Freedom and Prosperity Center

Michael Fisch is a founder of American Securities and has been CEO since inception in 1994. He is also a Managing Member of the general partners of the American Securities Partners’ series of private equity funds and a member of the Investment Committee of AS Birch Grove, an affiliate of American Securities. Before founding American Securities, he was a partner in two private equity funds, a consultant in the Paris office of Bain & Company, and a professional in the mergers and acquisitions department of Goldman Sachs.

Michael received a BA in Economics and Policy Studies from Dartmouth College, where he is a Member of the President’s Leadership Council, and an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he has been a guest lecturer since 2006. Michael serves as a Director of the 1162 Foundation, a Member of the Atlantic Council’s Board of Directors and its Executive Committee, a Member of the Board of Trustees of Northwell Health, and Chair of the Board of Trustees of Princeton Theological Seminary.

He has authored a number of articles and appeared as a guest on national television programs, all on private equity and investing.

Senior executive with a demonstrated history of working in the health care services, medical device and pharmaceutical industries, having served in various senior management roles at Fresenius Medical Care, AstraZeneca and Syngenta.

Transformational leader experienced in change management, business development and innovation, negotiation, mergers & acquisitions. A founding member and sponsor for Asia Pacific Women’s Leadership Initiative at Fresenius and a leading advocate for diversity and inclusion in workplace.

International business and legal experience with a Doctor of Law (JD) from Harvard Law School and an MBA from HKUST.

Michelle S. Giuda is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center, and the CEO of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue University, harnessing Purdue’s leadership in innovative research, commercialization, STEM education, corporate partnerships, and national security to advance the mission of safeguarding freedom from techno-authoritarianism.

From February 2018 to March 2020, Giuda served as the US assistant secretary of state for global public affairs. In February 2019, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also delegated to Giuda the authorities of the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. In this capacity, she also served as a board member of the US agency for Global Media. In May 2019, Giuda led and executed the largest restructuring at the State Department in twenty years to modernize the department’s global public affairs and public diplomacy operations. Giuda also served as executive vice president of geopolitical strategy and risk at Weber Shandwick, counseling clients to prepare for and address the impact of geopolitical issues on their business and reputation.

Previously, Giuda was senior vice president of global corporate communications at Weber Shandwick and deputy press secretary for 2012 presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Giuda is a member of Business Executives for National Security and a senior advisor to Concordia. She was honored in 2016 with the Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business Award by the Asian American Business Development Center.

Giuda received her master’s degree in political management from George Washington University and earned a BA in political science from the University of California Los Angeles where she was an NCAA champion and team captain of the women’s gymnastics team.

Matthew Kroenig is the director of studies at the Atlantic Council, and the senior director of the Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. In these roles, he oversees the Council’s extensive network of nonresident experts, leads the Scowcroft Center’s global strategy unit, and manages a bipartisan team of over forty resident staff. His own research focuses on US national-security strategy, great-power competition with China and Russia, and strategic deterrence and weapons nonproliferation.

Kroenig has served in several positions in the US government. He is currently a commissioner on the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States. He previously served in the Department of Defense and the intelligence community in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, including in the Strategy, Middle East, and Nuclear and Missile Defense offices in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Strategic Assessments Group. From 2017 to 2021, he was a special government employee and senior policy adviser to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capability/Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy. In this role, he provided advice on matters relating to the formulation, drafting, coordination, and implementation of nuclear-deterrence policy and strategy in support of the 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review. In 2011, he developed strategic options for addressing Iran’s nuclear program. In 2005, he was the principal author of the first-ever US-government-wide strategy for deterring terrorist networks. For this work, he received the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Award for Outstanding Achievement. He is a featured character in the New York Times bestselling book, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign against Al Qaeda, by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker. He was a national security adviser on the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney (2012) and Marco Rubio (2016). He has testified before Congress and regularly consults with the White House, State Department, Pentagon, Congress, the intelligence community, and allied governments.

Kroenig is also a tenured professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University. A 2019 study in Perspectives on Politics ranked him one of the top twenty-five most cited political scientists of his generation.

He is the author or editor of seven books, including The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the US and China (Oxford University Press, 2020), which was Amazon’s number one new release in international relations. The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (Oxford University Press, 2018) was selected by the US Air Force for its professional reading list and was translated into Chinese and Korean. Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons (Cornell University Press, 2010) was awarded the International Studies Association Best Book Award, Honorable Mention.

Kroenig co-authors the bimonthly “It’s Debatable” column at Foreign Policy. His articles and commentary have appeared in many other publications, including American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Strategic Studies, Politico, Security Studies, Strategic Studies Quarterly, the Atlantic, the New Republic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, among others. He provides regular commentary for major broadcast media outlets, including on PBS Newshour, Fareed Zakaria GPS, CBS, BBC, CNN, Fox News, NPR All Things Considered, and C-SPAN.

Previously, he was the Stanton nuclear security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Security at Harvard University, and a research fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Hertog Foundation, and the Stanton Foundation. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and holds an MA and PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. Follow him on Twitter @matthewkroenig.

Barry Pavel is the head of the national security research division at the RAND Corporation.  Before that he headed the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, focusing on emerging security challenges, defense strategies and capabilities, and key European and global defense issues.

Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, he was a career member of the Senior Executive Service in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for almost eighteen years. From October 2008 to July 2010, he served as the special assistant to the President and senior director for defense policy and strategy on the National Security Council (NSC) staff, serving both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. In this capacity, Pavel led the development of five of the first eight Obama Administration Presidential Study Directives. He was the initiator and architect of the NSC’s first-ever National Security Priorities Review and a key contributor to the President’s 2010 National Security Strategy. He led the NSC’s oversight of the four Defense Department strategic reviews (the Quadrennial Defense Review, Nuclear Posture Review, Ballistic Missile Defense Review, and Space Posture Review), including the President’s September 2009 decision on European missile defense and all presidential decisions on nuclear policy and posture; co-led the development of the president’s June 2010 National Space Policy; and contributed to the president’s policies on Europe and NATO, Korea, cyberspace, Defense Department operational plans and activities, military family policy, and other matters.

Prior to this position, Pavel was the chief of staff and principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations/low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities. He helped Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Vickers develop policy on the capabilities and operational employment of special operations forces, strategic forces, and conventional forces. His main areas of work covered strategic capabilities policy, including development of the first Defense Department cyber deterrence strategy and better aligning the department’s approach to cyberspace activities and capabilities with defense strategy and policy.

From October 1993 to November 2006, Pavel led or contributed to a broad range of defense strategy and planning initiatives for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He led the Clinton administration’s development of the Defense Planning Guidance and the defense planning for the first round of NATO enlargement. He also contributed to President Clinton’s National Security Strategies and the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). As the principal director for strategy, he also played a leading role in the conduct of the 2001 QDR, the global defense posture realignment, and the development of the 2005 US National Defense Strategy. Other main work areas included: the Secretary of Defense’s Security Cooperation Guidance and the first Interagency Security Cooperation Strategy Conference; the Unified Command Plan; post-9/11 deterrence policy (including deterrence of terrorist networks and regional nuclear powers); strategies for reducing ungoverned areas; and a long-range planning construct that accounts for trends and “strategic shocks” that could significantly change Department of Defense’s role in national security.

Pavel holds an MA in security studies and an MPA in international relations from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and a BA in applied mathematics and economics from Brown University. While at Princeton, he was a founding editorial board member of the Journal of Public and International Affairs. He also served in the Office of the Defense Advisor, US Mission to NATO, and as a consultant to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.

Prior to Princeton, Mr. Pavel served in the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), where he specialized in research on force planning and coauthored numerous IDA reports and publications.

Pavel received a Presidential Rank Award in 2007 in recognition of his career accomplishments. He also has served as a key adviser to policy leadership on civil service professional development and mentorship. He is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and speaks and writes on a wide range of foreign and security policy issues. He also is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

J. Peter Pham rejoined the Atlantic Council as a distinguished fellow in March 2021, after concluding public service as United States Special Envoy for the Sahel Region with the personal rank of Ambassador. He had previously been Atlantic Council vice president for research and regional initiatives and director of the Council’s Africa Center.

From 2018 to 2020, Ambassador Pham served as the United States Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa at the US Department of State with a mandate from Secretary of State Michael Pompeo “for coordinating the implementation of U.S. policy on the cross-border security, political, and economic issues in the Great Lakes region, with an emphasis on strengthening democratic institutions and civil society, as well as the safe and voluntary return of the region’s refugees and internally displaced persons.”

In March 2020, he was appointed the first-ever US Special Envoy for the Sahel, a position created to assume “the lead in shaping, devising and coordinating U.S. strategy on the cross-border security, political, economic, assistance, and social issues arising in the Sahel as well as coordinating with both international partners and U.S. Government stakeholders to help return the Sahel to stability through programs to enhance security and support governance, political liberalization, social progress and economic development.”

Prior to joining the Atlantic Council in 2011, Ambassador Pham was previously senior vice president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, and editor of its bimonthly journal, American Foreign Policy Interests. He was also a tenured associate professor of justice studies, political science, and Africana studies at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he was director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs. He served on the Senior Advisory Group of the US Africa Command from 2008-2013.

From 2008 to 2017 he also served as vice president of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), an academic organization which represents more than 1,300 scholars of Middle Eastern and African Studies at more than 300 colleges and universities in the United States and overseas and was founding editor-in-chief of ASMEA’s peer-reviewed Journal of the Middle East and Africa.

Ambassador Pham is the author of more than 300 essays and reviews and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books, including, most recently, Somalia: Fixing Africa’s Most Failed State (Tafelberg, 2013; coauthored with Greg Mills and David Kilcullen). Dr. Pham also contributes to a number of publications including The National Interest and Foreign Policy, and regularly appears as a commentator on broadcast and print media outlets including CBS, PBS, VOA, CNN, the Fox News Channel, MSNBC, NPR, the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, USA Today, Newsweek, US News & World Report, the Times of London, New Statesman, Maclean’s, Le Monde, and Le Temps.

A longtime staunch advocate of robust American engagement with Africa, Ambassador Pham served as member of the USAID-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) delegation monitoring the historic post-conflict national elections in Liberia in 2005. He also served on the IRI pre-election assessment (2006) and election observation delegations to Nigeria (2007, 2011) and Somaliland (2010). He is also a frequent guest lecturer on African affairs at the Foreign Service Institute, the US Army War College, the Joint Special Operations University, and other US government professional educational institutions.

In 2015, the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution elected Ambassador Pham to the Board of the National Museum of African Art, reelecting him to successive terms in 2018 and 2021. He served concurrently as vice-chair of the Board from 2016-2021.

Ambassador Pham is the recipient of numerous honors and awards from African countries in recognition of contributions made over the course of his career to strengthening relations between the United States and Africa, including Commander of the National Order of Mali, Commander of the National Order of Burkina Faso, Officer of the National Order of Merit of Niger, Commander of the National Order of Merit of Gabon, and Commander of the Order of the Friendship of Peoples of Burundi.

Kenneth Roth served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organization, which operates in some 100 countries.

Before that, Roth served as a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigations and missions around the world, meeting with dozens of heads of state and countless ministers. He is quoted widely in the media and has written hundreds of articles on a wide range of human rights issues, devoting special attention to the world’s most dire situations, the conduct of war, the foreign policies of the major powers, the work of the United Nations, and the global contest between autocracy and democracy. Roth is currently writing a book about the strategies used by Human Rights Watch to defend human rights, drawing on his years of experience.

Ambassador Michael George DeSombre is a partner at the international law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell where he leads their Asia M&A practice as well as the Korea and Southeast Asia practices. Ambassador DeSombre served as the United States Ambassador to the Kingdom of Thailand from 2020-2021. During his tenure in Thailand, Ambassador DeSombre focused on energizing the strategic relationship and strengthening the economic partnership between the United States and Thailand. While serving as Ambassador to Thailand, DeSombre worked closely with the Royal Thai Government on economic reforms to encourage the relocation of supply chains and manufacturing to Thailand. Ambassador DeSombre was deeply involved in the United States Indo-Pacific Strategy and pioneered the all-of-Embassy economic diplomacy and deal team structure that has been emulated at many other US embassies. Key accomplishments during his tenure included the sale of Textron T-6 aircraft to the Royal Thai Air Force, delivery of Strykers to the Royal Thai Army, hosting the inaugural Roundtable Discussion on Religious Freedom attended by representatives of all religions in Thailand, and hosting the inaugural Conference on helping Thai Companies Go Global with the CEOs of the five largest Thai companies that have significant operations in the US.

Ambassador DeSombre serves as a Senior Diplomatic Advisor to the Keith Krach Center for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue as well as an Advisor to the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Indices. Ambassador DeSombre is recognized as one of the preeminent mergers & acquisitions and private equity lawyers in the world and is a frequent speaker on the art of negotiations. From 2015-2020 Ambassador DeSombre served as the Chairman of the Board of Save the Children Hong Kong where he doubled the revenue and substantially expanded the children supported by their programs. Ambassador DeSombre has a Bachelor’s degree in Quantitative Economics and a Masters degree in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and has a JD degree (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School. He speaks Mandarin Chinese fluently and has some ability in Korean and Japanese.

Vanessa Rubio Márquez had a 25 year-long career in Mexico’s public sector, including serving as a senator and three times Deputy Minister (Finance, Foreign Affairs and Social Development). She has vast experience in domestic and international policymaking and implementation, including in the financial sector, public finances, international trade, poverty reduction and migration. Vanessa was in charge of Mexico’s foreign policy with Latin America and the Caribbean for three years and was a key actor of Mexico’s economic and financial relations with the world for almost fifteen years. She represented Mexico at the G-20, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and several regional development banks (IADB, CABEI, CDB and CAF, amongst others).

She was involved in the negotiation of the US- Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the finalization of the Pacific Alliance treaty and the implementation of the Mexico-Central America Single Treaty.

Vanessa is Associate Dean and Professor of Practice at the School of Public Policy of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Senior Advisor at McLarty Associates. She is also Associate Fellow for the US and Americas Programme at Chatham House and member of the Mexican Council of International Affairs (COMEXI), the International Women’s Forum (IWF), Hispanas Organized for Political Equality (HOPE) and the LSE’s Latin America and the Caribbean Centre (LAC).

Danladi Verheijen is the Co-Founder/CEO of Verod, a leading African investment firm specializing in growth private equity and venture capital strategies.  Before Verod, he held roles at Citibank, Ocean & Oil Holdings and McKinsey & Company.  Danladi sits on the Board of several Verod portfolio companies.  In addition, he is a Board Member of the African Venture Capital Association and Chairman of the Board of the Private Equity & Venture Capital Association of Nigeria.

Danladi has an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.Sc. in Engineering Economic Systems & Operations Research from Stanford University, and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Calvin College.  Danladi was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and one of Africa’s top 20 rising stars in finance by Euromoney in 2014.

Andrew Wilson is the Executive Director of the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) in Washington, DC. Mr Wilson has worked with CIPE since 1996 and served a variety of roles including Deputy Director for Strategic Planning and Programs, and Regional Director for Europe, Eurasia, and South Asia at CIPE.

Working with CIPE, he has extensive experience in dealing with private sector development issues in conflict and post-conflict settings, crafting successful business strategies to reduce corruption, encouraging entrepreneurship development, strengthening business advocacy, improving corporate governance standards, and the promotion of economic reform. He has worked with not for profit boards to improve strategic planning and organizational development, and has served on several international working groups dealing with political and economic development in transitional societies.

Wilson has worked at CIPE since 1996, and prior to that worked for several development NGOs focusing on economic reform, private sector development, and public diplomacy. He received his MA in East European Area Studies from the University of London (SSEES) and a BA in History from Lewis and Clark College. He is a board member of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, the Regional Center for Organizational Management in Bucharest, Romania, and is a Director of the Meadows, Foundation in Dallas, Texas.