I'm Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where I oversee its work in Washington, Beijing, New Delhi, and Singapore on both East Asia and South Asia. I was the 2019-2020 James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. I co-host the "Politics Possible" podcast and write for Forbes Markets. Initially an academic with a PhD in Chinese politics from Stanford University, then two postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University, my career has spanned government, business, markets, and nonprofits, and three regions of Asia. From 2001 to 2009, in the Bush Administration, I served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia, Member of the Policy Planning Staff with principal responsibility for East Asia, advising two Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and a China adviser to Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick. I led several high-stakes diplomatic negotiations, including with India and Kazakhstan, and received five Superior Honors Awards from the State Department. Outside of government, I was founding Vice Chairman and first Director of The Paulson Institute at the University of Chicago, established by former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, and cofounder of MacroPolo, its digital venture on the Chinese economy. I headed the Asia Practice at the advisory firm Eurasia Group, and was also a senior advisor at Macro Advisory Partners, advising a wide range of markets and corporate clients; was Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; taught at Harvard as Lecturer on Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and at the Naval Postgraduate School as Lecturer of National Security Affairs; and was Executive Director of the Asia-Pacific Security Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I'm the author of books and monographs, including The United States in the New Asia, and China’s Techno-Warriors: National Security and Strategic Competition from the Nuclear to the Information Age, selected by Foreign Affairs as a best book on Asia of 2003. I've authored reports on Asian technology futures, especially on Korea and Taiwan, and publish widely on geopolitics and geoeconomics, US strategy in Asia, China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Central Asia. I'm a member of the advisory board of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue and was its 2023 Leadership Honoree, and of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Cosmos Club.