Biden Adviser Confronted Over Touting Quiet Middle East

 A top aide to President Joe Biden defended his assessment that the Middle East was in a period of relative calm roughly a week before Hamas launched a terrorist attack on Israel.

Kristen Welker, moderator of NBC’s “Meet The Press,” had U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on as a guest on Sunday and showed a clip of his statement eight days prior to the violence that drew a wave of criticism on social media.

“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” Sullivan said at the recent The Atlantic Festival. “Now challenges remain – Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. 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 911 is significantly reduced.”

Welker asked Sullivan, “Jake, why was your assessment there so far off the mark?”

“Well, first Kristen, I made those comments in the context of developments in the wider Middle East region over the last few years after two decades that involved a civil war in Yemen and a massive humanitarian catastrophe, a civil war in Syria and a massive refugee crisis, an invasion and insurgency in Iraq, a NATO military operation in Libya, Iranian-backed attacks on both Saudi [Arabia] and the UAE, as well as many other steps including the rise of a terrorist caliphate that actually occupied a huge amount of territory,” Sullivan said.

 

“The sentence before what you just played, I said, in fact, that this was for now, and that it could all change. And the two threats that I identified that were the most acute on my mind at the time, were tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, as I mentioned, and the threat from Iran,” Sullivan added.

“And so yes, it is true that those two threats remained a real challenge to the long-term stability of the Middle East region, and we’ve just seen this absolutely tragic attack,” Sullivan said. “But at no point did the Biden administration take its eye off the ball of the threats to Israel. In fact, President Biden saw [Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu just weeks before this attack to discuss the security challenges facing the State of Israel, and we’ve continued to support them to as significant or greater an extent than any previous administration.”