US President Joe Biden appointed a former US Department of Defense Taiwan specialist and a visiting professor at National Chengchi University to the National Security Education Board (NSEB).
The appointment of Karl Eikenberry and Patrick Mendis to the 14-member NSEB, which provides strategic guidance and oversight for the National Security Education Program, was made public in a statement by the White House on Friday.
Eikenberry is a distinguished senior fellow at the Stimson Center and a faculty member of the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in Beijing, the White House said.
A retired US Army lieutenant general, Eikenberry was the US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011. He subsequently served as country director for China and Taiwan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and later as defense attache at the US embassy in Beijing.
In 2019, he led a group of academics from Stanford University on a six-day political and security fact-finding visit to Taiwan, during which he also met with then-vice president Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁), who currently heads the Cabinet.
Mendis is a distinguished visiting professor of trans-Atlantic relations at the University of Warsaw in Poland as well as a distinguished visiting professor of global affairs at National Chengchi University, the White House said.
He is a former diplomat who previously worked as the secretariat director of US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs under former US secretary of state Colin Powell.
An alumnus of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, Mendis has authored more than 200 books, journal articles, newspaper columns and government reports, and also taught at more than 25 Chinese universities and academies, it added.
In an article he coauthored with Polish academic Antonina Luszczykiewicz last year, Mendis said Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the UN is far more than just a matter of international presence.
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