When talk show host Stephen Colbert was looking for someone to explain the U.S. war with Iran to his Late Show audience in early March, he turned to Brett McGurk, who had served as a key Middle East advisor to four U.S. presidents.

“The case I don’t think has been made to the American people,” McGurk, now a venture capitalist and CNN analyst, told Colbert. “Before launching a military operation … a president has to be clear in his own mind of what he wants to achieve and how to achieve it. And that’s not always the strong suit” of U.S. President Donald Trump, he said.

McGurk was Colbert’s go-to on the subject of war in the Middle East for a reason. The 52-year-old, while little known outside policymaking circles, has held a uniquely enduring role in U.S. foreign policy over two decades. In a period of heightened polarization and personnel shifts between administrations, McGurk has survived—and thrived—in both Republican and Democratic presidencies. With few interruptions, he has taken on an increasing share of responsibilities for Washington’s Middle East policy starting with the George W. Bush presidency and then going through the Obama years, the turmoil of Trump’s first term, and finally the Biden administration. Agreeing or disagreeing with McGurk’s body of work is, in a sense, a Rorschach test for whether one thinks U.S. policy in the Middle East this century has been a success or failure.

McGurk spent his early years in government focusing on nation-building during the Iraq War. But by 2021, when he returned to the White House as a deputy assistant to President Joe Biden, he was determined to steer U.S. foreign policy in a different direction from what had come before. The era of grand U.S. ambitions in the Middle East was over, McGurk told National Security Council staff, according to people who worked with him at the time. McGurk’s mantra: Back to basics.

Instead of pursuing “grandiose aims,” McGurk said at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Manama Dialogue in Bahrain in November 2021, the Biden administration would pursue “sound strategy, setting goals and objectives only after careful study of facts on the ground and consultations with our friends and partners.”

McGurk’s diplomatic ambitions were shattered on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas carried out its deadly attack, igniting a catastrophic Israeli counterstrike that fueled widespread accusations that the United States was empowering Israel to carry out genocide against the Palestinians.

The National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa became a lightning rod for people who viewed him as the key architect of the Biden administration’s embrace of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Critics such as Randa Slim, the head of the Stimson Center’s Middle East Program, say McGurk won the trust of successive presidents from both parties by embracing a quintessentially U.S. view of foreign policy.

“This is a guy who prefers expeditious, short-term solutions to deal with festering long-term issues in a region that does not lend itself to short-term fixes,” Slim said.

To McGurk, securing incremental gains in the Middle East is better than pursuing hubristic and often unrealistic objectives in a complex region.

“It’s a common folly of foreign policy to declare maximalist aims and then think of how to achieve them,” McGurk told Foreign Policy in a series of rare on-the-record interviews. “Proximate aims, incremental progress, the careful alignment of ends, ways, and means—that’s the better approach in my experience.”

McGurk left the White House last January facing college campus protesters who had branded him a war criminal. The legacy of his work continues to reverberate as the Trump administration wages its quixotic war with Iran and wrestles with controversial moves McGurk made elsewhere in the region.

To get a fair picture of McGurk’s career and influence, Foreign Policy spoke with McGurk and more than two dozen people who worked directly with him. McGurk stands by his response to the Gaza war, and his success in endearing himself to presidents from both major parties suggests that he’s likely to return to political power in Washington. To his detractors, though, McGurk is both cause and effect, a potent symbol of the United States’ misguided approach to the Middle East over two devastating decades—from Iraq’s sectarian fallout to Yemen’s proxy quagmire, the total devastation of Gaza, and, most recently, the global energy shock sparked by war with Iran.

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When Israel’s ambassador to the United States sent McGurk word of an unfolding assault by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7, 2023, McGurk sent back a message of unequivocal support: “We are with you.”

That instinctual response became the foundation for McGurk’s approach to the crisis.

McGurk had worked with Biden during the Obama administration and backed his candidacy in 2020. When Biden won, he tapped McGurk to be his main Middle East advisor at the White House, propelling the ambitious strategist into the most important role of his career.

In framing his own views, McGurk has said he harks back to a quote from former President John F. Kennedy: “The purpose of foreign policy is not to provide an outlet for our own sentiments of hope or indignation; it is to shape real events in a real world.”

James Jeffrey, a veteran Washington diplomat who battled McGurk on various Middle East policy decisions when they worked together under Presidents Barack Obama and Trump, hailed his former colleague as one of the most skilled diplomats of his generation.

“I think he has been among the most consequential government officials on the Middle East over the past four presidencies,” Jeffrey said. “Brett understands power. He understands the tradecraft of diplomacy: having good relations with people, what works, what doesn’t work, and what each side needs. It is an objectively dispassionate approach to advancing foreign policy by deploying American power.”

But McGurk’s realpolitik wasn’t the approach Biden said he would bring to the White House when he defeated Trump in 2020. Instead, Biden vowed to put human rights at the center of his foreign policy. When he brought McGurk in to be his main Middle East advisor, skeptics took it as a bad omen, according to former administration officials.

Within days of returning to the White House in 2021, though, McGurk was in Riyadh to deliver a pointed message to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Biden had run for office on a vow to treat Saudi Arabia like a pariah. The president’s stance came after the United States had concluded that the crown prince had directed a hit team to assassinate Jamal Khashoggi, a leading Saudi writer and U.S. resident, in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Biden sent McGurk to deliver a harsh dressing-down: The White House would cut off major weapons sales to Riyadh until it curtailed its war against Iran-backed Houthi fighters in Yemen. The war had become an albatross for Saudi Arabia, and McGurk made it clear that the Biden administration would scale back its military aid until Riyadh got out.

Biden was following through on his pledge to put human rights at the center of his foreign-policy agenda and fulfilling a vow he’d made on the campaign trail. The pressure helped propel Saudi Arabia into embracing a tenuous cease-fire in Yemen. But McGurk said he didn’t think it was wise to use military aid as a cudgel with Middle East allies. Halting weapons to Saudi Arabia may have accelerated the kingdom’s efforts to extricate itself from Yemen, but it also created space for Iran to step up its support for the Houthis, who would evolve to become an unexpectedly potent regional threat.

The suspension of aid irked Saudi leaders, who had been trying to disentangle themselves from the morass in Yemen. The divide would create years of tensions between Washington and Riyadh.

McGurk began to press for a course correction that gained momentum when the White House needed help from Saudi Arabia in keeping oil prices down after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, upending global energy markets. McGurk also saw a unique opportunity to create a landmark diplomatic deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia—a move that couldn’t happen until Biden repaired relations with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The diplomatic reset created deep fissures in the Biden administration and drew vocal opposition from progressive Democrats in Congress, who saw it as a betrayal of the president’s pledge to keep human rights and democracy promotion at the center of his agenda.

McGurk himself never saw foreign policy that way.

“For an American diplomat, human rights should always be on the table. It’s what makes us different. But the issue does not swallow all other interests,” he told Foreign Policy. “From a human rights standpoint, it’s under an American umbrella, over the course of years, that countries in the Middle East and elsewhere will be more tolerant and moderate than if we cede the field to China or Russia.”

State Department officials pushing back against the Saudi reset told Foreign Policy that they were sidelined in key discussions. The debate culminated in a fist bump heard round the world: Biden flew to Saudi Arabia and gave Mohammed bin Salman the controversial greeting that became the foundation for warming relations.

McGurk stepped up his trips to the Gulf as he tried to create a complex diplomatic deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. A key stumbling block was how to handle the Palestinian conundrum as part of the deal.

Palestine was something of a blind spot for McGurk, according to several Biden administration officials who worked with him on Middle East issues. His vision of the Middle East was shaped by the early years of his career he’d spent in Iraq. He hadn’t focused much on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. In any event, Biden had little interest in pursuing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. He’d seen president after president fail spectacularly when they tried. Instead, Biden pushed a policy of trying to manage the issue with modest economic initiatives meant to make the daily lives of Palestinians a little bit better.

When McGurk outlined the Biden administration’s Middle East priorities in his 2021 Manama Dialogue speech, he didn’t mention Palestinians at all. Several administration officials who worked with McGurk in the Biden administration said he viewed the Palestinian issue mostly as a bargaining chip for his grand regional deal rather than a problem worthy of its own attention.

“Brett was very dismissive of the Palestinian issue,” said one former senior government official who worked with McGurk. “‘Nobody cares about it. That’s yesterday’s news.’ That was the overall psychology, certainly until Oct. 7.

Biden’s broader national security team also took a hubristic view of the Middle East. Eight days before the Hamas attack, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, boasted at the Atlantic Festival that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

Mohammed bin Salman, too, had an ambivalent view of the conflict. He privately told then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken that he had little empathy for Palestinians but knew he couldn’t throw them under the bus if he established diplomatic relations with Israel. (A Saudi official has disputed this account of the conversation.) Publicly, the crown prince and Saudi government have stood firmly on the issue.

It would take months of painstaking negotiations for the proposed deal to include any substantive concessions to help boost fading Palestinian hopes of establishing their own independent state. McGurk worked to secure plans for a Saudi diplomatic delegation to travel to Ramallah a month before the Hamas attacks in 2023, a move meant to signal Riyadh’s commitment to helping the Palestinian Authority as part of any deal with Israel.

“We believe the Biden administration did their best, but we would have appreciated more of an active role because we do believe that they could have done more,” said Ayah al-Muhisin, the chief of staff to Palestinian Vice President Hussein al-Sheikh.

According to several Biden administration diplomats, an Israeli-Saudi diplomatic deal was McGurk’s “white whale,” a reference to Captain Ahab’s doomed obsession with hunting the whale that maimed and eventually killed him in Moby Dick.

McGurk was undeterred. On Oct. 6, 2023, McGurk was hammering out more details with Saudi officials in hopes of finalizing a proposal before Biden’s term came to an end. All that was upended the following day when Hamas carried out its surprise attack, which left nearly 1,200 people dead and another 251 taken into Gaza to be held hostage.

In the early days, the Biden administration counseled Israeli leaders against letting their humiliation dictate their response. Key U.S. leaders, including McGurk, urged their counterparts to not let revenge guide their decision-making.

McGurk soon turned his sights toward trying to negotiate a hostage deal. In late November, McGurk helped secure the first cease-fire in the war—an initial four-day pause that led to the release of more than 100 Israelis and other citizens captured on Oct. 7. Israel agreed to free 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees as part of the deal. But the agreement fell apart prematurely, and Israel stepped up its military campaign soon thereafter.

By Thanksgiving, key Biden administration officials were starting to have qualms about the Israeli response. Israeli airstrikes were killing hundreds of women and children. Israeli forces were killing United Nations workers, Palestinian doctors, aid workers, and entire families in refugee camps.

Some U.S. officials wanted Biden to call on Israel to end the war by the end of the year. Blinken was sympathetic to the view. But McGurk, Sullivan, and Biden weren’t prepared to do that, according to several U.S. officials involved in the discussions. Some administration officials raised the idea of putting conditions on what Israel could do with U.S. military aid, but others, they said, including McGurk, argued that doing so would tie Israel’s hands.

“There was no way to stop the war absent a hostage deal,” McGurk said. “That was true from the beginning.”

McGurk worked to accelerate weapons deliveries to Israel in the early months, including Hellfire missiles and massive 2,000-pound bombs used to carry out repeated attacks that contributed to a soaring Palestinian death toll. And the United States had to regularly battle Israel over its refusal to allow large amounts of food and humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Throughout the Gaza war, critics of the Biden administration’s policy—both inside and outside government—focused their ire on McGurk.

“All of us were appalled on Oct. 7, but the administration took an approach that, from the outset, fed a narrative that the U.S. was viewing Palestinian lives as somehow less equal in value to Israeli lives,” said the former senior government official who worked with McGurk. Of civilian casualties in Gaza, the official noted, “I don’t think Brett was sufficiently engaged on that.”

To Jeffrey, McGurk’s close embrace of Israel was the right move.

“At the end of the day, U.S. interests have been dramatically advanced by what has happened after the tragic day of Oct. 7, and allowing the Israelis and enabling and fighting alongside them was the right thing to do,” Jeffrey said.

“Brett is a strong believer in realpolitik,” he added. “He is also a very good judge of who the 800-pound gorilla was. He knew [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu was the 800-pound gorilla, and he was determined to change the strategic calculus in the Middle East. Brett was central to our effective enabling of Israel to defeat Iran and its proxy empire to the great benefit of Israel and the U.S.”

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The son of Pittsburgh schoolteachers, McGurk started his political career as an idealistic law clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He was at the Supreme Court building in Washington on 9/11, when al Qaeda hijackers crashed commercial jets into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. McGurk rushed from the marble building, saw smoke rising from the Pentagon, and knew that the attack would set his life off in a new direction.

About two years later, McGurk flew to Baghdad to serve as a legal advisor for the U.S. team working to create a new democratic government for Iraq after the United States toppled longtime dictator Saddam Hussein. McGurk was an early champion of America’s ambitious democracy-building efforts in the Middle East. But he quickly came to sour on the idea as he watched Iraq descend into a bloody spiral of deadly car bomb attacks that threatened to break the country apart.

Bush brought McGurk into the White House in 2005 to help shape the president’s flailing Iraq strategy. McGurk was part of a White House team that helped devise a plan to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq in a military surge meant to prevent the country’s collapse.

McGurk quickly established himself as an eloquent Oval Office advisor who was able to deftly explain complex issues and offer clear options for the president to consider.

“He finds the most reassuring way to brief any situation and to always find a solution in theory,” said a senior Biden administration official who worked with McGurk. “It doesn’t always work in practice. For principals, it’s extraordinarily effective to have someone say: Here’s the problem, and here’s the answer. He will say it with great confidence over and over.”

In navigating Iraq’s fraught sectarian relations, McGurk closely aligned himself with Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite politician who returned from exile in 2003 and relied on U.S. support to become prime minister in 2006. Maliki was a divisive figure accused of stoking sectarian divisions by backing Shiite militias and alienating the country’s Sunni and Kurdish communities.

McGurk backed Maliki’s bid for a second term in 2010, with some referring to him derisively as the “Maliki whisperer.” In a letter last February calling for a congressional hearing on McGurk’s influence in Washington, Republican Rep. Joe Wilson called Maliki the “single most important factor in driving the rise of ISIS.” Wilson wrote that it was “hard to understate the damage that Brett McGurk has had on U.S. national security interests in the Middle East” by supporting the Iraqi leader with close ties to Iran.

To McGurk, working with Maliki was an inevitable reality driven not by his own preferences but by the fact that the Shiite leader had cobbled together the votes in parliament to return as prime minister. Republicans blasted McGurk for failing to use his influence with Maliki to successfully negotiate a deal to allow U.S. troops to remain in Iraq, forcing the United States to pull out all its forces by the end of 2011.

McGurk’s support for Maliki and failed negotiating efforts came back to haunt him when Obama nominated him in March 2012 to be the United States’ ambassador to Iraq. Republican senators, including John McCain, opposed his nomination and castigated McGurk for his political machinations in Iraq.

The day before his Senate confirmation hearing that June, salacious emails and messages between McGurk and a then-Wall Street Journal reporter were leaked showing that the pair had had an affair while they were working in Iraq in 2008.

McGurk withdrew his nomination as Republicans called for him to step aside. It appeared that McGurk’s political ascent had been halted. (He and the reporter married in 2012 and remain “happily” together, according to McGurk.)

After that humiliating setback, however, McGurk managed to quickly sidestep further trouble. The following year, Obama tapped him to be the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran as the Islamic State was extending its control in eastern Syria and threatening to expand into Iraq. Secretary of State John Kerry referred to McGurk as his “Swiss Army knife,” according to a spokesperson for Kerry—a versatile tool he could use to get out of all kinds of problems.

As the Obama administration tried to find fighters who could successfully defeat the militant group, it homed in on a small force of Syrian Kurdish fighters with a complicated history. The People’s Protection Units (YPG) was a socialist militia closely aligned with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a larger Kurdish force that had staged terrorist attacks in Turkey as part of its decades-long fight for autonomy. The European Union, Turkey, and the United States had all branded the PKK a terrorist group. There were few differences between the PKK and YPG. The forces trained at the same mountain camps in northern Iraq and sometimes shared fighters, blurring the lines between a group the White House considered terrorists and a force the United States wanted to train and equip to fight the Islamic State.

McGurk was Washington’s leading champion of the YPG, and he repeatedly defended the group as distinct from the PKK, a move that outraged Turkish leaders and pushed Washington’s relationship with mercurial President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the breaking point.

U.S. officials involved in the effort conceded that the distinction between the two groups was largely fiction and privately dubbed the force “Brett’s militia,” diplomatic sources told me at the time and confirmed more recently. Turkey accused the U.S.-backed force of funneling weapons to its PKK brethren and pressed the Obama administration to remove McGurk from his post. At one meeting with Obama, according to attendees, Erdogan was so enraged to see McGurk sitting in the room that he demanded he be removed.

But McGurk’s approach won the day. The YPG proved to be the most effective force leading the fight against the Islamic State.

Retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, who was leading the international coalition against the Islamic State at the time, praised McGurk for his deft diplomacy in persuading reluctant Turkish allies to work with Iraqi Kurds in 2014 to beat back a potentially game-shifting battle in the Syrian city of Kobani.

That, Allen said, was a “pivotal moment of the entire war” for the United States.

“He proved himself individually as a great diplomat, really innovative and really intellectually agile,” Allen said. “He expanded my capacity to be successful rather than being restrained.”

Another career high point for McGurk was securing the release of Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran-based correspondent. Rezaian had been detained by Iran since July 2014 and imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison after being falsely accused of being a U.S. spy.

“He put in a lot of hours and lost a lot of sleep to save American lives—and I’m one of them,” Rezaian said. “I’ve encountered a lot of people in similarly high positions who never put in a sleepless night trying to save Americans. I’m not here without Brett McGurk—and I’m not the only person that can say that.”

In January 2016, McGurk orchestrated a complex deal to secure freedom for Rezaian and three other Americans. Washington agreed to free several Iranians held in the United States and, in parallel, immediately release $400 million in frozen Iranian assets from a financial settlement unrelated to the hostage negotiations.

The deal nearly fell apart when Iran refused to let Rezaian’s wife, Yeganeh Salehi, board the plane to freedom with her husband. McGurk was at the InterContinental hotel in Geneva with the Iranian negotiators. The Swiss ambassador called McGurk with ominous concerns that Iran’s feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had taken control of the process and weren’t going to let Salehi leave Tehran.

McGurk stormed into the Iranian negotiator’s room and threatened to withhold the money, block the release of the Iranian prisoners, and scuttle the entire deal if they didn’t ensure Salehi flew out of Iran.

“‘You’re not getting anything until everybody is on the plane,’” McGurk said he told the Iranians. “‘If they don’t all get on the plane, it’s over.’”

The coordinated release of the $400 million, which the Obama administration kept quiet, blew up in McGurk’s face when the agreement was revealed months later by the Wall Street Journal. Republicans accused McGurk and the Obama administration of secretly paying a hefty ransom to Iran to seal the deal. Trump repeatedly denounced the deal while running for president that year, calling it a “disgrace.”

While the money was not explicitly part of the hostage deal, McGurk said he did use it as a critical pressure point.

“There’s this idea out there that he’s just kind of cold and calculating and doesn’t care,” Rezaian said. “That’s not been my experience, especially around the lives of Americans.”

While McGurk proved adept at advancing U.S. policies under Bush and Obama, he eventually ran into irreconcilable differences with Trump while serving as his special envoy overseeing the fight against the Islamic State. McGurk was one of the few people from the Obama administration whom Trump kept on when he became president. Trump wanted McGurk to help deliver a death blow to the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate. And he did. But, on Dec. 19, 2018, as U.S.-backed fighters in Syria were battling the last pockets of Islamic State forces, Trump abruptly ordered a withdrawal of the estimated 2,000 U.S. troops providing support for the counterterrorism campaign in the country. McGurk was appalled that the United States was abandoning the Syrian fighters who paid one of the heaviest prices in the war.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced his resignation the following day. McGurk, who had already been planning to leave the administration in a few months for a post at Stanford University, followed suit.

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McGurk’s exile to California, while ultimately short-lived, came as a relief to many career diplomats in Washington who viewed him as a corrosive influence on U.S. foreign policy. Detractors took aim at the fact that McGurk never learned fluent Arabic and said he gravitated more toward the halls of power than the gritty streets, giving him a skewed view of the region.

“I think he’s a smart guy who has tried his best on a variety of really hard issues,” the former senior government official said. “I don’t think he is somebody who knows the Middle East well. … He knows leaders and government officials, but he doesn’t know the population outside of hotels or government office centers.”

McGurk chafed at such characterizations and pointed to his repeated trips to the front lines of the fight against the Islamic State as one sign of his willingness to put his life on the line to advance U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Biden administration officials who worked with McGurk and questioned his judgment said that when it came to the Israel-Hamas war, the White House aide consistently embraced the Israeli view of the war, downplayed Israeli recalcitrance in negotiations, and pinned most of the blame for the failures to end the war on Hamas.

As the war in Gaza stretched into 2024, top Biden administration officials began making the case that the White House should halt the delivery of some U.S. weapons to send a clear signal of discontent to Israel. McGurk was opposed, referring to it in a podcast interview later as “naive and not realistic.”

U.S. frustrations hit a boiling point on April 1, 2024, when an Israeli airstrike targeted an aid convoy working for celebrity chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen, killing six international aid workers and a Palestinian. Israel quickly admitted that it had mistakenly attacked the cars and disciplined several military officials. But the strike bolstered those in Washington urging Biden to curtail weapons deliveries to Israel.

A month later, Biden and his team coalesced around a modest plan to temporarily halt delivery of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. It was one time when McGurk’s worldview didn’t win the day. But McGurk was the one to ensure that the weapons were immediately removed from a shipment heading to Israel.

McGurk viewed the decision as a mistake that led Hamas to dig in its heels, making it even harder to broker an end to the war.

“My primary vantage point was the hostage talks, and when we paused the one shipment of heavy payload munitions or it was reported that we were considering more than that, Hamas hardened its positions or stopped engaging at all,” he said.

A cross-section of former Biden administration officials argued that Israel’s war in Gaza would have been far worse had the United States not tempered its response over and over again. For comparison, they cited Trump’s decision to let Israel block all aid from going into Gaza and step up its deadly airstrikes.

“The degree of destruction was not necessary, but the degree and level of the Hamas tunneling was far more extensive than anyone imagined,” said Amos Hochstein, a top Biden White House advisor who worked closely with McGurk. “When we decided they were going a little too far, we pushed back. I guarantee it would have been far worse if we hadn’t.”

David Satterfield, a veteran diplomat who served as Biden’s special envoy overseeing humanitarian aid during the Gaza war, said the president had little leverage to pressure Israel. Like McGurk, Satterfield opposed using weapons suspension as a tool and said Biden didn’t have the necessary political clout with Netanyahu to put meaningful public pressure on the Israeli leader to shift course.

“We did what we thought was best, was right, in the face of the atrocities of Oct. 7, to do as much as we could to prevent famine and starvation,” Satterfield said. “Could we have done more? The circumstances and parameters for doing more were not present in my analysis during the Biden administration.”

McGurk worked with the Trump team during his final weeks in the White House, shuttling around the Middle East, spearheading efforts to broker a cease-fire that took effect on the last day of Biden’s presidency. The tenuous deal lasted two months before Israel renewed its offensive. In October 2025, Israel and Hamas agreed to a broader cease-fire, and the Palestinian group returned the remaining hostages seized on Oct. 7, 2023. But Gaza remains a deadly war zone, with more than half of it in Israeli hands. Hamas is reasserting its power in Palestinian areas not controlled by Israel. Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians since the October cease-fire took effect. Four Israeli soldiers have died in Gaza during that time. The fundamental issues that led to the war in Gaza remain unresolved.

Many top Biden administration officials who helped shape the U.S. response to Oct. 7 left office with serious misgivings about what they had done, based on their public comments. Sullivan; Jon Finer, Sullivan’s deputy at the White House; and Philip Gordon, Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security advisor, all expressed regrets and thought, in hindsight, that they could have done more to constrain Israel and save Palestinian lives in Gaza. Not McGurk.

After leaving the White House, McGurk repeatedly defended the Biden administration’s Middle East policy and argued that the region was better off on Jan. 20, 2025, than it had been for some time. McGurk ticked off his barometers for success: a Hezbollah threat in Lebanon neutralized by Israel; the toppling of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; militias in Iraq on their heels; Iran weakened by Israel’s strikes; U.S. relations with Gulf nations strong; and a cease-fire in Gaza.

Still, “the human consequences of this war tear at the soul of anyone who worked on it and from every dimension—the hostages in tunnels, the civilians trapped above,” McGurk said in our discussions.

Some U.S. officials said McGurk had undue influence over Biden’s thinking.

“I have a lot of regrets about our Middle East policy, and it’s hard to see Brett as anything but the singular driving force behind it,” a second senior Biden administration official said. “The idea that the president was unmovable on tactical issues is, I think, just not true.”

But key administration officials said Biden was presented with tougher options to pressure Israel; he just didn’t embrace them.

“At the end of the day, Joe Biden was not shielded from the robust disagreements over how to approach the question of leverage and arms cutoff at all,” a third senior Biden administration official said. “He made his decisions.”

McGurk made a quick transition out of the White House in 2025. Three weeks after Trump took office, he joined the venture capital firm Lux Capital as a partner. Sometime later, McGurk started appearing regularly on CNN as a global affairs analyst.

As to his own track record, McGurk remains defiant. “To critics of ours, I ask the question: Well, what was your alternative? What was the alternative to the cease-fire-hostage road map?” he said in June 2025. “Honestly, I don’t hear very good ones. … I think you got to judge it by the overall results.”