Ambassador Marc Grossman served as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the State Department’s third-ranking official, until his retirement in 2005 after twenty-nine years in the US Foreign Service.

As Under Secretary, he helped marshal diplomatic support for the international response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. He also managed U.S. policies in the Balkans and Colombia and promoted a key expansion of the NATO alliance. As Assistant Secretary for European Affairs (1997-2000), he helped direct NATO’s military campaign in Kosovo and an earlier round of NATO expansion. Ambassador Grossman was the US Ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997.

Ambassador Grossman was a Vice Chairman of The Cohen Group from July 2005 to February 2011, when he was called back to service by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan by In this capacity, Ambassador Grossman promoted the international effort to support Afghanistan by shaping major international meetings in Istanbul, Bonn, Chicago, and Tokyo. He provided US backing for an Afghan peace process designed to end thirty years of conflict and played an important role in restoring US ties with Pakistan. Ambassador Grossman returned to The Cohen Group in February 2013.

Ambassador Grossman is Chairman of the Board of the Senior Living Foundation of the Foreign Service. He is a Trustee of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the UC Santa Barbara Foundation, and Robert College of Istanbul. Ambassador Grossman is Vice-Chair of the American Academy of Diplomacy. In 2013, Ambassador Grossman was a Kissinger Senior Fellow at the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy at Yale University.

Ambassador Grossman has a BA in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.