Speeches

Suleimani’s Extrajudicial Killing Legitimizes Assassination as a Foreign Policy Tool
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
01/06/2020

This was not a retaliation, as claimed, but the pre-planned exploitation of a pretext to assassinate a foreign official designated as an enemy as well as the commander of an Iraqi militia hostile to the United States.  It was an act of war that will inevitably evoke reprisal.  Iran has already pr

The 1981-82 Sino-American Taiwan Arms Sales Negotiations
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.) Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
The Foreign Service Institute, Arlington, Virginia, 19 August 2019

Like everyone here, I feel honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country.  I did so for three decades before entering the private sector a quarter century ago.  I now chair a globally engaged business development company and the Committee for the Republic.  I also lecture at Brown Univ

On Hostile Coexistence with China
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.) | Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
Stanford, California

President Trump’s trade war with China has quickly metastasized into every other domain of Sino-American relations.   Washington is now trying to dismantle China’s interdependence with the American economy, curb its role in global governance, counter its foreign investments, cripple its companies

Order in Turmoil: Making Sense of Kaleidoscopic Change in the Middle East
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.) | Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Providence, Rhode Island, March 11, 2019
Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 28, 2019

By now it is widely accepted that U.S. influence in the Middle East is in something approaching freefall. The Arab uprisings of 2011 overthrew the governments in Tunis, Egypt, and Yemen, stimulated bloody miscalculations by both the Syrian government and its opposition, and destabilized Bahrain.

After the Trade War, a Real War with China?
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.) | Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
St. Petersburg, Florida

 

I’m here at your kind invitation to discuss China, how bad our relations with it may get, and how the contest we’ve initiated with China is likely to play out.  Let me take a minute or two to set the context for this discussion.