Kent E. Calder

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Kent Calder, the Edwin O. Reischauer Professor in East Asian Studies, director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies.

Kent E Calder (born 1948), is a distinguished Edwin O. Reischauer Professor. He is currently the Director of the Japan Studies Program at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and the Director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

Professor Calder joined the faculty of Princeton in 1983 after teaching for four years at Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. He is also the first executive director of Harvard University's Program on U.S. Japan Relations. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Utah. A specialist in Japanese trade and industrial policy, he has focused on how politics and social structure affect the Japanese economy. Since 1990, he has directed the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Calder took a leave from the University from 1996 to 1999 to serve as special adviser to the U.S. ambassador to Japan, working un-der Walter Mondale and Thomas Fo-ley. He also has held staff positions with the U.S. Con-gress and the Federal Trade Commission and has served as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1990. He joined Johns Hopkins SAIS in 2003.

Professor Calder is the author of numbers of books and articles. In particular, his book Pacific Defense is the first publication by an American to receive the Mainichi Grand Prix in Asia-Pacific Studies in 1997 for its analysis of how economic change is transforming the U.S.-East Asia security equation. His works have been translated into foreign languages including Japanese and Korean.

Professor Calder received his Ph.D. in Government at Harvard University in 1979, where he worked under the Direction of Edwin Reischauer. He is also the recipient of the Ohira, Arisawa, and Mainichi Asia-Pacific Prizes for his academic work.

Regions of Expertise

Professor Calder is among the top scholar in the international academia in regional studies on East Asia, particularly on Japan, North Korea and South Korea. His expertise in terms of issues including US-Japan relations, alliance management, energy, energy and security, international political economy, and strategic and security issues.

Selected Publications

Books

• The New Continentalism: Energy and Twenty-First Century Eurasian Geopolitics (New Haven: Yale University Press, May 2012).

This book has already been translated in to Japanese and Korean, and is available for purchase. In this groundbreaking book, Professor Calder argues that a new transnational configuration is emerging in Asia, driven by economic growth, rising energy demand, and the erosion of longstanding geopolitical divisions. What Professor Calder calls the New Silk Road—with a strengthening multi-faceted relationship between East Asia and the Middle East at its core—could eventually emerge as one of the world’s most important multilateral configurations. Straddling the border between comparative politics and international relations theory, this important book will stimulate debate and discussion in both fields.

• The Making of Northeast Asia co-author with Min Ye (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

Northeast Asia, where the interests of three major nuclear powers and the world's two largest economies converge around the unstable pivot of the Korean peninsula, is a region rife with political-economic paradox. It ranks today among the most dangerous areas on earth, plagued by security problems of global importance, including nuclear and missile proliferation. Yet, despite its insecurity, the region has continued to be the most rapidly growing on earth for over five decades—and it is emerging as an identifiable economic, political, and strategic region in its own right. As the locus of both economic growth and political-military uncertainty in Asia has moved further to the Northeast, a need has developed for a book that focuses analytically on prospects for Northeast Asian cooperation within the context of both Asia and the Asia-Pacific regional relationship. This book does exactly that, while also offering a more general theory for Asian institution building.

• Pacific Alliance: Reviving U.S.-Japan Relations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

Despite the enduring importance of the U.S.–Japan security alliance, the broader relationship between the two countries is today beset by sobering new difficulties. In this comprehensive comparative analysis of the transpacific alliance and its political, economic, and social foundations, Kent E. Calder, a leading Japan specialist, asserts that bilateral relations between the two countries are dangerously eroding as both seek broader options in a globally oriented world. In the book, Professor Calder documents the quiet erosion of America’s multidimensional ties with Japan as China rises, generations change, and new forces arise in both American and Japanese politics. He then assesses consequences for a twenty-first-century military alliance with formidable coordination requirements, explores alternative foreign paradigms for dealing with the United States, adopted by Britain, Germany, and China, and offers prescriptions for restoring U.S.–Japan relations to vitality once again.

• East Asian Multilateralism: Prospects for Regional Stability, co-editor with Francis Fukuyama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

While the Iraq war and Middle East conflicts command the attention of the United States and most of the rest of the developed world, fundamental changes are occurring in East Asia. North Korea has tested nuclear weapons, even as it and South Korea have effectively entered a period of tepid détente; relations among China, Japan, and South Korea are a complex mixture of conflict and cooperation; and Japan is developing more forthright security policies, even as it deepens ties with the United States. Together, these developments pose vital questions for world stability and security. In East Asian Multilateralism, prominent international foreign affairs scholars examine the range of implications of shifting alignments in East Asia. The first part delves into the intraregional dynamics, and the second assesses current economic conditions and policies within individual East Asian states. The third section examines the challenge of regional cooperation from the perspectives of local players, while the fourth analyzes the implications for foreign policy in the United States and in Asia. This thorough review and assessment charts the preconditions and prospects for deeper multilateralism, poses tough questions about America’s security and national interests in the region, and carries a plea for more serious institution-building in the North Pacific, using the ongoing six-party process in talks on North Korea as a point of departure.

• Korea's Energy Insecurities: Comparative and Regional Perspectives (Washington DC: Korea Economic Institute of America, 2005).

In this book, Dr. Kent Calder examines the actual and potential sources of energy available to each of the two Koreas as well as present and prospective policies to address the insecurities that each country faces. He weaves together the complex political-security considerations and the compelling laws of economics. This book is particularly timely in light of the recent Declaration of Principles agreed at the fourth round of the six-party talks.

• Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

The overseas basing of troops has been a central pillar of American military strategy since World War II--and a controversial one. Are these bases truly essential to protecting the United States at home and securing its interests abroad--for example in the Middle East-or do they needlessly provoke anti-Americanism and entangle us in the domestic woes of host countries? Embattled Garrisons takes up this question and examines the strategic, political, and social forces that will determine the future of American overseas basing in key regions around the world. Professor Calder traces the history of overseas bases from their beginnings in World War II through the cold war to the present day, comparing the different challenges the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union have confronted. Providing the broad historical and comparative context needed to understand what is at stake in overseas basing, Professor Calder gives detailed case studies of American bases in Japan, Italy, Turkey, the Philippines, Spain, South Korea, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He highlights the vulnerability of American bases to political shifts in their host nations--in emerging democracies especially--but finds that an American presence can generally be tolerated when identified with political liberation rather than imperial succession. Embattled Garrisons shows how the origins of basing relationships crucially shape long-term prospects for success, and it offers a means to assess America's prospects for a sustained global presence in the future.

• Pacific Defense: Arms, Energy, and America's Future in Asia (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1996).

Northeast Asia's stunningly successful political economy threatens to become a military danger zone - with global implications. In Pacific Defense, Kent E. Calder, director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, shows how a combination of high-speed economic growth, impending energy shortages, and political insecurity could well provoke an accelerating arms buildup and deepening geopolitical rivalries. Here he explains the urgent need for a strategic, far-sighted American role in defusing these dangerous possibilities. Calder analyzes the risks to regional stability of Asia's continuing struggle for offshore oil, and the subtle dangers that regional energy dependence on the Middle East may bring. He also points to the possible links between efforts to acquire civilian nuclear power and the potential for nuclear armament. Political uncertainty casts deep shadows over Asia's key nations, as experienced leaders pass from the scene and popular frustrations mount, from the large cities of China to the crucial U.S.-Japan island military bastion of Okinawa. Calder provides a dynamic overview of where each country is headed politically and describes the role that the United States can play in these developments, from improving security relations with Japan to studying alternate sources of energy for China to resolving nuclear arms issues in North Korea.

• Strategic Capitalism: Private Business and Public Purpose in Japanese Industrial Finance (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Was Japan's economic miracle generated primarily by the Japanese state or by the nation's dynamic private sector? In addressing this question, Professor Calder's richly detailed study offers a distinctive reinterpretation of Japanese government-business relations. Professor Calder challenges popular opinion to demonstrate how Japanese private enterprise has complemented the state in achieving the national purpose of industrial transformation.

• Crisis and Compensation: Public Policy and Political Stability in Japan, 1949-1986 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Why does Japan, with its efficiency-oriented technocracy, periodically adopt welfare-oriented, economically inefficient domestic policies? In answering this question Kent Calder shows that Japanese policymakers respond to threats to the ruling party's preeminence by extending income compensation, entitlements, and subsidies, with market-oriented retrenchment coming as crisis subsides.

• The Eastasia Edge, co-author with Roy Hofheinz (New York: Basic Books, 1982).

Articles

• Energy is the key to 21st century Eurasian geopolitics
• Japan’s Energy Angst and the Caspian Great Game
• Letter From Tokyo: New Regime, New Relationship? A New Era in U.S.-Japanese Relations
• China and Japan's Simmering Rivalry
• The New Face of Northeast Asia
• Asia's Empty Tank
• Review: Japanese Foreign Economic Policy Formation: Explaining the Reactive State
• Coping with North Korea's Energy Future: KEDO and Beyond
• Resource Development and Arctic Governance: An American Perspective
• U.S. Climate Policy and Prospects for US-Japan Cooperation
• Alliance Endangered? Challenges from the Changing Political-Economic Context of U.S.-Japan Relations
• Beneath the Eagle's Wings? The Political Economy of Northeast Asian Burden-Sharing in Comparative Perspective
• Coping with energy insecurity: China’s response in global perspective
• Halfway to Hegemony: Japan's Tortured Trajectory

Selected lectures/ interviews online (available in audio/video with external links)

• Beyond Fukushima: Japan's Emerging Energy and Environmental Challenges, April 5, 2012, at Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia.
• The New Continentalism: Energy and Twenty-First-Century Eurasian Geopolitics, July 5, 2012, at Asan Institute, Seoul, South Korea.
• Dr. Calder: The New Continentalism: Energy and 21st Century Eurasian Geopolitics, September 17, 2012, at Johns Hopkins SAIS, Washington DC.
• The Making of Northeast Asia, at the East West Center, Washington DC.
• Dr. Kent E. Calder on NHK World Wave, December 19, 2011
• Public Lecture: Kent Calder Book Talk: The Making of Northeast Asia
• Managing Risk and Security in East Asia
• ケント・カルダー　ジョンズ・ホプキンス大学高等国際問題研究大学院, June 14, 2013, at Japan National Press Club,
• ケント・カルダー_5_日本経済再生の処方せんは, interviewed by Japanese media NHK on December 17, 2012.
• シリーズ「日米中」①ケント・カルダー氏　October 19, 2009 at Japan National Press Club