Ivan J. Kanapathy is a retired United States Marine Corps officer currently serving as senior director for Asia at the National Security Council (NSC) in the second Trump administration.

[5][6][7][8][9] Kanapathy holds an AA and diploma (with highest honors) in Mandarin Chinese from the Defense Language Institute, a BS in physics and economics from Carnegie Mellon University, and an MA (with distinction) in East Asian security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School.

In a May 2022 piece analyzing recently translated articles about US strategy toward the Indo-Pacific authored by PRC scholars for CSIS, Kanapathy wrote:In Beijing’s depictions of international relations, the United States is a declining, hegemonic bully and China an ascendant, righteous martyr standing up for multilateralism and the developing world.

[14] Subsequently, in a February 2023 NYT interview about U.S. sanctions toward Russia amid growing PRC economic support for Putin, he again said it was “quite easy” to bypass export control through front companies or by altering relevant entities' names and addresses, noting that “China is quite adept at that.”[15] Kanapathy was a member of CFR independent task force on US-Taiwan alliance, which published its study report in 2023 titled "U.S.-Taiwan Relations in a New Era: Responding to a More Assertive China.

"[16] Kanapathy and David Sacks wrote in a June 2023 Foreign Affairs piece titled What It Will Take to Deter China in the Taiwan Strait: "Washington must also do more to leverage its strong network of alliances in the Indo-Pacific, which are its most notable advantage over Beijing.