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Ambassador Daniel Fried

Ambassador Daniel Fried (BlueskyX) is Weiser Family Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council. In the course of his 40-year Foreign Service career, Ambassador Fried played a key role in designing and implementing American policy in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. As Special Assistant and NSC Senior Director for Presidents Clinton and Bush, Ambassador to Poland, and Assistant Secretary of State for Europe (2005-09), Ambassador Fried helped craft the policy of NATO enlargement to Central European nations and, in parallel, NATO-Russia relations, thus advancing the goal of Europe whole, free, and at peace. During those years, the West’s community of democracy and security grew in Europe. Ambassador Fried helped lead the West’s response to Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine starting in 2014: as State Department Coordinator for Sanctions Policy, he crafted U.S. sanctions against Russia, the largest U.S. sanctions program to date, and negotiated the imposition of similar sanctions by Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia.

Ambassador Fried became one of the U.S. government’s foremost experts on Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. While a student, he lived in Moscow, majored in Soviet Studies and History at Cornell University (BA magna cum laude 1975) and received an MA from Columbia’s Russian Institute and School of International Affairs in 1977. He joined the U.S. Foreign Service later that year, serving overseas in Leningrad (Human Rights, Baltic affairs, and Consular Officer), and Belgrade (Political Officer); and in the Office of Soviet Affairs in the State Department.

As Polish Desk Officer in the late 1980s, Fried was one of the first in Washington to recognize the impending collapse of Communism in Poland, and helped develop the immediate response of the George H.W. Bush Administration to these developments. As Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw (1990-93), Fried witnessed Poland’s difficult but ultimately successful free market, democratic transformation, working with successive Polish governments.

Ambassador Fried also served as the State Department’s first Special Envoy for the Closure of the Guantanamo (GTMO) Detainee Facility. He established procedures for the transfer of individual detainees and negotiated the transfers of 70 detainees to 20 countries, with improved security outcomes.

Ambassador Fried is currently a Weiser Family Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is also on the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy and a Visiting Professor at Warsaw University.

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Protestors make a human chain in front of NATO headquarters, demanding NATO membership and weapons for Ukraine on November 27, 2022 in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)
Hanna, a retired local teacher for more than 35 years, wipes a tear as she briefly weeps next to her house that was destroyed during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian occupying forces, on October 30, 2022 in Knyazivka, Kherson oblast, Ukraine. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)
Hanna, a retired local teacher for more than 35 years, wipes a tear as she briefly weeps next to her house that was destroyed during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian occupying forces, on October 30, 2022 in Knyazivka, Kherson oblast, Ukraine. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)
Konstantin Ivashchenko (seated in foreground on the right), former CEO of the Azovmash plant and appointed pro-Russian mayor of Mariupol, visits a polling station as people vote in a referendum in Mariupol on September 27, 2022. He is seated in a green uniform in front of a desk where poll workers are examining documents, and a uniformed, armed soldier wearing a balaclava is standing behind him. In the background is another desk with poll workers on one side and a civilian on the other, possibly a voter. Western nations dismissed the referendums in Kremlin-controlled regions of eastern and southern Ukraine as the voting on whether Russia should annex four regions of Ukraine started on September 23, 2022. (Photo by STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)
Konstantin Ivashchenko (seated in foreground on the right), former CEO of the Azovmash plant and appointed pro-Russian mayor of Mariupol, visits a polling station as people vote in a referendum in Mariupol on September 27, 2022. He is seated in a green uniform in front of a desk where poll workers are examining documents, and a uniformed, armed soldier wearing a balaclava is standing behind him. In the background is another desk with poll workers on one side and a civilian on the other, possibly a voter. Western nations dismissed the referendums in Kremlin-controlled regions of eastern and southern Ukraine as the voting on whether Russia should annex four regions of Ukraine started on September 23, 2022. (Photo by STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)
A Taliban fighter leaves a building inside an US army camp at the airport in Kabul on September 14, 2021.
A person takes a picture of the tribute display full of photographs, candles and flowers outside the Belarus embassy in Kiev on August 3, 2021, in memory of Vitaly Shishov, the head the Belarusian House in Ukraine, an NGO, who was found early morning hanged in a park, near the Kiev.
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