Exploring the World: Adventures of a Global Traveler

I’m a professor of political science. Within political science, my areas of specialization are international relations, comparative politics (the study of other countries), and foreign policy. Because of these specializations, I travel a lot (about ninety countries visited) and have lived abroad for quite a number of years. I started off my academic and Washington think tank/policy career as a specialist in Latin America, then developed a specialization in Europe East and West, and in recent decades have spent a lot of time in Asia. I’ve also visited Africa and the Middle East on several occasions but do not consider myself a specialist on either of those two areas.

This account of a trip around the world, undertaken in May-June 2010, had its origins in my rising interest in Asia. Asia, we all believe, is the continent of the future. Our diplomatic, commercial, and strategic attentions are increasingly concentrated in Asia, especially China but Japan, the Koreas, and India as well. I had friends and colleagues in Japan whom I wanted to see, an invitation from Fudan University and its Center for American Studies in Shanghai, and invitations from Civic Forum in Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong to lecture there. I also have long-term research interests in Singapore.

Once you’re in Singapore, you’re half way around the world. I had been in Singapore several times before, but I had always returned home from there by flying back east across the Pacific. Why not this time just keep on going and return home by continuing to fly west, around the world? That would give me a chance not just for a Grand Tour of Asia but also to stop off in the Persian Gulf (where I’d never been before) and in Europe on the way home. I had a travel grant from my university to cover the round trip to Hong Kong part of my travel, and the spring semester was over and my grades turned in. Plus I’m serious about and interested in all these places, most recently the issue of whether there is a distinct “Gulf Model” of development centered in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bahrain, and Qatar. So why not visit them and find out? I write books about such issues.

I also had this theory that I wanted to try out. My theory was that, if you continuously fly west instead of flying back east overnight across the Pacific and if you break the trip up into six- or seven-hour segments with only three or four changes of time zones each, instead of one big twelve-hour change, you will have some extra-long days and be tired, but you will avoid the jet lag that overnight flights trigger. I won’t tell you here how my experiment worked. Sorry to be coquettish about this, but you’ll have to read the book to find out.

The countries visited on this trip are Japan, China, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Malaysia, Abu Dhabi, and Great Britain. I’d been in all these countries before and know them well, except for Malaysia and Abu Dhabi which were new to me. And, as a student of comparative politics, I’ve studied and read in depth on all these countries. The result in this book is not just a travelogue—that, too!—but a running commentary on the countries visited, their developmental status and prospects, and where they all fit internationally, in an increasingly globalized world, and in U.S. foreign policy.