The Aspen Institute

Robert D. Blackwill is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). As deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for strategic planning under President George W. Bush, Blackwill oversaw government-wide policy planning to develop and coordinate the mid- and long-term direction of U.S. foreign policy. He was U.S. ambassador to India from 2001–2003 and presidential envoy to Iraq from 2003–2004. In 2016 Blackwill became the first U.S. Ambassador to India since John Kenneth Galbraith to receive the Padma Bhushan Award from the Indian government for distinguished service of a high order. Before reentering government in 2001, he was the Belfer lecturer in international security at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Blackwill’s most recent book is War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft (Harvard University Press, April 2016), co-authored with Jennifer M. Harris. His CFR Special Reports include Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China (April 2015) co-authored with Ashley J. Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Xi Jinping on the Global Stage: Chinese Foreign Policy Under a Powerful but Exposed Leader (February 2016) co-authored with Kurt M. Campbell, Implementing Grand Strategy Toward China: Twenty-Two U.S. Policy Prescriptions (January 2020), The End of World Order and American Foreign Policy (May 2020) co-authored with Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution, and The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War (February 2021) co-authored with Philip Zelikow of the University of Virginia. He is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and the Trilateral Commission.