AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Camman
Eight days, and three major crises ago, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan tempted fate. Addressing the Atlantic Festival, he uttered the words, “The Middle East Region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
With the scenes of Hamas’s inhuman barbarism flashing across the world’s televisions and an estimated 700 Israeli dead and thousands wounded, the population equivalent of twelve 9/11s for the Jewish state, those words are already beginning to haunt Sullivan’s public persona. Americans can only hope they also haunt his conscience, and that of his master, Joe Biden.
It would be too simplistic to say that Biden and his foreign policy team are responsible for this attack. Hamas carried it out, and intelligence and security failures abound on all sides.
It is, however, fair to say that Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, and Anthony Blinken have been willfully indifferent to every major contributing factor to these attacks. That indifference characterizes every aspect of this administration’s foreign policy.
American Foreign Policy has at times been set by men with poor instincts. With poor judgement. With the wrong priorities. By the selfish and the foolish. Never, however, have all of those factors been combined, and then mixed with a general indifference to the world to produce a toxic cocktail quite like the foreign policy we have witnessed over the last three years.
The reality is that the suffering in Israel this week is not the consequence of the Biden policy. It is merely the latest.
Let us first examine the state of the Middle East when Jake Sullivan declared it quieter than at any point in over two decades.
In the Caucuses, nearly 100,000 Armenians had been driven from their homes in the preceding two weeks after Azerbaijan ignored the urging of Washington as well as an agreement Baku signed in 2020, to shell the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh into submission. This outcome was hardly unforeseen. Armenia has made desperate efforts to pivot away from Russia toward the West and received from Blinken and Sullivan empty words.
Blinken called upon Azerbaijan to fulfill its promise to reopen a land corridor between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia in January. Undeterred by Baku ignoring his call, Blinken responded to Armenian complaints about the violation of existing agreements with an offer to negotiate new ones in March.
When Azerbaijan struck, a U.S. military detachment was in the country to assist with training the Armenian forces. It promptly departed. Blinken was still floating the idea of U.S. observers monitoring a cease-fire line that no longer existed at the end of September. Then to add insult to injury, he dispatched USAID Director Samantha Power to Armenia – something which might be considered an act of aggression in and of itself.
It may be that Sullivan believed things were now quiet as Nagorno-Karabakh and the conflict had been liquidated, though that defied the expectations of observers who believe Azerbaijan will drive further into Armenia proper. However, it seems more likely that the conflict and the displacement of 120,000 individuals, slipped Sullivan’s mind.
For Sullivan and Biden, this failure points to a wider problem. To them, foreign policy is a game of communication, not substance. If stories are kept out of the news, they do not exist. The withdrawal from Kabul, from the Biden administration’s standpoint, was not a military or diplomatic failure, but rather a public relations failure to properly manage the media.
When Ukraine was attacked, the Biden administration’s chief priority was to disassociate themselves from the fallout of a Ukrainian defeat, not to prevent one, urging Zelensky to flee. When Ukraine proved able to resist beyond all expectations, their interest was not in helping Kyiv win, but rather in using the war as a cudgel against their domestic opponents, the Republican Party and Donald Trump.
The result has been a situation where the Biden administration’s interest in Kyiv’s war effort is almost entirely correlated with what it can do for them politically.
That seems to be what Sullivan meant when he discussed how quiet the Middle East was – not that things were going well. It is hard to believe that the Iranian situation is stable when Tehran is extracting billions for hostages, bragging about its nuclear program, and doubling down on the policies that produced last year’s uprising by increasing the penalties on women who do not wear burqas, all while the regime depends entirely on the whims of an 84-year-old Supreme Leader who will not live forever. But the media is not talking about it, so from the perspective of Jake Sullivan, who has always viewed the role of National Security Adviser as more of a communications than a policy position, it is quiet.
By this standard, the success of the administration in evading attention on the total collapse of its entire Iran policy is considered a triumph rather than trainwreck. Biden’s envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, is currently on unpaid leave, his security clearance having been revoked this spring due to unclear circumstances which may or may not have involved unwittingly bringing a host of Iranian spies onto his team and installing them in key administration roles, including Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations.
While it remains to be seen what role the $6 billion Sullivan and Biden gifted Tehran played Hamas’s recent attacks, or whether the infiltration of virtually the entire Iran policy portfolio by spies may have contributed to the intelligence failures, what is striking is that the possibility they might never seems to have crossed anyone’s mind in the Biden administration.
Instead, there was a fanatical belief in the principle that if you couldn’t hear things because you had plugged your ears, that qualified as “quiet.”
This belief has proved as erroneous for the Biden team last weekend as it has for anyone who has attempted the same strategy in the hope of a solid night sleep only to have firetrucks arrive on the other side of the street. Except in this case, the Biden team were the ones in charge of the fire department, and their approach to claiming a reduction in dispatches was to switch to an unlisted number while moving out of state.
It is a mistake to say that the Biden administration’s failures are driven by a special animus towards Israel. The Biden team clearly dislikes Israel in general because they see no easy path to weaponizing it against Republicans. They also dislike Netanyahu because he refuses to be used as a campaign prop.
However, the Armenian, Iranian, and Afghani people know firsthand that Biden’s negligence is not unique to Israel. It is general. It has just produced an epic tragedy there.
At a certain point, however, motives cease to matter. In December of 1916, Pavel Milyukov, a Russian statesman, rose in the Duma to denounce the repeated failures of the Czarist government. After each accusation, Milyukov asked his audience, “Is it incompetence or is it treason?” His point was that it did not matter. The result was the same.
When it comes to the foreign policy of the Biden administration, too much time is spent mulling over motives on both sides. Conservatives work overtime searching for malice when the evidence of failure is overwhelming. Democrats defend the patriotism of senior officials so they are not called upon to defend their performance, the policies they pursue, or the outcomes that follow.
The debate is largely beside the point. The Biden team has convinced the world it does not care, and the world has responded accordingly. Now, it must be judged on results.
Andrew Camman is the pseudonym of a regular writer on current affairs who has taught history at the University level for eight years. He has worked on Capitol Hill and is familiar with the historical development of the American and British political systems.
