Mira Rapp-Hooper

Mira Rapp-Hooper is a political scientist and expert on the Indo-Pacific who currently serves as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for East Asia and Oceania at the National Security Council, White House. She is the White House’s top advisor for and responsible for coordinating all of US government policy towards the region. From 2021-2023 she served as Director for Indo-Pacific Strategy at the National Security Council, where she was responsible for the White House’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, the management of the Quad partnership among Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, and US-Japan-ROK trilateral relations, among other initiatives. In 2021 she briefly served at the State Department on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff.  

She holds a B.A. in history from Stanford University and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. At Columbia she was research assistant to Kenneth Waltz, the founder of structural realism, and had Robert Jervis, Virginia Page Fortna, Richard K. Betts, and Andrew J. Nathan as advisors.[1] Previously she worked at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) as a senior fellow in the Asia-Pacific Security Program,[2] and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) as a fellow and as director of CSIS’ Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative.[3]

Rapp-Hooper was also Asia Policy Coordinator for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.[4] She was a Foreign Policy Interrupted Fellow, and is a David Rockefeller Fellow of the Trilateral Commission and an Associate Editor with the International Security Studies Forum. Her 2021 appointment to the Department of State was seen as part of the Biden administration's pivot to the Indo-Pacific.[5]

She has published in Political Science Quarterly, Security Studies, and Survival (academic); the National Interest, Foreign Affairs, and The Washington Quarterly (press). She is a regular journalistic source on Asia issues and has provided expert analysis to the New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR and the BBC. Her book Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America’s Alliances (Harvard University Press, 2020) analyzes the history of and the challenges to the United States' system of alliances.[6] Her second book, An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century Order, co-authored with Rebecca Lissner, was published in December 2020 by Yale University Press.[7][8][9]