Commentary
Contrary to commonly held beliefs, studies have shown that retread tires offer reliability comparable to new tires, according to the National Highway Safety Administration, after concluding two decades of study.
A retread in government, someone who has previously served in a certain capacity in an earlier administration, however, is rarely effective. We are seeing evidence of that today with retreads in the Biden administration.
When one wonders who’s running the Biden White House, it isn’t difficult when we see the Obama, Clinton retreads in key administration positions.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, is one person in particular who I have been critical of in the past, is a typical retread. He was deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the Benghazi attack, former President Obama’s director of policy, and senior advisor on the Iran nuclear negotiations, and senior policy advisor to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Embarrassingly, Sullivan got caught with his intelligence down when he authored the cover story – The Sources of American Power – for the October 2023 Foreign Affairs magazine, in which he boasted that the “disciplined” approach of the Biden administration to de-escalation and negotiation in the Middle East has borne fruit.
“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” he wrote.
With Hamas’ October 7, 2023 slaughter of Jews attending the music festival, Sullivan quickly did a rewrite for online consumption that obviously did not include the passage “the region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
Foreign Affairs is the publication that shapers of American foreign policy go to be viewed as an intellectual player. Having to rewrite the article for online readers while the print version remains in pdf form had to be humiliating for Sullivan.
His boast of the Biden’s success in the Middle East, followed by a “correction,” didn’t go unnoticed by conservative media.
In his opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Biden Needs a New Foreign-Policy Team,” Garry Kasparov wrote that the October 7 Hamas attack “wasn’t only the greatest intelligence failure in modern Israeli history; it was also a massive failure of American intelligence.” He referred to Sullivan and CIA Director William Burns as “clueless,” and suggested “Biden must fire Messrs. Burns and Sullivan.”
Reading letters to editors often provides me with what John Q. Public is thinking.
“Burns, Sullivan and Blinken simply have sunk too much into eight years of foreign-policy mistakes to be the clear-eyed and coldly rational national-security team we require now,” wrote Peter Wolf of Sedona, Arizona.
I was surprised to see the left-leaning The Nation magazine headline, “Jake Sullivan’s Rewrite Can’t Paper Over an Impoverished Foreign Policy.” In its piece, it called attention to Sullivan’s hasty edits “make clear the incoherence of Biden’s diplomacy.”
Feeling the need to comment on Hamas and Israel was former President Obama, another foreign-policy failure, who wanted so badly to strike a nuclear deal with terrorist Iran that he gave them $1.7 billion in cash and released another $100 billion in frozen assets.
Typical of Obama, he called for Israeli restraint and counsels “an admission of complexity.” Why is that every conflict in old Washington is “complex?”
In stating “You have to admit that nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree,” Obama at least admits his past role. One wonders if he isn’t behind the decisions being made by his former advisors, who now make up the Biden team.
Obama will also be remembered for blinking after drawing a red line in August 2012, threatening to respond militarily if Syria used chemical weapons. They did, and he did nothing.
The retreads in the swamp are many, even within families. Sullivan’s wife, Maggie Goodlander, who clerked for Merrick Garland when he was a D.C. Circuit Judge, is now counsel to Attorney General Garland.
Sullivan’s bother, Tom, serves as deputy chief of staff in the Blinken State Department, while his wife, Rose, holds a top position as the principal deputy assistant secretary for legislation in the Department of Health and Human Services.
I thought it would be appropriate for me to close with this quote about Biden from another retread – Robert Gates – who served as director of the CIA under President H.W. Bush and secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama
“I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
