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• Ambassador William B. Taylor: Russia's War on Ukraine - Prospects for Peace

  • When
    02 May 2025
  •  
    10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
  • Location
    First Presbyterian Church, 540 William Hilton Pkwy, Hilton Head Island, SC

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  Biography

  Ambassador William B. Taylor is a distinguished fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, where he brings decades of diplomatic leadership and expertise to this role. Prior to the Atlantic Council, Taylor was vice president, Europe and Russia at the US Institute of Peace, building on a career of diplomatic engagement and conflict resolution that included serving in several of the world's most complex regions.
  

  Taylor was US Ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009, and later returned as chargé d'affaires at the US Embassy in Kyiv in 2019 during a pivotal period in U.S.-Ukraine relations. He served as the special coordinator for Middle East Transitions at the US Department of State from 2011 to 2013, where he oversaw assistance and support to the Middle East during the Arab Spring—including support to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria. Taylor served in Jerusalem as the US Government’s representative to the Middle East Quartet, which facilitated the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Prior to this assignment, he served in Baghdad as director of the Iraq Reconstruction Office from 2004 to 2005; in Kabul as coordinator of US Government and international assistance to Afghanistan from 2002-2003; and in Washington with the rank of ambassador as coordinator of US Government assistance to the former Soviet Union countries and Eastern Europe from 1992-2002.

  Before joining the US State Department, Taylor spent five years in Brussels as the Special Deputy Defense Advisor to the US Ambassador to NATO, William Taft. Prior to that, Bill directed an in-house Defense Department think tank at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.
  

  Taylor holds a Bachelor of Science from the US Military Academy at West Point, and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Taylor also served as an infantry platoon leader and combat company commander in the US Army in Vietnam and Germany.

  
  

  

  Guest Policy

  Guests may register in advance or at the door for $25. Please arrive at 9:30 am to check in. Advance registration opens one month before each event and closes the Wednesday before each event. There is no cost for WACHH members to attend.

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• Book Club - Japan’s Quiet Leadership by Mirey Solis

  • When
    08 May 2025
  •  
    4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
  • Location
    Island Recreation Center, 20 Wilborn Rd., Hilton Head Island
  • Spaces left
    31
  • Registered
    4 registrants

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  Note: Registration opens one month in advance.

  ABSTRACT

  Why has Japan emerged from the “lost decades” unscathed from the populist wave and a far more consequential actor in the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific? In answering this question, Japan’s Quiet Leadership provides a sweeping look at Japan’s domestic economic and political evolution, its economic statecraft, and the array of geopolitical challenges that have triggered a gradual but substantial shift in the country’s security profile. This deep dive into Japan’s trajectory over the last three decades underscores Japan’s hidden strengths in its democratic resilience, social stability, and proactive diplomacy; while reckoning with the profound challenges the nation faces: depopulation, rising inequality, voter disengagement, and threats to Asia’s long peace. The book traces the profound currents of change coursing through the Japanese polity and its external environment; and the myriad ways in which Japan’s experience has become more relevant to countries coping with slow growth, adverse demographics, adjustment to economic globalization, and the emergence of a powerful and assertive China.
  

  This is a story of Japan’s reinvention as a network power to overcome the harsh realities of diminishing relative capabilities. In reshaping the Indo-Pacific, Tokyo deployed a robust economic strategy of trade integration and infrastructure finance; and a proactive security diplomacy cultivating new partnerships with regional and extra-regional actors and deepening the alliance with the United States. Nevertheless, acute geopolitical rifts, Japan’s pandemic insularity, and the securitization of international economic relations are testing Japan’s statecraft of connectivity. The tasks at home are no less pressing: delivering on the green, digital, and human capital transformations, avoiding the return of the politics of indecision at the helm of the nation, and fostering democratic dynamism. This book illuminates where the Japanese polity, economy, and people are heading as we move past the Abe era, and well into the 2020s and beyond.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  Mireya Solís is Director of the Center for Policy Studies and Knight Chair in Japan Studies at the Brookings Institution, where she specializes in Japanese foreign economic policy, regional integration in East Asia and U.S. economic strategy in Asia.

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• Book Club - Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism by Alan Kahan

  • When
    12 Jun 2025
  •  
    4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
  • Location
    Island Recreation Center, 20 Wilborn Rd., Hilton Head Island
  • Spaces left
    35

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  Note: Registration opens one month in advance.

  ABSTRACT

  A provocative new history of liberalism that also provides a road map for today’s liberals
  
  Freedom from Fear offers a striking new account of the dominant political and social theory of our time: liberalism. In a pathbreaking reframing of the historical debate, Alan Kahan charts the development of Western liberalism from the late eighteenth century to the present. Examining key liberal thinkers and issues, Kahan shows how liberalism is both a response to fear and a source of hope: the search for a world in which no one need be afraid.
  
  Freedom from Fear reveals how liberal arguments typically rely on three pillars: freedom, markets, and morals. But when liberals ignore one or more of these pillars, their arguments generally fail to persuade. Extending from Adam Smith and Montesquieu to today’s battles between liberals and populists, the book examines the twists and turns of the “incomplete” or unfinished liberal tradition while demonstrating its fundamental continuity. It combines fresh accounts of familiar figures such as Tocqueville and Rawls with discussions of less-famous but pivotal thinkers such as A. V. Dicey and Jane Addams, and explores how liberals have dealt with crucial issues, from debates over male and female suffrage to colonialism and liberal anti-Catholicism.
  
  By transforming our understanding of the history of liberal thought and practice, Freedom from Fear provides a new picture of the political creed today: the paths liberals need to follow, the questions they need to answer, and the dead ends they must avoid—if they are to win.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  Alan S. Kahan received his Ph.D. in History from The University of Chicago in 1987, and is currently Professor of British Civilization at the Université de Paris-Saclay. He is a Senior Member emeritus of the Insitut Universitaire de France, and previously he was Professor of History at Florida International University in Miami. Besides the books found on this page he has also translated Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution: Volume 1, The complete Text, and Volume 2, Notes on the French Revolution and Napoleon, and Benjamin Constant’s Commentary on Filangieri’s Work.

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• Book Club - Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum

  • When
    10 Jul 2025
  •  
    4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
  • Location
    Island Recreation Center, 20 Wilborn Rd., Hilton Head Island
  • Spaces left
    35

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  Note: Registration opens one month in advance.

  

  ABSTRACT

  NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer-prize winning author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them

  We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

  But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.
  
  International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.
  

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  
  Anne Applebaum is a historian and journalist. She is a staff writer for the Atlantic as well as a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several history books.

  Anne has been writing about Eastern Europe and Russia since 1989, when she covered the collapse of communism in Poland for the Economist magazine. She has also covered US, UK and European politics for a wide range of American and British publications. She is a former Washington Post columnist and a former deputy editor of the Spectator magazine.

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• Book Club - The new politics of Poland: A case of post-traumatic sovereignty by Jaroslaw Kuisz

  • When
    14 Aug 2025
  •  
    4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
  • Location
    Island Recreation Center, 20 Wilborn Rd., Hilton Head Island
  • Spaces left
    35

  Register

  Note: Registration opens one month in advance.

  ABSTRACT

  The election of populist far-right party Law and Justice in 2015 marked a shocking break in Polish politics. A period of stability was brutally interrupted as Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his allies took over public media and launched a controversial ‘reform’ of the judiciary.
  
  How was this illiberal turn possible after years of democratic development? Jaroslaw Kuisz, one of Poland’s leading liberal thinkers, digs deep into Polish history to propose an original analysis of the crisis. He reveals how centuries of statelessness have left Poles with a ‘post-traumatic’ attitude to sovereignty, making them wary of powerful foreign blocks, be it the EU, the Soviet Union or present-day Russia. This is a phenomenon populists have proved adept at exploiting.
  
  Providing a brilliant account of Europe’s largest illiberal democracy, The new politics of Poland shines a light on the broader situation in East and Central Europe, offering valuable lessons for other countries experiencing the rise of populist right-wing movements.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  

  Editor in Chief, Kultura Liberalna

  Dr. Jarosław Kuisz is a writer, essayist and political analyst. He is editor in chief of the Polish intellectual and centrist weekly Kultura Liberalna. He is a policy fellow at the Center for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge and an associate researcher at l'Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. 
  
  From 2016 through 2018, Dr. Kuisz was co-director of the Knowledge Bridges Poland-Britain-Europe Project at St. Antony’s College Oxford. Previously, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, the University of Chicago Law School and Columbia Law School, as well as Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Copenhagen. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, the Journal of Democracy, Foreign Policy, Le Monde and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He is also a columnist for Die Tageszeitung. His new book, “PTSD Sovereignty: Poland`s New Politics,” will be published by Manchester University Press in 2023.

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