Kenneth R. Weinstein

Kenneth R. Weinstein is the Japan Chair at Hudson Institute.

Dr. Weinstein was Hudson’s inaugural Walter P. Stern Distinguished Fellow from 2019 until 2023. From 2011 through 2020, Weinstein served as president and CEO of Hudson. In December 2019, he became the inaugural holder of the Walter P. Stern Chair. He joined the institute in 1991, was appointed CEO in June 2005, and was named president and CEO in March 2011.

Under his leadership since 2005, Hudson grew significantly in size, prominence, visibility, and impact, recruiting top-flight talent and advising officials around the globe. The institute’s annual budget nearly tripled to $20 million in this time period, and its endowment grew fivefold to $60 million.

A political theorist by training whose academic work focused on the early Enlightenment, Dr. Weinstein has written widely for publications in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, and the Yomiuri Shimbun. In 2006, he was decorated with a knighthood in arts and letters by the government of France and serves on the boards of nonprofit organizations in the US and Europe.

Dr. Weinstein has served under the last four US administrations as a member of presidentially appointed commissions. From 2017 until 2020, Dr. Weinstein chaired the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the oversight body for US Agency for Global Media, and was chair of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting, and the Open Technology Fund.

He is often interviewed by major broadcast and cable outlets around the world and speaks French and German. A frequent guest on French television and radio, he has served as in-studio commentator for live French-language coverage of US congressional and presidential elections for nearly twenty-five years.

He is the co-editor of The Essential Herman Kahn: In Defense of Thinking (Lexington Books, 2009).

Dr. Weinstein previously served on the Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations, which provides counsel on trade agreements to the United States Trade Representative. In March 2020, he was nominated by President Trump to serve as US ambassador to Japan. His nomination was reported unanimously out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2020.

Dr. Weinstein earned his BA in general studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, DEA in Soviet and Eastern European studies from Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, and PhD in government from Harvard University.