Military & Government

Jonathan Greenert

Chief of Naval Operations | United States

For helping make U.S.-China military-to-military exchange surprisingly successful.

In contrast to the Pentagon’s China hawks, Jonathan Greenert is a relative dove who believes that dialogues can help break the cycle of rising tensions, and argues that open talk of countering China will “unnecessarily antagonize” the rising power. On the heels of China’s first participation in the U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific naval exercises in June 2014, Greenert paid a five-day visit to his Chinese counterpart, Wu Shengli, in July, and invited Wu to attend a maritime symposium in the United States in September 2014. The back-and-forth shows that both sides want more military-to-military cooperation.