Senior Advisor, Brunswick Group; former US Ambassador to the European Union
Daimler Foreign Policy Forum - Class of Fall 2020
Anthony Gardner is a managing partner with Brookfield’s Private Equity group; a senior adviser at the Brunswick Group; senior counsel at the international law firm Sidley Austin; a board member of the global utility firm Iberdrola; and a member of the investment committee of Qualitas Equity Partners. He serves on the board of directors of the American Ditchley Foundation and the advisory boards of the Centre for European Reform, European Policy Centre, and the American European Community Association. Gardner is also a non-resident Fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
From 2014-17, Gardner served as US ambassador to the European Union. He played a key role in the negotiations of a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement and of Privacy Shield, the legal framework enabling flows of personal data from Europe to the United States. He was also instrumental in bringing about a change in US privacy legislation that gives European citizens greater rights to protect their privacy interests before US federal courts.
Before serving in Brussels, Gardner worked at Palamon Capital Partners, a private equity firm, and GE Capital, both in London. During 1994-95, he served as director of European Affairs at the National Security Council, where he focused on EU issues and was closely involved in the negotiation of the New Transatlantic Agenda. He has also worked at the Directorate-General for Competition Policy of the European Commission and at the Treuhandanstalt in Berlin.
Gardner is the author of Stars with Stripes: The Essential Partnership between the European Union and the United States (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), and A New Era in US-EU Relations? (Avebury Press, 1997). He appears regularly on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg, BBC, Euronews, and Fox Business News as a commentator on transatlantic issues. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, and Foreign Affairs.
Gardner is a graduate of Harvard College (BA), Oxford University (MPhil), Columbia Law School (JD), and London Business School (MSc in Finance). He has lived in Europe for 29 years and is a dual US and Italian national.