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 being quiet, stressing they were made in “the context of developments in the wider Middle East region over the last few years.”
A year later, the Middle East finds itself engulfed in termoil and the Harris-Biden administration is scrambling to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from spiraling into a broader regional conflict.
Over the weekend, Hezbollah confirmed that its longtime notorious leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli strike on Friday in Dahieh in Beirut — while also launching deadly airstrikes on Gaza and Yemen.
The strike came as tensions between Hezbollah and Israel have been simmering for months, with a threat looming of Israel facing a second front of warfare to its north.
Earlier this month, thousands of Hezbollah operatives faced a shocking pager and walkie talkie explosion attack that its leaders blamed on Israel.
In the wake of that attack against Nasrallah, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is believed to have moved into hiding with additional security measures, Reuters reported.
On Sunday, the US announced it took out 37 terrorists in Syria, including top leaders of ISIS and Hurras al-Din, an affiliate of al Qaeda.
