International Security and Strategic Competition
Christopher Ford is a professor with Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Pharos Foundation at Oxford, and serves on the Advisory Board of the American Foreign Policy Council and George Mason University’s National Security Institute.
Dr Ford was previously a Visiting Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and worked at the MITRE Corporation as a MITRE Fellow and founding Director of MITRE’s Center for Strategic Competition. When last in government, he was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, for 15 months also acting as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, and previously Senior Director for WMD and Counterproliferation at the National Security Council. A Rhodes Scholar with degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale – and trained as a lay chaplain in the Prajna Mountain Buddhist Order within the Soto Zen tradition – Ford also served as U.S. Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, a staffer on multiple Senate committees, and naval intelligence officer. He is the author of three books, including two on Sino-American relations and Chinese strategic culture, and many articles and monographs.