It isn’t uncommon for foreign policy prognosticators to get things spectacularly wrong. What sets Jake Sullivan apart, in my opinion, is not just that he is the sitting National Security Advisor – and therefore speaks not only for himself but for the Biden administration – but that his failure to take the Middle East’s temperature was exposed mere days after he committed his views on international relations to writing in a 7,000-word article for Foreign Affairs magazine.

Five days before Israel suffered the bloodiest day in its history, Sullivan boasted that the Biden administration had ‘de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence’. Hamas missed the memo. The original version of the article is replete with observations similarly lacking in prescience.

Not least among these was the rapidly debunked claim that the Middle East ‘is quieter today than it has been for decades’. Perhaps we should count our blessings that Sullivan resisted the temptation to declare a Pax Arabia.

Titled The Sources of American Power, Sullivan’s article is pitched as a treatise on the Biden doctrine. Instead, it reads as a campaign tool aimed at absorbing credit for policy successes and deflecting blame for policy failures. Sullivan may have been inspired by George F Kennan’s influential 1947 essay The Sources of Soviet Conduct, which formed the ideological basis for the Truman Doctrine. Had he followed Kennan’s example and allowed the focus of the article to rest upon unrealised policy objectives and the formulation of a strategy to achieve them, not only would Sullivan have produced a far more impressive and coherent work, but he would have insulated the Biden administration from the now unavoidable criticism that it does not have its finger on the global pulse.

An editor’s note now states that the online version of Sullivan’s article was ‘updated to address Hamas’s attack on Israel’. The word ‘updated’ is rather charitable. The original version of the article contained a lengthy passage explaining how the Biden administration’s ‘disciplined approach’ had diverted impending crises in the Middle East and brought the region to the precipice of an Arab-Israeli rapprochement.

This section has now been rewritten at large. In its place is a relatively shallow exposition of the United States’ diplomatic response to the unfolding crisis. While the revisions are generally inoffensive, it is curious that he didn’t see fit to emphasise the Biden administration’s commitment to the two-state solution in his original article. In any event, what is most concerning is the fact that the Biden administration’s complacency is the reason the edits were necessary at all.

Much has been made of the Israeli intelligence failures that made Hamas’s surprise attack possible – and rightly so. Those same questions must be asked of the United States and its allies. Sullivan’s article is proof-positive that the United States was caught completely off-guard by the events of October 7.

A similar intelligence failure in Taiwan would of course be disastrous. If there is one positive to be drawn from this embarrassing episode it is that Sullivan’s self-congratulatory analysis of Middle Eastern affairs is not mirrored in his more grounded albeit unoriginal discussion of US-Chinese relations.