David Ignatius’ panegyric to Jake Sullivan. Hagiography devoid of criticism, which could have been written by Sullivan himself

Disasters of "The Best and the Brightest"

January 1, 2025 by James Rowles

BACKGROUND

1) David Ignatius, “The strategist in the hurricane; As national security adviser, Jake Sullivan often had to improvise — and weigh some very imperfect responses,” Washington Post, December 31, 2024 (6:30 a.m. EST)

If you want to understand the failures of Joe Biden’s foreign policy, there is no better place to start than with David Ignatius’ Wahington Post column on December 31, 2024. Unadulterated hagiography, unburdened by a hint of criticism or hard-nosed reporting, Ignatius’ panegyric reveals how Sullivan has masterfully spun the story of his achievements over the last four years and longer. The result has been a submissive press, and a foreign policy establishment unwilling to take on Sullivan’s self-serving assertions directly.

With such a perfectly designed and executed foreign policy as that presented by Sullivan and Ignatius, one is hard dressed to grasp the significance of Joe Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and how that strategic and humanitarian disaster appears to have emboldened Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine in February 2022, or how the cowardice of Biden and Sullivan in the face of Putin’s nuclear threats has led to a long and drawn-out war with no end in sight.

Sullivan is brilliant, at least by academic standards, beyond any doubt, He has so impressed Biden that one might think of Sullivan as the real architect of U.S. foreign policy over the last four years.

We seem to have forgotten the lessons of The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s brilliant 1972 book which described the influence of the “whiz kids” in the White House and around Defense Secretary Robert Mcnamara on decisions on Vietnam in the John F. Kennedy administration, and their disastrous consequences.

Without real criticism from academia and the press, and with absolutely no ear for hearing such criticism, the Biden administration has stumbled into failure after failure in what will eventually be seen as the worst foreign policy record of any president in recent memory.

Think of only two events:

1. The withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. The abandonment of 20 million women and girls to a cruel medieval fate. Breaking 20 years of promises to the people of Afghanistan, and abandoning the people who believed in those promises. Throwing away 20 years of progress in building a civil society inAfghanistan.

2. The failure to deter Putin from invading Ukraine, and to stand up to him and his nuclear threats in prosecuting the war.

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   James Rowles is a former Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and professor of international law at other universities.

   He studied the history of Nazi Germany at Stanford, and has studied and worked on human rights, judicial reform, and access to justice projects in many countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and in Afghanistan and Russia. At Harvard Law School, he taught a course on “Law, Human Rights, and the Struggle for Democracy in Latin America”.

   At the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the OAS, he worked on human rights cases involving forced disappearances, executions, and torture in a number of authoritarian countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

   Recent Books by the Author

   The Rape of American Democracy: Republican Actions and Democratic Failures, 2016-2021 (September, 18, 2024). Available on Amazon and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.

   Don’t Be Stupid. Pay Attention, Damn It! Advice for Undecided Voters and Voters Leaning Toward Trump (November 11, 2024). Available on Amazon and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.

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