Active on the front lines of the struggle to help oppressed people achieve democracy in the Middle East, China, North Korea and beyond, Ambassador Mark Palmer brings an unusual set of skills, experiences and passions to the task. Through the years of the Cold War and up to the present, he is a respected foreign policy innovator inside and outside the U.S. Government. He served in policy positions in the State Department in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and first Bush Administrations, including launching the National Endowment for Democracy. From the outside, he has worked with both the Clinton and present Bush Administrations, helping persuade them to initiate new democracy policies, including the Community of Democracies and abolishing the so-called Arab exception, for the first time promoting democracy in the Arab world.

 

He has practical experience inside dictatorships, working directly with dictators, and helping to oust them without a shot being fired. He lived for eleven years in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Hungary under the Communists as a student and diplomat. He organized and participated in the first Reagan-Gorbachev summit as the State Department’s top “Kremlinologist,” and as the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary helped persuade its last dictator to leave power. He has been active on China and the Middle East – recently for example as the founding board member of an organization to support the largest movement for change in China, the Falun Gong, member of the Advisory Board of the American Libyan Freedom Alliance and working to support the emergence of politically independent commercial television and radio stations throughout the Not Free countries of the Arab world and beyond.

From his days in the U.S. civil rights movement as a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, through demonstrating in the streets of Budapest as ambassador, to marching with the students in Belgrade against Milosevic in 1996, he has witnessed and practiced the power of organized non-violent force in achieving freedom and justice. As a successful venture capitalist and investor from 1990 to the present, and president of his own firm, Capitol Development Company LLC, he also has realized the potential of business in the transition to democracy. He co-founded Central European Media Enterprises which financed and launched the first national independent television stations in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Ukraine with over $600 million in investment. Finally, he is a recognized writer and advocate – having written speeches for six Secretaries of State and three Presidents, including as principal speechwriter for Henry Kissinger and co-author of Ronald Reagan’s favorite speech, and as Vice Chairman of the Board of Freedom House, a frequent contributor to published appeals and policy statements, and participant in democracy programs in the United States and across the arc of dictatorships stretching from China, through the Middle East and Africa, on to Belarus and Cuba. He is the author of “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025”, Rowman & Littlefield, October, 2003.