Jonathan E. Hillman is senior fellow for geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His expertise spans economic and security issues, including investment, trade, infrastructure, and technology. He is the author of The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future and The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century.

Hillman has served as a senior advisor to three U.S. cabinet officials. From 2023 to 2024, he advised the secretary of commerce on investment and infrastructure issues and was a lead member of the U.S. negotiating team for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. From 2022 to 2023, he served on the secretary of state’s policy planning staff as the lead member covering economics and co-lead for technology. From 2014 to 2016, he directed the research and writing process at the office of the U.S. trade representative for reports, speeches, and other materials explaining U.S. trade and investment policy.

From 2016 to 2022, Hillman was a senior fellow and director of the Reconnecting Asia Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has also worked as a researcher at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at the Council on Foreign Relations for then president emeritus Leslie H. Gelb, and in Kyrgyzstan as a Fulbright Scholar. Hillman is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a presidential scholar, and Brown University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received the Garrison Prize for best thesis in international relations.