He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Atlantic Council where he was the Founding Senior Director of the Freedom and Prosperity Center. Between 2021 and 2024, he established the center’s unique annual freedom and prosperity indexes covering 164 countries over 29 years, and the related research reports and country atlas. He started two annual international convenings: the center’s Washington D.C. research conference and the Rome conference on religious freedom and integral human development.

Between 2019 and 2021, he served as the State Department’s Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs. He pioneered and led the Deal Team Initiative, a coordination mechanism between 14 U.S. government agencies, the NSC, and the NEC to help U.S. companies win business abroad, especially by leveling the playing field with China.

He was between 2018 and 2019 a Senior Advisor in the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff where he was responsible for the economic portfolio. He coordinated the Global Entrepreneurship Summit held in The Hague in 2019 that was attended by 2,000 leaders from government, business, and international organizations.

Prior to that, he was a founder and managing partner of MTN Capital Partners, a New York private equity firm associated with over $500 million in transactions.

Between 1981 and 2003 he held senior positions in leveraged finance with top Wall Street firms. He raised over $15 billion in financings in the United States and abroad, in a broad range of industries.

In his youth, he defected from Communist Romania where he had been an official in the Ministry of Finance involved in negotiating government loans with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

He holds an MBA from Cornell University and an MBA from the School of International Economic Relations in Bucharest, Romania.

He was the co-author of We Win They Lose. Republican Foreign Policy and the New Cold War, published in 2024.

He was the lead editor of 2024 Atlas: Freedom and Prosperity Around the World and of The Freedom and Prosperity Equation, a collection of essays published in 2023.

His articles on foreign affairs appeared in The National Interest, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The American Conservative, Fox News, National Review, The Washington Times, The Spectator, The Jerusalem Strategic Review, Real Clear World, Real Clear Defense, and The Week.

He is a member of the Order of Malta, a Catholic charitable organization.