As the new year begins, the administration of ROK President Lee Myung-bak faces an unusually complex and rapidly evolving regional security landscape as he seeks to craft a strategy that simultaneously deepens ties with the U.S., protects South Korean equities in North Korea, continues to reduce tensions with neighboring countries and promotes economic objectives in Northeast Asia (including eastern Siberia). What are his options, considerations and prospects for success?

The past year witnessed an accelerated pace and apparent deepening in substance of the nascent security ties between and among the nations of Northeast Asia. A veritable whirlwind of diplomatic activity featured “upgraded” dialogue and symbolic steps. Meanwhile, as token of warming relations and impetus for even closer regional cooperation, China, Japan and the ROK met trilaterally on an array of issues. Ambitious proposals – and cutthroat bargaining – attended competition for a stake in Russian energy resources and potential infrastructure projects in the conjunction of eastern Siberia, Korea and China. Through the year all involved parties – the ROK, China, Russia, Japan, and the U.S. – met in the Six-Party talks context. Each party, excepting North Korea, paid public obeisance to the goal of “transforming” the talks into a new regional security mechanism.

But the year 2009 dawns against the backdrop of uncertainties that cast a cloud over the promise suggested by these developments: the global economic and financial crisis; battered, untested or unpopular political leaderships; competing nationalisms – and national interests; and the import and implications of China’s “rise.”

Mr. Keyser retired from the U.S. Department of State in September 2004 after a 32-year career. He had been a member of the Senior Foreign Service since 1990, and held Washington-based ambassadorial-level assignments 1998-2004. Throughout his career he focused on U.S. policy toward East Asia, particularly China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the Korean Peninsula. Fluent in Chinese and professionally conversant in Japanese, Russian and French, he served three tours at the American Embassy in Beijing, two tours at the American Embassy in Tokyo, and almost a dozen years in relevant domestic assignments. In the course of his career, Keyser logged extensive domestic and foreign experience in senior management operations, conflict resolution, intelligence operations and analysis, and law enforcement programs and operations.

Peter Henry's research on emerging markets provides fundamental insights about the impact of economic reform on the lives of people in developing countries. It uses theory and data to grapple objectively with some of the most important and contentious economic questions of our time: Does debt relief help or hurt poor countries? Should emerging nations permit capital to flow freely in and out of their economies? Is it possible to reduce inflation without undermining economic growth? Peter's answers to these questions appear in the leading academic journals and have led him to testify before the U.S. Congress and various United Nations Ambassadors.

Peter is Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics, the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Faculty Scholar, and Associate Director of the Center for Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2000-2001 he was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The National Science Foundation's Early CAREER Development Program supported his research and teaching from 2001-2006. In 2004 Peter participated in the Copenhagen Consensus, an international conference on how to make the most efficient use of the world's scarcest resources. The Economist magazine named the published proceedings of the conference one of the best business books of 2004.

Peter received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997. While in graduate school, he served as a consultant to the Governors of the Bank of Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB). His research at the ECCB contributed to the intellectual foundation for establishing the first stock market in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Area.

Prior to attending MIT, Peter was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University where he received a BA in mathematics and a Full Blue in basketball. He also holds a BA in economics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar, a National Merit Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a Marshall Scholar-Elect, a reserve wide receiver on the varsity football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campus-wide slam-dunk competition.

Born in Jamaica, Peter became a U.S. citizen in 1986. His wife of 12 years, Lisa J. Nelson, received her BA and MD from Yale University. She is a child psychiatrist and was a Glaxo Welcome Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association from 1995 to 1997. They have four sons: Christian Blair, Langston Alexander, Hayden Montgomery, and Harrison Elbert.

Shadi Hamid is a Hewlett Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He currently also serves as director of research at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED). This past year, he was a research fellow at the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman, where he conducted research on the evolving relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jordanian regime. His articles on Middle East politics and U.S. democracy promotion policy have appeared in The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Jerusalem Post, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other publications. A Marshall Scholar, Hamid is completing his doctoral degree in politics at Oxford University, writing his dissertation on Islamist political behavior in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco.

Previously, Hamid served as a program specialist on public diplomacy at the State Department and a Legislative Fellow at the Office of Senator Dianne Feinstein. During 2004-5, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Jordan, researching Islamist participation in the democratic process. He writes for the National Security Network's foreign affairs blog Democracy Arsenal and is a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project. He has been a consultant to various organizations on reform-related issues in the Arab world, and has appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NPR, Voice of America, and the BBC. Hamid received his B.S. and M.A. from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. 

Minxin Pei is a senior associate in the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research focuses on democratization in developing countries, economic reform and governance in China, and U.S.-China relations. He is the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 1994) and China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Harvard University Press, 2006). Pei’s research has been published in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Modern China, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy and many edited books. Pei is a frequent commentator on BBC World News, Voice of America, and National Public Radio; his op-eds have appeared in the Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek International, and International Herald Tribune, and other major newspapers. Pei received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.

Andrew F. March is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Yale University. He is the author of Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (OUP, 2009), “Islamic Foundations for a Social Contract in non-Muslim Liberal Democracies (American Political Science Review, Vol. 101, No. 2, May 2007), “Liberal Citizenship and the Search for Overlapping Consensus: The Case of Muslim Minorities,” (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 34.4, Fall 2006) and “Sources of Moral Obligation to Non-Muslims in the ‘Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities’ (Fiqh al-aqalliyyat) Discourse.” (Forthcoming in Islamic Law and Society).

He is working on a new book project entitled Explaining Disbelief: Moral Epistemology and the Moral Other in the Islamic Tradition.

The United States was one of the early champions of the human rights movement and international criminal justice institutions like the Nuremberg Tribunal and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. It is also a country with a deep constitutional tradition of respect for human rights and the rule of law. Yet the United States has been reluctant to join some of the most important international human rights treaties and has strongly opposed the International Criminal Court (ICC). What explains the U.S. attitude toward the ICC? What should the new Administration's approach tot he ICC be?

Co-presented in commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights by UNA-USA Midpeninsula Chapter and the Peninsula World Affairs Council

Additional co-sponsors (partial list): Program on Global Justice, Stanford University; American Red Cross Palo Alto Area, Los Altos Library; United Nations Association Film Festival (UNAFF)