President Donald J. Trump’s actions have often been rash, ignorant, and chaotic. Yet some of his individual foreign policies are substantially better than his opponents assert.
About the Expert
Expert Bio
Robert D. Blackwill is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. His current work focuses on U.S. foreign policy writ large as well as on China, Russia, the Middle East, South Asia, and geoeconomics. Blackwill served as counselor to CFR in 2005. Most recently, he was a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, from 2008 to 2010, after serving from 2004 to 2008 as president of BGR International. As deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for strategic planning under President George W. Bush, Blackwill was responsible for government-wide policy planning to help develop and coordinate the mid- and long-term direction of U.S. foreign policy. He also served as presidential envoy to Iraq and was the administration’s coordinator for U.S. policies regarding Afghanistan and Iran. Blackwill went to the National Security Council (NSC) after serving as the U.S. ambassador to India from 2001 to 2003. He is the recipient of the 2007 Bridge-Builder Award for his role in transforming U.S.-India relations. In 2016 he became the first U.S. Ambassador to India since John Kenneth Galbraith to receive the Padma Bhushan Award from the government of India for distinguished service of a high order.
Prior to reentering government in 2001, Blackwill was the Belfer lecturer in international security at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. During his fourteen years as a Harvard faculty member, he was associate dean of the Kennedy School, where he taught foreign and defense policy and public policy analysis. He was faculty chair for executive training programs for business and government leaders from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and Kazakhstan, as well as military general officers from Russia and the People's Republic of China. From 1989 to 1990, he was special assistant to President George H.W. Bush for European and Soviet affairs, during which he was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany for his contribution to German unification. Earlier in his career, he was the U.S. ambassador to conventional arms negotiations with the Warsaw Pact, director for European affairs at the NSC, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, and principal deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs.
Blackwill is the author and editor of many articles and books on transatlantic relations, Russia and the West, the Greater Middle East, and Asian security. He edited the CFR book Iran: The Nuclear Challenge (June 2012). His best-selling book, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (MIT Press, February 2013), coauthored with Graham Allison of the Harvard Kennedy School, has sold over 300,000 copies. He has coauthored four Council Special Reports, Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China (April 2015) with Ashley J. Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment, Xi Jinping on the Global Stage: Chinese Foreign Policy Under a Powerful but Exposed Leader (February 2016) with Kurt M. Campbell of The Asia Group, Repairing the U.S.-Israel Relationship (November 2016) with Philip H. Gordon of CFR, and Containing Russia: How to Respond to Moscow’s Intervention in U.S. Democracy and Growing Geopolitical Challenge (January 2018) with Philip H. Gordon. His latest book, War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft (Harvard University Press, April 2016), coauthored with Jennifer M. Harris, was named one of the best foreign policy books of 2016 by Foreign Affairs. His Council Special Report titled Trump’s Foreign Policies Are Better Than They Seem, was published in April 2019.
He is a member of CFR, the Aspen Strategy Group, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Affiliations:
Kissinger Center at Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar
Featured
In War by Other Means, Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris show that geoeconomic warfare requires a new vision of U.S. statecraft.
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Panelists discuss current U.S. strategy toward China and offer their security, economic, and foreign policy recommendations to address increasing tensions in the relationship.
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Ambassador Robert D. Blackwill’s Council Special Report Trump’s Foreign Policies Are Better Than They Seem takes a step back from the feverish media temperature associated with coverage of Donald J. Trump’s first two years in office and offers a detailed analytical look at the president’s foreign policies—from his heavily scrutinized approaches to NATO and European security and rising Chinese power to his stances on North Korea, Afghanistan, and Venezuela. Blackwill grades Trump not on whether the president gets what he wants, but on whether his policies successfully promote U.S. national interests.
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In the Council Special Report Containing Russia: How to Respond to Moscow’s Intervention in U.S. Democracy and Growing Geopolitical Challenge, Robert D. Blackwill and Philip H. Gordon argue that the U.S. response to Russia’s continued attacks on U.S. democracy and attempts to undermine U.S. power worldwide has been insufficient to deter future attacks.
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Experts discuss potential reforms to the National Security Council.
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Robert D. Blackwill and Jennifer M. Harris discuss War by Other Means.
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Robert D. Blackwill and Jennifer M. Harris discuss War by Other Means, their new book on why the United States must strategically integrate economic and financial instruments into its foreign policy or risk losing ground as a world power.
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Experts discuss U.S.-India relations, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
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CFR Senior Fellow Robert D. Blackwill, Vitaly Churkin, permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, and Frank Elbe, former director of German Foreign Minister Hans-Deitrich Genscher's cabinet, join Mary Elise Sarotte of Harvard University to discuss the factors and steps that led to the end of the Cold War.
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CFR Fellows Alyssa Ayres, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, and Robert D. Blackwill join Charles Kaye of Warburg Pincus to discuss the results of the recent Indian election.
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Increased petroleum production in the United States, fueled largely by recent technological advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, has had a profound effect on the U.S. economy and global energy markets. CFR's Robert D. Blackwill sits down with Admiral Dennis C. Blair and former BP CEO John Browne to outline both the economic and geopolitcal implications of the current U.S. energy boom.
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Please join us for a panel discussion to celebrate the release of Iran: The Nuclear Challenge, a forthcoming Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) ebook. The essays in this volume, all authored by fellows in CFR's David Rockefeller Studies Program and edited by Robert Blackwill, aim to inform readers how, not what, to think about Iran's nuclear activities.
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This special event is organized in conjunction with the U.S.-India Joint Study Group on Shared National Interests, a collaboration between CFR and Aspen Institute India. The group is composed of former government officials and scholars from each country. At this meeting, they will discuss the group’s prescriptive report on U.S.-India relations, which will be available on CFR.org on September 15.