Julia Friedlander is a nonresident senior fellow with the Economic Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center and the chief executive officer of Atlantik-Brücke in Germany. Previously, Friedlander served as the C. Boyden Gray senior fellow and director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative. Friedlander was a senior policy advisor for Europe in the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the US Department of the Treasury from 2015 to 2017 and from 2019 to 2020, where she collaborated with European Union partners on global sanctions policy and combating illicit finance. She also served as a macroeconomist in the Europe Office in Treasury’s Department of International Affairs.
From April 2017 to July 2019, Friedlander was detailed to the White House as the director for the European Union, Southern Europe, and Economic Affairs at the National Security Council, charged with coordinating US interagency policy on transatlantic relations and the European Union and staffing the national security advisor on European engagements. Her work encompassed all aspects of security and economic relations, but focused on trade, financial policy, and investment security.
Before joining the Treasury in 2015, Friedlander held multiple analytical positions within the Central Intelligence Agency, focusing on global economic stability and energy security.
Friedlander holds a BA in European history from Princeton University, where she wrote her senior thesis on the historical and economic origins of the European Union, and an MA in international economics and international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Before graduate school, she spent two years in Berlin on a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), working on European security and energy issues at the German Council on Foreign Relations and German Marshall Fund. She speaks French and German fluently and has working knowledge of Russian. Friedlander lives in Washington, DC with her husband Oliver Bose, a software architect from Berlin.