A year ago Jake Sullivan claimed the Middle East was the ‘most peaceful’ in two decades

This was not a good age.

The Middle East teetered on the brink of all-out war on Sunday – exactly a year after US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan boasted about how peaceful it was under the current administration.

“The Middle East region is more peaceful today than it has been in two decades,” Sullivan announced On September 29, 2023 – exactly eight days before Hamas terrorists launched a deadly attack on Israel, sparking the war.

Sullivan acknowledged at the time that “challenges remain.”

“But the amount of time I have to spend today on the crisis and conflict in the Middle East is significantly less than it was for my post-9/11 predecessors,” he said at last year’s Atlantic Festival.

At the time, the Harris-Biden administration was aggressively working behind the scenes on a deal to entice Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel and focused on unrest in Eastern Europe.

Of course, just eight days after Sullivan’s comments, Hamas launched its own bloody surprise attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 people, sparking war and regional conflict.

This forced Sullivan to spend the next year dealing with the various geopolitical fires raging in the Middle East, starting with Hamas’s brutal massacre against Israelis on October 7, 2023.

Yet at the time, Sullivan seemed so confident in his assessment of the Middle East that even Wrote an article for Foreign Affairs magazine in October Which claimed that President Biden’s “disciplined approach” to foreign policy “reduces the risk of new Middle Eastern conflict.”

That portion of his initial piece was edited, as described in the editor’s note below online version Its. These edits were made following the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.

“Indeed, although the Middle East is beset by perennial challenges, the region is calmer than it has been in decades,” read another fragmentary section of his article.

Sullivan later defended my comment on Middle East calm, emphasizing that they were made “in the context of developments in the wider Middle East region over the past few years”.

A year later, the Middle East finds itself engulfed in crisis as the Harris-Biden administration struggles to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from escalating into a broader regional conflict.

Over the weekend, Hezbollah confirmed that its long-time notorious leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut’s Daheeh on Friday – while deadly airstrikes were also carried out in Gaza and Yemen.

The attack comes as tensions between Hezbollah and Israel have been simmering for several months, leaving Israel at risk of facing a second front of war in its north.

Earlier this month, thousands of Hezbollah activists suffered a shocking pager and walkie talkie blast attack, which its leaders blamed on Israel.

Reuters reported that in the wake of that attack against Nasrallah, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has gone into hiding with additional security measures.

On Sunday, the US announced it had killed 37 militants in Syria, including top ISIS leader and al Qaeda affiliate Hurras al-Din.