One Thing I Learned at Harvard: To Read Geopolitics, First Read Fear
In 2000, I went to the Harvard Kennedy School for a second master's degree. By then I had already been a reporter and news anchor for years — the logical move was to keep climbing back home in Taiwan. Instead I planned my way into the snow of New England, to become, once again, a student chased by deadlines.
What decided the course for me was a book I found in a Taipei bookstore before leaving: Preventive Defense, by former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry and Assistant Secretary Ashton Carter. The title sounds severe, but its idea is one every Chinese speaker knows: prevention beats cure. At Harvard I discovered Carter himself taught a course at the Kennedy School — "American National Security Policy" — using that very book. I signed up almost without hesitating. It went on to take about ninety percent of my energy just to pass.
But the one thing it taught me, I still use today to read any international conflict.
Preventive Defense sorted geopolitical threats into tiers. Tier A: immediate threats to the U.S. — Russia, China. Tier B: conflict on the Korean Peninsula, the Persian Gulf. Tier C: places where U.S. forces ran peacekeeping operations, like Bosnia and Haiti.
The first time I read that ranking, something clicked: national security is, at its core, the management of fear. What a country fears, and how badly, decides where it puts its troops, its budget, its attention. Reading geopolitics is never about who shouts loudest. It's about who genuinely fears whom, and how much. The loud ones are usually Tier C. The ones that keep great powers up at night, calling emergency meetings — those are Tier A.
How strict was the training? The Kennedy School assumed we would all end up in senior government, so it drilled one core skill: briefing the president — a two-page memo, a two-minute briefing. Why two minutes? Because you might catch the president in the ground-floor elevator, and by the sixth or seventh floor he steps out; in that short window you have to make a national-security matter clear enough for him to decide on the spot. Not one wasted word. And don't assume two pages is easy because it's short — precise and actionable is the hardest thing to write.
Nearly every assignment backed me into a corner. One imagined terrorists releasing sarin gas in the Boston subway, eight dead, and the four of us in our group had to play defense secretaries testifying before Congress. Another had North Korea attacking South Korea, and we had to draft the U.S. war plan. I — a television anchor from Taiwan — had to defend, in English, how America should fight a war, in front of classmates who were West Point and Air Force Academy graduates. For every assignment I researched with one hand and dialed Taipei with the other — calling my godfather, Tang Fei, who had been Taiwan's Minister of National Defense and later Premier. "Godfather, if there's a terrorist attack, should the defense secretary resign to take responsibility?" Down the line, point by point, he walked me through the U.S. standard operating procedures while I scribbled. We rehearsed the congressional testimony over and over. In class I drew the role of the secretary myself, and the professors — former deputy and assistant secretaries of defense — and other students questioned me: "Madam Secretary…" Every question and every answer, I remember clearly to this day.
The hardest was the final individual assignment: as national security advisor, write a memo to a newly inaugurated president — what U.S. national security must watch for, with concrete policy recommendations.
I chose China.
It was the only topic all semester I didn't have to cram for — because the tug-of-war among Taiwan, the U.S., and China was already what I studied and read every day. The ideas were there, accumulated.
In that memo I boldly advised the president: take a tougher line on Beijing, strengthen arms sales to Taiwan — including Aegis destroyers — while maintaining strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan, and requiring Taiwan to take more responsibility for its own defense rather than leaning on unconditional American protection.
That was written in 2000.
Lay it on today's table — tougher on Beijing, more arms sales, strategic ambiguity, Taiwan responsible for its own defense — and those lines have barely moved in more than twenty years. Not because anyone was especially prophetic, but because the structure of fear beneath them hasn't changed: who is the Tier A threat, who fears whom, who can't sleep — in twenty years that has only deepened, never flipped. Once you see the structure, you realize the conflicts in today's headlines, which look sudden, are mostly moves already slotted into the same ranking of fear.
I will always remember the season I wrote that first assignment — the last week of October, when New England's first snow of the year came down. It was the first time in my life I had ever seen snow. Flakes scattered outside the window, the temperature at zero; it should have been beautiful. But my first encounter with snow made me want to cry. Because I was buried in how many nuclear warheads Russia had, and where North Korea's special forces might infiltrate across the 38th parallel — cold, afraid, alone, with no idea why I had come all this way to suffer like this.
At the time it only felt like suffering. Years later I understood what that course really gave me. Not knowledge of how many missiles a country has — that goes out of date. It gave me a way of seeing the world: faced with any conflict, don't rush to pick a side, don't rush to be frightened. First work out who fears whom, and how much. Then decide what to worry about.
Fear isn't there to be felt. It's there to be ranked — and then managed.