Monteagle Stearns (December 5, 1924 – May 14, 2016) served as United States Ambassador to Greece from August 1981 through September 1985. As a career Foreign Service Officer he was also United States Ambassador to the Republic of the Ivory Coast from 1976 to 1979 and Vice President of the National Defense University from 1979 to 1981. Other Foreign Service postings included Turkey, Zaire, the United Kingdom and Laos. Among his Washington assignments he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and as Special Assistant to W. Averell Harriman, then the State Department’s Roving Ambassador.

After leaving the Foreign Service in 1987 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., Warburg Professor of International Relations at Simmons College in Boston, and Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In 1992 his book, Entangled Allies: US Policy Toward Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, was published by the Council on Foreign Relations. A Greek edition was issued the same year by Pondiki Press in Athens.

Ambassador Stearns was married to the former Antonia Riddleberger, the daughter of James W. Riddleberger, also a former United States Ambassador to Greece. They met and were married in Athens and had four children.

Stearns held a BA degree from Columbia University. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts.