Ashley Townshend is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Ashley Townshend was a senior fellow for Indo-Pacific security at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also founding co-chair of the annual U.S.-Australia Indo-Pacific Deterrence Dialogue and a nonresident senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.
A leading Australian expert on Indo-Pacific strategic affairs, Townshend’s research focuses on the evolving regional order, alliances and partnerships, defense policy, deterrence and statecraft, and collective approaches to Indo-Pacific strategy. He has written extensively on U.S. strategy in Asia, regional strategic competition with China, the U.S.-Australia alliance, and Australian foreign and defense policy; and he is co-author of the monograph Averting Crisis: American Strategy, Military Spending and Collective Defence in the Indo-Pacific.
Prior to joining Carnegie, Townshend was the inaugural director of the Foreign Policy and Defence Program at the United States Studies Centre, where he led a number of research and strategic policy initiatives in partnership with the Australian Department of Defence. He has also held research and teaching positions at the Lowy Institute, the Australian War College, the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at Australian National University.
Townshend’s analysis has been widely published, including in Foreign Policy, the Guardian, Nikkei Asia, CNN, Defense One, War on the Rocks, the Australian, and the Australian Financial Review. He has also written for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Brookings Institution, the Lowy Institute, and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, among others. Townshend is a frequent commentator in the international media and completed his studies at the University of Oxford, Sciences Po Paris, and the University of Sydney, where he was awarded the University Medal.
New U.S.-Australia force posture initiatives are pulling the alliance into unchartered territory, raising critical challenges that Washington and Canberra must address.
Amid rising concern about the United States’ ability to deter Chinese aggression and uphold a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, Washington and Canberra are working to accelerate a strategy of collective deterrence.
This report lays out a case and provides a menu of policy options for how the Quad can pursue a collective approach to Indo-Pacific maritime security, with a particular focus on regional deterrence and defence.
In March, US President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Australia's Anthony Albanese unveiled the first part of the AUKUS pact with a $368 billion dollar handshake.
Canberra is becoming a critical player in collectively deterring Chinese aggression through force posture cooperation
Carnegie’s Ashley Townshend and Evan A. Feigenbaum will join Stacie Pettyjohn and William C. Greenwalt to discuss AUKUS developments and the challenges and opportunities of U.S.-Australia alliance reform.
Australia is now well on its way to becoming just the seventh country to have a nuclear-powered submarine.
Despite what you’d infer from the news articles, nuclear-powered submarines form just one part of the AUKUS Agreement. There is a whole other portion of the pact focused on other technological capabilities.
China has grown its military from a fairly rusty Soviet-era force in the mid 1990s to being one of the world's most powerful militaries, perhaps the world's second most powerful military, and one optimized around preventing the United States from projecting military power into Asia.
In this episode of Interpreting India, Ashley Townshend joins Deep Pal to discuss the recent developments in the Indo-Pacific.