When writing a tick-tock, behind-the-scenes essay on a just-concluded current event, you cannot forget that you already know how it ends.

That’s the mistake Franklin Foer makes in his long Atlantic piece on the Biden administration’s year of failure when it comes to producing peace in Gaza. The article is a credulous recounting of Biden-Bibi tensions entirely from the National Security Council’s perspective without the benefit of hindsight. Foer ends his opus with national security advisor Jake Sullivan beginning to suspect that Hamas has been playing him this whole time; it would seem, rather, that Foer himself was coming to that conclusion about Sullivan and his efforts to spin Foer.

Both are true.