How the controversial White House adviser is managing the administration's agenda on Gaza Brett McGurk-crisis management engineer
Huffington Post
Four men in Washington are shaping American policy in the Middle East. Three are obvious: President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. The fourth is less well-known, despite his enormous influence over the other three - and despite his determination to continue championing policies that many see as fueling the bloodshed in Gaza and beyond.
His name is Brett McGurk. He is the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, one of the most powerful people in American national security.
McGurk makes the choices Biden is considering on issues from negotiations with Israel to arms sales to Saudi Arabia. He controls whether global affairs experts within the government - including the most experienced employees of the Pentagon and the State Department-can have any influence, and decides which outside voices have access to the White House decision-making talks. He has a clear vision of how he believes American interests should be advanced, and human rights concerns are secondary to him at best, according to current and former colleagues and close observers.
"McGurk's power is enormous, completely opaque, non-transparent and unaccountable,"a former US official told HuffPost.
Comparing McGurk's highly centralized approach in the Biden era to the more participatory way previous administrations made decisions, a representative of the civil society group said that McGurk is "able to lead things with [Sullivan] and the president in a process that is not formal".
It's an amazing degree of authority for a 50-year-old employee with a very controversial favor. One of the current US officials said that McGurk's dominance made the State Department's top Middle East official - a former ambassador who, unlike McGurk, was confirmed for his post by the Senate - just a "fig leaf".
"The State Department basically has no say in the [Israel-Palestine] conflict because Brett is at the center of making this decision,"the official said.
At the same time, McGurk's primary focus, a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, has come to dominate U.S. diplomacy in the region. "He has consistently pushed for engagement with the Saudis and has sought to put this relationship at the forefront of what we are trying to do in the Middle East,"the U.S. official said.
A State Department spokesman declined to comment for this story. The ministry has witnessed an internal uprising in recent weeks. On Thursday, a State Department official told HuffPost that staff members submitted at least six official letters opposing Biden's Gaza policy to Blinken through a confidential communication channel.
Amid the crisis that broke out on October 7, McGurk maintained his influential role. He was strongly involved in the negotiations between Israel, Hamas and the regional governments that allowed more than 100 Israeli hostages to return home and boosted the amount of humanitarian aid flowing into Gaza. He tightly manages his team, is in regular contact with foreign officials who say that America's largely unrestricted support for Israel stimulates great discontent around the world.
Now there is growing concern that, despite the shock of the Hamas attack and the overwhelming Israeli response, McGurk will stand by priorities and tactics that many officials and analysts consider not very useful.
"Brett's theory of the region is that it is a source of instability but also resources,"the former official said. "It's a very old colonial mentality: people need strong rulers to control them, and we need to extract what we need for our own benefit while minimizing the cost to ourselves and others we see like us, in this case the Israelis."
"This approach always fails," the official continued, saying that it is "short-sighted" and forces the United States to reinvest in the Middle East every few years.
"This is a clear example before you: they wanted to bypass the Palestinians" in the Saudi-Israeli normalization, the former official said.
Saudi Arabia, the rich spiritual center of the Islamic world, has long said that it will establish relations with Israel only if a Palestinian state is established. Many Palestinians and their supporters believe that if Israel concludes a deal with the Saudis without significant concessions to the Palestinians, it will remove a key incentive for Israeli leaders to reach a just settlement with Palestine.
A White House official told HuffPost that McGurk and the Biden administration are prioritizing Palestinian rights, including during talks on Saudi-Israeli normalization. In those talks, "the Palestinians were at the center,"the official said.
But skeptics fear that McGurk's focus on so - called Saudi-Israeli "normalization" means America's strategy in the Middle East is focused on a Saudi-Israeli deal that lacks a settlement that satisfies the Palestinians, sowing the seeds of discord in the future-and that the deal will ignore American values through massive arms sales and security commitments despite the documented Saudi and Israeli misuse of U.S. military aid.
Critics also worry that McGurk will continue to centralize policymaking among a handful of carefully selected close aides, marginalizing alternative views on world affairs from officials outside that circle.
"He's pretty much thinking the Bush administration mentality."It's a mentality that hasn't changed over the past 25 years,"said the current US official. McGurk first gained fame in the US occupation authority in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
HuffPost discussed McGurk's personality with 23 current and former US officials and people in regular contact with the Biden administration on Middle East Policy. Most of them will only speak anonymously for fear of reprisals. McGurk refused to speak.
Many sources have expressed respect for various elements of McGurk's background and work. The White House official said he was working "closely and cooperatively" with colleagues across the government.
However, most also described a deep concern about McGurk's power and what that might mean for the future of the United States. Washington's strategy in the Middle East.
Yasmin Al-Jamal, who served in the Defense Ministry for almost nine years before leaving in 2017, pointed to McGurk's comments linking aid to Gaza to Hamas ' release of hostages.
"I don't know what happened to Brett that makes him so unkind when it comes to US foreign policy."I don't know what he thinks of us as Muslims, as Arabs,"she said.
The White House maintains that McGurk's comments on the aid were misrepresented. "The United States does not support the conditions for the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza,"spokeswoman Adrienne Watson told Politico. "The implication is that McGurk implicitly said this ... He falsely describes what he said."
McGurk's powerful position under Biden's leadership is the culmination of a long journey. President Barack Obama appointed him to the State Department despite his ties to President George W. Bush, and he quickly developed close ties throughout the administration - including with Biden, who like McGurk made the widely criticized choice to encourage the U.S. to support Nouri al-Maliki to lead Iraq, leading to the rise of the Islamic State, or ISIS.
Obama tried to appoint McGurk as the US ambassador to Iraq, but a scandal prompted him to be distracted. Eventually, Obama tapped McGurk to help coordinate the global fight against ISIS, a job he held until 2018.
A former Obama administration official told HuffPost, " what I think is more impressive is that he was one of the few top Obama administration appointees retained by President Donald Trump."
Fans of McGurk see his age as evidence of his skills, useful relationships and reliability. In 2022, former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis told HuffPost that he personally pushed the Trump administration to keep McGurk. "He studies the issues rigorously,"Mattis said at the time. "He has a strategic framework."
Other observers say the pattern reflects the failure of the US foreign policy establishment to learn from its mistakes.
"He is an unstoppable force of failure for me."It's always great to be a white man," a current U.S. official told HuffPost. A former official said that there is a joke in some national security circles: "if a nuclear bomb is dropped on the capital, two life forms will remain: cockroaches and Brett McGurk".
At Biden's National Security Council, McGurk chose to focus on issues related to Saudi Arabia - a stunning choice given the disconnect between America's historic rapprochement with the Saudis, which expanded under Trump, and Biden's campaign pledge to punish Saudi repression. This decision also determined Biden's broader policy in the Middle East, where other senior staff such as Blinken and Sullivan focused on separate regions such as Europe and China.
Under some pressure, the Saudis released several imprisoned human rights activists and began to end their military campaign in Yemen. However, the Biden administration embraced Riyadh much more than many lawmakers and outside analysts expected. By 2022, McGurk persuaded Biden to visit the kingdom, as the administration claimed that this would help to rein in oil prices after the shock of the global energy market caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine that year.
Three months after Biden's trip, the Saudis cut oil production, driving up gas prices just before the midterm elections and angering worried Democrats.
However, it also seemed clear that McGurk and his team pursued a different goal: Saudi-Israeli "normalization," a big moment in relations between two powerful if problematic American partners and a move that would trump Trump-era deals between Israel and smaller Gulf Arab states known as the Abraham accords. US officials have repeatedly said that the agreement will mean significant benefits for the Palestinians. But it was widely understood that the Biden administration had little interest in big steps toward Israeli-Palestinian peace.
"The challenge we've faced over the course of this administration is that we've been very, very cautious - that's a simple description - when it comes to [Israel-Palestine]. There are some who really wanted to crush and sweep this issue under the carpet,"a current US official told HuffPost. "She was not at the forefront of any discussions, and the steps we could have taken on the Palestinian issue were thwarted, whether it was the opening of a US Consulate [for Palestinians in Jerusalem] or it was a return from the [Trump-era] declaration that settlements are not illegal."There was never any appetite for it."
"He has made it very difficult to keep hope alive for the Palestinians,"the U.S. official said. "It's hard to put that in the quiver and responsibility of one person, but I don't think Brett had a beneficial effect in this regard."
A European diplomat said that his government expected the worst as the United States relied on the "logic of the Abraham accords", which provided only statements and promises of a Palestinian state.
"We knew that sooner or later there would be a new explosion of violence: it was taken for granted,"said the European diplomat. "The question was when; the surprise was this great tragedy."
Biden's team said they are supporting Palestinian prospects as much as possible given Israeli sensitivities, through steps such as restoring funding to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and helping to secure a trip by the first Saudi diplomatic delegation to the occupied West Bank since 1967.
However, the US measures had little resonance, according to Munther Ishaq, a priest who lives in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank and has repeatedly met with US officials to discuss the Palestinian Christian community.
"They decorated our prison."They gave us better mattresses in our prison. They've upgraded our list. "We are still imprisoned,"Isaac argued. "It's a naive idea to think that you can ... To confine us to accepting any compromise, I think all this exploded in the face of the architects of this plan."
However, there are growing indications that once the fighting in Gaza subsides, McGurk's offer to get a Saudi-Israeli deal will return to the top of Biden's agenda.
Speaking last month, McGurk said that before October 7, the United States was "in intensive discussions" about a Saudi-Israeli agreement that would include material incentives for Palestine.
"This was not the end of this case, quite the opposite,"he said. "What was true before October 7 is much more true now."This central issue must be addressed, and with Hamas in retreat, we are determined to help address it."
Biden used a Washington Post op-ed the same day to declare that the United States would not allow Hamas to "subvert broader regional stability and integration".
Daniel Mouton, who worked with McGurk from 2021 until this summer, called the October visit of the Saudi defense minister to Washington proof that officials are still quietly progressing on aspects of the Israeli-Saudi deal, such as the full restoration of US arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
The European diplomat said that he would be very worried if the Biden administration did not understand that the Gaza crisis "should serve as a wake-up call".
"If the plan is only to bring the situation back under control as it was the day before the crisis, I think it will be a disaster,"the diplomat said. "The crisis will not be solved only by trade, normalization and business."
Biden administration officials argue that McGurk's work with Saudi Arabia has had significant benefits beyond its potential effects on Israel and Palestine - for example, in maintaining a fragile truce in Yemen that has lasted since April 2022.
"It's one of the biggest diplomatic achievements that has been made, "said a White House official.
However, if Washington is too confident, this may stimulate alarming measures. A U.S. official told HuffPost that McGurk is seen internally as responsible for pushing to end Biden's ban on U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia, which human rights groups say the Saudis have repeatedly used in violation of international humanitarian law in Yemen. The U.S. official said McGurk has been defying the ban in recent weeks as well, even as fears of a regional war have grown.
"Brett has a huge impact."It is somewhat surprising considering that his only experience [stationed] in the region is Iraq. Some say that he is Jared Kushner in this administration: he is listened to, not deeply versed, and he does the bidding of Youssef al - Otaiba," said a former US official-referring, respectively, to Trump's son-in-law and the UAE Ambassador to Washington.
Besides McGurk's handling of specific countries, his broader worldview worries some observers, who say he treats human rights considerations as a weakness rather than a vital factor for international stability and U.S. influence abroad.
A former US official highlighted McGurk's social media post on October 13 of a video from the Israeli government, which included audio of Biden's speech on footage of the September 11 attacks, corpses, Palestinian militants and American weapons. The former official speculated that McGurk had a role in it because of his previous focus on the Islamic State.
The former official said: "the framing of the war on terror and the characterization that this is a battle between good and evil ... It fuels anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry". "He also draws false analogies, because what is happening is not from ISIS."
"It is rooted in a real political conflict with legitimate causes of Palestinian grievances,"the official said. "Labeling it as a crazy, hate-filled state like ISIS is a form of misinformation that doesn't get us any closer to the answer - and actually produces the wrong policies ."
During his visit to Israel after the Hamas attack-with McGurk-Biden said in Tel Aviv: "after September 11, we were outraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes."
A former Obama administration official described McGurk as putting "Turkey on a human rights perspective, except for for his base, where he serves as a useful leverage for his preferred strategic outcome".
This could have serious repercussions for the American approach to the Middle East, given its heaviness.
One US official said that in internal conversations, McGurk often dissuades colleagues from raising concerns about rights and freedoms with other governments, often telling them that it will make them more likely to move away from the United States and towards China. In May, when the White House scheduled a meeting for McGurk to listen to activists to discuss Middle East policy, his team intervened to cancel the invitations of two prominent advocates, two people familiar with the meeting told HuffPost.
"He doesn't deal with NGOs very much ... He rejects many of us as being overly critical and unhelpful of what he wants to accomplish,"a representative of the civil society group told HuffPost. But " if he listens to human rights organizations ... He will understand that this is a missing link in the dilemma".
The European diplomat noted that in the past, he was shocked by McGurk's view of Western attempts to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, as a murderer and war criminal. "For him, it was less of a priority,"the diplomat said. "The priority was more to ensure security."
Another current U.S. official said that McGurk's team includes too few voices from communities with ties to the Middle East, undermining Biden's promises to take advantage of increased diversity to crystallize positions on national security and rethink America's engagement with the Middle East in recent decades.
However, some familiar with McGurk's work object to the idea that he resists alternative views.
"We didn't always have exactly the same priorities, but I think it was always possible to discuss them," the European diplomat said, calling McGurk "really cool" and hardworking.
An administrative official who worked with him for more than a decade described him as "ready to look to anyone for advice". She said that McGurk sought her insights when she was a junior officer.
"More than almost anyone I've worked with throughout my career, he really appreciates that I offer a unique perspective in some ways,"said the official, who identifies himself as a Muslim American.
Despite all his influence, McGurk is ultimately not the main decision-maker on Middle East policies that arouse public contempt and risk the interests of the United States.
"He's giving the president what he wants,"the former Obama administration official said. "Biden makes these decisions ."
However, this makes some observers even more adamant that McGurk deserves stronger scrutiny, including from the president.
Given his luck, another former official said that they would ask Biden to be careful in relying on McGurk.
"Over and over again, it hurts us more than it helps us,"the former official said.
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