It may be a small detail, but it tells a big, clarifying story: the Biden administration did not appoint an ambassador to Cairo until March of last year. After he came to office, President Biden’s orders to his foreign policy staff were to “keep the Middle East off my desk”. The idea was that the Arab case was largely closed. “The Middle East is quieter today than it has been in decades,” said the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in a fate-tempting speech just a week before the Hamas attacks.
The plan was to “ultimately integrate” the region by encouraging further normalisation between Arab states and Israel, thereby isolating and taming Iran. As the scholar Edward Said once put it: “It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.”
