Very early in his career, Freeman had been the personal interpreter for President Richard Nixon during his historic 1972 trip to China and meetings with Mao, and that country remained one of his areas of special expertise.

During subsequent decades, Freeman served as our ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time of the Gulf War and was afterward appointed as an assistant secretary of defense. Then in early 2009, the Obama Administration nominated him as chairman of our National Intelligence Council, responsible for assessing and aggregating the findings of our 17 different intelligence agencies, and then providing the final report to our president and other top leaders. But the Israel Lobby regarded Freeman as insufficiently loyal to the foreign nation that they served, so their activists successfully mobilized to block his appointment.

Despite his very distinguished record of accomplishment, Freeman was rarely interviewed by our media so I was only slightly aware of him. However, over the last year he had become a regular guest on several YouTube channels and he greatly impressed me with his knowledge and acumen, prompting me to publish that piece quoting long sections of his extremely sensible views on our troubled relationship with China.

Ambassador Chas Freeman on Our Cold War Against China
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 9, 2024 • 7,500 Words
In that article I noted the vital role played by the Internet, whose video platforms and social media distribution channels now provided the entire world with access to views and ideas that had routinely been blocked by the gatekeepers of the traditional electronic media.

Under different political circumstances, someone like Freeman might have spent the last couple of decades as a top foreign policy advisor to our president, but despite his knowledge and eminence only the Internet transformed him from a name barely known to me into someone whose views I carefully followed on a weekly basis. And much the same had happened with many other individuals, including leading academic scholars and national security experts such as Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Ted Postol, Ray McGovern, Larry Wilkerson, and Douglas Macgregor.

Despite all of this, I only belatedly recognized that the power of this same Internet can also enormously magnify the impact of ordinary, apolitical citizens, whose personal experiences can potentially inform our understanding of major geopolitical controversies.