Jeremy Stern is deputy editor of Tablet. He has written a stupendous account of the rise of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan headlined “The George Kennan who wasn’t.” It a long column that warrants a full reading. Here are a few paragraphs (links omitted) that are keyed to to Susan Glasser’s recent (laudatory, of course) New Yorker profile of Sullivan:
As it happened, The New Yorker profile arrived just in time to rescue Sullivan from the now-infamous statement he made at the 2023 Atlantic Festival: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” Sullivan claimed on Sept. 29. “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.”
On Oct. 2, however, Foreign Affairs went to press with a 7,000-word essay by Sullivan which repeated his statement to The Atlantic, in addition to claims such as, “The Israeli-Palestinian situation is tense, particularly in the West Bank, but in the face of serious frictions, we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.” (Foreign Affairs later scrubbed at least five of Sullivan’s more embarrassing Middle East predictions in the essay’s online version, but not before the original appeared in print.)
Five days later, on Oct. 7, the genocidal regime in Tehran—the recent recipient of $16 billion in sanctions relief from the White House—drove a murderous wedge between the Sunni Arab states and Israel, turning the Jewish state into the site of pogroms worse than Kristallnacht. Nuclear war isn’t entirely out of the question.
It is not for a journalist (I’m talking about myself now) to insist that there is something morally or intellectually wrong with someone whose political analysis is baldly and repeatedly contradicted by events. But there is clearly something morally and intellectually wrong with the cult of Jake Sullivan, which in turn suggests a crisis of greater proportions than the abject analytical and geostrategic failures of a single individual.
If he had any sense of honor or capacity for embarrassment, Sullivan would resign, as would Biden, Blinken and Nod.
Please read the whole thing here.
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