Michael Gfoeller
Ambassador Michael Gfoeller is an independent consultant on international politics and economics.
Ambassador Gfoeller served from 1984 to 2010 as an American diplomat. His diplomatic career included service in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Manama, Bahrain; Iraq; Moscow, Russia; Yerevan, Armenia; Chisinau, Moldova; Warsaw, Poland; and Brussels, Belgium. His assignments included two years (2008-2010) as the Senior Political Advisor to General David Petraeus, then Commander, US Central Command. From 2004 to 2008, he served as Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge' d'Affaires at the US Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He retired from the State Department with the rank of Ambassador and Minister Counselor.
Ambassador Gfoeller also served as the director of Middle East and North African (MENA) affairs at Exxon Mobil's International Government Relations department (IGR) in Washington from 2010 to 2012. He was an advisor to Dr. Henry Kissinger on Middle Eastern affairs from 2013 to 2019. He was also an advisor to the CEO of DynCorp, a defense contractor, from 2014 to 2021. He advised Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm based in New York, from 2014 until 2024.
Ambassador Gfoeller founded the Gfoeller Foundation, a private institution dedicated to conducting archeological, geological, historical, ecological, and botanical research in Armenia. The Foundation has supported continuously expanding excavations and research activities for many years, which have led to fundamental discoveries concerning human evolution and the rise of early civilizations. Its discoveries include two ancient cities (7500 to 3900 BC), the world’s oldest winery (c. 4100 BC), the oldest known sculpture (c. 120,000 BC), and some of the oldest known human sites (c. 2 million BC).
Ambassador Gfoeller holds a Master of Arts degree from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He earned his Bachelor's degree from Ohio State University. From 1979 to 1981, he studied at the American University in Cairo under the Fulbright program's Center for Arabic Study Abroad. He taught at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) from 2000 to 2001. While there, he wrote a book on the politics of Central Asia and the Caucasus entitled "United by the Caspian." It was published in two editions by ISD. He also published a book on archeology, entitled “A New Golden Age of Archeology: Recent Discoveries in Armenia,” with Academica Press.
His foreign languages include Arabic, Russian, French, German, Polish, Romanian, Latin, and Greek. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Cosmos Club, and the Union League Club of New York. He is married to Amb. Tatiana C. Gfoeller-Volkoff (ret.) They have one son, Emmanuel C. Gfoeller, an Army Ranger and major in the US Army.