[1] He attended graduate school in North Carolina, worked as a lawyer in Arizona and held diplomatic posts in New York City and Washington, DC.
Born in 1955 in Menziken in the canton of Aargau,[2] Sager earned a doctorate from the law school of the University of Zurich.
In 1988, he began his career with the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) and was posted as a diplomat-in-training in Bern, Switzerland, and Athens, Greece.
From October 2005 to July 2008, Sager was an executive director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London,[4] in charge of nine countries, including those in the ex-Soviet Union.
[5] Sager met his American-born wife, Christine, at a youth hostel in Oregon in 1982 while both were travelling around the United States.