Director, Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, The Brookings Institution
Richard Bush is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies (CNAPS). Richard Bush came to Brookings in July 2002, after serving almost five years as the Chairman and Managing Director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the mechanism through which the United States Government conducts substantive relations with Taiwan in the absence of diplomatic relations.
Richard Bush began his professional career in 1977 with the China Council of The Asia Society. In July 1983 he became a staff consultant on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs. In January 1993 he moved up to the full committee, where he worked on Asia issues and served as liaison with Democratic Members. In July 1995, he became National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and a member of the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates the analytic work of the intelligence community. He left the NIC in September 1997 to become head of AIT.
He is author of a number of articles on U.S. relations with China and Taiwan; of At Cross Purposes, a book of essays on the history of America’s relations with Taiwan published in March 2004 by M.E. Sharpe; and of Untying the Knot, a book on cross-Strait political relations published by the Brookings Institution Press in July 2005. Dr. Bush’s latest book, A War Like No Other: The Truth About China’s Challenge to America (Wiley, 2007), is co-written with Brookings scholar Michael O’Hanlon and examines the challenges that the United States faces in avoiding conflict and developing its relationship with China. He is currently working on a book examining structural factors in the U.S.-Japan-China trilateral relationship.
Richard Bush received his undergraduate education at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He did his graduate work in political science at Columbia University, getting an M.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1978.