A week ago, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, sounded optimistic about the region.
Updated at 3:12 p.m. ET on October 7, 2023
What a difference a week makes.
Just eight days ago, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking at The Atlantic Festival, rattled off a long list of positive developments in the Middle East, developments that were allowing the Biden administration to focus on other regions and other problems. A truce was holding in Yemen. Iranian attacks against U.S. forces had stopped. America’s presence in Iraq was “stable.” The good news crescendoed with this statement: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
One week later, a shocking, multifront attack launched by the Iranian-supported Hamas against Israel has turned the Middle East into a maelstrom. The assault, almost 50 years to the day after the surprise Arab attack on Israel that marked the opening of the Yom Kippur War, could represent a paradigm-shifting moment as big as 9/11. So far, more than 100 Israelis are confirmed dead and many hundreds more gravely injured in a coordinated attack by Hamas terrorists who infiltrated by land, sea, and air. A thousand tragedies will unfold—at the moment, an unknown number of Israeli civilians and soldiers might be held hostage in Gaza. As of this writing, nearly 200 are reported dead in Israeli reprisal raids. The Israeli army has activated at least 100,000 reservists, and a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza is plausible, if not probable.
Behind this moment are failures of intelligence, but also of imagination. The Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has styled himself as “Mr. Security” for decades, will have much to answer for in the coming weeks and months. But Sullivan’s comments, made onstage in Washington to The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, also suggest how little sense there was among Biden officials that something like this could happen. “Challenges remain,” Sullivan said in his comments last week. “Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. But the amount of time 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.” (His remarks begin at 58:52 in the video below.)
In the coming days, there is no doubt that Sullivan’s Pollyannaish view will be subjected to great scrutiny. Hamas, and its Iranian and Hezbollah allies, have not made a secret of their ultimate aims. Beyond wishful thinking, the cause of the hopefulness articulated by Sullivan might be this: the developing deal to establish formal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia—a developing deal that is most likely developing no more.
The Biden administration and Netanyahu have been deeply invested in such an agreement, and the desire for it might have created a blindness among Israelis and Americans alike about what was happening just over the border in Gaza. “We wanted to try and pretend that this conflict was isolated and contained and didn’t need our attention,” Yaakov Katz, the former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, told me today hours after the invasion.
“There is clearly in his comments a perception that Iranian options for disrupting were limited,” Dennis Ross, a Middle East peace negotiator in several administrations, told me, referring to Sullivan’s earlier assertions. “You don’t make that statement unless you think the Iranian options for disrupting are limited. And obviously at this point that proves not to be correct.”
On Netanyahu’s side, an agreement with the Saudis would help distract from the ongoing domestic unrest in Israel over the judicial overhaul his right-wing coalition has sought and that has led to nearly a year of protests. For Biden, a peace agreement would help bolster his foreign policy record going into the 2024 elections—with the possible effect of erasing memories of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Out of these twinned interests emerged the goal of de-escalation and quiet—a noble desire, to be sure. The United States, for its part, is eager to do more than just respond to crises in the region and seems to have been genuinely caught by surprise (“There is never any justification for terrorism,” read a statement from the NSC). But it apparently didn’t take into account Iran’s capabilities for sowing such crises. Behind the Hamas attack can be seen the desperation in Tehran to avoid the chance of a handshake between Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. (Iran, a longtime backer of Hamas, celebrated today’s attacks.)
“The attack is so extreme and unusual that it is almost impossible to imagine Israel feeling comfortable with a return to the status quo ante in Gaza,” Hussein Ibish, the senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, told me. A change to Israel’s control over Gaza, which Ibish sees as inevitable, will affect the negotiations with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis need a concession from the Israelis in the Palestinian conflict to move forward, which seems hard to fathom now. “The conditions and the terms and the contexts have been thrown into radical uncertainty,” Ibish said.
Ross said he doesn’t think that it’s clear the Hamas invasion will necessarily spell the end of what had been a period of less tension. “A lot depends on how this comes out. If it comes out looking like Hamas succeeded and Iran succeeded, well, then we’re looking at a region that’s going to look quite hopeless for a long time to come. But if this comes out in a way where they expended their best efforts and they ended up being set back—losing—well, then the prospects for the region can look much more hopeful.”
At the moment, it seems Iran is getting its wish, and at the expense of Gaza’s population. Israel is at war, prepared to launch a major campaign against Hamas in retaliation. Further death and destruction will surely follow. And the truism holds: The only constant in the Middle East is precipitous and dramatic change. The “quiet” that Sullivan was observing—if it ever existed as more than just a wish—is already a distant memory.
