An End to the Mirage
24th November 2023
“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” This observation, which seems to have already receded over history’s lost horizon, came courtesy of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan barely one week before Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel. Speaking at the Atlantic Festival at the end of September, Sullivan described a new Middle East in the making. In recent years, he explained, a burst of diplomacy had established the political and economic conditions for a new equilibrium from the Persian Gulf to Gaza. The implications for the de-escalation of old conflicts were profound. A truce in Yemen, Iranian attacks against US forces down, American involvement in Iraq “stable.” Although regional problems remained, the diminished chaos of the Middle East was allowing the Biden administration to turn its attention to more pressing concerns in other parts of the world.