Speaker Bio

Isaac B. Kardon, Ph.D. is senior fellow for China studies in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is concurrently adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and was formerly assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI, where he was a core member of the China Maritime Studies Institute. Isaac studies the People’s Republic of China’s foreign and security policy, with specialization in maritime affairs. Kardon’s book, China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order (Yale, 2023), analyzes PRC influence on “the rules” of the law of the sea. His writing appears in the Financial Times, New York Times, International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the Naval War College Review. He has delivered his research as congressional testimony and briefed it across the joint force and interagency. Kardon earned a PhD in Government from Cornell University, an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies from Oxford University, and a BA in History from Dartmouth College. He was a China & the World post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University, and held visiting appointments at NYU School of Law, Academia Sinica, and the PRC National Institute for South China Sea Studies. He studied Chinese (Mandarin) at Peking University, Tsinghua University, Hainan University, and National Taiwan Normal University.