The Hubert H. Humphrey Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor notable public service by a political scientist.
Professor Victor D. Cha is Vice Dean and D.S. Song-KF Professor in the School of Foreign Service and Department of Government at Georgetown University. He is also Senior Vice President for Asia and Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is the author of seven books, including the award-winning Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States-Korea-Japan Security Triangle (Stanford University Press, 1999) (winner of the 2000 Ohira Book Prize), and The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (Harper Collins Ecco, 2012) selected by Foreign Affairs as a “Best Book on the Asia-Pacific for 2012.” His most recent book is Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale University Press, 2023) with Ramon Pacheco Pardo. His articles on international relations and Asian affairs have appeared in journals including International Security, Political Science Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, Armed Forces and Society, Foreign Affairs, Asian Survey, Journal of Asian Studies, International Journal of the History of Sport, and Journal of Strategic Studies.
He was appointed in 2021 by President Joseph R. Biden’s administration to serve on the Defense Policy Board in an advisory role to the Secretary of Defense. He formerly served on the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007 where he was responsible primarily for Japan, the Korean peninsula, Australia/New Zealand and Pacific Island nation affairs. Dr. Cha was also the Deputy Head of Delegation for the United States at the Six Party Talks in Beijing, and received two Outstanding Service commendations during his tenure at the NSC.
Dr. Cha is a two-time Fulbright Scholar, former Olin Fellow at Harvard University, and former Hoover, CISAC, and Koret Fellow at Stanford University. He currently serves on ten editorial boards of academic journals and is co-editor of the Contemporary Asia Book Series at Columbia University Press. In 2022, he was elected to serve on the Board for the National Endowment for Democracy, and he remains a Senior Fellow in Human Freedom (non-resident) at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, Texas. He is a Foreign Affairs Contributor for MSNBC and NBC News. He co-hosts The Impossible State podcast and The Capital Cable YouTube show. In 2023, he was named Distinguished University Professor, the highest honor bestowed upon a tenured faculty member at Georgetown. Dr. Cha received his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University, MIA from Columbia, B.A. Honors in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University, and A.B. in Economics from Columbia. He was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Citation from the Award Committee:
The committee is pleased to award this year’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award to political scientist Victor Cha. Dr. Cha studies international relations and international security in the Indo-Pacific region with a focus on the Korean peninsula. He is an award-winning author on U.S.-Asia relations in outlets like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Washington Post, and New York Times. In addition to his service on the Defense Policy Board, a second stream of Dr. Cha’s work has focused on human rights and democracy in U.S. foreign policy. As a Senior Fellow in Human Freedom at the George W. Bush Institute (GWBI), he helped in 2017 to conceive and create a scholarship fund with GWBI and the Communities Foundation of Texas for North Korean defectors to attend college and graduate school. As Director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007, he was responsible for all relationships with U.S. allies in Asia. In that capacity, he served as White House representative to the Six-Party talks and as U.S. Deputy Head of Delegation, where he negotiated two denuclearization agreements with North Korea in 2005 and 2007, supported the conclusion of free trade agreements in 2005, pressed for North Korean human rights, helped to construct multilateral humanitarian disaster response and relief institutions in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, worked on base realignment agreements in Korea and Japan and negotiated the return of remains of U.S. soldiers from the Korean War.
In 2017, Dr. Cha was nominated by the Trump administration to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Korea. However, Cha’s nomination was withdrawn when he publicly, in a Washington Post op-ed, opposed the Trump administration for considering the use of military force against North Korea, out of concern that such a policy could escalate into a major, even nuclear, war. Cha’s willingness to stand publicly against the administration arguably played a role in Trump’s pivot from military options to diplomacy the following year.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Matthew A. Baum (chair) of Harvard University, Amanda Hollis-Brusky of Pomona College, Dr. Reyko Huang of Texas A&M University, Dr. Bryan D. Jones of the University of Texas, Austin, and Dr. Alexander Thompson of Ohio State University.
