Isaac B. Kardon, Ph.D. (孔适海博士) is senior fellow for China studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. He is concurrently Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and was formerly Assistant Professor at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC), where he served as a research faculty member in the China Maritime Studies Institute.

Isaac’s research centers on the People’s Republic of China’s maritime power — especially maritime industrial policy and strategy for ports, shipping, shipbuilding, and trade infrastructure. His writing appears in The New York Times, Financial Times, International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The China Quarterly, the Naval War College Review, as well as other scholarly and policy publications. Isaac’s book, China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order (Yale, 2023) analyzes whether and how China is “making the rules” of regional and global order.

Kardon earned a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University, an M.Phil in Modern Chinese Studies from Oxford University, and a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College. He was a China & the World post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University, and has held visiting appointments at NYU School of Law, Academia Sinica, and the PRC National Institute for South China Sea Studies. He studied Chinese (Mandarin) at Peking University, Tsinghua University, Hainan University, and National Taiwan Normal University.