About

Donald Hellmann (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1964) is a professor in the Department of Political Science and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is also the Director of the Institute for International Policy. Hellmann is a specialist in Asian and international politics with a particular focus on the politics of Japan. He has authored, co-authored, and served as an editor of numerous books, three of which have been published in both Japanese and English editions. His expertise and work have led him to serve as a frequent consultant to government institutions such as Congress and the State Department, as well as to public policy research organizations like the Brookings Institution. Hellmann teaches courses in American foreign policy, Japanese politics, and the international political economy of East Asia.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Security
• Law
• Computer Science
• Political economy
• Economics

Selected publications

• Japanese Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics

  2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Political economy
  PublisherDOI

• Japanese Security and Postwar Japanese Foreign Policy

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Computer Security
  PublisherDOI

• Japan and Asia: Growing Entanglement

  2019-02-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Two patterns of trade development since 1970 are especially dramatic in underscoring the Asian orientation of Japan and the mounting dependence of Tokyo on trade with the more politically volatile and unpredictable developing nations. Japan continues to dominate trade in the East Asian region to a startling degree. During the 1950s and 1960s, despite vestigial anti-Japanese feelings from World War II, Japan moved into a commanding trade position, displacing the former European colonial powers, completely overshadowing China, and eventually surpassing the United States. Just how fully the Japanese dominate intraregional trade is even more evident in the bilateral trade patterns between East Asian countries and Japan. The size of Japanese trade looks substantial from all of the capitals of Asia, and Asian trade is also important from the viewpoint of Tokyo. The rise in the amount of Japan's trade taken by the Asian region has taken place entirely during the decade of the 1970s.

  PublisherDOI

• Japan and the United States in the 1980s: The Domestication of Foreign Policy

  2019-04-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The "domestication" of foreign policy poses a long-term threat to the disintegration of the Japanese-American alliance because it reduces the capacity of policymakers in both nations to lead and control bilateral relations. Japan will be forced to make decisions regarding matters of defense, national strategy, and geopolitics that have been avoided in the past primarily because of the nature of its alliance with the United States. Perhaps the most important international reality that bears on the future of relations between Japan and the United States is the extent to which each nation is engaged in the Western Pacific. Japanese-American economic issues moved deeply into the morass of domestic policymaking involving Washington's bureaucracies, the web of connections between them, standing Congressional committees, and a plethora of lobbyists and consultants. As long as there was a strategic vision accepted by American policymakers and the general public, the presidency was the institution that dominated foreign policymaking.

  PublisherDOI

• From APEC to Xanadu: Creating a Viable Community in the Post-Cold War Pacific

  The SHAFR Guide Online · 2017-10-02 · 15 citations

  dataset1st authorCorresponding

  The economic analysis of legal and regulatory issues need not be limited to the neoclassical economic approach. The expert contributors to this work employ a variety of heterodox legal-economic theories to address a broad range of legal issues. They demonstrate how these various approaches can lead to very different conclusions concerning the role of the law and legal intervention in a wide array of contexts. The schools of thought and methodologies represented here include institutional economics, new institutional economics, socio-economics, social economics, behavioral economics, game theory, feminist economics, Rawlsian economics, radical economics, Austrian economics, and personalist economics. The legal and regulatory issues examined include anti-trust and competition, corporate governance, the environment and natural resources, land use and property rights, unions and collective bargaining, welfare benefits, work-time regulation and standards, sexual harassment in the workplace, obligations of employers and employees to each other, crime, torts, and even the structure of government. Each contributor brings a different emphasis and provides thoughtful, sometimes provocative analysis and conclusions. Together, these heterodox insights will provide valuable supplementary reading for courses in law and economics as well as public policy and business courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

  PublisherDOI

• America, APEC, and the Road Not Taken: International Leadership in the Post-Cold War Interregnum in the Asia-Pacific

  2016-07-11 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER V: The Confrontation with Realpolitik

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2015-04-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Nuclear Politics, North Korea, and the Political Economy of Northeast Asia at the Dawn of the Asian Century

  Asian perspective · 2010-01-01

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  NUCLEAR POLITICS, NORTH KOREA, AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NORTHEAST ASIA AT THE DAWN OF THE ASIAN CENTURY* Donald C. Hellmann* During the past two decades a China-led Northeast Asia grew explosively to become a new center of the global economy. But throughout this time the strategic agenda for the region was set by the defiant and determined effort of a small, economically failed state to become a nuclear power. This anomalous and paradoxical situation created by the “nuclear politics” of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) provides an exceptionally good window through which the dynamics of international relations in the region can be examined at the dawn of the Asian century. The articles that follow analyze the protracted and varied multilateral diplomatic maneuvers over the past decade, on an * Editor’s note: The five articles that follow this introduction are the result of the organizing efforts of Professors Don Hellmann and Yong Chool Ha of the University of Washington and its Korean Center, and Dr. Park Myoung Kyu, director of the Institute for Peace and Unification of Seoul National University. They wish to thank Republic of Korea Consul General Lee Ha Ryong in Seattle for his contributions. Asian Perspective is grateful to all these colleagues, and other participants, for their efforts at the conference on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and the distinguished papers that resulted. ASIAN PERSPECTIVE, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2010, pp. 5-9. Introduction to the Special Issue agenda set largely by Pyongyang. They cast light on an array of features of the contemporary regional and global international systems. Several are quite surprising. These include: how a small semi-pariah nation could magnify its international power through “nuclear politics” in an age of globalization; how the American global hegemony was constrained from providing the effective leadership (multilateral, bilateral, or unilateral) to deal with the kinds of problems presented by the North Korea security issue; how China, the regional hegemon, was inhibited from conclusively dealing with a wayward regional “ally,” while becoming a major stakeholder in the global political economy; how South Korea, blessed with an economy thirty times that of the North, driven by existential and nationalist impulses and a flexible and innovative foreign policy, was unable to devise a strategy that produced the detente seen in Europe as the failures of communism became acute; and how, the Six Party Talks, a multilateral and multidimensional focal point in the nuclear talks with the potential to become an institution for addressing issues of conflict and cooperation in Northeast Asia, failed in the absence of strong leadership by the United States and China and the obstructionist tactics of Pyongyang. Despite the extensive literature about and discussion of the North Korean nuclear problem, these questions are rarely asked and even more rarely answered in terms of the global and regional contexts. One purpose of the conference, from which these articles were drawn—“North Korean Nuclear Politics: Constructing a New Northeast Asian Order in the Twenty-First Century” (held at the University of Washington, June 4-5, 2009) —was to place the Korean nuclear talks in the broader context of the contemporary global political economy. Somewhat paradoxically, a second purpose of the conference was to explore how the domestic decision-making processes of each country affected and was affected by the Korean nuclear issue—an inside-out, not an outside-in focus. Although no paper frontally addresses the issue of the reciprocal linkage between the international context and domestic politics in the DPRK, each of the articles explicitly references this topic—an 6 Donald C. Hellmann approach made possible because all of the contributors are distinguished scholars of both Korean politics and international relations and bring to bear a sophisticated understanding of the issues and events about which they write. Three articles concern the pivotal bilateral relationships for Pyongyang: ties with the United States, China and South Korea. The other two articles take a broader approach, analyzing the subject matter more theoretically and/or refining or redefining elements of the negotiations to provide fresh insight into the process and the policies. A third purpose of the conference and this issue is to suggest policy options that may...

  PublisherDOI

• 北東アジアのエネルギー協力--地域共同体形成に向けた制度的序幕 (特集:北東アジアのエネルギー安全保障)

  ERINA report/ERINA report plus · 2010-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Northeast Asian energy cooperation: an institutional prelude to regional community building (特集:北東アジアのエネルギー安全保障)

  ERINA report/ERINA report plus · 2010-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• John H. Makin

  3 shared

• Gaddis Smith

  2 shared

• Donald S. Zagoria

  2 shared

• Saito Takashi

  1 shared

• Jacky C. So

  1 shared

• John H. Makin

  1 shared

• Savitri Vishwanathan

  1 shared

• 昭夫 渡辺

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California, Berkeley

  1964