Jonathan Stromseth - Professor of the Practice at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy

Colbert Cannon: Welcome to season 10 of the HPScast. I’m your host, Colbert Cannon. If you’re new to the pod, HPS is a global investment firm.

We manage approximately $110 billion in assets for a broad range of institutional and retail investors. That capital is invested across private credit and public credit strategies. Each week, I sit down with key relationships to, partners of, and friends of the firm to learn from their experience, ask how that experience shapes their current roles, and give insights into HPS and how we operate.

So with that, let’s bring in our guest. Our guest this week is a Professor of Public Policy at Duke University and a world renowned academic, author, and policymaker with a particular focus on Southeast Asia and China in particular. After graduating from St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he spent time continuing his studies in Singapore before returning to Cornell and later Columbia, through which time he got enough degrees to prove himself thoroughly better educated than your humble podcast host.

He spent 14 years working with the Asia Foundation across Thailand, Vietnam, and China, and, in 2014, joined the State Department, focused on East Asian foreign policy. In 2017, he joined the Brookings Institution, where he spent seven years continuing his work and scholarship, along the way publishing several important books on East Asian policy and power dynamics in the region.

Earlier this year, he joined the faculty of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke in my home state of North Carolina. And this man has dedicated his life to thoughtful and rigorous study focused on U. S. and East Asian policy and foreign relations. And we are honored to have him on today to talk about his work at such an important time in global geopolitics.

So, without any further ado, I’m excited to welcome in this week’s HPScast guest, Jonathan Stromseth, Duke Professor of Public Policy. Jonathan, welcome to the pod.

Jonathan Stromseth: Thanks very much for having me.

Colbert Cannon: Well, Jonathan, I like to go all the way back. Let’s start from the beginning. Where’d you grow up? Where are you from originally?

Jonathan Stromseth: I grew up in a small Minnesota college town, actually where St. Olaf and Carleton College are on either side of a river. It’s a really beautiful, picturesque place. My father was a Professor of Philosophy at St. Olaf. My mom was Director of International Studies – all of those semester abroad programs. That’s where it all started.

Colbert Cannon: So, you come by your academiology, I love it.

Okay, so then, did it make sense to stay in town? I mean, undergrad at St. Olaf seems like the obvious choice given that background.

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, honestly, I was not a stellar student in high school, but St. Olaf was just a wonderful place for me. I studied Chinese history, and it really was an inspiring place for me and set me up for the rest of my studies.

Colbert Cannon: How did you first get interested in Asian Studies? What was the original draw there, Jonathan?

Jonathan Stromseth: Partly, I just grew up in a family that was very focused on current events. It could be domestic politics. It could be international events. The TV was always on over dinner. But also, when I was about 10 years old, in the early 1970s, uh, my parents took a study abroad program from St. Olaf College where my father was the field supervisor professor, and that went to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and then Thailand – northern Thailand – for four months at Chiang Mai University. And that really just, sort of, sealed the deal for me and got me very interested in Asia, I think, for the long-term.

Colbert Cannon: You had a formative time, and as a kid, that must have been incredible.

Okay. So, talk to me through your time post-college, Jonathan. We talked about your academic pursuits and later with the Asia Foundation, eventually the State Department, but help me navigate your path there through scholarship and then the later work with the Asia Foundation.

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, I frankly wasn’t sure if I wanted to follow in the family business and get a PhD. So, I went off to Columbia for their MA program in International Affairs, kind of a similar program to what I teach in now at Duke. But eventually, yeah, I got, kind of, hooked in and pursued the PhD and followed the family comparative advantage of writing really long papers.

Colbert Cannon: What did you write your dissertation on?

Jonathan Stromseth: My dissertation was on the early reform efforts of Vietnam, their Doi Moi, or renovation, following China’s reform efforts. But I was, sort of, part of a new group that was wanting to study Vietnam the country and not necessarily the war.

So, we were looking at domestic politics, and eventually, I became one of the first Americans – maybe the first two or three – to be allowed to go to Vietnam to do a year or two of dissertation research. I lived in Hanoi, in the mid-1990s, actually, but I always had this itch to do something a little more operational.

And so, right next door to Vietnam, in Cambodia in the early 1990s, there was going to be the largest UN peacekeeping operation ever. And I’d done a lot of work on Cambodia. And so, I applied for that peacekeeping operation and became an electoral officer. And that was really critical for me because I realized that I really loved the operational nature of all of that. It affected my future career trajectory.

Colbert Cannon: And in what way, Jonathan? Tell me, what were you actually doing, and what was it about it that you found so engaging?

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, it’s pretty incredible. I went through two weeks of training, and the Head of the Electoral Division, which is one of the biggest divisions of this peacekeeping operation, noticed that one other guy and I had an academic background. So, he wanted to create a think tank. That didn’t really work, so he decided to create an internal newsletter where everybody would have a chance to learn best practices of what UN workers in far-flung provinces all over the country were doing as they were starting to organize the election.

So, what would have been a nightmare to a lot of people was, sort of, a fantasy to me. And I was given permission to basically sign up for any helicopter I wanted every week to go to some province and just, kind of, dig in and write about it and share those stories and lessons learned. Then eventually, I did become an election worker in a province, myself, toward the end.

Colbert Cannon: Incredible. Okay, so then, tell me about your time at the Asia Foundation. For those less familiar, what is the Asia Foundation? What does it actually do?

Jonathan Stromseth: I mean the Asia Foundation is a U. S. international development organization in Asia. It’s headquartered in San Francisco, has an office in Washington, and has 18 offices in Asia. And around the time that I was coming out of grad school, finishing my PhD, they were looking for someone to basically set up an office in Hanoi because the political situation in terms of U. S.-Vietnam relations was, I think, ready for that.

It wasn’t easy. I came and went from Bangkok for two years until I got an office license, and then I moved my wife and emerging family to Hanoi. So, it was a real startup operation there – very interesting programs on provincial economic governance, which is basically like trying to improve the business environment for the private sector in the provinces, which might sound simple today, but at the time, that was a highly controversial, ideologically complex issue.

Colbert Cannon: I’m sure incredibly complicated, and it was from a, sort of, standing start, right? I mean, you’re trying to create markets at a time when, as you say, it’s fraught with complication.

You spent time across a range of countries in your time there: Thailand, Vietnam, and China. How important to your work was that exposure you got throughout the region?

Jonathan Stromseth: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I was very happy after five or six years in Vietnam to get the chance to basically be the country representative of the Asia Foundation in China. And I was the first not to be based in Hong Kong but to actually be based up in Beijing and then spent another eight or nine years there. But I did Southeast Asian studies in grad school, and it was just so great to see, kind of, the macro sense of how China relates to the rest of the region.

Colbert Cannon: And tell me about what the Asia Foundation was doing in China? What was your actual work?

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, you know, it wasn’t too long ago. I left in 2014, but we were supporting legal reform, especially in administrative procedure – how citizens participate in the making of rules and laws of the government and open government information. But we also focused on foreign affairs and regional cooperation. And if you can believe it, even supported joint training of U. S., Chinese, and Thai experts on disaster management in Bangkok – the sort of thing you frankly couldn’t imagine happening today.

Colbert Cannon: Yeah, it’s incredible, a different time.

Okay, so by 2014, you move into public service directly then at the State Department. Why was that the right time to move over to State?

Jonathan Stromseth: My wife and I stayed eight or nine years in, so quite a long time. She had a great job with UNICEF. Our kids were happy, but, you know, I was always itching to have a chance to engage in high level policymaking. And so, when that opportunity came along, I just did it. And so, I was basically the lead for China and Southeast Asia on the policy planning staff. And, as you probably know, the policy planning staff is, sort of, a unique think tank-like organization that reports directly to the Secretary of State. And so, I was working for John Kerry, who had a long-standing interest in Vietnam, for instance, and so, it was a very exciting time.

Colbert Cannon: Yeah, and so, tell me about that work. What is that policy that you were spending your time focused on?

Jonathan Stromseth: A couple things. I worked quite hard on further developing and upgrading the relationship between the United States and Vietnam, and as you probably heard, back in September, Biden visited Hanoi and upgraded the relationship. They call it a double upgrade to a strategic partnership, which is a very interesting development.

I also worked a lot on China, and that was a time where we still talked about, can we have cooperation with China amid escalating rivalry and competition today? But there was a lot of confidence in that possibility. Those times seem, kind of, distant as we stand here today.

Colbert Cannon: You became a senior fellow at Brookings. Organizations like Brookings can be a little Byzantine from the outside looking in. What is its mission, and how did you spend your time there, personally?

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, it is often called the top think tank in the world. So, I was just blessed to have the opportunity. When the administration changes, you’d leave jobs like the one I had at the State Department, unless you’re a career foreign service officer.

And so, fortunately for me, a chair had been established in in Southeast Asian Studies, so I was able to apply and get that. And, you know, at Brookings, you do conferences, but it’s really about writing, and it’s about book writing. And then you try to leverage those books as an independent scholar to influence policy, particularly of the executive branch – at least that’s where I put my efforts.

Colbert Cannon: We’re recording this in May of 2024. So, just a few months ago, you joined Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. It’s actually just a couple miles down the road from where I went to high school. What was the draw at that point to get back on a college campus?

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, I’m affiliated with the Duke Center for International Development, and I think, most crucially, I’m a Professor of the Practice. That’s my formal title. Professors of practice are not only expected to teach and bring the experience of my 25 or 30 years, in my case, of work on the ground in Asia or the State Department or what have you, but also to keep practicing and work on project initiatives, develop them, raise funds for them and so on. And ultimately, it just seemed like a good fit.

Colbert Cannon: Well Jonathan, it’s interesting because, given your background, I’m not surprised. I would imagine that the ability to combine both academic work as well as real policy and project work suits your background greatly.

Let’s talk about both. Let’s start on academia. What are you actually teaching at Duke? What is your course of study there these days?

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, I taught a course basically on how the U. S. – China rivalry or competition, a new Cold War or whatever you want to call it, is affecting the way foreign aid is being delivered across the world. Basically, what you have are, kind of, alternative universes.

You’ve got the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and other sort of elements of what China does in the foreign aid space. And then you have the US and its allies, not only developing, sort of, their own versions of Belt and Road or what we call BRI but other types of initiatives. And these things are really on parallel tracks. They don’t meet. And you have developing countries trying to navigate this space. And in some cases, they’re very concerned about instability and the possibility of war between the U.S. and China, but they can also be quite clever at leveraging the rivalry and, kind of, playing one major power off the other and getting more benefits for their country.

Colbert Cannon: And then how about on the project and policy time side? How are you spending your time there?

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, I am in the process of developing an interesting new project on climate innovation in Southeast Asia. And Southeast Asia is not only a region of great promise and dynamism, but it’s also highly vulnerable to climate change – probably one of the most, if not the most vulnerable region in the world. Vietnam, you know, could be underwater – Southern Vietnam in a few years.

Bangkok and Manila and Ho Chi Minh City are considered three of the five most vulnerable cities to climate change. So, I thought, how can I look at this region? And when you look at it on climate, there’s a lot of entrepreneurial dynamism in all sorts of green sectors like electric mobility, a lot of NGOs and subnational actors. And it’s, kind of, a testing ground for innovation, but it’s mostly limited to country level action. And there isn’t a lot of talking about best practices. So, I thought about developing an initiative that would maybe identify the most promising innovations in the region, help to spread best practices, and hopefully, connect these innovations with sources of financing and investment.

Colbert Cannon: What’s fascinating about that is, you know, relative to the early part of the conversation, this is full circle for you. I mean, this is exactly what you did when you were sharing best practices across small provinces in Cambodian elections.

Listen, it’s the biggest problem of our time, a global problem, of course, and as you say, complicated by the interrelationship between the U.S. and China and all of that. What is success to you? You know, if you think about this project that you’ve initiated, if you’re sitting here in five years and say, we actually did what I hoped to set out to do, what are the goals?

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, I would say, there’s two things. One thing we want to do is track and monitor. Identify, track and monitor innovations, and develop easily digestible data visualization, which will show where these innovations are, but more importantly, show where the finance is going, including private finance, public finance, blended finance, what have you. Really, catalog the best innovations and help them be better identified and supported. T

This is also meant to be an opportunity where U.S. and Chinese experts have an opportunity to share information and so on. So, I hope that, as we’re dealing with so much competition and rivalry in U. S. – China relations but we have this global problem of climate change – and we’re not talking to each other as much as we used to if at all on that issue – this could be an opportunity, I think, to maybe break the dam a little bit and have those discussions that maybe will build over time.

Colbert Cannon: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting, Jonathan. Cooperation begets more cooperation. And as you say, this is an intractable problem that we all need to solve. And if you can at least start here, maybe there’s a knock-on effect from that. I think that’s incredibly exciting.

You mentioned that this is a project, obviously, that has scholarship attached to it. And also, investment and support from bigger institutions is important to making this a success. Can you talk a little bit, a) about the importance of that and what people can do to be helpful, and b) the involvement of HPS and these kinds of organizations?

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, I should say that, in the development and formulation of the ideas for this project, I benefited a lot from discussions with colleagues of yours at HPS. And also, I’m very encouraged by both that intellectual support and funding support as well going forward. We really are looking forward and excited to launching this summer.

Colbert Cannon: Well, it’s exciting stuff. And Jonathan, I think that, throughout your career, you’ve had a front row seat to a lot of really complicated and important types of issues. It’s hard to imagine a bigger problem for us to solve than global climate change, and your ability to be both thoughtful about ways that we can support innovation, and through that, greater global cooperation, is incredibly inspiring.

With that, I want to move to the last segment of the podcast. It’s something we like to call “Best Ideas”, where we offer up something that’s added value in our lives recently. It’s “Best Ideas” because it’s our goal as investors to maximize exposure to those.

As our guest, Jonathan, I’m going to ask you to go first. What is your best idea this week?

Jonathan Stromseth: Well, I was thinking about this. One best idea is leveraging your passions. For me, a lifelong passion has been downhill skiing.

It’s not quite what you think. I grew up, as we discussed, let’s say, the modest hills of Minnesota. This wasn’t, you know, the Rocky Mountains or Aspen, and I grew up on what we called hard pack but other people call ice. I started early. I became a ski instructor at a local resort in my early teens, which allowed me to ski for free, and it’s just a lifelong thing that has stayed with me.

Early morning skiing on freshly groomed runs and carving wide turns is pretty much like Zen to me.

Colbert Cannon: Well, I will heartily co-sign this one, Jonathan. I’m an avid skier, in particular with my family. I think it’s one of the great family trips you can do, especially when the kids are younger. There’s nothing quite like – you’ve got them on a ski lift, there’s no phones anywhere to be seen. It’s where you get all the good stories. I couldn’t love that more. That’s a great idea.

Jonathan Stromseth: And, one other one. I just wanted to make a restaurant recommendation. I’m in Arlington, which is just across the river from the Potomac from D. C., and about 10 minutes from me is a place called Eden Center in Falls Church. And it is a center of Vietnamese restaurants, snack shops, jewelry stores, supermarkets, even tax preparers. It’s like a time capsule of Vietnam before 1975, in the South in particular. And I would recommend a place called Hai Duong for pho. It’s southern, so the northerners won’t like it, but I think, for most Americans, it’ll be fantastic.

And also, other Asian restaurants there – there’s a place called Kao Sarn Thai Street Food that has been recommended to me by Thai diplomats. There’s a particular dish there that I had in the 1970s with my brother in Chiang Mai, Thailand, when we were kids. It’s called Khao soi, and I would strongly recommend that. It’s sort of a flat egg noodle and coconut soup with chicken, shallots, limes, chilies – you name it – but it’s just an incredible setting. It’s pretty much cafeteria style, but I highly recommend it.

Colbert Cannon: I love it. Eden Center. Well worth checking out. Let me also co-sign that one. And I usually only give one best idea, but I’ll give two this week.

Before I get to my actual one, I’ve served on multiple jury duties here in New York City. And when you do get to jury duty down at Center Street in New York, my favorite place to eat – I think it’s the greatest spot in the city – there’s a place called Nha Trang right off where the courthouse is downtown. The food is truly remarkable, and as somebody who loves pho, it’s one of my favorite. It’s like the only good thing about getting stuck on jury duty.

Okay, so then for my actual best idea this week, as folks know, I like to be inspired by the guests of the week. As a host, I like to peruse previous interviews to learn about my guests, and I read an interview with Jonathan where he rattled off a couple of his favorite movies at the time. And one jumped out to me because a) I also think it’s fantastic, and b) I love the director, generally. That movie he mentioned is not my best idea this week, mostly because it won the Palme d’Or and a Best Picture Oscar, and therefore, I’m going to guess many of you have already seen it. I’m speaking of Bong Joon Ho’s remarkable film, Parasite. But my best idea this week is one that Joon Ho directed and wrote six years before Parasite, relevant for some of Jonathan’s work around the theme of climate change.

My best idea is his 2013 film, Snowpiercer. Snowpiercer imagines the Earth as frozen over in the wake of climate engineering going wrong, and a single train is carrying the last remnants of humanity on a globe-crossing track.

The cast is stacked with Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer. If you liked Parasite, you know that Joon Ho is a stunningly talented director. He keeps you guessing at every moment of where the story’s going to go next.

So, in honor of a man quite thoughtful about climate issues, and one I know who appreciates this director’s work, let me recommend, as my best idea this week, the movie, Snowpiercer.

Jonathan, you ever see that one?

Jonathan Stromseth: I have not, but I’ll put it on the top of my list now.

Colbert Cannon: There you go.

With that, it’s time to wrap up for the week. Jonathan, we sincerely appreciate you taking the time today. I look forward to hearing more about your work to come, and we very much value the partnership with HPS through what you’re doing.

Jonathan Stromseth: Yeah. Delighted to be here. Thank you.