BANNING GARRETT
Independent Writer & Consultant   

Banning Garrett has more than four decades experience as a strategic thinker, writer, consultant, speaker, program director, and entrepreneur. Most recently, Garrett was Strategic Foresight Senior Fellow for Innovation and Global Trends at the Atlantic Council, where he worked for nine of the previous eleven years.  He was Director of the Asia Program (2003–2012) and in 2006 established and subsequently led the Council’s cooperation with the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in production of the NIC’s unclassified, quadrennial long-term global trends assessments, including Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (2008) and Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (2012). Garrett was founding director of the Council's Strategic Foresight Initiative and created and led the Council’s program on the foreign policy implications of emerging technologies and its Urban World 2030 program. In addition, Garrett created and directed the Council’s US-China joint assessment of long-term global trends project and was co-author of the project's 2012 report, China-US Cooperation: Key to Global Future. 

Garrett was founding Executive Director of the Institute for Sino-American International Dialogue at the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver (2007) and Director of the Asia Society’s Initiative for US-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate (2008). Garrett was a consultant for twenty-two years to the US Department of Defense and other US government agencies carrying on a strategic dialogue with China. He was also a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a founding board member of the US Committee for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (USCSACP), and an adjunct professor of political science at The George Washington University. 

Garrett has written extensively on a wide range of issues, including long-term global trends; technology and its implications for US foreign policy and global challenges; US-China relations and cooperation on climate change, energy, and other strategic issues; globalization and its strategic impact; US defense policy and Asian security; and arms control and nuclear strategy. He has been published in numerous journals and media outlets, including Arms Control Today, Asian Survey, The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, Beijing Review, ChinaDialogue, China-US Focus, CNN.com, EuroAtlantic Journal, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Globalist, Global Policy, Global Times, Huffington Post, International Security, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Asia Contemporary Southeast Asia, The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, Le Monde Diplomatique, the New York Times, The Washington Quarterly, and YaleGlobal.  He has also contributed to many edited volumes on Asian and strategic affairs and is co-author of War and Peace: The Views from Moscow and Peking (1984).

Garrett has made nearly sixty trips to China since 1981 for consultations with Chinese officials and analysts as well as numerous similar visits to Russia, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. He has also traveled with the National Intelligence Council on more than a dozen trips to most of the G-20 countries for global trends consultations. 

Garrett received his BA in the History of Social Thought and Institutions from Stanford University and his PhD in Politics from Brandeis University.