The Kissinger Chair is a newly endowed Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations. It has two components–a scholar to be selected annually to pursue his or her own research in the Library of Congress, and a distinguished practitioner of foreign affairs to deliver an annual lecture in the Coolidge Auditorium. Henry Kissinger delivered the first lecture, and former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing will deliver the second in February 2003.

Aaron Friedberg, Professor of Politics and International Affairs and Director of the Research Program in International Security and the Library of Congress’ first Kissinger Scholar, presented a lecture “The United States as an Asian Power 1787-2002" on June 20, 2002 in the Mumford Room of the James Madison Building of the Library of Congress.

Friedberg, who was selected as the first scholar to occupy the Kissinger Chair, is Professor of Politics and International Affairs and Director of the Research Program in International Security at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. He has taught at Princeton since 1987, after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard. He is the author of two books, both published by the Princeton University Press, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline 1895-1905 (1988) and In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and its Cold War Grand Strategy (2000).