March 05, 2020 / By mobanmarket
Profile of Anthony Luzzatto Gardner, United States’ ambassador to the European Union.Anthony Luzzatto Gardner – Obama’s oracle
Anthony Luzzatto Gardner is hoping that before he leaves his post as the United States’ ambassador to the European Union, the EU and the US will have signed the biggest bilateral trade deal ever. If he achieves this goal, he could plausibly claim that no US ambassador in Europe has had as great an economic impact since the envoys who helped establish the US’s post-war Marshall Plan.
Gardner is well prepared for such a giant task. He has a thorough knowledge of the EU’s workings, has invested decades of his life in Europe, is married to a Spaniard, and speaks Italian, Spanish, French and German (as well as Russian). The EU was centre-stage in his career in law and a previous stint in the US administration, and he has spent a decade in a centre of European business, London. In the US, no door seems closed. A major fundraiser for President Barack Obama, he is also a close friend of the chief US negotiator of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), Michael Froman, and of many senior figures in the administration.
And yet all that may not be enough for a US ambassador to deliver the TTIP, at least in its current ambitious form. To direct his staff’s diplomacy, Gardner likes to use an anecdote. He and his wife, Alejandra, wanted to marry in Toledo in a synagogue that was turned into a church and is now a museum. They turned to the Spanish royal family and the archbishop, to no avail. Then a Spaniard in the US embassy said she would have a word with the archbishop’s dentist. Permission duly arrived. Gardner’s message is that “it is not always how far up the tree you go, it is going to the right person in the right place at the right time”.
From the same anecdote, one could derive another message: Gardner comes from a family that can gain an audience with kings. His father, Richard, taught at Columbia Law School with Zbigniew Brzezinski, and, like Brzezinski, became a central figure in the foreign policymaking of President Jimmy Carter and other Democrats. Brzezinski viewed Italy as “potentially the gravest political problem [the US] now has in Europe” and in 1977 Carter appointed Richard Gardner as his man in Rome. It was a febrile period that saw Gardner Junior whisked away from school by security staff when Aldo Moro, the man expected to be Italy’s next president, was kidnapped. Moro was later killed. Italy’s extremism and communism could be irksome – once prompting Gardner to pull down a Communist Party banner draped in Venice’s San Marco piazza – but did not weaken family ties to Italy. Gardner’s mother, daughter of a Venetian family that fled fascist laws in 1939, herself became a public figure in Italy and a founding board member of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. His sister, Nina, married an Italian ambassador.
The siblings tested, and then acquired, some of the parents’ interests. Nina became an academic and lawyer focused on issues of corporate social responsibility. Anthony interspersed studies at Harvard, Columbia Law School, and Oxford (as well as some months in Leningrad) with a trail of internships. In the Gorbachev era, they included stints in the US Congress-funded Radio Liberty, the State Department’s Soviet desk (with Alexander Vershbow, now NATO’s deputy security-general), the US embassy in Moscow, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and law firms; in the early 1990s, he spent time in the Paris bourse, at the German privatisation agency Treuhandanstalt, and with the European Commission.
It was his time in the Commission’s competition department that had the most immediate effect – and, he says, the most important – on his career. The EU’s single market had opened up a new landscape, and Gardner opted to stay in Brussels and join a law company known for a frontier spirit, Coudert Brothers. Gardner dealt with telecoms, mergers and anti-dumping cases, and regularly provided back-up for the small, “nutty and colourful” Moscow office. A colleague recalls Gardner’s “excellent legal mind” and easy manner – but also an evident interest in public policy.
With a Democrat, Bill Clinton, back in the presidency, Gardner fought for a post with the National Security Council (NSC), via a one-year programme open to member-supporters of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank. His post was senior, though not quite as senior as the title – director – suggests, and he found a natural niche. He recalls saying he wanted to focus on the EU. “That’s great because no one is doing that and understands that stuff,” he was told. During an extended year in the post, he helped shape Clinton’s New Transatlantic Agenda, an experience that he then put in book form.
A classic Washington career spent between think-tanks and public service seemed possible, but Gardner – not an “inside-the-beltway person”, he says – returned to Brussels and to law. The shock of the return – from travelling on Airforce One to writing memos on food additives – was “healthy”. He stayed for 18 months, before starting a three-year period that took him (and his wife) from New York and Paris to the “far more dynamic environment” of London.
1963: Born in Washington, DC 1981-85: Studies government, Harvard University 1985-87: Studies international relations, Oxford University 1987-90: Studies law, Columbia Law School 1992-94: Associate, Coudert Brothers, Brussels 1994-95 Director for European affairs, National Security Council, Washington, DC 1996: Publishes book on US-EU relations 1996-97: Senior associate, Hogan & Hartson, Brussels 1997-98: Senior associate, Coudert Brothers, New York 1999-2000: Senior associate, Coudert Brothers, Paris 2000-02: Senior associate, Well Gotshal & Manges 2000-02: Studies finance, London Business School 2002-04 Director, GE International, London 2004-07: Executive director, GE Leveraged Finance, London 2007: Executive director, Bank of America, London 2007-13: Managing director (structured finance), Palamon Capital Partners, London 2014-: US ambassador to the EU
By then, Gardner wanted to leave the increasing specialisation of law and to move from advising on corporate transactions to being a “principal” in deals. He held two top London-based jobs with GE, dealing frequently with mergers and acquisitions in the European energy and infrastructure industries, before before transferring to a private equity company focused on nurturing small-ish knowledge-economy businesses across Europe, Palamon Capital Funds. For him, delving into the “gruesome detail” of a firm’s business was a plus, not a minus.
This long period outside public service was book-ended by articles in European Voice. In 1996, he argued that disappointment with Clinton’s EU policy was exaggerated, highlighting the value of innovations – such as regular institutional contacts – that now seem mundane. In 2010, he suggested that co-operation on humanitarian and development aid could be a “cornerstone” of relations. He then teamed up, for Foreign Affairs, with Stuart Eizenstat, a former ambassador to the EU, to argue that the Lisbon treaty’s creation of a European External Action Service could produce welcome and significant “evolutionary” effects on European foreign policy.
So when Gardner says that Brussels was the only diplomatic post he wanted, and will probably be his last, it does not mean his only interest is TTIP. But, while the Ukraine crisis has forced foreign policy into the spotlight, TTIP will be the touchstone of his tenure. A liking for detail, a focus on “high-impact”, value-adding “deliverables” and an “allergy to generalities” suggest a lurking impatience – a characteristic he readily acknowledges. Selling TTIP to Europe will sorely test that impatience. The European Parliament’s new representatives of the dentists of Toledo, Thum and Tilburg may be happy to cause all sorts of pain.
*The text was amended on 17 June more accurately to reflect Gardner’s role at Palamon Capital Partners.
Categories: News