Ian Buruma | The End of Pax Americana in Europe and East Asia

Ian Buruma will discuss the consequences of increasing detachment of the US from its allies, a tendency that has been boosted under the Trump administration. It has become clear—to Canadians, Europeans and East Asians—that wealthy U.S. allies will have to plan for a future in which they can no longer be dependent on US security guarantees.

Since the Cold War, U.S. administrations have paid less attention to Europe, and foreign policy in East Asia has become complicated because of the rise of China as a more powerful rival than the Soviet Union ever was. Will NATO survive? Will Japan revise its pacifist constitution? Will such countries as Poland, Japan and South Korea eventually even acquire nuclear arms? These are some of the questions we will discuss.

Ian Buruma is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College and a former editor of The New York Review of Books. A Dutch-born historian and journalist educated in Holland and Japan, he has written widely on Europe, Asia and the United States, including: The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan; Year Zero: A History of 1945; Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance; A Tokyo Romance; The Churchill Complex: The Rise and Fall of the Special Relationship and the End of the Anglo-American Order; and, most recently, Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-1945. His work has won the Erasmus Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.