CWP alum Eyck Freymann on the Observing Japan Podcast

May 18, 2026
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In the first episode of The Observing Japan Podcast, I discuss three things to know about Japan’s politics this week, including: how Japan was watching the US-China summit; the Hormuz crisis and the impact on Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae’s fiscal ambitions; and the Liberal Democratic Party’s deliberations on defense spending.

Then, I talked with Eyck Freymann, a Hoover fellow at Stanford University, about his new book, Defending Taiwan.

Stay tuned next week when I talked with Jane Nakano, senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change program at CSIS, about the Hormuz crisis and Japan’s energy security.

Links:

 

Episode 1: Eyck Freymann Plus: the US-China summit, the fiscal policy outlook, and the LDP's defense spending debate Tobias Harris May 15, 2026

Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, where he directs the Allied Coordination Working Group. He is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, the Institute of Geoeconomics in Tokyo, and the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

Dr. Freymann works on strategies to preserve peace and protect U.S. interests and values in an era of systemic competition with China. He is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China (Oxford, 2026), The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices (Hoover, 2025), and One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard, 2021). His scholarly work has appeared in The China Quarterly and is forthcoming in International Security. 

Dr. Freymann comments on bipartisan national security issues in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, War on the Rocks, The Wire China, and The Atlantic, among other venues. 

Before Hoover, Dr. Freymann held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Columbia. He holds a doctorate from Oxford, masters degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, and a bachelors from Harvard, all in history and China studies.

Photo Credit: https://observingjapan.substack.com/p/episode-1-eyck-freymann

Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, where he directs the Allied Coordination Working Group. He is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, the Institute of Geoeconomics in Tokyo, and the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.