In April 2024, Iran launched 120 ballistic missiles, 170 drones, and 30 cruise missiles at Israel. At that exact moment, inside the White House, Joe Biden's top Middle East adviser was drawing up plans to impose what he now calls "pretty draconian measures" against the country those missiles were aimed at.
The adviser put it in a book.
Brett McGurk — White House National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, senior adviser to four presidents — sat down with CBS News' Margaret Brennan on "Face the Nation" this past weekend to promote his memoir, "Brink," set for release this Tuesday. What came out of his mouth was a detailed account of how close the Biden administration came to cutting arms shipments to America's closest ally in the Middle East while that ally was under the largest aerial assault in the region's modern history.
"At that moment, if not for that impending missile attack, which we then had to deploy military forces... I think we would have taken some pretty draconian measures against Israel," McGurk told Brennan.
The trigger was an Israeli military drone strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza. Biden was, by McGurk's account, "fed up." The response under discussion wasn't a sternly worded letter. It was a potential halt to American weapons transfers.
Biden made the threat directly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "You think I'm Santa Claus?" Biden told the Israeli leader, according to McGurk's account. "No Santa in Israel, pal." Biden told Netanyahu he could "cut Israel from military aid at a finger snap."
Then Iran's missiles entered the atmosphere and the conversation shifted from punishing Israel to defending it.
The administration did pause one shipment — 2,000-pound bombs — but never instituted a complete weapons halt. All other aid continued through the end of Biden's term. McGurk himself acknowledged the limits of the leverage: "Israel also has one of the largest arms industries in the world," he said, adding that "the record does not support" the argument that cutting American aid would have stopped the war.
So the Biden team's own Middle East point man is now on the record saying the policy they considered wouldn't have worked — but they considered it anyway. That's not strategy. That's a president reacting to headlines.
The State Department's own findings from that period found it "reasonable to assess" that Israeli forces had used U.S.-made weapons "inconsistent with" international humanitarian law. Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland was among those pushing for restrictions. The internal pressure was real.
McGurk's memoir also reveals the wreckage of what October 7th destroyed beyond the immediate horror. A Saudi-Israel normalization deal — one McGurk describes as "one of the biggest deals since the Cold War" — had been in development since January 2021, when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman first floated the idea. It would have included a civil nuclear program for Saudi Arabia and Israeli concessions on Palestinian territories. Hamas's attack buried it.
On the intelligence failure itself, McGurk is blunt: "We did not have anything in our system that would have been a warning and indicator." The U.S. had no advance intelligence on October 7th.
The timeline McGurk lays out is worth sitting with. December 2024: McGurk traveled to Israel with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan for deal discussions with Hamas. January 2025: a ceasefire was struck days before the Biden team left office. October 2025: Hamas released the last living hostages under a separate agreement — one negotiated by Trump envoy Steve Witkoff.
Biden's team spent months debating whether to punish Israel for defending itself. Trump's team got the hostages home. McGurk wrote 400 pages explaining the first approach. The second one fit in a deal memo.
