Ambassador Rob Macaire CMG is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. He had a diverse career in the UK’s Ministry of Defence and Diplomatic Service, including at the ambassadorial level in Nairobi and Tehran. He has also worked as a senior adviser at BG Group plc and Rio Tinto.
Much of his diplomatic career has been involved with the Middle East, ranging from working on the Oslo Process in the 1990s to serving as ambassador in Iran from 2018 to 2021. In Tehran and subsequently in Vienna negotiations, he represented the United Kingdom in multilateral nuclear talks with Iran, and he negotiated for the release of UK detainees. He was briefly, illegally, arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
As British high commissioner in Nairobi from 2008 to 2011, Ambassador Macaire played an important role in stabilizing Kenya after the severe post-election violence of 2007. He became deeply involved in development, transitional justice, and governance issues. He was also responsible for regional security, defence, counterterrorism, and counter-piracy matters.
Previously, Ambassador Macaire ran the Foreign Office’s largest global public-facing service (two thousand people delivering consular services worldwide). He also focused on counterterrorism, both in the United Kingdom’s Washington embassy through 9/11, and then leading the Foreign Office’s counterterrorism department. His other postings included New Delhi and Bucharest.
His private sector roles have focused on managing and quantifying political risk in diverse jurisdictions, from major economies to frontier and conflict economies. He has also worked on long-term strategy, including geopolitical scenarios, in the natural resources sector.
Ambassador Macaire is a member of the Council of Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) and comments on Middle East and geopolitical issues for the media. He is also a trustee of the Thunderbird Project, a charity that aims to enable the use of drones by the emergency services to save lives.
