Michael Froman

Michael Braverman Goodman Froman (born August 20, 1962) is an American lawyer who is the current president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Froman served as the U.S. Trade Representative from 2013 to 2017. He was Assistant to the President of the United States and Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs, a position held jointly at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council. In that position he served as the United States sherpa to the G7, G8, and G20 summits of economic powers. On May 2, 2013, President Barack Obama nominated him to succeed Ambassador Ron Kirk as the U.S. trade representative. He was confirmed on June 19, 2013.

Early life and education

Born August 20, 1962, Froman grew up in a Jewish family in San Rafael and graduated from the Branson School. As a teenager, Froman was active in the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization, serving as the 56th International President in 1980. He later spoke at the BBYO International Convention in Washington, D.C., in February 2013. Froman received a B.A. in Public and International Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University with a senior thesis entitled Negotiating from Strength: The Principle of Power in US-Soviet Arms Control in 1985, a D.Phil. in International Relations entitled The development of the idea of detente in American political discourse, 1952-1985, supervised by Sir Michael Howard, and also where he was an associate of Obama on the Harvard Law Review.

Career Froman served as liaison of the American Bar Association's Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI) legal assistance program in Albania. He was also a member of the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission in Brussels.

Between January 1993 and December 1995, Froman was Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs on the United States National Economic Council, a position held jointly at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council.

Froman and Obama were not in touch after their time at Harvard until Obama's 2004 Senate campaign, when Froman volunteered to advise Obama on policy; he introduced Obama to Robert Rubin. and joined the White House for a second run in 2009. He went back to the position he held during the Clinton years, as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council until 2013.

U.S. Trade Representative On May 2, 2013, Froman was nominated to serve as U.S. Trade Representative. Financial documents provided to the Senate Finance Committee showed he had nearly $500,000 in an offshore fund at Ugland House on the Cayman Islands, which Obama had once described as "the biggest tax scam in the world". In 2013, congressional testimony Kevin Brady, criticized the EU low carbon fuel standard, where oil from tar-sands is classified by itself due to its higher carbon polluting impact compared to regular oil as a "discriminatory, environmentally unjustified" trade barrier, to which Froman responded, "I share your concerns", followed by a description of his work to "press the Commission to take the views of . . . U.S. refiners under consideration". Froman's role as in the drafting of classified trade deals (made public by WikiLeaks) was under scrutiny by lawyers and politicians alike. One of the four dissenting senators was Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren, who faulted Froman for "refusing to commit to [...] standards of transparency in trade talks set by the George W. Bush administration". Environmental groups have criticized Froman for negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement in secret and that he "took care of his friends on Wall Street and in corporate board rooms at the expense of sound environmental and climate policy".

From 2013-2017, Froman served as the lead negotiator on the U.S. side for a bilateral investment treaty with China. The negotiations had been on-going since 2008.

In September 2018, he became a director of The Walt Disney Company.

Since 2019, he has also been serving on the Transatlantic Task Force of the German Marshall Fund and the Bundeskanzler-Helmut-Schmidt-Stiftung (BKHS), co-chaired by Karen Donfried and Wolfgang Ischinger.

In March 2023, he was chosen as the new president of the Council on Foreign Relations, succeeding Richard N. Haass, who led the organization for two decades.

Personal Froman lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Nancy Goodman.