Ambassador Rudd served as Australia’s twenty-sixth Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Minister for Foreign Affairs, before a second term as Prime Minister in 2013.Since then, Ambassador Rudd has resided in the United States where he is recognised as a leading analyst of China. In 2015, he became inaugural President of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York. In 2020, he was appointed President and CEO of the Asia Society globally and, in 2022, he founded the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. Ambassador Rudd received his PhD from Oxford University in 2022 and has written two books on China relations, ‘The Avoidable War’, published in 2022, and ‘On Xi Jinping’, published in 2024, based on his doctoral thesis. Ambassador Rudd started his diplomatic career in 1981 with postings to Beijing and Stockholm. He was most recently appointed as Australia’s Ambassador to the United States of America, taking up his posting in Washington in March 2023.
