William Drozdiak

William Drozdiak is a nonresident senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution, and a senior advisor for Europe with McLarty Associates, an international strategic consultancy firm based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Fractured Continent: Europe's Crises and the Fate of the West (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017).

For 10 years, Drozdiak served as president of the American Council on Germany (ACG), one of the oldest and most prestigious of the non-profit organizations devoted to cooperation and understanding between the United States, Germany, and Europe. During that time, he expanded ACG’s popular Young Leader programs, its high-level policy conferences, and fellowships in urban affairs, journalism, and the environment. He also hosted events featuring Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, leading cabinet members, and prominent statesmen, legislators, and corporate executives that sought to improve transatlantic dialogue between business and government on trade, investment, new technologies, and climate change. For his achievements, he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany by President Joachim Gauck.

Previously, Drozdiak was the founding executive director of the Transatlantic Center in Brussels, Belgium, created in 2001 by the German Marshall Fund of the United States to serve as the hub of its operations in Europe and as an independent, non-partisan think tank for U.S.-European relations. The Center provides a base for prominent American scholars, policy analysts, and journalists conducting research on Atlantic relations. It also organizes the annual Brussels Forum, which brings together influential American and European political, corporate, and intellectual leaders to discuss global 21st century challenges facing the Western alliance.

Drozdiak worked for two decades as a senior editor and foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. As foreign news editor from 1986 to 1990, he directed the Post’s award-winning international news coverage. During his tenure, the Post won two Pulitzer Prizes for its international reporting on the Middle East and on the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As a correspondent covering events in Europe and the Middle East, he reported on the Iran-Iraq war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the events leading to German reunification. As the Post’s bureau chief in Paris and Berlin and as its chief European correspondent in Brussels from 1990 to 2001, he conducted interviews with many leading statesmen and covered major political, economic, and security issues across Europe, including the enlargement of NATO, the European Union, and the Balkan wars. For his coverage of NATO’s air war in Kosovo, he was part of a The Washington Post team selected as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for international affairs in 1999.

Before joining the Post, Drozdiak was the U.S. State Department correspondent for Time and an international affairs writer at its New York headquarters. He also covered the Middle East while based in Cairo and Beirut for Time and The Washington Star, reporting on the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, the fall of the Shah of Iran, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and the war between Iran and Iraq from both sides of the conflict. He has written extensively about international relations for many other publications, including articles in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy Magazine, Newsweek, and The Financial Times.

Before becoming a journalist, Drozdiak played professional basketball in the United States and Europe from 1971 until 1978. He graduated from the University of Oregon in 1971 with two bachelor's degrees in political science and economics, and was awarded a postgraduate fellowship as an NCAA Scholar-Athlete. He earned a master’s degree in economics at the College of Europe in Bruges and did postgraduate studies at the Institute of European Studies at the University of Brussels. He received the Distinguished Alumnus award as commencement speaker at the University of Oregon and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former trustee of the International School of Brussels. He speaks fluent French and German.

EDUCATION

• Postgraduate Studies, Institute of European Studies, University of Brussels
• M.A., Economics, College of Europe in Bruges
• B.A., Political Science and Economics, University of Oregon