The conflict has spilled over into Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and the Red Sea \u2013 yet the context is barely discussed or understood <\/p>\n
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\u2019s orders<\/a> to his foreign policy staff were to \u201ckeep the Middle East off my desk\u201d. The idea was that the Arab case was largely closed. \u201cThe Middle East is quieter today than it has been in decades,\u201d said the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in a fate-tempting speech<\/a> just a week before the Hamas attacks.<\/p>\n The plan was to \u201cultimately integrate\u201d the region by encouraging further normalisation between Arab states and Israel, thereby isolating and taming Iran. As the scholar Edward Said once put it: \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The conflict has spilled over into Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and the Red Sea \u2013 yet the context is barely discussed or understood 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, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}