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Michael Robert Auslin (born 17 March 1967) is an American historian, writer, and policy analyst, known for his work on U.S-Asian relations. He is currently the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University^[1] and was formerly an associate professor of history at Yale University. Since 2024, he has published The Patowmack Packet, a Substack containing articles on the history of Washington, D.C.

Early life and Education

Auslin grew up in suburban Chicago.^[2] He graduated with a BSci from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in 1988; received a Master's Degree from the Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1991; and was awarded a PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 2000. In 1991-92, he lived and worked in Japan as an Assistant Language Teacher on the JET Programme^[3], and he studied at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, in Yokohama, in 1995-96.

Career

Auslin was an assistant professor (2000–2006) and then associate professor (2006–2007) in the Department of History at Yale University.^[4] In addition, he was also the founding director of the Project on Japan-U.S. Relations (2004–2007) and a senior research fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies (2006–2007) at Yale.^[5]

In 2005, he was a visiting researcher at the Graduate School of Law of Kobe University and in 2009 was a visiting professor in the Faculty of Law at Tokyo University.^[4] After leaving Yale, he was a resident scholar and director of Japanese studies at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, D.C.^[4] In 2017, he joined the Hoover Institution as the inaugural Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia. Auslin is the Senior Advisor for Asia at the Halifax International Security Forum,^[6] a Senior Fellow in the Asia and National Security Programs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute,^[7] and was a senior fellow at London's Policy Exchange.^[8]

Auslin currently serves on the board of directors of the American Ditchley Foundation^[9] and as the Vice Chair of the Wilton Park USA Foundation.^[10]

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2018,^[11] and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2006 and a Marshall Memorial Fellow while a professor at Yale.^[12] In addition, he was a Fulbright Scholar and Japan Foundation Scholar while in graduate school.

Auslin has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations^[13], the U.S House of Representatives Armed Services Committee^[14], and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission^[15].

Media

Auslin was a regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal,^[16] writing on Asia, and continues to publish there as well as in The Atlantic^[17], Foreign Affairs^[18], Foreign Policy^[19], National Review,^[20] and The Spectator,^[21] among others. He has been a commentator on Fox News, BBC, and for other media outlets, including The News Hour on PBS. He was a featured commentator and script consultant in the 2004 PBS series Japan: Memoirs of a Secret Empire^[5] and for Netflix's Age of Samurai, in 2021.^[22] Auslin hosted the Pacific Century podcast, in which he interviewed senior policymakers, journalists, historians, business leaders, and others on contemporary Asian issues.

Select works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Michael Auslin, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly eight works in over thirty publications in one language and 100+ library holdings.^[23]

• 2024 — The Patowmack Packet Substack (an ongoing collection of articles on the history of Washington, D.C.)
• 2020 — Asia's New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific Stanford: Hoover Institution Press.
• 2017 — The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World's Most Dynamic Region New Haven: Yale University Press.
• 2011 — Pacific Cosmpolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• 2007 — Japan Society: Celebrating a Century 1907-2007 (with Edwin O. Reischauer). New York: Japan Society. ISBN 9780913304594; OCLC 85766283
• 2004 — Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01521-0; OCLC 56493769

Journals

• The Japanese Discovery of America: A Brief History with Documents, The Historian, Vol. 61, 1999.

Honors

• Elected Fellow, Royal Historical Society
• Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum^[24]
• Fulbright fellow^[5]
• Japan Foundation fellow^[5]
• Asia Society Asia 21 Fellow
• Marshall Memorial Fellow^[25]
• Yasuhiro Nakasone Prize for Excellence, Institute for International Policy Studies, Tokyo^[26]

Notes

External links

• The Hoover Institution, Stanford University
• Wilton Park
• Cosmos Club
• The Elizabethan Club
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Library of Congress webcast: Highlights of Japan-US relationship with Norman Mineta, Midori Goto, Naoyuki Agawa and Michael Auslin, 2007
• Interview with Auslin on "New Books in East Asian Studies"