Robert "Bud" McFarlane

Former National Security Advisor and Co-founder and Director
IP3 International


Robert C. McFarlane

Robert C. McFarlane’s distinguished record of public service includes ten years in the White House and State Department, serving variously as Military Advisor to National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, Counselor to the Secretary of State, The President’s Special Representative in the Middle East, and ultimately President Reagan’s National Security Advisor.

He is perhaps best remembered as the architect of the comprehensive set of U.S. policies — including most notably the Strategic Defense Initiative (or Star Wars) — which so stressed the Soviet economy as to bring it down and in the process accelerated the collapse of Marxism in the former Soviet Union.

After leaving the Reagan White House, Mr. McFarlane founded Global Energy Investors LLC, which sponsored energy and environmental projects in Brazil, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia and China Currently, Mr. McFarlane serves as Chairman and CEO of McFarlane Associates Inc., a consultancy focused on the development of alternative fuels and other measures designed to reduce US reliance on foreign oil.

He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, served 20 years in the US Marine Corps (where he commanded an artillery battery in the first landing of American forces in Vietnam), holds a Master of Science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, and was selected as a White House Fellow.

In recent years Mr. McFarlane has focused on organizing investment into developing countries, nurturing reconciliation between rival Sunni and Shia sects in Iraq, coaching the tribal leaders of Darfur as they sought to negotiate a new Darfur Peace Agreement, and in 2011, to co-founding (with James Woolsey, former head of the CIA) The U.S. Energy Security Council. The USESC is a bipartisan group of former senior government and corporate officials focused on raising public understanding of the risks to the security of our nation when all air, sea, and land transportation must utilize a single fuel (oil) whose price is set by a foreign cartel. He is currently the Co-Founder and Chairman of IP3 International, a bipartisan company devoted to assuring the peaceful introduction of nuclear energy internationally