James Crabtree

James Crabtree is an award-winning author and geopolitical analyst.

He is currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a Senior Fellow at the Asia Society in New York, and a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. He spent spring 2024 as a Visiting Fellow at the Schwarzman Scholars Programme at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Until the end of 2023, he was the Singapore-based Executive Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies in Asia, where he organized the annual Shangri-La Dialogue security summit, an annual gathering of security leaders in the Indo-Pacific.

Prior to that, James was an Associate Professor in Practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School, Asia’s leading school of public policy. He was also a prominent journalist, notably as Mumbai Bureau Chief for the Financial Times. He continues to write frequently for a range of global publications including the New York Times and Wired, and appears as a commentator on Bloomberg, BBC, CNN, CNBC, and elsewhere. He worked previously as a senior advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He was educated at Harvard’s Kennedy School and at the London School of Economics.

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