Dr. Christopher Ford is Professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University’s Graduate School of Defense and Strategic Studies, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.  He is also the founder and Principal of Two Ravens Policy & Strategy LLC, which furthers national security missions by providing support to both U.S. Intelligence Community and Department of Defense customers. Additionally, Dr. Ford is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security Research (CGSR), 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’s Antonin Scalia Law School. 

From February 2021 through January 2023, he worked at the MITRE Corporation in various capacities, most recently as a MITRE Fellow and as the founding Director of the Center for Strategic Competition, where he spearheaded MITRE’s work to bring systems thinking and MITRE’s range of skills and capabilities to bear in helping the United States and its partners solve strategic competition challenges.   (MITRE Fellows are the “the highest technical recognition that MITRE bestows ... a select group of scientists, all preeminent in their fields, who lead critically important programs.”  There have been only 12 Fellows since MITRE’s establishment in 1958, and Dr. Ford was the first one ever appointed from a policy-centric background.)

From January 2018 until January 2021, following his unanimous confirmation by the U.S. Senate, Dr. Ford served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and also exercised the authorities of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security from October 2019 until his resignation from the Department of State on January 8, 2021. 

During his tenure, Dr. Ford was instrumental in reorienting the Department to support U.S. competitive strategy vis-à-vis China and Russia.  Among other things, he was the first U.S. official publicly to draw attention to China’s “Military-Civil Fusion” strategy, and he spearheaded sweeping reforms to U.S. national security export control policy in order to deny sensitive dual-use technologies to Beijing, beginning with civil-nuclear exports but thereafter pivoting to Chinese high-technology companies.  (His bureau, for instance, was the government component that nominated Huawei for the Commerce Department’s “Entity List” in 2019, and led State Department efforts to negotiate coordinated national security export control restraint with key U.S. allies and partners.) 

Dr. Ford also reformed his bureau’s $265 million in nonproliferation capacity-building programming to tie it to intelligence-informed threat assessments, realigned the structure of his bureau to ensure better support for U.S. competitive strategy, led the development and negotiation of the innovative new Nuclear Cooperation Memoranda of Understanding (NCMOUs), spearheaded global diplomacy under Section 231 of the CAATSA legislation to penalize those who engaged in significant transactions with the Russian defense industry, oversaw global efforts to enforce nonproliferation sanctions against Iran and North Korea, negotiated civil-nuclear cooperation agreements (“123 Agreements”) on behalf of the U.S. Government, managed U.S. relations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), revised U.S. interpretations of Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) standards, developed and implemented the groundbreaking “Creating an Environment for Nuclear Disarmament” (CEND) nuclear disarmament initiative, and (when performing the duties of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security) approved hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. arms transfers, including to Taiwan. 

Dr. Ford also personally wrote the State Department’s widely-read and influential 25-paper series of Arms Control and International Security Papers, which can be found on this website.  Under Dr. Ford’s leadership, moreover, the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation rose to be rated – by a large margin – the top policy bureau at the U.S. Department of State in the Partnership for Public Policy’s assessment of the “best places to work” in the federal government. 

Before his service at the State Department, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counterproliferation at the U.S. National Security Council, where he ran the directorate of that name throughout 2017.  There, among other things, he led the development of the U.S. Government’s responsive strategy to Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty, contributed to the drafting of the U.S. National Security Strategy and the Nuclear Posture Review, and personally ran the Administration’s internal “Nuclear Vision Review” of disarmament policy.

A veteran of many years as a congressional staffer, Dr. Ford has served at various points on the staffs of the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, Banking Committee, Appropriations Committee, Select Committee on Intelligence, Permanent Select Committee on Investigations, and Governmental Affairs Committee.  He also served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance in 2003-06, and as U.S. Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation in 2006-08.

A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard who got his doctorate at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a law degree from Yale, Dr. Ford has also worked as a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., and served from 1994 until 2011 as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, which he left with an Honorable Discharge in 2011 at the rank of Lieutenant Commander.  He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and the American Society of International Law.

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) – as well as a great many articles and monographs. 

His work has appeared in many journals and periodicals, including the Cyber Defense Review, National Security Law Journal, Science & Diplomacy, Hoover Institution Press, Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Military Law Review, International Security, Quillette, Lion’s Roar, Asia Policy, Nuclear Abolition Forum, Contemporary Security Policy, Rivista Italiana di Geopolitica, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, SAIS Review, International Journal of Korean Unification Studies, The New Atlantis, National Security Policy Proceedings, KAS Auslandinformationen, Nonproliferation Review, The  Economist, Mongolian Journal of International Affairs, Joint Forces Quarterly ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law, Journal of Strategic Studies, Michigan Journal of International Law, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, UCLA Law Review, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Texas  International Law Journal, Denver University Law Review, Wisconsin International Law Journal, and California Law Review.

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio – as well as a sometime martial artist who studied in the Jigo Tenshin-Ryu lineage of Japanese jujutsu under the late Grandmaster Dong Jin Kim (achieving the rank of Sandan, certified by the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai), and a lay chaplain in the Soto tradition of Zen Buddhism who was given jukai by by Roshi Joan Halifax at the Upaya Institute and Zen Center  – Dr. Ford lives with his wife and daughter (and their multiple pugs) in Bethesda, Maryland.