April 2026 Polar Bearings

Join us on campus for our speaker series by outstanding alumni of Bowdoin College and other leaders in a wide range of professions. 

U.S. - China Competition and the Future of the Global Order

Program Details:

Tuesday, April 14, 2026

11:30 a.m. Doors Open

12:00 p.m. Program Begins

1:30 p.m. Program Ends

Location:

Thorne Hall, Daggett Lounge

13 South St, Brunswick, ME 04011

We will hear from Susan Thorton '85, retired U.S. Diplomat. “The world is undergoing changes unseen in a century.” This was the assessment made by Chinese leader Xi Jinping in a December 2017 speech to China’s ambassadors from around the world. This speech immediately followed the publication of the Trump 1.0 National Security Strategy that asserted his “America First” foreign policy and proclaimed “strategic competition” with China. U.S.-China relations entered a downward spiral, exacerbated by COVID-19, that eight years later is still being talked about in terms of major power war. Can the two leading world powers, one the status quo hegemon and the other, a rising upstart, find a way to a new world order without cataclysmic crisis? What role do we and others play in this drama and what questions should we be asking?

Susan A. Thornton, ’85, is a retired senior U.S. diplomat with almost three decades of experience with the U.S. State Department in Eurasia and East Asia. She is currently a Senior Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Law at the Yale University Law School Paul Tsai China Center, Director of the Forum on Asia-Pacific Security at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution.  Thornton was Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs until July 2018 and, in previous State Department roles, she worked on U.S. policy toward China, Korea and the former Soviet Union.  She speaks Mandarin and Russian and now lives on a working farm in Lisbon, Maine.