This one didn't age very well.
The Middle East was on the brink of a feared all-out war on Sunday. It comes exactly one year after National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan boasted about how peaceful things have been under the current administration.
“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been for the past 20 years.” sullivan declared September 29, 2023 — just eight days before Hamas terrorists sparked war with a brutal invasion of Israel.
Sullivan acknowledged at the time that “challenges remain.”
“But compared to my predecessors after 9/11, today I have to spend significantly less time on crises and conflicts in the Middle East,” he said at last year's Atlantic Festival.
At the time, the Harris-Biden administration was actively pursuing behind-the-scenes agreements to encourage Saudi Arabia to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, and was fixated on the unrest in Eastern Europe.
Of course, just eight days after Sullivan's remarks, Hamas launched a bloody surprise attack on Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and sparking war and regional conflict.
Sullivan will therefore spend the next year dealing with various geopolitical fires that have erupted in the Middle East, most sparked by Hamas's brutal massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023. Ta.
But at the time, Sullivan seemed very confident in his assessment of the Middle East, writing in Foreign Affairs magazine in October of the same year that President Biden's “disciplined approach” to foreign policy was “prone to a new Middle East conflict.” He also wrote an article that argued that “reducing risks.” ”
That part of his first work was edited out, as revealed in the editor's note. online version Of that. This edit was made in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
“To be sure, the Middle East remains beset by persistent challenges, but the region is quieter than it has been in decades,” another scrap of his text read.
Sullivan then defended his statement Commenting on the quietness in the Middle East, he stressed that these developments had taken place “against the backdrop of developments in the broader Middle East region over the past few years.”
A year later, the Middle East is drowning in term oil and the Harris-Biden administration is scrambling to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from escalating into a broader regional conflict.
Hezbollah confirmed over the weekend that its longtime and notorious leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli attack in Beirut's Dahiyeh on Friday, while also launching deadly airstrikes in Gaza and Yemen.
The attack comes as tensions between Hezbollah and Israel have been simmering for months, with the threat looming that Israel faces a second front in the north.
Earlier this month, thousands of Hezbollah operatives faced a shocking bombing of pagers and walkie-talkies that their leaders blamed on Israel.
Following the attack on Nasrallah, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei appears to have taken additional security measures and gone into hiding, Reuters reported.
On Sunday, the United States announced that it had eliminated 37 terrorists in Syria, including the top leader of ISIS and members of the al-Qaeda affiliate Hurras al-Din.
