikes.

About the speaker: Jaganath “Jay” is an associate professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and a non-resident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. He works on problems at the intersection of international security and science & technology. Dr. Sankaran spent the first four years of his career as a defense scientist with the Indian Missile R&D establishment. Dr. Sankaran’s work in weapons design and development led to his interests in missile defenses, space weapons, nuclear weapons, military net assessment, and arms control.

The current focus of his research is the growing strategic and military competition between the major powers. In particular, Dr. Sankaran studies the impact of emerging technological advances on international politics, warfare, and nuclear weapons doctrine. His recent publications examine the impact of five technologies—small satellites, hypersonic weapons, machine learning, cyber weapons, and quantum sensing—on nuclear operations, strategic nuclear stability, and international security. His other recent publications have explored a multitude of national security issues, including the lessons for air power emerging from the Russia-Ukraine War, the politics behind the India-China border crises, and the influence of missile defenses on great power nuclear deterrence.

Dr. Sankaran has held fellowships at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, and the RAND Corporation. He has held visiting positions at the Congressional Budget Office’s National Security Division, the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS) at the U.S. Air University, Tsinghua University, and the National Institute for Defense Studies (Tokyo). Dr. Sankaran has served on study groups of the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) and the American Physical Society (APS) Panel on Public Affairs examining missile defenses and strategic stability. Dr. Sankaran’s first book, “Bombing to Provoke: Rockets, Missiles, and Drones as Instruments of Fear and Coercion,” was published by Oxford University Press. He has published in International Security, Contemporary Security Policy, Journal of Strategic Studies, Journal of East Asian Studies, Asian Security, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Arms Control Today, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and other outlets. The RAND Corporation and the Stimson Center have also published his research.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

What are the patterns of Japan’s foreign policy behavior toward Taiwan in the post-Cold War era? It is generally taken for granted that the origin of Japan’s foreign policy to Taiwan has been derived from a unitary strategic calculation related to East Asian international politics and its maritime security in the Asia-Pacific region. This conventional interpretation is insufficient. In this seminar, by reviewing three case studies in 2006, 2019 and 2021 through the theoretical lens of neoclassical realism and empirical investigation based on primary and secondary Japanese-language sources, the speaker suggests that Japan’s Taiwan policy has been shaped by the combination of three factors: the degree of systemic clarity at the international level, the Japanese prime minister’s political survival and bureaucratic prudence over the Taiwan issue at the domestic level. Since 2021, Japan has adopted a subtle approach to Taiwan, driven more by a defensive and precautionary response to the heightened sense of crisis across the Taiwan Strait.

Speaker:

Mong Cheung is Professor of School of International Liberal Studies (SILS) at Waseda University, Japan. He received his PhD degree in international relations from Waseda University and M.Phil degree in political science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University (2025). His research interests include contemporary Sino-Japanese relations, Japan’s foreign and security policy, foreign-domestic linkage in Chinese and Japanese foreign policy, misperception and reconciliation in China-Japan relations, and comparative strategic culture. He is the author of Political Survival and Yasukuni in Japan`s Relations with China (London: Routledge, 2017, Paperback, 2018). He has published widely in peer-reviewed international journals such as The Pacific Review, Pacific Affairs, East Asia Forum, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Contemporary East Asian Studies. He serves as a peer reviewer for several international academic journals such as International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Contemporary East Asian Studies. He is also a columnist for the "Japan Outlook" section of Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper.

Moderator:

Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor, Professor of Sociology, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Deputy Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where he is also Director of the Japan Program. Tsutsui’s research interests lie in political/comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, human rights, and Japanese society. His most recent publication, Human Rights and the State: The Power of Ideas and the Realities of International Politics (Iwanami Shinsho, 2022), was awarded the 2022 Ishibashi Tanzan Award and the 44th Suntory Prize for Arts and Sciences.