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.

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.

Brett McGurk (left) talks with host Stephen Colbert on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on March 2. Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images

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.

McGurk walks to a meeting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Oct. 23, 2019. Alex Wong/Getty Images

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.

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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........

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