When U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan sat down for an interview at the Atlantic Festival in late September, he was a man beaming with cautious optimism about the future of the Middle East.
His confidence wasn’t entirely unreasonable. A region most Americans equate with death, destruction, and sunk costs was, if not stable, then at least relatively calm. Saudi Arabia and the de facto Houthi authorities had, for the most part, been holding fire for 18 months, with peace talks mediated by the U.N. and Oman making progress. The Islamic State, which had ripped Iraq and Syria apart years before, had been relegated to a rural insurgency. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria had largely stopped sending drones and rockets toward U.S. bases in both countries, supposedly because of an understanding with Washington that traded a relaxation of U.S. sanctions enforcement for Tehran’s restraining its proxies. “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” Sullivan boasted at the festival. It was a theme he repeated in an essay for Foreign Affairs: “Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
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Events on Middle East
