The 2021 botched withdrawal from Afghanistan on President Joe Biden's watch sparked widespread calls for his top advisers and military leaders to resign. Nobody did.
However, according to Fox News, in a bombshell revelation admitted to The Washington Post's David Ignatius, Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, reportedly offered to resign in the wake of the disastrous situation that resulted in numerous dead American soldiers.
The news came as Ignatius spoke with Sullivan and other top Biden advisers as their roles come to an end.
Sullivan's offer to resign was met with resistance by the president, according to the other aides the Post columnist spoke with.
Ignatius reported that the early disaster in Biden's presidency immediately created a rift and turmoil behind the scenes of the president's national security team.
Fox News reported:
Ignatius reported that the Afghanistan withdrawal "broke the early comity" of the Biden administration's national security team, and created a riff between Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Sullivan weighed in on the "challenge" of the Afghanistan troop withdrawal.
"You cannot end a war like Afghanistan, where you’ve built up dependencies and pathologies, without the end being complex and challenging," Sullivan told Ignatius. "The choice was: Leave, and it would not be easy, or stay forever."
Sullivan added, "Leaving Kabul freed the [United States] to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in ways that might have been impossible if we had stayed."
Jake “Sullivan offered to resign” after the Afghanistan withdrawal, @IgnatiusPost reports.
If true, that would be very different from what many advisers told me for THE INTERNATIONALISTS, which is that no one in admin offered to resign. https://t.co/8YqMrVyxA6
— Alex Ward (@alexbward) December 31, 2024
Sullivan provided Ignatius a self-assessed performance review of his time in the Biden administration.
"Are our alliances stronger? Yes. Are our enemies weaker? Yes. Did we keep America out of war? Yes. Did we improve our strategic position in the competition with China while stabilizing the relationship? Yes. Did we strengthen the engines of American economic and technological power? Yes," he said.
Fox News reached out to both the National Security Council and the White House in the wake of the published interview. Neither responded.
Earlier reports indicated that nobody offered to resign in the wake of the withdrawal. So, somebody's lying.
