Joshua Kurlantzick

Joshua Kurlantzick is an American journalist and scholar now living in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, though he is from West Hartford, Connecticut. He is Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, and has been for seventeen years.^[1][2] At CFR, he is now working on various topics. These include the growing global ties among illiberal states and their impacts on the world. He also is currently examining the militarization of politics in Asia and around the world, China’s relations with Southeast Asia and other developing regions, China’s influence and information efforts, U.S.-China relations, the rise of global populism and populism in Asia, global democratic regression, and South and Southeast Asian politics and economics on a day-to-day basis. He previously studied topics including Thailand's unique monarchical situation, the long periods of military rule in Myanmar, the growth potential of Southeast Asia, and the rise of Gen Z voices in politics across Asia, among other issues. He frequently appears in major media outlets including Al Jazeera, the Associated Press, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Barron's, the BBC, Bloomberg News, CBS News, Channel News Asia, CNBC, CNN, Deutsche Welle, Fortune, Haaretz, Le Figaro, National Public Radio, Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, Nikkei Asia, Politico, Reuters, Science, South China Morning Post, Straits Times, Voice of America, the Washington Post, The Week, and many other outlets. His articles and media appearances are available at: https://www.cfr.org/experts/joshua-kurlantzick

Career

Kurlantzick was a visiting scholar from 2006-2009 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he studied Southeast Asian politics and economics and China's relations with Southeast Asia, including Chinese investment, aid, and diplomacy. Previously, he was a fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy^[3] and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy.

He has also served as a columnist for Time, a foreign editor and special correspondent for The New Republic, a senior correspondent for American Prospect, a writer for U.S. News and World Report, a writer based in Bangkok for The Economist and many other publications, and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. He also serves on the editorial board of Current History.^[4] He also writes monthly columns for World Politics Review and regular colums for the Japan Times while also contributing regularly to CFR.org on a range of issues. He has written for hundreds of outlets including the Atlantic, Axios, BloombergBusinessweek, Boston Globe Ideas, Commentary, the Diplomat, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Globe and Mail, GQ, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, the National Interest,  the New Yorker, the New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Monthly, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and many others.

He is the winner of the Luce Scholarship for journalism in Asia and was selected as a finalist for the Osborn Elliot Prize for journalism in Asia.^[5] He was educated at Haverford College and Loomis Chaffee high school.

Authorship

Kurlantzick is the author of Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World (Yale University Press),^[6] which was published in 2008 and nominated for the Council on Foreign Relations's 2008 Arthur Ross Book Award.^[7]

He also is the author of five other books, and is working on a seventh, on authoritarian collaboration worldwide, to be released in 2027 by Oxford University Press, In 2010, he published The Ideal Man: the Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War (John Wiley), and it both tells the story of Jim Thompson, a famous American spy and entrepreneur in Thailand and the growing disaster of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia in the late 1950s and 1960s. The book is in the process of being made into a feature film. In 2013, he published Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline in Representative Government (Yale University Press) and it was one of the first books to predict the global retreat, if not collapse of democracy. The book was nominated by the Wall Street Journal and other publications as one of the best books of 2013. In 2016, he published State Capitalism: How the Return of Statism is Transforming the World. (Oxford University Press), and it was one of the first books to show how China, among other countries, was not actually moving toward more free market economics but instead was returning to state control of the economy and state-forced consolidation in many economic sectors. In 2017, he published A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA (Simon and Schuster), which both traced the arc of the CIA's secret war in Laos during the Vietnam War and showed how that conflict helped transform the CIA into a paramilitary organization capable of running military operations, which it later would do in Central America, Afghanistan, and other places. In 2022, he published Beijing's Global Media Offensive: China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World. (Oxford University Press.) ^[2][8] In the book, which received largely positive reviews and was reviewed by many of the world's leading publications, he analyses China's use of disinformation campaigns, state media and digital infrastructure and its growing power in using these campaigns to infiltrate both neighboring states and some of the most powerful democracies in the world, including the United States.^[2]

References

External links

• Expert Page at CFR.org