Like-Minded Allies? Indo-Pacific Partners’ Views on Possible Changes in the U.S. Relationship with Taiwan

Jeffrey Hornung is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He specializes in Japanese security and foreign policies, East Asian security issues, and U.S. foreign and defense policies in the Indo-Pacific region, including its alliances.

Prior to joining RAND in April 2017, Hornung was the fellow for the Security and Foreign Affairs Program at Sasakawa USA from 2015 until 2017. From 2010 until 2015, Hornung worked as an associate professor for the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, a Department of Defense education facility in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Hornung has written extensively about Japanese security and foreign policy issues and broader Northeast Asia security issues for numerous media, policy, and academic outlets. This includes Washington Quarterly, Asian Survey, Foreign Policy, New York Times, Washington Post, War on the Rocks and many others, including the two major Japanese dailies Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun.

Hornung received his Ph.D. in political science from The George Washington University, where he wrote his thesis on Japanese decisionmaking to send the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War. During 2005–2006, Hornung was also a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo where he conducted his doctoral research as a Fulbright Fellow. He also holds an M.A. in international relations with a concentration in Japan Studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Miranda Priebe is director of the Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.

Her work at RAND has focused on grand strategy, the future of the international order, effects of U.S. forward presence, military doctrine, history of U.S. military policy, distributed air operations, and multi-domain command and control. She has also conducted research on deterrence, reassurance, threat perceptions, rising powers, alliance politics, and U.S. defense budgets. Priebe received a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also received a Master of Public Affairs degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and S.B. degrees in physics and political science from MIT.

Bryan Rooney is a political scientist at the RAND Corporation. His work at RAND has focused on wargaming, U.S. cooperation with allies and partners, grand strategy, and deterrence and escalation in great power competition. Prior to working at RAND, his research also explored the interaction of domestic politics and international conflict, states of emergency in democracies, autocratization, state capacity, and alliance dynamics. Rooney earned a B.A. in Political Science from Boston College in 2011, and a Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University in 2017. He also was previously a Junior Research Fellow at the Carlos III - Juan March Institute in Madrid.

Saya KIBA is an Associate Professor at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies and a member of the Expert Panel on Ministry of Defense Capacity Building, Ministry of Defense of Japan. Her major fields of interest are Southeast Asian studies, civil-military relations, security sector governance, and defense cooperation. She has experience as a practitioner, working in the Embassy of Japan in the Philippines and the Embassy of Japan in Thailand. She also served as a staff to Diet member/ former Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara from 2010 to 2012 when his Democratic Party of Japan was the ruling party. Her recent works include a co-edited book, Pathways for Irregular Forces in Southeast Asia: Mitigating Violence with Non-state Armed Groups (Routledge, 2022).

Tsuneo “Nabe” Watanabe is a senior fellow of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, an independent policy research organization in Tokyo. In October 2016, Watanabe joined the Sasakawa Peace Foundation after serving a senior fellow and a director of foreign & security policy research at the Tokyo Foundation in 2009 to 2016. He served a senior fellow at the Mitsui Global Strategic Studies Institute in Tokyo in 2005 to 2009. In 1995, Watanabe joined Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. He served a visiting research scholar, research associate, fellow and senior fellow until 2005. He is currently adjunct fellow of the CSIS.

His publications include “Powers out of Control: Why the US, China & Russia are Threats to the World?” [co-authored with Daisuke Kondo et.al. in Japanese] (Kodansha, 2017), “Asia Pacific Countries and the US Rebalancing Strategy”[co-authored with David W.F. Huang et.al.] (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016), “NATO and Asia Pacific”[co-authored with Alexander Moens and Brooke A. Smith-Windsor et.al.](NATO Defense College, 2016), “NATO after the Cold War“[co-authored with Tomonori Yoshizaki et.al. in Japanese] (Minerva Shobou, 2012), “Are the US and China Trading Places in 2025: History Tells the Truth of the US-China Relations” [in Japanese] (PHP Research Institute, 2011). Watanabe received his D.D.S. from Tohoku University in Japan and his M.A. in political science from the New School for Social Research in New York.