He attended Harvard College from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1971, receiving the Sophia Freund Prize, given to the student ranked academically highest in his class.

Waldron has lived and studied in China, Japan, Taiwan, France, England, and the former Soviet Union, where he earned a certificate in Russian language proficiency.

[10] In 1992, Waldron published MacMurray's memorandum of 1935, which foresaw the coming of conflict between the United States and Japan and was greatly esteemed by such later diplomats as George F. Kennan, with introduction and notes.

[11] Parallel research on China during the same period—that of the "Warlords" or junfa (軍閥), a term often taken as indigenous but that Waldron has demonstrated is borrowed from Japanese Marxist writings —produced his third book, From War to Nationalism, in 1995.

[12] This presents a novel argument showing how the large-scale but almost entirely unstudied Second Zhili-Fengtian War of 1924 (his was the first book in any language, Chinese included, to analyze the conflict)[13] so utterly disrupted the existing political and power structures of China as to create a vacuum, along with the conditions for the emergence, in the following year, of the radical nationalist May Thirtieth Movement.

Waldron's research interests include twentieth century Chinese history, China's policies toward and conflicts with her neighbors, and Asian international relations.

[17] He has compared China's foreign policy with that of Germany leading up to World War I, calling it a "Griff nach der Weltmacht, with Chinese characteristics.