Sievers, Marc Jonathan, 1955-

Marc Jonathan Sievers (born 1955) is a retired American diplomat. He notably served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Sultanate of Oman (2016-2019).

Sievers attended the University of Utah, earning a BA in history in 1978. He went on to Columbia University in New York to earn a master’s degree in international affairs in 1980. Sievers joined the Foreign Service the following year. His early political counselor assignments included postings in Hong Kong; Cairo, Egypt; Rabat, Morocco; Ankara, Turkey; and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Most of Sievers’ career has been focused on the Middle East. In 2001, Sievers was named Deputy Director in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs of the Office of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. He was sent to Algiers, Algeria, in 2003 to serve as Deputy Chief of Mission. His task there included trying to convince Muslim religious leaders to publicly condemn acts of terrorism. From his post there, he also warned that the U.S. had intercepted a letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu al-Zarqawi that outlined Al-Qaeda’s plans to turn Iraq into their base for overthrowing moderate regimes in the region and establish a caliphate. In 2006, he was a political counselor in the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. He did a stint in Baghdad as political minister-counselor in the embassy there from 2010 to 2011.

In 2011, Sievers was sent to Cairo, Egypt, as Deputy Chief of Mission there. He served as Chargé d’Affaires for much of 2014. That was a difficult time, and Sievers found himself having to do such things as deny the existence of a plot by the U.S. against the Egyptian government.

From September 2014 to July 2015, Sievers was the first appointed diplomatic fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Nominated on July 15, 2015 to be U.S. Ambassador to Oman, he was officially appointed on November 23, 2015 and presented his credentials on December 15. He left his post on November 30, 2019, whereupon he retired from the Foreign Service. In January 2020, the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs announced Sievers as a nonresident senior fellow.

Sievers and his wife, Michelle Huda Raphael, have a son, Samuel. Sievers has a daughter, Miriam, and a son, David, by a previous marriage. Sievers speaks Arabic, Hebrew, French and Turkish.