CWP alum Isaac Kardon on the Blue Blaze Podcast about "How Countries Get Security Assistance from Both Beijing and Washington"

Welcome! Blue Blaze new Scouted series spotlight cutting-edge work in international relations and foreign policy. This marks our inaugural podcast episode, hosted by Blue Blaze editor Jennifer Lind.

In this episode, we explore how countries around the world are navigating great power competition not by choosing sides between the United States and China—but by playing both.

We’ve heard warnings about a new Cold War and a world hardening into rival blocs. But not so fast. From Hungary to Vietnam, Papua New Guinea to the UAE, governments are forging relationships with both Washington and Beijing—getting external security guarantees from the United States and internal security support from China.

To help us understand this trend, host Jennifer Lind talks with Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an expert on authoritarian politics and East Asian security, and Isaac Kardon, a leading scholar of China’s global strategy and influence. They’ve coauthored several important pieces—including a new report for the Carnegie Endowment on International Peace—on what they call security hybridization.

In this episode, we discuss:

• What does security hybridization look like in practice?
• How do these trends differ from superpower patronage during the Cold War?
• What happens when a country’s military works with the Americans, but its police and internal security services work with the Chinese? What are the implications of this for internal security? (hey, grad students: dissertation topic alert!)
• And what does it mean for the United States when a treaty ally looks to China to help manage dissent at home?

Welcome to the conversation!

Isaac B. Kardon, Ph.D., (孔适海博士) is a senior fellow for China studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is concurrently adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and was formerly assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC), where he served as a research faculty member in the China Maritime Studies Institute.

Isaac’s research centers on the People’s Republic of China’s maritime power, with specialization in maritime disputes and the international law of the sea, Chinese global port development, China-Pakistan relations, and the People’s Liberation Army’s overseas basing. His writing appears in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Naval War College Review, as well as other scholarly and policy publications. Isaac’s book, China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order (Yale, 2023) analyzes whether and how China is “making the rules” of regional and global order.

At Carnegie, Isaac is building on his foundation of research on China in the maritime domain to explore China’s role in the wider global commons. High seas, deep seabed, polar regions, and orbital space are among the “strategic frontier issues” prioritized by China’s leadership—and thus key sites to observe China’s interests in and influence on vital global rules, norms, and standards. China’s interest in leading the nascent regime for deep sea mining is a particular area of research focus. He is also continuing “past the pier” on his existing stream of research on PRC ports to further study China’s development of transport and communications infrastructure networks with dual civilian and military functions.

Isaac earned a Ph.D. in government from Cornell University, an M.Phil in modern Chinese studies from Oxford University, and a B.A. in history from Dartmouth College. He was a China & the World post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University, and has held visiting appointments at NYU School of Law, Academia Sinica, and the PRC National Institute for South China Sea Studies. He studied Chinese (Mandarin) at Peking University, Tsinghua University, Hainan University, and National Taiwan Normal University.

Photo Credit: https://blueblaze.substack.com/p/introducing-scouted