Following the U.S.-led ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro this January, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled what commentators have dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine,” outlining his vision for American foreign policy. Introduced in the National Security Strategy as a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, it aims to reassert American dominance in the Western hemisphere by cracking down on drug trafficking and immigration, controlling strategic locations and resources, and reducing the influence of China, Russia, and other non-hemispheric powers in the region.

Moscow and Beijing have been highly critical of Trump’s foreign policy, portraying recent U.S. military actions as unilateral and violating the international legal order. With parallels to be noted between U.S. intervention in Venezuela, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s designs over Taiwan, what lessons are China and Russia drawing from the “Donroe Doctrine”? How is bilateral China-Russia relationship affected? And do recent actions by Washington vindicate a new “world order” advocated by Beijing and Moscow?

On February 23, to help break down these questions, the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis (CCA) is hosting a webinar featuring experts in Sino-Russian relations, including Elizabeth Wishnick, Senior Research Scientist in the China Studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses and Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, and Lyle Goldstein, Director of the China Initiative at Brown University and Director of Asia Engagement at Defense Priorities, moderated by Lyle Morris, CCA Senior Fellow on Foreign Policy and National Security.

Speakers

Dr. Elizabeth Wishnick is Senior Research Scientist for China Studies at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). She is an expert on Sino-Russian relations, Chinese foreign policy, and Arctic strategy. At CNA, she contributes her dual regional expertise on China and Russia, including professional proficiency in both languages, to research and analysis of Xi Jinping’s risk-taking, Sino-Russian military cooperation, and China’s Arctic policy. She is also a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute and a professor at Montclair State University, where she has taught political science. She leads a policy blog focused on identifying risks associated with China’s resource projects, www.chinasresourcerisks.com. She is the author of Mending Fences: Moscow’s China Policy from Brezhnev to Yeltsin; Russia, China, and the United States in Central Asia; and has written more than sixty academic and policy articles. She spent about three years living and working in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and received two Fulbright awards, one for Hong Kong in 2002, and another for China, Russia, and Kazakhstan in 2018. She also has traveled extensively in the Russian Far East for research. She was previously a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Stanford University, Harvard University, and the Academia Sinica (Taiwan). Her analysis has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, and The Diplomat, and she was featured on the PBS NewsHour.

Dr. Lyle J. Goldstein is the Director of the China Initiative and Visiting Professor at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. At Brown, he is investigating the costs of great power competition with China and Russia. Goldstein serves concurrently as Director of Asia Engagement at the Washington think-tank Defense Priorities, which advocates for realism and restraint in U.S. defense policy. In this role, he oversees a range of studies evaluating U.S. foreign policy and defense strategy in the Asia-Pacific region, including key flashpoints such as the Korean Peninsula, the South China Sea, the Sino-Indian border, and the status of Taiwan. He maintains expertise in Chinese and Russian military strategic development and in specific issues in the China-Russia relationship, particularly the Arctic and Central Asia. In Oct 2021, Goldstein retired after 20 years of service on the faculty at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC) after being promoted by his peers to the rank of Full Professor. During his career at NWC, he founded the China Maritime Studies Institute and was awarded the Superior Civilian Service Medal for this achievement. He has written or edited several books on Chinese strategy and most recently published The New Cold War at Sea: Maritime Implications of the China-Russia Quasi-Alliance. He is fluent in both Chinese and Russian and is now studying Korean. He tweets regularly on Chinese and Russian strategic matters at @lylegoldstein.

Lyle Morris is a Senior Fellow on Foreign Policy and National Security at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. Prior to joining ASPI, Lyle was a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, leading projects on Chinese military modernization and Asia-Pacific security from 2011-2022. From 2019 to 2021, Morris served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) as the Country Director for China, advising OSD on defense relations between the Department of Defense and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and on Indo-Pacific maritime security. He received the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service for his service. Before joining RAND, Lyle was the 2010–11 Next Generation Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) and a research intern with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Lyle has lived and studied in Beijing, China, for four years, where he studied Mandarin at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies (IUP) at Tsinghua University and later worked at Dentsu Advertising and the China Economist Journal.