Michael Pillsbury is a long-time U.S. defense and foreign policy strategist whose career has focused on China, intelligence, and covert action. Educated at Stanford and Columbia under prominent advisers, he worked at the UN, conducted field research in Taiwan, and served as an analyst at RAND and Harvard. His early scholarship included a 1980 contribution to the Journal of International Security that helped shape debates on U.S.–China military cooperation.
He became a key figure in shaping U.S. policy toward both China and Afghanistan. His mid-1970s proposals for U.S.–China military ties helped influence the Carter and Reagan administrations’ decisions to build intelligence and defense cooperation with Beijing. During the Reagan administration, Pillsbury served as Assistant Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning and played a central role in the 1986 decision to supply Stinger missiles to Afghan resistance forces—a pivotal step in the Soviet-Afghan War. He later advanced his views on China’s long-term strategic ambitions in his widely discussed book "The Hundred-Year Marathon".
Pillsbury also held senior Pentagon roles under President George H. W. Bush and contributed to key legislation creating the U.S. Institute of Peace and the National Endowment for Democracy. From the late 1990s onward, his research on Chinese military strategy informed the Department of Defense’s annual reports to Congress. He remains affiliated with leading policy institutions, including the Council on Foreign Relations.