Jake Sullivan boasted exactly a year ago about how quiet the Middle East was as it now sits on cusp of all-out war

This didn’t age well.The Middle East sits on the brink of a feared all-out war Sunday — exactly a year after US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan bragged about how peaceful it had been under the current administration.“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” Sullivan declared on Sept.29, 2023 — just eight days before Hamas terrorists sparked war with its murderous incursion on Israel.Sullivan admitted at the time that “challenges remain.”“But the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced,” he told last year’s Atlantic Festival.At the time, the Harris-Biden administration had been aggressively pursuing a deal behind the scenes to entice Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel and was fixated on unrest in eastern Europe.

Of course, a mere eight days after Sullivan’s remarks, Hamas launched its bloody surprise attack on Israel that killed over 1,200, sparking a war and regional strife.It forced Sullivan to spend the next year dealing with various geopolitical fires erupting in the Middle East, most triggered by Hamas’ brutal masacre against Israelis on Oct.

7, 2023.Yet at the time, Sullivan seem so sure of his assesment of the Middle East that he also penned a piece that October for Foreign Affairs magazine which claimed that President Biden’s “disciplined approach” to foreign policy “reduces the risk of new Middle Eastern conflict.”That part of his initially piece was edited out, as revealed in an editor’s note at the bottom of the online version of it.The edits were made in the aftermath of the Oct.

7, 2023 Hamas attack against Israel.“Indeed, although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” another scrapped portion of his piece read.Sullivan later defended his remarks about the Mideast...