BACKGROUND
1) David Ignatius, “The strategist in the hurricane; As national security adviser, Jake Sullivan often had to improvise — and weigh some very imperfect responses,” Washington Post, December 31, 2024 (6:30 a.m. EST);
If you want to understand the failures of Joe Biden’s foreign policy, there is no better place to start than with David Ignatius’ Wahington Post column on December 31, 2024. Unadulterated hagiography, unburdened by a hint of criticism or hard-nosed reporting, Ignatius’ column reveals how Sullivan has masterfully spun the story of his achievements over the last four years and longer. The result has been a submissive press, and a foreign policy establishment unwilling to take Sullivan’s self-serving assertions on directly.
With such a perfectly designed and executed foreign policy ss that presented by Sullivan and Ignatius, one is hard dressed to grasp the significance of Joe Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, or how that strategic and humanitarian disaster appears to have emboldened Vladimir Putin to incade Ukraine in Fevruart 2022, or how the cowardice of Biden and Sullivan in the face of Putin’s nuclear threats have ed to a long drawn-out war with nonend in sight.
Sullivan is brilliant, beyond any doubt. He has so impressed Biden that one might think of Sullivan as the real architect of U.S. foreign policy over the last four years.
We have forgotten the lessons of The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s brilliant 1972 book which described the influence on decisions in the John F. Kennedy administration and their disastrous consequences in Vietnam.
Without real criticism from academia and the press, and with absolutely no ear for hearing such criticism, the Biden administration stumbled into failure after failure in what will eventually be seen as the worst foreign policy record of any president in recent years.