Chas W. Freeman Jr.

Charles "Chas" W. Freeman Jr. (傅立民, born March 2, 1943) is an American retired diplomat and writer.

He served in the United States Foreign Service, the State and Defense Departments in many different capacities over the course of thirty years.

Freeman was born in Washington, D.C., on March 2, 1943, to Charles Wellman Freeman and Carla Elizabeth Park.

His mother died when he was nine years old.

His father, an MIT graduate from Rhode Island who served in the United States Navy during World War II, "declined to join the family business" in Rhode Island and started his own business, with the help of a G.I. loan.

As a child Freeman lived in Nassau, the Bahamas, where his father's business was located, and attended the St. Andrew's School.

But he returned to the United States at age 13 to attend Milton Academy, a private boarding school in Massachusetts.

Freeman matriculated at Yale University in 1960 with a full scholarship and graduated early, magna cum laude, in 1963.

He studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico "for a while, when I was supposed to be at Yale."

After graduating from Yale he entered Harvard Law School, but he left during his second year to pursue a career in the United States Foreign Service.

He finished his J.D degree at Harvard nine years later.

Freeman joined the United States Foreign Service in 1965, working first in India and Taiwan before being assigned to the State Department's China desk.

Most notably, he worked as the main interpreter for Richard Nixon during his 1972 China visit and served as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992, where he dealt with the Persian Gulf War.

He is a past president of the Middle East Policy Council, co-chair of the U.S. China Policy Foundation and a Lifetime Director of the Atlantic Council.

As an officer on the China desk, he was assigned as the principal American interpreter during U.S. President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China.

He later became the State Department Deputy Director for Republic of China (ROC, commonly known as Taiwan) affairs.

The State Department sent Freeman back to Harvard Law School during this time, where he completed his J.D. The legal research he did there eventually became "the intellectual basis for the Taiwan Relations Act."

After various positions within the State Department he was given overseas assignments as chargé d'affaires and deputy chief of mission at the Embassy in Beijing, China, and then Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand.

In 1986, he was appointed as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1986, a position in which he played a key role in the negotiation of Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola and the independence of Namibia.

He became United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in November 1989, serving before and after Operation Desert Storm, until August 1992.

The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs described his career as "remarkably varied."

From 1992 to 1993 he was a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies.

From 1993 to 1994 he was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

From 1994 to 1995 he was a Distinguished Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace.

In 1995 he became Chairman of the Board of Projects International, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based business development company that arranges international joint ventures.

In 1997, Freeman succeeded George McGovern to become the president of the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC), formerly known as the American Arab Affairs Council, which "strives to ensure that a full range of U.S. interests and views are considered by policy makers."

Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy was published by the U.S. Institute of Peace in 1997.

From 2004 to 2008 he served on China National Offshore Oil Corporation's international advisory board, which convened annually to advise the corporate board on the implications of various global developments (Freeman was neither consulted nor involved in the company's dealings with Iran or its attempt to buy U.S. oil company Unocal).

He served as a member of the board of several other corporate and non-profit advisory boards, including diplomatic institutes.

He was the editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica's entry on "Diplomacy".

In his thirty-year diplomatic career, Freeman received two Distinguished Public Service Awards, three Presidential Meritorious Service Awards, two Distinguished Honor Awards, the CIA Medallion, a Defense Meritorious Service Award, and four Superior Honor Awards.

He speaks fluent Chinese, French, Spanish, and Arabic and has a working knowledge of several other languages.

In 2006 MEPC was the first American outlet to publish Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard Professor Stephen Walt's working paper called The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

According to a The Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Freeman endorsed the paper's thesis, and he said of MEPC's stance that "No one else in the United States has dared to publish this article, given the political penalties that the Lobby imposes on those who criticize it."

Freeman has written two books on statecraft.

In February 2009, it was reported that Freeman was then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair's choice to chair the National Intelligence Council in the Obama administration.

After several weeks of criticisms, he withdrew his name from consideration.

The Diplomat's Dictionary has gone through several revisions, the most recent of which, also published by USIP, came out in 2010.

He is also the author of three books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and in China.

America's Misadventures in the Middle East, published by Just World Books in 2010, focused on Bush's invasion of Iraq, America's failure to lead in the same way it did in the postwar years, and Saudi Arabia.