Is Jake Sullivan a "brilliant young strategist" or just a relatively young one?

David Ignatius, the unofficial spokesman for the deep state, pays tribute to Jake Sullivan in this Washington Post article. To write it, Ignatius interviewed Sullivan and “a dozen close friends and advisers.” That’s hardly the way to get a well-rounded view of one’s subject.

The adviser whom Ignatius quotes repeatedly is Graham Allison. He’s a Harvard professor who served as a counselor to Sullivan. What did Ignatius expect Allison to say? “We really messed up”?

What Allison did say, among other things, is that Sullivan is in a league with Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scowcroft,” but “struggled at times because he confronted a more complex world than they did.”

Really? Kissinger had to deal with the war in Vietnam, the biggest quagmire in American history, and the Yom Kippur invasion of Israel led by Egypt and Syria and supported by the Soviet Union. Afterwards, he conducted “shuttle diplomacy” to conclude the disengagement agreement between Israel and Egypt.

Kissinger had to deal with a Soviet empire far more formidable than Putin’s Russia. He figured out how to play China against the Soviets. Arguably, this helped tip the Cold War in favor of the U.S.

Kissinger had to deal with the oil crisis of 1973 while the Nixon administration was preoccupied with Watergate. He had to keep managing the national security portfolio as the administration crumbled in 1974. When Gerald Ford succeeded Nixon, Kissinger had to guide foreign policy under a new president with little experience in that realm.

Brzezinski also had to deal with the formidable Soviet empire. He had to deal with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (he did so by supporting the Afghan mujahideen, including Osama bin Laden) and the revolution in Iran (he did so by inexcusably failing to back the Shah). The hostage crisis in Tehran, which Carter and Brzezinski badly mishandled, was probably more challenging than any crisis Sullivan faced.

Brzezinski managed the normalization of relations with China. And he worked to undermine the Soviet empire by encouraging dissidents in Eastern Europe.

Finally, during Brzezinski’s time in office, the Carter administration helped negotiate the historic Camp David accords.

Brent Scowcroft was national security adviser under Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. During the Bush administration he faced challenges stickier than any confronted by Sullivan. The fall of the Soviet empire had to be managed. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had to be redressed. This meant creating a multi-nation coalition that included Arab states. Once Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait, Scowcroft had to figure out whether the coalition should proceed to Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein.

Allison’s claim that Sullivan faced a more complex world than his predecessors is a case of recency bias, at best. I think it’s a self-serving deliberate misstatement.

Any discussion of Sullivan’s tenure should begin with Afghanistan. This, after all, was a U.S. war, not the war of an ally. American troops were on the ground and in harm’s way.

Our withdrawal from Afghanistan was, as Ignatius acknowledges, catastrophic. Sullivan offered to resign. He should have.

The best spin Sullivan is able to put on the Afghanistan catastrophe is that “leaving Kabul freed the [United States] to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in ways that might have been impossible if we had stayed.”

How lame is this? Let us count the ways.

First, it’s a defense of the decision to leave Afghanistan (which Trump made), not a defense of the criminally irresponsible way we left (which was down to Biden and Sullivan).

Second, it’s ex post facto. We did not leave Kabul in order to free ourselves up to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That invasion hadn’t occurred yet and Team Biden did not anticipate it.

Third, why couldn’t we have dealt with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and still maintained our small military presence in Afghanistan? Why would it have been “impossible” fully to back Ukraine while still in Afghanistan?

Fourth, it might well be that the Afghanistan fiasco encouraged Putin’s Ukraine adventure. The Russian dictator could only have concluded from what happened in Kabul and what he witnessed at the June 2021 Geneva summit (where Ignatius admits Sullivan exhibited naivety) that the Biden administration was “weak and pliable” as Ignatius puts it.

Turning to the other two wars that will define Sullivan’s legacy, we find a mixed bag, at best. Sullivan did help lead the U.S. response to Russian aggression which included the provision of a large amount of weaponry. But Sullivan was cowed repeatedly by Putin’s implausible nuclear bluff. This led to a pattern of refusing to provide weapons needed by Ukraine and/or refusing authorization to use them aggressively, then later reversing course — a pattern that persists to this day. Ukraine’s war effort has therefore been less than optimal, and today Russia has the upper hand.

The response to the October 7 massacre in Israel and the taking of U.S. hostages has been similarly unsteady. Once again, the U.S. has supplied arms to our ally. But at the same time, it has tried to curb Israel’s war effort.

Team Biden applied pressure on Israel to refrain from seizing the Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt and — under White House threat of suspending access to “critical arms” — from invading Hamas’ southern-Gaza stronghold in Rafah. As Peter Berkowitz reminds us:

Seizing the Philadelphi corridor enabled Israel to cut off Hamas’ weapons’ smuggling. And invading Rafah – in response to which America paused shipment of heavy bombs to Israel – inflicted a decisive blow against Hamas without causing civilian casualties in numbers remotely resembling the Biden administration’s dire forecast.

No matter how one views the war in Gaza, Sullivan comes off poorly. If one backs Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war, Sullivan’s demands on Israel were unreasonable and, if followed, would have hampered the effort to crush Hamas. If one opposes Netanyahu’s war efforts, Sullivan failed to influence them. He didn’t stop the war or even limit it. And seven Americans are still held hostage in Gaza.

Whatever one thinks of Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Scowcroft, Sullivan isn’t in their class. He’s a lightweight by comparison.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Kissinger and Brzezinski, for all of their flaws, were among the foremost scholars on foreign policy in America before being tapped for service in Washington. Scowcroft was a long time military man who, by the time he served as national security adviser to President Bush (41), had already held that position for a time under President Ford.

Sullivan, by contrast, is a lawyer. He had held staff positions related to foreign policy and national security under Secretary of State Clinton and Vice President Biden, but, as Ignatius says, “lacked experience in top-level management.” And he certainly lacked the depth of experience and expertise possessed by Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Scowcroft.

In Ignatius’ telling, Sullivan is a “brilliant young strategist“ who had to deal with “a world on fire.” As I’ve tried to show, there was nothing unique about the severity of the conflagrations Sullivan confronted. Nor did Sullivan put the fires out. Rather, in some cases, he caused them to rage more fiercely

That may be the work of a relatively young strategist, but it’s hardly the work of a brilliant one.