Shorenstein APARC, 1983-1989

The Center began its work in the last decade of the Cold War, focusing on Northeast Asia, the region of greatest strategic significance. Through the efforts of John W. Lewis and Daniel I. Okimoto, who served as its first co-directors, the Northeast Asia–United States Forum on International Policy was founded at Stanford University in 1979. The Forum brought together existing research programs focusing on U.S.-Japan and U.S.-China relations, ones that provided a critical link between faculty members who had little prior knowledge of the countries to area specialists at Stanford and to Chinese and Japanese specialists with similar interests.

In 1983 both the Forum and the Center for International Security and Arms Control were brought under the administration of the International Strategic Institute at Stanford, a single independent administrative unit that would later become the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The Forum addressed the need for collaboration between U.S. and Asian specialists, using interdisciplinary and regional approaches to security and economic issues.

Against the backdrop of a budding partnership with China forged to balance the Soviet Union and of increasing trade tensions with Japan, America’s most valuable ally in East Asia, early Forum research focused on arms control, high-tech industry competition, and reform in China.