Center
for International Policy
ASIA
PROGRAM
Program
Staff
Asia
Director: Selig S. Harrison
Asia
Program Intern: Michelle Trone
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Asia
Program Staff
Asia
Director: Selig S. Harrison
 SELIG
S. HARRISON
is director of the Asia Program at the Center for International
Policy and a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars. He has specialized in South Asia and East
Asia for fifty years as a journalist and scholar and is
the author of five books on Asian affairs and U.S. relations
with Asia, including Korean Endgame:
A Strategy For Reunification and U.S. Disengagement,
published by Princeton University Press in May 2002. He
has visited North Korea eleven times, most recently in January
2009.
Harrison
served as South Asia Correspondent of the Associated Press
from 1951 to 1954, in New Delhi, returned as South Asia
Bureau Chief of The
Washington Post from 1962 to 1965, and served as Northeast
Asia Bureau Chief of the Post, based in Tokyo, from 1968 to 1972.
From 1974 to 1996, as a senior associate of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, he pursued investigative
assignments every year in a variety of countries, especially
those where he worked as a journalist, such as India, Pakistan,
China, Japan, and the two Koreas.
His reputation for giving “early warning” of foreign policy
crises was well established during his career as a foreign
correspondent. In his study of foreign reporting, Between
Two Worlds, John Hohenberg, former secretary of the
Pulitzer Prize Board, cited Harrison’s prediction of the
1965 Indo-Pakistan war eighteen months before it happened.
Hohenberg wrote: “What Harrison foresaw came to pass,
and when it happened, American editors suddenly rose up
in their wrath — as they always do at such times — and demanded,
why weren’t we told about all of this? They had been told at great length, but
because too many editors were bored with places like India,
they weren’t listening. Terming Harrison “one of the few
correspondents in all of Asia who was able to maintain a
balanced point of view,” Hohenberg called him a model of
the “first-rate correspondent who knows the past of the
area to which he is assigned, writes with clarity and meaning
of the present and has an awareness of the future."
 More
than a year before the Russians invaded Afghanistan, Harrison
warned of this possibility in one of his frequent contributions
to the influential journal Foreign Policy.
During the Afghan war, he was one of the earliest
to foresee that the Soviet Union would withdraw its forces
and became a leading advocate of a two-track policy designed
to promote a withdrawal through a combination of military
pressure and diplomatic incentives. He was also one of the few who predicted
that the Kabul Communist regime would not fall immediately
after withdrawal.
Rep. Stephen Solarz, chairman of the House Subcommittee
on Asian and Pacific Affairs, introducing him at a hearing
on February 21, 1989, one year after withdrawal, observed
that “with each passing day his reputation as a prophet
is enhanced. I am sure it wasn’t easy for Mr. Harrison,
in the face of a phalanx of analysts, academicians, and
others who were all saying the opposite, to maintain his
position, but he had the intellectual fortitude and moral
strength to stick by his guns, his analytical guns, and
I think he deserves credit for that."
In
the last week of May, 1972, Harrison, representing The
Washington Post, and Harrison Salisbury of the New
York Times became the first Americans to visit North
Korea since the Korean War and to interview Kim Il Sung.
Following the second of his five visits to Pyongyang
in 1987, Harrison presided over a 1989 Carnegie Endowment
symposium that brought together North Korean spokesmen
and American specialists and officials for the first time
and has reported on this meeting in his Endowment study,
Dialogue with North Korea. In 1992, he led a Carnegie Endowment delegation
to Pyongyang that learned for the first time that North
Korea had reprocessed plutonium.
In
June, 1994, on his fourth visit, he met the late Kim Il
Sung for three hours and won agreement to the concept of
a freeze and eventual dismantlement of the North Korean
nuclear program in exchange for U.S. political and economic
concessions (for an account of his discussions in Pyongyang
leading to the freeze concept, see Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, pages 321–22). President Carter, meeting Kim Il Sung
a week later, persuaded the North Korean leader to initiate
the freeze immediately, opening the way for negotiations
with the United States that resulted in the U.S.-North Korean
nuclear agreement of October 21, 1994.
In
1994 and 1995 Harrison directed a Carnegie Endowment program
on “Japan’s Role in International Security Affairs” centering
on a series of U.S.-Japan dialogues on global and regional
arms control and nonproliferation issues.
Harrison
is frequently invited to testify as an expert witness before
congressional committees and lectures at the National Defense
University, the National War College and the State Department’s
Foreign Service Institute.
At the same time, his outspoken, constructive criticisms
of administration policies often appear on op-ed pages of
The Washington Post, the New York Times, and
International Herald Tribune.
He has appeared on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,”
“Nightline,” and other TV programs as well as National Public
Radio’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”
 Selig
Harrison is the author of five books:
-
India:
The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton, 1960)
-
China,
Oil, and Asia: Conflict Ahead?
(Columbia, 1977)
-
The
Widening Gulf: Asian Nationalism and American Policy
(The Free Press, 1978)
-
In
Afghanistan’s Shadow (Carnegie Endowment, 1981)
-
He
is co-author with Diego Cordovez of Out of Afghanistan:
The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (Oxford,
1995) and edited India and the United States (Macmillan,
1960); and Superpower Rivalry in the Indian Ocean:
Indian and American Perspectives (1989). A former managing editor of The New
Republic, he has served as senior fellow in charge
of Asian studies at the Brookings Institution, senior
fellow at the East-West Center and professorial lecturer
in Asian studies at the Johns Hopkins University School
of Advanced International Studies.
He is currently adjunct professor of Asian studies
at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George
Washington University.
E-mail:
sharrison@ciponline.org
Asia
Program Intern (Summer 2010): Michelle Trone
Michelle is a 2010 graduate from Emory University, where she earned a double major in Political Science and History. She spent a year studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the Department of Government. Michelle is very interested in human rights issues, and in South Asia in particular. She has worked as an intern at Human Rights First, for the ACLU, and for Senator Ben Cardin. She hopes to pursue graduate studies in International Relations, with a focus on human rights. Michelle loves to travel, and plans to spend next spring interning for a local human rights NGO in Rajastan, India.
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