William R. Hawkins

William R. Hawkins is a conservative American author and scholar whose principal field of study is the interplay between economic policy and national security. He serves on the board of the Asia America Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting democratic ideals, strengthening international security, and mediating in conflict-plagued areas throughout the Asia-Pacific region.[1] In 1990 he won the Republican nomination for the United States Senate race in Tennessee, but lost in the general election to the Democratic incumbent Senator Al Gore, Jr.[2] He is the author, with Erin Anderson, of The Open Borders Lobby and the Nation’s Security After 9/11, a book published by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 2004.[3]

He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1972 with a degree in political science and history, received an M.A. in Diplomatic and Military History from Stephen F. Austin State University, and received an M.A. in Economics from the University of Tennessee in 1980. He served as president of the Hamilton Center for National Strategy from 1989 to 1994 and again from 2014 to the present. He wrote a syndicated column for the Knight Ridder/Tribune Newswire from 1991 to 1995. He served as a senior adviser on economic policy and national security from 1995 to 1999 to Representative Duncan Hunter, chairman of the National Security Subcommittee on Military Procurement, U.S. House of Representatives. Between 1997 and 2000 he hosted "In the National Interest", a one-hour radio program which was broadcast by the Information and Entertainment America Network in more than 60 radio markets across the United States. Between 1999 and 2008 he was senior fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council Educational Foundation. He served on the staff of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee 2011-2013. [4][5]

He was a prominent critic of the so-called FSX deal in which the U.S. government agreed in 1987 to provide the Japanese aerospace industry with important American military technology to build a new generation of fighter planes for the Japanese defense establishment. He argued that Japan should instead buy American-made planes. [6][7]

In the mid-1990s he opposed the Clinton administration's cuts in the U.S. defense budget.[8]

Hawkins has called the Sovremenny class destroyer ships "cruisers" and complained that the United States has built no "cruisers" since 1994, even though the USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) class destroyers are much larger and more capable than the Sovremenny and continue to be produced.[9]

Hawkins has written widely on defense, diplomacy and military history including for the Army War College Parameters, The Naval War College Review, Joint Force Quarterly, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings and Naval History, Army Magazine, Defense News, Military History, MHQ, The National Interest, The Journal of Political Risk and a host of other scholarly and popular publications. he is a leading critic of the People's Republic of China, and of U.S. policies that have allowed the transfer of jobs, capital and technology to the Beijing regime which he sees as a strategic rival of the United States. https://www.jpolrisk.com/who-set-the-real-trap-thucydides-or-cobden/, https://www.jpolrisk.com/china-and-the-war-of-shipyards-and-factories/