Jake Sullivan on Sisi, Egypt’s Aid and Why the Saudis Never Normalized

Few people know more about how Washington handled the Middle East between 2021 and 2025 than Jake Sullivan. As Joe Biden’s national security adviser he ran the White House end of the Afghanistan withdrawal, the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Gaza war after October 7 and the long courtship of Saudi Arabia that began with the July 2022 fist bump between Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah. Since leaving office he has given few interviews, and almost none to foreign media.

Silent Dossier’s publisher put four questions to him in a one-on-one conversation on the sidelines of a World Affairs Council forum in the United States, where the publisher was attending as a guest of the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), an invitation-only exchange whose past guests include Egypt’s late President Anwar Sadat. Reaching a former national security adviser one-on-one, without an agreed list of topics, is rare. The questions were not cleared in advance: why the Biden administration cut part of Egypt’s military aid, what he made of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, what Egypt told Washington when Israeli forces moved into Rafah, and why Saudi Arabia never signed a normalization deal with Israel.

His answers on Sisi and Saudi Arabia are revealing. His answer on Egypt’s aid is a diplomat’s answer, and it does not survive the facts.

Sullivan blamed Congress for the Biden-era cuts to Egypt’s military aid, but the law leaves the decision with the administration, and the Trump administration has just released the same conditioned money with the same Congress in place.

He described Sisi as remarkably candid and said he respected him, an assessment that carries weight because Sullivan is out of office and under no obligation to flatter Cairo.

He refused to say what Egypt told Washington when Israel advanced on Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor.

He said Saudi Arabia did not normalize with Israel because of the Gaza war and unresolved Palestinian demands, not because of weapons or a defence pact.

Sullivan told Silent Dossier he had visited Egypt often, and he met Sisi in Cairo several times while in office. Asked for his impression, he said: “I found my meetings with him remarkably candid. He is somebody who is able to speak quite freely about his perspective on what he needs to do for his country, but also how he sees things in the international picture.”

He went further. “He’s also not shy about telling me or telling the United States what he disagrees with. So we were able to have very hearty conversations, and I really respected that about him.” He said he was always grateful for the time Sisi gave him and tried to show the same respect in return.

This testimony matters because of who gave it and when. Sullivan is a former official with no duty to protect the relationship. He was not speaking to a television network but in a side conversation, where he was free to say whatever he wanted. If he thought poorly of Sisi, he had every opportunity to say so. Instead he described a leader who tells Washington to its face where Egypt disagrees, and who earned his respect for it. That is an Egyptian president who deals with the United States as a partner, not a client.

At the forum itself Sullivan also defended the administration’s biggest decisions. On Afghanistan, whose chaotic withdrawal produced the images of Afghans clinging to departing American aircraft, he said Biden “inherited a deal in which the Trump administration had not only released several thousand prisoners over the objections of the Afghan government, but had agreed with the Taliban that the United States would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021.” When Biden took office, he said, US troops were at “their lowest point basically since 2001, 2,500 US forces”, while the Taliban was “at its strongest military point since 2001”. The choice, in his telling, was to send thousands more troops back into the war or to leave. The withdrawal decision was rooted in the deal the previous administration had already signed.

On Ukraine he revealed how early Washington knew. “Starting in the fall of 2021,” he said, “the US intelligence community began collecting very, very compelling evidence that Russia was going to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine”, not a limited operation like Crimea in 2014 but an attempt “to essentially take the capital and subjugate the country”. The administration then chose to make that intelligence public rather than keep it to closed talks with allies, so that other governments could press Moscow to stop. The stream of warnings that filled Western newspapers in the winter of 2021–22 was not a series of leaks. It was policy, deliberately released by the White House.

On Iran he recalled that in 2012 President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent him and two colleagues to Oman for the first face-to-face secret meeting with Iranian diplomats in many years, a channel that led to an interim deal in late 2013 and to the 2015 nuclear agreement, the JCPOA. He said the Iranians were already threatening the Strait of Hormuz in those talks, a threat the war that began in February 2026 has shown to be real: shipping through the strait was brought to a near standstill and Iran’s military has threatened to close it completely. He argued that the JCPOA’s inspection regime was the strictest ever applied to any country’s nuclear programme, and that the nuclear deal Trump is now pursuing with Tehran is the kind of agreement Obama had already reached before Trump abandoned it.

On Egypt, Sullivan’s praise for Sisi stands, and his explanation of the aid cuts does not: the record, capped by Rubio’s waiver this month, shows that releasing or withholding Egypt’s military aid has always been the administration’s decision. Watch whether Congress tightens the conditions in the next appropriations bill or accepts that waivers have become routine. On Saudi Arabia, his answer confirms that normalization runs through Gaza and the Palestinian question, and no nuclear deal or arms package from Washington will buy its way around that. For background on Egypt’s role in the Gaza file, see our report on Egypt’s spy chief’s warning to Israel before October 7.