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White House Memo
The national security adviser has drawn criticism for recent public remarks. Biden officials pushed back on the idea that Mr. Sullivan was offering a lasting view on Middle East conflicts.
In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published this week, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, tried to sum up the state of the Middle East.
“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he wrote in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
While noting that challenges remained, including a tense situation between Israelis and Palestinians and the threat from Iran, he wrote that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”
Mr. Sullivan’s assertions did not age well.
Just five days after his article was sent to print on Oct. 2, Hamas staged a devastating terror attack inside Israel, killing at least 1,400 Israelis and taking hundreds of people hostage. Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes against Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, have killed thousands of people and led to a humanitarian crisis.
Nobody can be expected to predict the future, but the essay offers a rare insight into how the United States misread an explosive situation in the Middle East. In the end, all of the diplomacy, intelligence sharing, check-ins and visits did not anticipate the worst breach of Israeli defenses in half a century.
Before the article was posted online, Foreign Affairs asked Mr. Sullivan to update it to reflect the Hamas attack. The online version scrubbed Mr. Sullivan’s “quieter” sentence, as well as his assertion that the Biden administration had “de-escalated” crises in Gaza. (An editor’s note included a pdf of the original essay, which appears in the November/December 2023 issue.)
