The White House plan to keep the Middle East off Biden’s plate

How an early vision for a Biden doctrine was blown up by a repetitive cycle of violence.

President Biden’s pointman on Middle East affairs, Brett McGurk, had taken a humbling lesson from witnessing the decades-long repetitive cycle of violence in the region. 

As towering a presence the United States holds on the globe, American influence on foreign affairs is, in all actuality, quite limited — and largely reactionary. 

That uncomfortable truth prodded McGurk to fashion meager Middle East ambitions for the Biden administration at its outset in 2021.

McGurk liked to say if he could reduce Biden’s Middle East policy to a bumper sticker, it would read: “No New Projects.” That meant no peace processes, no grand plans for strategic realignment, no grandiose objectives. His job was to minimize the prospects of a crisis – to keep the Middle East off a president’s desk as much as possible.

This is Franklin Foer’s reporting in “The Last Politician,” a crisp and handsomely written chronicle of the Biden administration’s first two years in office. The recollection on this key leg of a Biden foreign policy doctrine has been torn asunder by events, much like many a presidents’ well-laid plans before him.