PolarisLive: February, March and April 2022 Schedule

February 22. 2022 8:00AM EST

Jonathan Fulton-Panel Discussion-U.S./China: Middle East Strategic Competition
From Abu Dhabi, UAE, Guest moderator, Prof. Jonathan Fulton, Zayed University and panelists Daniel Cederberg, Regional China Officer for the Middle East and North Africa, U.S. Department of State and Prof. Shaojin Chai, University of Sharjah will moderate panelists from the Middle East to discuss China’s accelerating business, economic, and cultural inroads into the Middle East; Is the U.S. paying attention to the warmth, breadth and depth of the Middle East’s welcome to China?

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8 March, 2022 7:30AM EST
Henry Gao – A New Chinese Economic Order?
Henry Gao is a CIGI senior fellow and a law professor at Singapore Management University. With law degrees from three continents, he started his career as the first Chinese lawyer at the World Trade Organization (WTO) Secretariat. He taught law at the University of Hong Kong, where he was also deputy director of the East Asian International Economic Law and Policy (IELPO) program. He has taught at the IELPO program in Barcelona, Spain, and the Academy of International Trade Law in Macau, and was the academic coordinator for the first Asia-Pacific Regional Trade Policy Course officially sponsored by the WTO.

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15 March, 2022 9:30AM EST
Deanna Horton – Canada between China and the US
Deanna Horton is a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She is a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC, a Senior Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation, and at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. She is a Board member of the Stratford-Perth County Museum. She speaks French, Japanese, and German.
Previously a career foreign service officer, she was appointed as Ambassador of Canada to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Canadian Embassy in Washington as Minister (Congressional, Public and Intergovernmental Affairs). She was a negotiator on the North American Free Trade Agreement. She served as Director, Canada’s Office of the Deputy Minister for International Trade.

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24 March, 2022 9:30AM EST
Susan Thornton – China Tariffs? Americans Deserve Better
Guest host Arthur Kroeber, highly respected analyst of China’s economy with Polaris-Live’s guest Ambassador Susan Thornton.

Susan A. Thornton was Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs during the first 18 months of the Trump administration and led East Asia policy-making amid crises with North Korea, escalating trade tensions with China. She is a retired senior U.S. diplomat with almost three decades of experience with the U.S. State Department in Eurasia and East Asia. She is currently a Senior Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Law at the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center. She is also the director of the Forum on Asia-Pacific Security at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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4 April, 2022 9:00PM EST
Dewi Fortuna Anwar – ASEAN, U.S., and China

Professor Dewi Fortuna Anwar is a Research Professor at the Centre for Politics at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. She previously served as Deputy Secretary in the Vice President’s office from 2010-2017 and a senior foreign affairs official from 1998-1999. She has also advised many international organisations and is currently a governing board member of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

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26 April, 2022 9:30AM EST
Deborah Brautigam: China’s BRI NOT debt trap
Some journalists, pundits and policymakers have promoted the idea that Chinese banks deliberately lend to risky countries to secure strategic assets. Prof. Brautigam’s research questions the evidence for “debt trap diplomacy.”

The nature of Chinese lending in risky countries remains poorly understood, a weakness that leads to faulty assumptions that result that are an impediment for crafting an effective U.S. foreign policy for China.

Deborah Brautigam, a leading expert on China in Africa, and China’s vast infrastructure project-Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – is the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC. A Sinologist with extensive Africa research experience, she is the author of over 50 journal articles and book chapters.

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The United States decisively terminated its 20 year long war in Afghanistan on August 31, 2021. In the world of geopolitics it was a seminal event, for many reasons: It was another military defeat for the world’s richest country with the world’s most powerful and well equipped military, at the hands of the Taliban, an army only in name that fights in sandals. A humiliating ending for America, to say the least.

While it is too early to figure out what this defeat means for America, for Afghanistan, China, India, and Pakistan–the key players in that part of the world, it is not too early to state that the impact will be profound.

PolarisLive joins this geopolitically, and economically critical dialogue in our October 2021 lineup featuring experts from the U.S., India, and Pakistan.

12 October 2021 9:30AM ET

Larry Goodson & Pamela Crossley – Out of Afghanistan
On October 12, Professor Pamela Crossley, Dartmouth College’s renowned China expert will host PolarisLive’s guest Professor Larry Goodson of the U.S. Army War College. Prof. Goodson is one of the most knowledgeable Americans about Afghanistan, and its neighbors, especially India and Pakistan. He is steeped in the geopolitics of all three countries through numerous visits and his views are sought out by U.S. military and political leaders. Goodson and Crossley will set the stage for PolarisLive’s discussion of the impact of America’s defeat by the Taliban on the Asian subcontinent and for America’s policy for the region.

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19 October 2021 7:00AM ET
Ayushi Ketkar, Prof. J.N University, India – Out of India
On October 19, we welcome Professor Ayushi Ketkar, from Jawarhalal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and its Special Center for National Security Studies. Her latest book “Geopolitics of the Himalayan Region,” is essential reading to understand the fault lines of that region.

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26 October 2021 7:30AM ET
Dr. Nadim Hussain, Islamic Policy Research Institute – Out of Afghanistan
On 26 October we welcome Dr. Nadim Hussain, Executive Director of Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI) based in Islamabad. He was previously the director of South Asia Study Group at the University of Sydney. He has served in senior advisory roles in the Government of Pakistan on matters of security, development and foreign policy.

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Welcome to PolarisLive’s 2nd year. . It is a pleasure for me to announce our September 2021 guest lineup and some programming changes that you will notice during the next year.

First the changes. They are a direct result of feedback from you, our viewers.

Beginning this month you will occasionally see someone else in the host’s chair. This will let us broaden the perspective of the informed and forthright conversation you have come to expect from PolarisLive. In a way this is like the “by invitation” guest columns in forward-thinking media. Another innovative step in PolarisLive’s leadership in exploring the most consequential relationship of our time–that between the United States and China.

We will also move to a bi-weekly format to give more depth to understanding the topic that is being illuminated. But we do this with an entrepreneurial caveat—whenever current events dictate PolarisLive will add an episode between the bi-weekly lineup that is sent to you at the beginning of each month.

We have changed the umbrella title for PolarisLive from “A China Agenda for President Biden,” to “The United States and China in the World.” The former title was a prelude to my report “The Telegram: A China Agenda for President Biden,” for the Foreign Policy Association (FPA)–which you can download from my website. Now we widen the aperture to take in the increasing complexity of the U.S. – China relationship. Think the American departure from Afghanistan and its impact on U.S.-India-Pakistan-China; increased complexity is an understatement, By the way, PolarisLive will explore the Afghan development through U.S., China, India, and Pakistan perspectives during October. Watch out for the announcements.

14 September 2021 8AM-9AM ET

An interview with Shan Weijian: Is China’s Communist Party jealous of its Capitalists?
On September 14, Shan Weijian, Chairman and CEO of PAG, one of Asia’s most influential private-equity firms, returns to PolarisLive to discuss the apparent turmoil in China’s giant financial-technology marketplace. What’s behind the last minute cancellation of large Chinese IPO’s on Wall Street. Is President Xi Jinping trying to bring China’s red-hot capitalism to heel? Is the Western media reporting these events accurately? Is Wall Street’s position as the world’s financial center in danger?

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21 September 2021 9:30AM-10:30AM ET
Prof. Li Xing, on “The Telegram: The United States and China in the World.”
On September 21 (see we’ve broken the bi-weekly format rule already!) Professor Xing Li, of Aalborg University, Denmark, takes over as PolarisLive’s host to question me about my analysis of the FPA report and especially its more controversial recommendations for large joint China-U.S. projects to ease the hostility between them. EG: the U.S. should use Wall Street money, American workers, and China’s expertise to rebuild American infrastructure.

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28 September 2021 1PM-2PM ET
Suzanne Nielsen, Colonel U.S. Army on “The Telegram: The United States and China in the World.”
On September 28, Suzanne Nielsen, Department Chair of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point’s famous Department of Social Studies (SOSH) takes over as host (in a personal capacity) to review the FPA report. Colonel Nielsen is one of the brightest thinkers in U.S. national security circles, and you won’t want to miss this episode.

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With a new American President and Administration there is an opportunity to recalibrate U.S. grand strategy for China to reflect today’s reality of two superpowers, with diametrically opposed governance ideologies, who have no choice but to co-exist. A new learning experience for both. POLARIS-LIVE invites leading experts and authors from the U.S., Asia, the EU, and around the world to converse with host Sarwar KASHMERI about their thoughts re what should be a 21st Century U.S. grand strategy for China. This schedule presents the dates/times/links to join the 40 minutes live programs through the end of June 2021. Each episode will be archived on the Polaris-Live channel and may also be accessed by the same links shown below.

Download the Foreign Policy Association Report

19 July 2021 5PM-6PM ET • ChinaFPA Live: FPA Report Release “A China Agenda for the Biden Administration” in conversation with Ryan Hass, Brookings Institution
Please join us for the official launch of this important FPA report, “A China Agenda for the Biden Administration,” published by FPA Fellow Sarwar Kashmeri. This report was informed by conversations held on Polaris-Live between January and May 2021 with leading U.S.-China experts from Asia, the EU, and the U.S. about their thoughts regarding what should be key agenda items that they would propose to President Biden’s team to improve the relationship between the two superpowers. Kashmeri’s narrative draws upon these expert views from across the political spectrum and from around the world.
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21 July 2021 8:30PM-9:30PM ET • FPA Asia Report Release “A China Agenda for the Biden Administration” in conversation with Kishore Mahbubani, National University of Singapore.
Please join us for the Asia launch of “A China Agenda for the Biden Administration” report; a conversation between Professor Kishore Mahbubani, noted author, Distinguished Fellow, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore, and Sarwar Kashmeri, publisher of the report.
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