Professor Dennis Wilder served for 36 years in intelligence and policy positions as one of the U.S. government’s foremost experts on China and the Indo-Pacific region. Since retiring from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2016, he has been … Continued
Professor Dennis Wilder served for 36 years in intelligence and policy positions as one of the U.S. government’s foremost experts on China and the Indo-Pacific region. Since retiring from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2016, he has been … Continued
Professor Dennis Wilder served for 36 years in intelligence and policy positions as one of the U.S. government’s foremost experts on China and the Indo-Pacific region. Since retiring from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2016, he has been an Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Asian Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. where he teaches on the rise of the Chinese military. He is also a Senior Fellow in the University’s China Initiative, linking Georgetown students with their counterparts at elite Chinese universities in dialogue on global issues.
Mr. Wilder served for five years on the National Security Council (NSC). He was appointed by President George W. Bush, first as the China Director and then as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for East Asia. He accompanied the President to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the G-8 summit in Japan, APEC summits in Australia and Peru as well as bilateral visits to South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, and Mongolia. He also organized and coordinated the State visits to Washington of President Hu Jintao of China, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan. Mr. Wilder’s transition memos on China, North Korea, and East Asia left for the Obama Administration have been declassified and appear in the book, “Hand-Off.”
At the apex of his CIA career, Mr. Wilder was appointed by the CIA Director as the first Deputy Associate Director responsible for restructuring collection and analysis in the newly created East Asia Mission Center. Prior to that, he had served for five years as the Senior Editor for the President’s Daily Brief (PDB). Earlier in his CIA career, Mr. Wilder served for nine years as the Division Chief in charge of all-source analysis on Chinese political, economic, and military developments.
After working at the White House, Mr. Wilder took a sabbatical and became a visiting scholar at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. Together with Dr. Kenneth Lieberthal, he co-authored a ground-breaking study entitled: “The U.S. Intelligence Community and Foreign Policy: Getting Analysis Right.”
Professor Wilder is an active participant in the Washington public policy community and has been a sought-after speaker at symposia sponsored by such prominent U.S. think tanks as the Brookings Institution, CSIS, the Aspen Institute, the Wilson Center, and the East-West Center. He is frequently called upon by major media outlets to share his East Asian expertise, including appearances on CNN, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, Fox News, C-SPAN, Al Jazeera, and the Chinese Global Television Network. His commentary is frequently quoted in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Economist, and the Washington Post.
During his junior year in college, Mr. Wilder was an exchange student in the Yale-in-China program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong studying Chinese politics and Mandarin Chinese. He holds a Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Kalamazoo College in Michigan. He was born in Asia and spent most of his childhood in Singapore and Malaysia.