David Asher

Senior Associate Fellow, Asian Studies Center

David Asher is a senior associate fellow with the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.

From 2001 to 2005, he served as senior adviser to the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. He also was coordinator of the State Department’s North Korea Working Group, co-chair of the North Korea Activities Group policy coordinating committee at the National Security Council, and U.S. delegation adviser to the Six Party talks on North Korea.

Asher has made numerous contributions to the Bush administration’s Asia policy. For example, he developed and supervised the North Korea Illicit Activities Initiative, designed to stop the communist country’s illicit activities and finances. It involved more than 100 U.S. law enforcement officers, intelligence analysts and policymakers as well as 15 foreign government partners. He also was involved in launching reviews of the U.S.-Japan and the U.S.-South Korea security alliances as well as coordinating counterterrorism task force on Southeast Asia.

Prior to joining the Bush administration, he was associate director of the Asian Studies Program at the American Enterprise Institute. Before that, he was with the Japan Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From 1996 to 2001, he consulted for a number of global macro hedge funds and fund managers doing business in Asia. From 1994 to 1996, he also was a policy planning adviser to the Pentagon’s East Asia Regional Affairs office – and played an important role in reviewing and strengthening the U.S-Japan security alliance.  In the early 1990s, he was a research staff member with the House Wednesday Group, coordinating a task force on U.S.-Japan trade relations for leading Republicans.

Asher graduated from Cornell University as a member of the elite College Scholar program. He did initial graduate work at the London School of Economics, and received his doctorate in International Relations from Oxford University.He is the co-author of the book, Japan’s Key Economic Challenges for the 21st Century. His op-ed essays and commentary have been published in several newspapers, including the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Nikkei Shimbun.