A Conversation With Mike Froman

CFR President Mike Froman discusses his career, priorities for the Council, and the current events affecting U.S. foreign policy, including the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

The CFR Young Professionals Briefing Series provides an opportunity for those early in their careers to engage with CFR. The briefings feature remarks by experts on critical global issues and lessons learned in their careers. These events are intended for individuals who have completed their undergraduate studies and have not yet reached the age of thirty to be eligible for CFR term membership.

BODURTHA: Good evening. My name is Nancy Bodurtha. I am a vice president here at the Council on Foreign Relations, and it’s my privilege and pleasure to welcome you all to this session of our Young Professionals Briefing Series. This is the first event in this series for our 2024-2025 programming year, and we are delighted to welcome those of you who are here in person in Washington with us this evening as well as the hundred and fifty of you who are participating virtually. 

For those of you for whom this might be your first Council event, I wanted to say a few words about the organization and also about the Young Professionals Program to give you some context about where you are and what to expect. The Council is just over a hundred years old. It was founded in 1921 in the aftermath of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles by a group of American business leaders, policymakers, and academics who were seeking to foster a more informed debate about America’s role in the world. Today, the Council is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for our 5,000 members as well as for government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help these constituencies better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States. 

If you visit our website, CFR.org, you’ll find an incredible wealth of resources ranging from a video archive of Council events on a rich range of subjects, task force reports on critical policy issues, timely podcast discussions, and analysis from the experts—our fellows and scholars who work in the Council’s think tank. And of course, I’m sure many of you are aware of the Council’s flagship publication, Foreign Affairs magazine. 

We launched the Young Professionals Program a few years ago as a way to open up the Council to individuals who have completed their undergraduate studies and are in the early years of their careers. Events alternate between our venues in New York and Washington, but are also available virtually. And last year, some of the discussions in this series focused on things like global hotspots, careers in the intelligence community, and sportswashing. 

In addition to the meetings series, we have a dedicated newsletter for the young professionals that highlights the Council’s latest work. That gets pushed out around the fifteenth of every month, so be looking for that in your email inboxes. 

Finally, I also want to let you all know that this evening we are being joined by the Council’s term members, and this is a program that we’re hoping the young professional cohort will aspire to. Our term members are foreign policy leaders from an array of fields, and each year a new group of individuals between the ages of thirty and thirty-six are elected to a special five-year term membership here. I’m going to ask those of you who are term members to raise your hands. Don’t be shy. OK. So there are lots of term members here this evening. They are the people with the green dot on their nametag. So if you’re a young professional and you want to learn more about the program, seek them out during the reception after this evening’s discussion; they can tell you all about their Council experiences. Also, if you go on the website there’s information about the Term Member Program and also about the application process, and staff will be around this evening as well if you’ve got questions. We’d be happy to speak with you about that. 

So thank you again for joining us this evening. I’m going to turn our proceedings over to our presider, Margaret Richardson, who is the chief of staff at Devex, the leading independent news organization covering global development. But more importantly, Margaret herself is a term member. 

RICHARDSON: Thank you so much, Nancy. And I—in fact, I also was a young professional, so I have really done both so far. I’m happy to talk to anybody about that. 

So welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations young professional briefing with Michael Froman. As many of you know, Ambassador Froman served in President Obama’s Cabinet as the U.S. trade representative responsible for the conclusion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, the negotiations towards the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union. Before that, he served in the White House as assistant to the president, deputy national security advisor. He served in the Clinton administration, as well as holding leadership roles at both Citigroup and Mastercard, which is where we first met. 

FROMAN: Exactly. 

RICHARDSON: And we are very lucky to have him now as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. 

It’s great to be here with you. 

FROMAN: Great to see you. 

RICHARDSON: Feels a little bit like back-to-school vibes, like convocation. We’re kicking it off. 

FROMAN: It really does. It’s like everyone’s got their new outfit on and— 

RICHARDSON: Yeah. Everyone showed up on time. 

FROMAN: Yeah. Fantastic, on time. 

RICHARDSON: Yeah. It’s been great. 

FROMAN: I think it’s the food, actually. I think it’s the— 

RICHARDSON: (Laughs.) Yeah. The food is always, always great at these events. 

So I do want to talk about the Council in just a second, but as Nancy just mentioned we have a lot of young professionals and term members here and online who are at pivotal moments in their career. They’re early in their career, or as many of the term members are they’re sort of at the precipice of big leadership moves. Take us back to when you were in your late twenties, early thirties—not so long ago—and—(laughter)—what were you thinking about? What were your career goals? And how did they take you to your career—how did they take you to the Council? How did they bring you here? 

FROMAN: So, first of all, welcome, everybody. It’s great to see you. This program didn’t exist when I was a—when I started as a term member back in 1996. I’m thinking—looking out at you and thinking: How many of you were born in 1996? (Laughter.) But, yeah, OK, a few. Thank you. (Laughter.) I don’t feel that old, then. Happy second birthday. (Laughter.) 

But I’m so excited to—this is actually my first young professionals event because—so I’m excited to meet you all and to get to know this program a little bit. And I’ll say one minute about that and then we’re going to answer your question, Meg. We’ll talk a lot about what the Council does and what our mission is, what role we see for ourselves here in Washington, in New York, around the world. But one of our functions, in my view—one of our main objectives—is to help identify, develop, and promote the next generation of diverse foreign policy experts. And we do that because we have a great internship program, we have young research assistants, we have junior staff, we have the Term Member Program, and we have the Young Professionals Program. And these are all parts of that mission. And so we’ll talk about the Term Membership Program, which I hope those of you who are interested will consider applying for when you—when you reach thirty years old. But it’s all part of our mission to help bring people who are interested in these issues into the fold, help them develop their careers, help promote them, make sure they have access to the information and the networks they need to succeed. So I hope you fully take advantage of that during your time as young professionals. 

When I was this age or somewhat older, I thought—I thought I had it all planned out. I was—I was fortunate enough to get a fellowship that brought me into the White House, and I thought: This is great. I finished my graduate degree in international relations. I finished my law degree. I thought: I’m going to go into the White House for two years. I’m going to practice law for two years. I’m going to become a law professor. None of that happened. (Laughter.) The two years in government became seven years. I went on one job talk to try out the law professor market; it was miserable. And I ended up going into business, which I never had thought I’d have any interest in. I went to Citigroup. I was there for about nine years. Came back into government under the Obama administration, and then went to Mastercard. 

And so, you know, I think one of the lessons I drew from my own career is that you can plan all you want; life is what happens to you while you’re busy planning something else. And you just can’t—you have to be flexible. You have to take risks. You have to take the experiences as they come. In my case, it was about a mentor. I ended up working for Bob Rubin, who was secretary of the treasury, and became his chief of staff for two-and-a-half years. And— 

RICHARDSON: We love chiefs of staff. 

FROMAN: We love chiefs of staff—(laughter)—I have to say the most important roles in the government and outside. And you know, when he left the government and said why don’t you come with me to the private sector, you know, I’d learned so much from him, I will continue to learn from him. I will learn the business community as well and see whether I like it, or whether I’m good at it or not. I ended up loving it, and I liked going back and forth between the private sector and the government, and to work on issues at the nexus of those two worlds where the private sector needs to know more about government and where our government needs to have a better sense of how the private sector operates. 

And then, frankly, the Council—every time I left the government—at the end of the Clinton administration, at the end of the Obama administration—the Council offered me political asylum, basically. (Laughter.) And it gave me an office and a little time to decompress and figure out what I wanted to do. I ran a task force here in 1999 when I left the Clinton administration, and I was a fellow here in 2017-2018 after I left the Obama administration. And so the Council’s always played a big part in my life as a term member, as a life member, as a fellow. My predecessor, a great guy named Richard Haass, had been here for twenty years when he decided to retire. And so you don’t—again, you don’t plan when these jobs open up. Meg and I worked together when I was in Mastercard. I loved Mastercard, would have been happy to stay there. This job opened up, and I was needless to say quite happy when they—when they approached me and offered me the job, so. 

RICHARDSON: Yeah. And you just finished your first year here, and that has been a pretty remarkable year for a number of reasons, not least of which is that you’ve brought a lot of innovation to the events that we have had here. I see a couple friends in the room who were with me at the Dinner of Extinction that we had, maybe you can tell us a little bit about. There was also an immersive theater production that we had which was very powerful about immigration at the border. What can we expect from you and the Council in the year to come? And what are—what are we looking forward to? 

FROMAN: Well, first of all, let me just say a word about the Dinner of Extinction because it continues to be one of my favorite events here. And Nancy Bodurtha, who runs both membership and meetings, she’s been a great partner in experimenting with new kinds of events here. 

I met somebody in the Obama administration named Sam Kass, and Sam was the Obamas’ personal chef when they were in Chicago, came with them to Washington, worked at the White House as a(n) advisor on nutrition, helped Michelle Obama plant the vegetable garden on the South Lawn, now is in New York as a—as a(n) investor in climate-related and agriculture-related investments, sustainable agriculture. And he’s a great chef. And we worked with him to curate a dinner, first in New York and then here in Washington, all made from ingredients that will be extinct with climate change. And he would get up at each course and explain here’s what’s going to happen to the ocean temperature and how it’s going to affect the ability of the salmon you’re about to eat to spawn, and here’s what’s going to happen to arable land and how it’s going to affect the vegetation. And when you get to dessert and he explains that coffee, chocolate, and wine are all gone— 

RICHARDSON: Depressing. 

FROMAN: —you get this huge reaction in the room, like, oh! You know? (Laughter.) Like, and the reaction was everybody, like, well, now we got to do something about climate change because this is, like—(laughter)—now it’s serious. And that was the whole idea; like, how do you bring something that is—that can be quite abstract, quite statistically focused, and make it—bring it to life for people to relate to? 

And that’s what we did with the immigration event, where we worked with a theater company called Waterwell and with the International Rescue Committee to dramatize from actual transcripts a hearing between a woman seeking asylum in the United States and the asylum officer having to work through the case and make the decision. And it was a very powerful—you know, she’s telling her story. He’s trying to help her, but the fact is her case is not worthy of asylum under our current law. And it was showing the weaknesses of our current law and how we finally found a solution, a bit of a loophole, for letting her into the country. So, again, how do you take immigration—and everyone reads about it, lots of people worry about it—and make it something that people can relate to and understand on a more personal level. 

We’re hoping to do more of that. We’re hoping to do wargaming here or peacegaming, tabletop exercises. You know, it’ll give our members and our community here and opportunity to see policymaking in action. For us it’s pretty easy because if we want to put on a mock National Security Council meeting, we have several former national security advisors who are members who kind of know what to do. So, you know, we’ll put it on, and the people will have an opportunity to participate and really learn firsthand what the policy process is like. 

RICHARDSON: And I think, you know, I would at least argue, and I’m sure many in the room would, there’s more of a need for the Council than ever right now, looking at the foreign policy landscape. We, of course, have the largest armed conflict in Europe since 1945. We have an escalating war between Israel and Hamas, as well as a humanitarian crisis in Palestine. We have China and its growing relationship with Russia as well as the Global South. These conversations at the Council are incredibly important. 

And I was reading through the Preventative (sic; Preventive) Priorities Survey —which surveys, for those of you who don’t know, hundreds of foreign policy professionals to alert policymakers to potentially threatening sources of instability and conflict—and I was struck by the fact that for the first time ever, since 2008 I believe, the leading—the leading sort of anxiety and issue that most foreign policy professionals are worried about is domestic terrorism in the United States around the elections. And I’m curious to hear from you, since we’ve got you in the hot seat, what does that mean for U.S. leadership this year, and with regards to the election but then also with regards to our position in the foreign policy landscape? 

FROMAN: Well, you’re absolutely right. This is a survey we do every year, and it comes out in January, and we ask people what’s the most significant conflict and what’s the most significant conflict that will affect the United States. And this year, as Meg said, it really was predominantly domestic issues and the possibility of violence around the—around the election. 

You know, we know this is a huge year for democracy generally around the world. Sixty percent of the globe is going to the polls. There’s a lot of worry about manipulation through AI and social media, a lot of worry about hacking and other sort of invasive activity. We know it(’s) happening here in the United States and we have some evidence of that. There’s just a lot of concern. And it’s not a purely domestic issue because when the U.S. is out around the world talking about the importance of democracy and strengthening democracy and the importance of elections, if we don’t have elections that have a high degree of confidence and integrity here it very much weakens our ability to make that argument against what is a rising chorus of autocracy. And so it’s very important that we deal with that issue here, and very important that we work with our allies and partners around the world who also face this kind of issue—a lot of the other democracies have seen intervention in their—in their elections—that we work with them to try and maintain as much confidence and integrity to the election process as possible if the democracy is going to be able to continue to advance the way we want to see it—we all want to see it advance. 

Again, it’s—the permeability—as you said, it’s a more complex world now than I think we’ve had in eighty years for all the reasons you said. Might add on top of that transnational issues like climate change and pandemic, poverty alleviation being reversed, things of that sort, new technologies including AI but not limited to AI and its impact on everything from misinformation/disinformation to how wars are fought. And all of these—all of these issues are issues that we’re taking on, that we’re being asked for our expertise on by our members and increasingly even by our corporate members. 

Every CEO I speak with and their boards are focused on geopolitics these days. You know, if you—and I’ve been in the private sector. You used to be able to think, well, that’s Washington, that’s the G-7; that doesn’t really matter to my business. Not anymore. Now every company is thinking about how do these dynamics that are going on around the world affect us, even if we don’t have business in Ukraine, even if we don’t have employees in the Middle East. How is this going to affect the dynamics around the world? And that means they’re coming to the Council and asking for more and more of our help. 

RICHARDSON: And you know, especially in a year with so many global elections but, you know, specifically the U.S. election, I know many folks are turning to you in particular to hear about your thoughts on what foreign policy will look like under a Harris administration versus a Trump administration. I was listening to a podcast that you were speaking on where they said that, obviously, elections are not decided based on foreign policy; that the average American voter is not, you know, so concerned with that, and it’s mostly wonks and eccentrics who are interested in foreign policy during an election year. 

FROMAN: Those who are members, yeah. (Laughter.) 

RICHARDSON: Right. So I was going to say, on behalf of the wonks and eccentrics— 

FROMAN: The wonks and eccentrics, yes. 

RICHARDSON: —in the room, I want to ask the question that’s on everyone’s mind leading into the election with what we know so far: What are your thoughts on what foreign policy will look like under a President Harris versus a President Trump? 

FROMAN: Well, I think we have to have a certain degree of humility in trying to predict that. Vice President Harris has clearly been part of the Biden administration, and I think one can expect a fair degree of continuity. I don’t think it’s a radical change. There may be more a matter of emphasis here or there. And if there is going to be a significant change, I don’t think she’s had the time yet to really fully develop and articulate that. It may be something she does—that she does over time. And of course, we saw what foreign policy looked like under the Trump administration. Whether there are changes in a potential second Trump administration also remain to be seen. And so I think we have to have a certain degree of humility. 

I think, look, there are—there’s a bipartisan consensus, largely, around issues I think both China and largely the Middle East. 

And China in Congress, Republicans and Democrats are more on the same page than not. There may be discussion of different tactics, different tools, how they might be used, but there’s a lot of concern about the challenge that China poses to the U.S. as a multidimensional competitor, and quite a degree of consensus about how to go—how to go at that and the importance of going at that—at that issue. 

On the Middle East, again, degree of emphasis, degree of—maybe a difference between Vice President Harris and former President Trump, and even between Vice President Harris and President Biden, on how much one publicly articulates a view that we know is privately articulated to the Israelis about the importance of minimizing civilian casualties in Gaza and supporting humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians, to having a pathway towards an ultimate solution that allows Palestinians to have autonomy and self-determination. Those, I think, are still broadly held in those camps. 

Where I think there may be differences, one, of course, most clearly potentially is Ukraine, where former President Trump has said he’ll end the war in twenty-four hours. Most people have interpreted that—although he hasn’t laid out a plan to do that, but most people have interpreted that that he will convey to the Ukrainians that there won’t be any more assistance. In that context, Europe is unlikely to be able to substitute or marshal the necessary assistance, and it would force the Ukrainians to the table regardless of what the situation is on the ground to negotiate the best deal they can get with the—with the Russians at that point. Whereas the Biden-Harris administration, I think, has very much committed to trying to provide Ukraine with as much support as possible, military and ultimately reconstruction support, so that they can maintain their viability as a separate, independent, strong state firmly embedded in the—in the West. 

I think the other general area, I would say—again, just based on the Biden administration’s approach—the Biden-Harris administration approach—versus the first Trump administration—is the degree to which the U.S. is committed to working with partners and allies. And clearly, there’s a significant difference, at least in approach, between kind of the America first approach of the—of the Trump administration and the degree to which the Biden administration has worked to invest in alliances and partnerships in lots of different ways in the Asia-Pacific around AUKUS, and the Quad, and the trilateral with Japan and Korea, working with the Philippines, Japan and the Philippines as well; clearly, working with Europe very closely. I know the Europeans are quite worried. They come and visit us regularly. They are quite worried because I think they feel like former President Trump won’t take them into account or listen to them or consult with them the same way that the Biden administration—the Biden-Harris administration has done. And you know, I think that is a significant difference going forward. 

But in terms of the other significant differences, we’ll have to see how it plays out. 

RICHARDSON: And I want to turn to the audience for questions shortly, so please, please start thinking about them. 

But before we do that, I’m curious, you talked about how you’ve been talking to a number of business professionals as well. What is top of mind for the folks—you know, CEOs, others—who are very tuned into foreign policy right now headed into this year? What are they most concerned about? 

FROMAN: I think it varies a bit from—depending on, for example, how invested they are in China versus not. 

RICHARDSON: Sure. 

FROMAN: For those who are have—mostly manufacturing companies, but others who have been—whose business model is based very significantly on manufacturing in China, they have a lot of worries about the future of U.S.-China relations. What does it mean for their—for their production in China, for their supply chains, for the capacity to supply markets outside of China from China, for their partnership with Chinese firms? So I think they’re quite concerned about that. 

I think there’s broad concern just about the instability, the lack of coherence in the global system right now, the increased fragmentation. Sometimes that shows up as a comment or a concern about trade and protectionism. Sometimes it’s about the inability or the challenges of getting countries to work together on a critical issue, or the pulling apart of traditional alliances and partnerships. 

You know, one thing that’s going on is, you know, for forty years—it’s hard to be nostalgic about the Cold War—but for forty years, you know, the world—it was a pretty clear system. It was us and them. It was, you know, relatively clear who was on whose side. The tools were known. And, by the way, we had a lot of contact with the Soviet Union. There were a lot of military-to-military contact, arms control, confidence building measures. So there was a relatively stable system, until it ended.  

And then we had a period, for lack of a better term, of sort of Western hegemony, neoliberalism, where everyone thought the whole world’s going to be democratic, and free market, and the end of history as Fukuyama wrote about, and others. And that lasted for thirty years. That’s over. And we haven’t quite got our arms around what this new era is. It’s not really multipolarity. Some people use that term. Multipolarity, in my view anyway, means you got, you know, three or four blocks of countries that do everything together. That’s not the case right now. My view is that it’s something closer to polyamory. (Laughter.) In that you’ve got— 

RICHARDSON: I bet you didn’t expect to hear that word tonight. 

FROMAN: (Laughs.) In that you’ve got—and India is my favorite example. You know, India loves the United States for our technology, our civil nuclear cooperation, investment, et cetera. They love Russia for its weapons, its munitions. They love Iran for its oil. They love, and they mostly hate China. But they’re a part of BRICS, and, you know, depending on the issue—they’ve got a terrible border dispute with China, a longstanding border dispute. They’re worried about the economic competition. But they are going to maintain—it wasn’t like the old nonaligned movement, a whole group of countries that just said we’re standing back from the U.S. and from the Soviet Union, They’re going to maintain relationships as they see fit. And on one issue they’ll work with the U.S. On another issue, they’ll work with Russia. On a third issue, they’ll work with China.  

And that makes it much more difficult for—much more complicated for the U.S. to operate, because you can’t say you’re either with us or against us. It’s got to be coalitions of the willing, coalitions of the ambitious around one issue, versus another issue, versus another issue. And being willing to work with India and be very close to them on sometimes, and then be quite frustrated with them on other issues. And that’s just going to be the reality of it. And I think businesses see that as a very complex world where it’s hard to predict where a country is going to come down on something, because those alliances are constantly shifting.  

RICHARDSON: Do you—are you concerned about U.S. leadership broadly? Just— 

FROMAN: That is—that’s our mission. Yes, exactly right. That is my primary concern because—I mean, the Council is a nonpartisan institution. We have a long and very well-established tradition of not taking institutional positions on issues. We have a whole variety of people here who write on issues. And they disagree with each other. And that’s fine. That’s encouraged. But if we do have a bias, an institutional bias, is we were created—and as Nancy said—in the aftermath of the First World War, to stand against isolationism, because of the view that the interests of the U.S. are very much furthered by U.S. engagement with the world. And our mission is to inform American engagement with the world. 

And we do that by, you know, working with folks down the street at the White House, the State Department, all the departments, helping policymakers do their jobs, equipping them with information so they can make their decisions. We do that by working with our members who are leaders across business, finance, law, consulting, academia, science, technology, the arts, government. And so helping to educate them so they can integrate those issues into their work. And we do that by more broadly engaging with the rest of the American public—community leaders, religious leaders, local journalists, local and state officials, educators.  

RICHARDSON: We were talking earlier, you’re taking—you’re taking the show on the road, as they say. 

FROMAN: Taking the show on the road. We have a program supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to do a series of events around the election. We’re going to go to four battleground states, do events at a university, bring people in from the community to talk about what’s at stake in this election—nonpartisan. We’ll talk about the positions of the two candidates, what the tradeoffs embedded in those positions are, and help, hopefully, educate and provide voters, citizens, with a greater capacity to make a choice. 

RICHARDSON: Adding to our wonks and eccentrics number, hopefully. 

FROMAN: Absolutely. We’re going to expand those eccentrics everywhere. (Laughter.) 

RICHARDSON: At this time I’d like to invite participants to join our conversation with their questions. A reminder to everybody that this meeting is on the record. Who has questions for the ambassador? In the front, right here. Is there a mic? Yeah, great. 

FROMAN: By the way, I’m really glad that you got to ask the first one. You have to stand up. Because he’s holding a bottle of beer. (Laughter.) And, yeah. 

Q: I didn’t come for the food.  

FROMAN: I’ve been trying—I’ve been trying to update and modernize and introduce innovation to the Council. Evidently, for a long time only wine was allowed. (Laughter.) So enjoy the innovation. (Laughter.) 

Q: Thank you. My name is Brander Suero. I’m a policy analyst at Open Society Foundations, and I mainly work in Asia. 

And my question is, in the long term what’s more beneficial for U.S. leadership and peace and security in the region? Is it supporting stronger military alliances at the cost of human rights violations or supporting democratic movements that typically tend to go against ruling parties and may result in alienating those countries with the U.S.? 

FROMAN: It’s a great question. And it’s a fundamental question. And it’s something we want to do some more work in because we now have kind of fifty years of history—from Jimmy Carter to the present—of where human rights became a major foreign policy issue. And we’ve seen some successes. We’ve seen some failures. I think we haven’t actually taken a step back and said, how do you integrate human rights and values sufficiently into our foreign policy, recognizing that we have national interests that we need to pursue with countries that don’t meet those values and human rights. Again, is it just paying lip service to it? Is there other tactics that we can continue to pursue our values and advocate for human rights, even as we have to work with countries whose systems we don’t like, whose practices we don’t approve of? 

And I don’t think we’ve really come to a good—a good solution there. The reality is, we’re a country that has a multiplicity of interests. And no one interest can be privileged above all others, or at the exclusion of all others. So in some cases, we need military alliances because it’s key to our security. If you don’t have security, you don’t have anything. You know, if you don’t have security human rights is a luxury. And so it’s sort of fundamental. On the other hand, we know that to have a partner that is reliable we want a partner that is stable. And a partner that is stable usually requires that they deal with dissent and have pluralism and have an opportunity to hear different voices in their society.  

One thing that I think is so critical right now in this competition between democracies and autocracies is that—I think sometimes we read, oh, autocracy is on the rise, democracies are, you know, yesterday’s business. I don’t believe that. And I think we’ve seen—in the case of Russia with the decision to go into Ukraine, in the case of China the handling of COVID—that if you’re in autocracy you’re not getting the feedback loop you need to make good policy decisions. And you’re going to make some really serious mistakes. That democracies are still the better way of governance. But what we need to do, including here in the United States, including in this city, and between here and the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, is demonstrate that democracies work and that they can deliver.  

Because if—right now what’s happening is if you’re in Beijing, you know, and we talked to Chinese think tank and government officials all the time, you know, their view is, hey, we’ve been telling you democracies don’t work. And look what’s going on. They can’t pass a budget. They can’t pass a supplemental. There’s political division. The Council on Foreign Relations says the biggest challenge to national security is domestic violence over the election. Like they’re pointing out the weaknesses of democracy. And those weaknesses are real. And so we have to deal with our own house, get our own house in order, if we’re going to have the credibility to be advocating for democracy and for human rights around the world as well.  

RICHARDSON: Thank you.  

I want to go to our virtual audience.  

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Avery Bower. Please accept the unmute now prompt. 

Q: Can you hear me?  

RICHARDSON: Yes. 

FROMAN: Yes. 

Q: Wonderful. Thank you, Mr. Froman, for speaking here. 

Sort of talking about—you sort of came from the private sector background. And I was just sort of curious about sort of international commerce. One of the big issues that we’ve been facing over, really, the last year, has been the Houthi pirates interfering with sort of global trade. And the U.S., the U.K., a number of our allies sort of stepped in. But a lot of people are starting to say—including some military officials—are starting to say that the U.S. kind of been unable to defeat the Houthis. So I was just sort of wondering, one, do you sort of agree with those assessments that have been going around? And, two, what is a way that a President Harris or a President Trump might restore deterrence and sort of restore confidence in the global trade? 

FROMAN: Well, I think there are a lot of issues around global trade that probably go beyond the Red Sea and the role of the Houthis in trying to disrupt trade there. But if that’s the issue to focus on, look, I think we’ve got a really big challenge there, in that from Iran’s perspective—with relatively modest investment and with almost no loss of Iranian life—they’ve been able to act through proxies, whether it’s the Houthis or Hezbollah or Hamas or the various other movements in the region including In Iraq and in Syria, to disrupt the global order and to disrupt U.S. and other interests in the region. And we’ve seen that, as you said, with the Houthis’ activity in the Red Sea. 

There is a coalition of countries. I think it’s probably smaller than it should be. It’s interesting that some countries that are highly dependent on trade, including China, aren’t participating in defending the free rights of passage through the Red Sea. But there is a small group of countries that are. And we’ve seen, as the Houthis have been assertive in trying to attack ships, that U.S. and other forces have taken action against Houthi strongholds in Yemen as well. They haven’t eliminated the threat by any means, but hopefully through these attacks they are deterring some of the more aggressive—some of the more aggressive activity. The fact that the U.S. is there in the region in force—I’ve lost track now whether it’s one or it’s two aircraft carriers that are now in the region. But you got very significant naval assets, very significant air assets, and, of course, you have some soldiers on the ground in some of the places before, like in Jordan and elsewhere.  

That that between the U.S. presence there and what we saw last April, the collaboration of the U.S., the U.K., France, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan in defeating—defending and defeating the attack by Iran on Israel, that that begins to serve as a deterrent force. Having said that, as Meg said, there’s a real risk of escalation in the region. And it’s something that our forces, our State Department, Defense Department, White House, are keenly focused on, trying to ensure that it doesn’t become a regionwide war. But, you know, there’s asymmetry here, because with very little investment you can arm the Houthis, and in the meantime we have to deploy, you know, a fleet. And that’s a hard balance to maintain.  

RICHARDSON: Other questions? Yeah, in the front here. We’ll start with—yeah. 

Q: Hi. My name is Taylor Bloch. I work on technology at USAID.  

I believe one of the only continents I haven’t heard you talk about yet is Africa. And so I’d love to hear your thoughts on what are some of the biggest foreign policy issues and trends affecting the continent for the next year or so. 

FROMAN: Right. Well—what’s that? 

RICHARDSON: Good question. 

FROMAN: Yeah, very good question. It’s kind of question Devex usually asks me. 

RICHARDSON: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that.  

FROMAN: So I think, you know, the significance of Africa really can’t be overstated. It’s going to be the largest continent by population, as we look at the demographics over the next several decades. The youth bulge there is incredibly significant now and going to be even more significant going forward. We’ve seen in the recent years this series of coups and the reversal of some of the democratic progress that has—that has been made. There are some good news stories as well in Africa. And, you know, the challenge—one of the challenges, I think, that Africa faces is that the world doesn’t pay nearly enough attention to it. And when it does, it’s sort of—the pendulum swings between euphoria and condemnation. And there’s hardly any realistic assessment in between, which Africa, like every other continent, has got countries and leaders that are doing well and doing good by their people—doing well by their people. And they have other countries that are backsliding, have human rights problems, are seeing the reversal of progress on poverty alleviation.  

And then the one thing I’d say is the continent is kind of the crucible of climate change. And we’re seeing the effects of climate change already, whether it’s on conflicts, migration, scarcity of water, famine, et cetera. And I think that’s going to bring, unfortunately, Africa very much to the attention of the rest of the world, as it becomes an even greater source of migration to Europe and as we see a lot of negative developments in terms of both humanitarian situations developing on the continent as well as political instability.  

RICHARDSON: And, of course, China is also growing their relationship with many nations in Africa. I’m curious what you make of that.  

FROMAN: So they’ve been doing that for some time. And from China’s perspective, I think it makes perfect sense. Look, you have a certain degree of respect for the discipline that China pursues in furthering its own national interests, narrowly defined, all around the world. And so in the case of Africa, getting access to commodities that it particularly values. Making sure that it can get access to those commodities and, if necessary, at the expense of others. I always found, though, that—and I used to go to Africa quite often when I was in the administration—that the more the Chinese presence is there, the more Africans want the U.S. and Europe to be present. That China has not actually succeeded in transforming its quite sizable financial investments into broader soft power.  

It has—it has managed to, I’d say—I’ll say this gently, capture some of the elite and the leadership. And so they were quite responsive to Chinese interests. But the African population as a whole, I think the more they see Chinese investment, frankly, the more suspicious they are. And so I think that’s an opportunity for the U.S. But the U.S. can’t pursue that opportunity if it sits on the sidelines, right? If it doesn’t fund its foreign assistance, if it doesn’t fund PEPFAR—which has been one of the most successful and well-respected programs in Africa. And so the U.S. needs to be on the front foot here, and be smart about it.  

And what the U.S. brings that really no other country brings, not just to Africa but I think, to developing countries and emerging markets around the world, it’s a very special mix of entrepreneurship, innovation, research and development, great universities, risk capital, a legal system that promotes all of this, bankruptcy law, et cetera. You know, every country wants to—every entrepreneur in every country wants to build their business in the United States to get access to the capital here, the expertise here, the legal system that allows them to benefit from that. And that is a powerful magnet. You know, just like our universities are a powerful magnet. People all over the world want to send their children to American universities, and some in Europe too.  

That’s a great opportunity for us I think to continue to use our soft power. But we’ve got to be proactive about it. That means a sensible immigration approach. It means opening up some of these opportunities for people. I think as new technology comes—you were talking about technology—as new technology becomes available, to make sure that we’re sharing that technology, that it’s being developed in a way that doesn’t have biases against people in certain parts of the world, including in Africa, that it’s being used on projects, including development challenges, agricultural challenges, climate change, to help further the issues that they care about. And that they’re a part of that process.  

RICHARDSON: Questions? I’m going to go to the back. I see a hand all the way in the corner. 

Q: Hi. Sorry I’m so hard to get to. I’m Edyt Dickstein. I work at HPSCI. 

And I was wondering, you talked about two strengths of the U.S. as being both from the capital side economically as well as the fact that the U.S. is reliable. But I feel like some of the major arguments I’ve heard from foreign partners is that because we’re a democracy the government, on one hand, can’t force businesses to invest in the way, say, China or other countries can. And then, of course, with the different administration they can just switch policies more broadly. And I’m wondering if you can kind of touch base on that tension between those two. 

FROMAN: Yeah. Look, let me take reliability first. I don’t think I said that, but I understand your—I understand your point.  

I think we’re at a moment where there are a lot of issues where we need to have a conversation about is there a common approach that has at least enduring support? You know, Ukraine is a good example. The Ukraine supplemental package ultimately passed by, I think it was, 80 percent of Congress. You know, that’s pretty—very few things pass, other than naming a post office—(laughter)—by that kind of margin in Congress. I think that shows that there is some underlying support here by the American people and by their representatives. There are lots of obstacles in the way of that—of that vote happening. There were lots of obstacles. And, you know, that coalition could fall apart quite quickly, I think, if there were—if leadership was somewhat different.  

So I think that’s an issue that we have to—we have to address. We have to, I think, get people back from thinking about party and partisan positions to thinking about national interest. And we can have a debate about national interest. Like, there isn’t—you know, there may be one view that was held thirty years ago about how to define the national interest. That may be defined differently now. That’s a worthwhile debate to have. But ultimately, what we need to do is align our policies with our national interests. And those national interests don’t change every four years. Now, they may change every generation. You know, we have to learn from the past. But they don’t change every four years. And we need to be able to maintain enough support for that to—for that to happen going forward. 

On the issue of the private sector, you’re right. The government can’t order the private sector. I have to say, I’ve now been involved from the government side and from the private sector side in various experiments with, for lack of a better term, public-private partnerships. When I was in government, and particularly when I was a junior in government, when we said public-private partnerships we really meant we wanted the private sector to write a check, right? (Laughter.) That’s what the partnership was. You write the check, we’ll take it.  

Now it’s really evolved, I think, to be a much more sophisticated notion. And so working with the private sector using tools of government—whether it’s, for example, the International Development Finance Corporation, or tools of the World Bank where you can use blended capital, you could use guarantee authority to try and crowd in investment from the private sector, the CHIPS Act where, you know, not everybody is a is a fan, but I think we can see a lot of positive development where the money that the CHIPS Act is deploying is crowding in tens of billions of dollars of additional private sector money. So we need to be creative about how we work with the private sector, how we use what are limited public resources, taxpayer resources, to leverage, crowd in, and incentivize the private sector to operate as well.  

Ultimately, the private sector has its own imperatives. It’s shareholder driven. It’s results driven. You can’t expect a company to give up its results, you know, in the interest of being asked by the White House to do something entirely unnatural. But I think what you can do is try and figure out how those activities ultimately achieve shareholder value. When I was at MasterCard I focused a lot on financial inclusion and inclusive growth. And the case we made, and it was accepted by investors and otherwise, is we can bring a billion people into the financial system through technology.  

That’s good for the company. It’s good for the world, but it’s also good for the company because the company is then seeding the next generation of consumers. Every sector has an issue like that, where there’s something that’s—it’s not an issue of shareholder value versus stakeholder value, in my view. It’s an issue of short term versus long term value creation. And if you’re able and willing and have coherence around what a long-term vision is for value creation, you can engage in some of the—in these kinds of activities that also have public benefit.  

RICHARDSON: I believe we have a question from our virtual audience.  

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Natalia Kanos. 

Q: Hi. Thank you so much for this conversation.  

Mine kind of relates to a previous question asked about relations with the continent of Africa as a whole. I know you briefly spoke about how U.S. foreign relations was going to be dependent on, like, who won this election, either Harris or Trump. Can you speak to how those perspectives of who wins the election will be—affect how Africa’s foreign relation policy works, and that relationship? 

FROMAN: A good question. Look, I don’t think either campaign has laid out a detailed policy position of what their approach to Africa would be. You know, historically we’ve had programs like PEPFAR, which was launched by President Bush. We’ve had programs like AGOA, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which was a trade preferences program started initially by President Clinton and renewed by every president—from every president since. We’ve had initiatives like Power Africa, trying to double the percentage— 

RICHARDSON: Which you were a big part of. 

FROMAN: —the percentage of Africa that was—had access to affordable and reliable electricity. And that’s something that has continued. Started in the Obama administration, continued in the Trump administration. Continues now in the Biden-Harris administration. So I think—you know, I think there are a number of pillars that any administration going forward is likely to want to focus on. And in some cases, the issue is what does Africa serve up to the rest of the world that we have to react to? Coups, humanitarian crises, refugee crises. And, you know, how does the rest of the world respond?  

But if we can maintain those areas of focus, with a strong humanitarian and development approach, a strong approach around trying to lever in the capabilities of the private sector, including technology, and then working with the governments in the—in the region to enhance their governance issues, to address corruption, to improve their regulatory environments, you know, those are good, long-term objectives for any administration to have there.  

RICHARDSON: And I would just add the global health situation as well. 

FROMAN: Global health, absolutely. 

RICHARDSON: Which, of course, we cover quite a bit, at Devex. You know, that’s certainly something that is—will be focused on and under any administration.  

FROMAN: Absolutely. 

RICHARDSON: Well, I think we have time for about one more question. Over in the corner here. 

Q: Thank you. Hi. I’m Alex. I come from the Middle East team at the Atlantic Council.  

The following has nothing to do with the Middle East. Well, you know, not explicitly, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask a former trade representative specifically. Which is, with the CHIPS Act and with certain provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, I feel that we’re kind of leaning more towards mercantilism, the justification is just different. It’s not about building wealth; it’s about protecting supply chain security. What are your thoughts on that? 

FROMAN: That’s it? (Laughter.) 

RICHARDSON: A small—a small question. 

FROMAN: Look, I think that issue, it points out—this is something we’re trying to do here at the Council you may be aware of—which is to really highlight the tradeoffs involved in policy making. So we really hate being overly dependent on China. We also really hate inflation and the high cost of living. The actions we take to reduce our dependence on China will almost certainly raise the cost of the products that particularly low-income Americans are going to have to pay, because they tend to be more dependent on imported products like clothing, footwear, et cetera. That’s a tradeoff.  

Now, the tradeoff may be worth it. We may say, given this competition we have with China there are certain goods we need to be prepared to pay more for to have them made in the United States or to have them made in friendly countries. But we ought to have that conversation openly and say: How much are we willing to pay? And I think that will help us make a distinction between strategic goods and nonstrategic goods. It’s not clear to me that a T-shirt is strategic. That we need to make T-shirts in the United States in order to have national security. So why do we have tariffs on them? On the other hand, if we’re going to invest tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money in building out an electric vehicle sector, and a clean energy sector, battery sector, then we may want to make sure we’re creating the time and space available for those industries to get their feet on the ground. And that may mean keeping imports from China out. That’s the debate.  

It means it’s going to be more expensive. We’re not going to have the same selection of electric vehicles that we would have if we allow the Chinese vehicles in. But at the end of the day, we may have a robust electric vehicle sector. And we’ve seen how important an auto sector, an airplane sector, a steel sector has been to the health and the success of the United States over the last century-plus. So that’s the argument, I think, that is to be made. But I think we’ve now gone through a series of experiments with industrial policy, export controls, restrictions on foreign investment, and tariffs, where we can take a step back and say, OK, what are the tradeoffs involved in here? Are there certain limiting principles that we should have? 

You know, neoliberalism, which is much maligned these days, but was the system that sort of ruled our global economy for a very long time, and, frankly, still does to a great deal. There’s still globalization. We’ve not deglobalized. And it has led to the largest decrease in poverty in human history, over a very short period of time. But it’s had its cost, particularly in advanced industrialized countries which saw the disruption to the manufacturing sector. And it’s had that because our system wasn’t really designed—the rules-based system wasn’t really designed to incorporate a country as big, and as important, and as well-integrated as China, that follows a different set of rules.  

For years, we tried to convince the Chinese to change their rules. We argued against them closing their markets. We argued against them restricting investment. We argued against them subsidizing industries, and distorting the production, and creating overcapacity. And they have effectively, I think, ignored us. The result is—you know, we had hoped China was going to become more like us. The result is we have become more like China. So we’re engaging in tariffs. We’re engaging in foreign investment restrictions. We’re engaging in expert controls. We’re engaging in industrial policy. We have to figure out now going forward, are there a set of limiting principles and rules that should govern these new—these new tools? Because they all come at a cost. The one thing we know that is clear is that no policy is costless. We sometimes pretend that that’s the case, but we have to weigh the costs and then decide, OK, how much are we willing to pay?  

RICHARDSON: We are out of time. I want to just finish this off by asking one quick question. Since we are at the Young Professionals briefing, what is one piece of advice, one thing you wish you had known when you were in our shoes, at this age? 

FROMAN: I wish I had known there was a Term Member Program. (Laughter.) No, let’s see, look, I’m going to say something trite and obvious. And it is that you’re all hard workers. And you’re all incredibly well educated. And you’re very professional. And those are all really important attributes. Ultimately, your success is sort of sitting around you, next to you. And it’s getting to know the people who you work with, getting to know people in your—in your sector, or in other areas that you might be interested in. And then, very importantly—and I’ve benefited hugely from having a series of mentors over my academic life, and then my professional life. To me, it’s much less important what you do in government, or in your job, what the domain knowledge is, than who you work for and what you can learn from them. And so I would say, be on a never-ending search for mentors who can teach you the things that you can’t just read in books, or get from a university, or learn in the day-to-day job.  

RICHARDSON: Well, thank you, Mike Froman. We now have our marching orders. Thanks for joining today’s session, and really appreciate all of the insight you gave us. Please note that the video and the transcript of this briefing will be posted on the CFR website. And then, with your advice in mind, I’ll invite you to stick around and meet and greet everybody in the room. Thank you. 

FROMAN: A pleasure. (Applause.) Thank you. Well done. 

(END) 

This is an uncorrected transcript.