Brett McGurk has sought to put a Saudi-Israeli relationship “at the forefront” of the U.S.’s Middle East policy — downplaying Palestinian concerns and human rights.
Brett’s theory of the region is that it’s a source of instability but also resources,” the former official said. “It’s a very old-school, colonialist mentality: People need strong rulers to control them, and we need to extract to our benefit what we need while minimizing the cost to ourselves and others we see as like us, in this case Israelis.”
“This approach always fails,” the official continued, saying it’s “short-sighted” and forces the U.S. to reinvest in the Middle East every few years.
“Here’s a clear example before you: they wanted to bypass the Palestinians” in Saudi-Israel normalization, the former official said.
Bowing and scraping to people who attack and control us in the hope they might be nice to US.
Four men in Washington shape America’s policy in the Middle East. Three are obvious: President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. The fourth is less well-known, despite his huge sway over the other three ― and despite his determination to keep championing policies that many see as fueling bloodshed in Gaza and beyond.
His name is Brett McGurk. He’s the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, and he’s one of the most powerful people in U.S. national security.
McGurk crafts the options that Biden considers on issues from negotiations with Israel to weapon sales for Saudi Arabia. He controls whether global affairs experts within the government ― including more experienced staff at the Pentagon and the State Department ― can have any impact, and he decides which outside voices have access to White House decision-making conversations. His knack for increasing his influence is the envy of other Beltway operators. And he has a clear vision of how he thinks American interests should be advanced, regarding human rights concerns as secondary at best, according to current and former colleagues and close observers.
“It’s tremendous power that is completely opaque and non-transparent and non-accountable,” a former U.S. official told HuffPost.
Comparing McGurk’s extremely centralized approach in the Biden era to the more consultative way in which past administrations made decisions, a representative of a civil society group said McGurk is “able to drive things with [Sullivan] and the president in a process that is not a process.”
It’s a stunning degree of authority for a 50-year-old operative with a deeply controversial career. One current U.S. official said McGurk’s dominance has rendered the top Middle East official at the State Department ― a former ambassador who, unlike McGurk, was confirmed to her post by the Senate ― merely “a fig leaf.”
“The State Department essentially has no juice on [Israel-Palestine] because Brett is at the center of it,” the official said.
Meanwhile, McGurk’s primary focus, a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, has come to dominate American diplomacy in the region. “He consistently pushed for engagement with the Saudis and sought to put that relationship at the forefront of what we’re trying to do in the Middle East,” the U.S. official said.
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment for this story. The agency has experienced internal uproar in recent weeks. On Thursday, a State Department official told HuffPost that staff have submitted at least six formal letters of dissent regarding Biden’s Gaza policy to Blinken through a protected channel.
Amid the crisis that erupted Oct. 7, when the Gaza-based Palestinian militant group Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and Israel responded by launching an ongoing offensive that has now killed more than 14,000 Palestinians, McGurk has maintained his importance. He’s deeply involved in the negotiations between Israel, Hamas and regional governments that have let more than 100 Israeli hostages come home and boosted the amount of humanitarian aid flowing into Gaza. His team is tightly managing what U.S. officials say about the conflict, and he is in regular contact with foreign officials who say America’s largely unrestrained support for Israel is spurring huge resentment worldwide.
Now there’s growing concern that despite the shock of the Hamas attack and the sweeping Israeli response, McGurk will stand by priorities and tactics that many officials and analysts see as deeply unhelpful.
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