Mireya Solís

Mireya Solís is Director of the Center for Asia Policy Studies and Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies at the Brookings Institution. For more than two decades, she has tracked the politics of trade, alliance management, and economic statecraft across the Asia-Pacific.

Before Brookings, Solís was a tenured Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service. Her scholarship is matched by an unusually sharp record of anticipating inflection points. Her book Dilemmas of a Trading Nation, winner of the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Award, laid out the structural tensions in US-Japan trade relations years before they became front-page news. It remains one of the most cited works on Japan’s strategic balancing act in the Asia-Pacific order. She is also the author of Banking on Multinationals and co-editor of two further volumes on trade agreements and competitive regionalism in the Pacific Rim.

Her most recent book, Japan’s Quiet Leadership is her most ambitious work yet. In it, Solís answers how Japan has avoided the populist wave destabilising so many advanced democracies, and how it has quietly emerged as one of the most consequential actors in Indo-Pacific geopolitics. Despite a measurable loss of relative economic and military capabilities, Japan has learned to do more with less. Evolving into a network power that actively shapes the region’s economic and security architecture through trade integration, infrastructure finance, and a proactive diplomacy, it has deepened alliances with the United States while cultivating new partnerships across Australia, India, and Southeast Asia.

Most recently, Solís has been central to analysis on Trump’s second-term trade offensive. She has mapped how reciprocal tariffs, Section 232 auto duties, and Section 301 investigations are reshaping Japan’s negotiating position. She has also examined what Tokyo’s pledge of $550 billion in US strategic investment reveals about the pressures facing even America’s closest allies. When Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi visited Washington in March 2026 — navigating a closed Strait of Hormuz, stacked tariff threats, and redirected US military assets — Solís was among the first analysts to publicly map the full scope of what was at stake for the alliance.

At a moment when Asia is the central arena of global economic and security competition, Mireya Solís brings rare depth across the continent’s most consequential dynamics. From Japan’s rearmament and Taiwan Strait tensions to China’s trade coercion and the fracturing of multilateral trade architecture, she tracks these shifts from within the policy conversation itself.