On Tuesday, August 17 Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster discussed the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the broader strategic challenges confronting the United States in an executive roundtable program presented by Asia Society Northern California. In addition to the situation in Afghanistan, McMaster discussed core arguments for U.S. national security policy, the future of conservative national security policy, and American civil-military relations — themes he covers in his new book, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World. Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society Orville Schell moderated the discussion. (1 hr., 6 min.)  

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

H.R. McMaster

H.R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.  He is also the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.  He serves as the Japan Chair at the Hudson Institute and Chairman of the Center for Political and Military Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy.  He was the 26th assistant to the president for National Security Affairs. McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army for thirty-four years after graduation from West Point.  He holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He is author of Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World and Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam.  He is host of the podcast Battlegrounds: International Perspectives on Crucial Challenges to Security and Prosperity.

Orville Schell (moderator)

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are: Wealth and Power, China’s Long March to the 21st Century; Virtual Tibet; The China Reader: The Reform Years; and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders. He has written widely for many magazine and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, The New Republic, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, the China Quarterly, and The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Schell was born in New York City, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and earned a Ph.D. (Abd) at University of California, Berkeley in Chinese History. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-70s.

He is a Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schell is also the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism.