Dr. Scott Harold

Dr. Scott W. Harold is a senior fellow and director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He also serves as an adjunct senior political scientist and professor of public policy analysis at the RAND Corporation, where he worked for most of the past 17 years.

From 2022 to 2024, he served in the Department of Defense as senior advisor to the deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy. In addition to his work at RAND, Harold is an adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He also previously taught as an adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. Prior to joining RAND in 2008, Harold worked at the Brookings Institution for two years. In the first half of 2025, he held a Council on Foreign Relations/Hitachi International Affairs Fellowship in Japan where he focused on the origins, evolution, and prospects of the U.S.-Japan Defense Industrial Cooperation, Acquisition, and Sustainment framework. From 2019 to 2021, he was a member of the Mike and Maureen Mansfield Foundation’s U.S.-Japan Network for the Future, Cohort V. In 2019, he was a visiting scholar at the Institut Montaigne in Paris; in 2018, he held a visiting scholar position at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.

Harold holds a doctorate in political science from Columbia University. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, proficient in French, and has studied elementary Japanese and Korean. His most recent writings focus on Taiwan’s security and U.S. policy; cooperation with the Republic of Korea and Japan on artificial intelligence; and how to advance trilateral capability development with Australia and the United Kingdom under AUKUS Pillar II.