Richard Heydarian in conversation with Don Emmerson

In this seminar, scholar/journalist Richard Heydarian will discuss the principal arguments and ideas in his just-published book on the Indo-Pacific.  He will do so in conversation with Southeast Asia Program director Don Emmerson.  Propositions to be discussed will include:  The 21^st century will not belong to China. There will be no Pax Sinica in the Indo-Pacific. China’s bid for primacy will fail due to its overbearing hubris abroad and its massive challenges at home.  Its effort to create a “neo-tributary” system in East Asia will not succeed, as evidenced by pushback regarding the Belt and Road Initiative and the South China Sea.  Neither China nor America will dominate the Indo-Pacific.  More likely to develop there is “an uneasy, fluid network of interlocking alliances, partnerships, and rivalries” in which middle powers such as Japan will figure prominently in efforts to address urgent and visceral challenges such as global warming and information war.  Most needed in the longer run will be a coalition of powers able jointly to “hold the line against the coming anarchy that will sweep the Indo-Pacific mega-region” if nothing is done to rescue it from the political, socioeconomic, environmental, and technological risks and dangers that lie ahead.  Copies of his latest book, from which these arguments are drawn, will be available for sale.

Richard Javad Heydarian’s latest book is The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Struggle for Global Mastery (2020). Earlier publications include Asia’s New Battlefield (2015), How Capitalism Failed the Arab World (2014), and articles and interviews in many outlets including The Atlantic, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He has interviewed heads of state and senior policy-makers across the Indo-Pacific, and has taught political science at Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University in the Philippines, and most recently was a visiting research Fellow at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He is an opinion contributor to South China Morning Post, The Straits Times, and Nikkei Asian Review, and is a columnist at the Philippine Daily Inquirer and television host at GMA Network.