Ambassador Robert D. Blackwill is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a Stanford University Hoover Institution Distinguished Visiting Fellow. From 2010 to 2026, he was the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Blackwill’s latest publications are Lost Decade: The U.S. Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power, coauthored with Richard Fontaine and published by Oxford University Press in 2024, and a Council on Foreign Relations Special Report on alternative U.S. grand strategies, America Revived: A Grand Strategy of Resolute Global Leadership, published in January 2026.
Under President George W. Bush, he was deputy national security advisor for strategic planning, presidential envoy to Iraq, and U.S. ambassador to India from 2001 to 2003. Blackwill was the recipient of the 2007 Bridge-Builder Award for his role in transforming U.S.-India relations, and was honored with India’s Padma Bhushan Award in 2016, the first U.S. ambassador to India since John Kenneth Galbraith to receive the award.
From 1989 to 1990, he was special assistant to President George H.W. Bush for European and Soviet affairs, and was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany for his contribution to German unification. In his career, Blackwill was the U.S. ambassador to conventional arms negotiations with the Warsaw Pact, director for European affairs at the National Security Council, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, and principal deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs. Prior to reentering government in 2001, he spent fourteen years as faculty and associate dean at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Blackwill’s best-selling book with Graham Allison, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (MIT Press, 2013) has sold over 300,000 copies. His book with Jennifer Harris, War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft (Harvard University Press, 2016), was named one of the best foreign policy books of 2016 by Foreign Affairs.
Blackwill’s CFR reports include No Limits? The China-Russia Relationship and U.S. Foreign Policy (2024), The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War (2021), Implementing Grand Strategy Toward China: Twenty-Two U.S. Policy Prescriptions (2020), The End of World Order and American Foreign Policy (2020), Trump's Foreign Policies Are Better Than They Seem (2019), Containing Russia (2018), and Repairing the U.S.-Israel Relationship (2016).
