The Hon. Christopher Ashley Ford is the Director of Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies, a tenured full profesor with Missouri State, and the founding (and still current) editor-in-chief of the school’s journal, Defense & Strategic Studies Online.   Dr. Ford is also a Nonresident Senior Associate in the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Pharos Foundation at Oxford, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security Research, a member of the Advisory Board of the American Foreign Policy Council, a member of the Advisory Board at the Vandenberg Coalition, and a Distinguished Fellow and member of the Advisory Board at the National Security Institute at George Mason University. 

From January 2018 until January 2021, after his unanimous confirmation by the U.S. Senate, Dr. Ford served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation.  He also performed the duties of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security from October 2019 into January 2021.  At State, Dr. Ford helped initiate and lead the Department’s reorientation to support U.S. competitive strategy vis-à-vis China and Russia, with a focus upon technology denial and national security export controls.  He also realigned his bureau’s structure to improve support for this strategy, reformed its $265 million in nonproliferation capacity-building funding to tie it to threat assessments, and led new efforts such as the “Creating an Environment for Nuclear Disarmament” (CEND) initiative.  When acting as Under Secretary, Dr. Ford approved hundreds of millions of dollars in arms transfers, including to Taiwan.

Dr. Ford served in 2017 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for WMD and Counterproliferation at the U.S. National Security Council. There, among other things, he led development of U.S. responses to Russian violations of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies Treaties, helped draft the 2017 National Security Strategy and 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, and ran a “Nuclear Vision Review” of disarmament policy.  Dr. Ford has served on the Republican staffs of the U.S. Senate’s Committees on Foreign Relations, Banking, Appropriations, Governmental Affairs, and Intelligence, and as staff director of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.   Additionally, he has been Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, U.S. Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation, a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute, a MITRE Fellow and founding Director of the MITRE Corporation’s Center for Strategic Competition, a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.  Dr. Ford served from 1994-2011 as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, leaving with an Honorable Discharge as a Lieutenant Commander. 

A summa cum laude Harvard graduate with a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a law degree from Yale, Dr. Ford is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the American Society of International Law, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.  For years a martial artist, in the heyday of his training he attained the rank of third-degree black belt (Sandan) in Japanese Jujutsu, as certified by the Dai Nippon Butoku Kaiorganization in Japan.  He is also a lay chaplain in the Soto tradition of Zen Buddhism, having trained under Roshi Joan Halifax at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Dr. Ford has been a member of the Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem since 2007, and was promoted by HRH Queen Elizabeth II to the rank of Commander in that British order of chivalry in 2017.   He is also a Freeman of the City of London and a Liveryman in the Most Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.  A native of Cincinnati, he and his wife divide their time between Washington DC and West Palm Beach. 

Dr. Ford is the author of three books – China Looks at the West: Identity, Global Ambitions, and the Future of Sino-American Relations (2015), The Mind of Empire: China’s History and Modern Foreign Relations (2010), and The Admirals’ Advantage: U.S. Navy Operational Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War (2005) – and numerous articles and monographs.  His personal website is https://newparadigmsforum.com, and a chronological list of his writings can be found at https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/publications. 

Please note that neither the School of Defense and Strategic Studies nor CSIS take specific policy positions, and all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in material published on this website should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).