Dr. Christopher Ford is a distinguished policy advisor at MITRE Labs, where he works on issues of great power competition, S&T policy, and the policy and national security implications of emerging technology. Ford served until January 2021 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.

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 US National Security Council, where he ran the directorate of that name throughout 2017.

A veteran of many years as a congressional staffer, Ford has served at various points on the staffs of the US 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 from 2003 to 2006, and as US special representative for nuclear nonproliferation from 2006 to 2008.

A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard who received a doctorate at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a law degree from Yale, Ford has also worked as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, and served from 1994 until 2011 as an intelligence officer in the US Navy Reserve, which he left with an honorable discharge in 2011 at the rank of lieutenant commander.

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: US Navy Operational Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War (2005)—as well as a great many articles and monographs.

His website may be found at https://www.newparadigmsforum.com.