A thorough, useful, and flattering profile of Jake Sullivan, Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser.  T

The Washington Post

Opinion

David Ignatius

The strategist in the hurricane

As national security adviser, Jake Sullivan often had to improvise — and weigh some very imperfect responses.

December 31, 2024

When President Joe Biden chose Jake Sullivan to be his national security adviser in November 2020, he touted him as a “once-in-a-generation intellect with the experience and temperament for one of the toughest jobs in the world.” But Sullivan’s dazzling résumé couldn’t prepare him for managing what turned out to be the most perilous events since the Cuban missile crisis. For that, he had to improvise — and weigh some very imperfect responses.

“Do I go to bed at night worried that the world could start spinning out of control? Of course I do,” Sullivan told me during one of a series of interviews I did with him and a dozen close friends and advisers for this piece. He maintains the bland, boyish demeanor of a perpetual graduate student. But at 48, he has carried as heavy a burden as any national security adviser in a half-century. The job, he told one recent interviewer, “ground down my affability.”

Sullivan’s story, including many details revealed here for the first time, describes the intersection of a brilliant young strategist with a world on fire. It’s a complicated record, as Sullivan and his colleagues juggled two hot wars — in the Middle East and in Ukraine — and a potential nuclear confrontation with Russia. Like Biden, Sullivan gets criticism for not using American power more decisively. But the record shows that during crises, Sullivan demonstrated a rare ability to conduct back-channel diplomacy and think outside the box.

“Jake is one of most influential national security advisers in our history,” argued Graham Allison, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who has been an informal counselor to Sullivan. Allison puts him a league with renowned predecessors Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. Sullivan struggled at times because he confronted a more complex world than they did. As he put it in a 2022 talk at the Council on Foreign Relations: “We have to manage the unachievable.”

Sullivan grew up in the heartland, an Irish Catholic boy in middle-class Minneapolis. He grabbed every merit badge in sight: He was summa cum laude at Yale; a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he won a prized “first”; an editor of the Yale Law Review; a Supreme Court clerk; and at the astonishing age of 34, director of policy planning at the State Department under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “He’s won every intellectual race that he ever entered,” Allison said.

Despite this superelite pedigree, Sullivan presents a convincing imitation of normal. He’s thin and slightly disheveled. He likes to watch sports with close friend and deputy Jon Finer. (He roots for all Minnesota teams and the English soccer club Chelsea.) He likes to party with his funny, brainy wife Maggie Goodlander, also a former Supreme Court clerk, who was just elected to represent New Hampshire in Congress. He enjoys romantic comedies, especially those featuring Reese Witherspoon. His is not exactly a Kissingerian profile.

As a junior at Yale, Sullivan found a mentor in Les Gelb, a former journalist, State and Defense official, and president of the Council on Foreign Relations. The lesson he took from Gelb, Sullivan said in 2022, was “what actually makes you smart is if you can simplify things, if you can get to the essence of things.” That has been an operating rule at the National Security Council, where Sullivan confronted a disordered world and an impatient, temperamental boss in Biden.

Sullivan came to the White House with a “big idea,” which was that “the American middle class is a national security asset,” as he put it to me. Since 2016, he had been ruminating that there was a disconnect between the United States’ grandiose notion of “exceptionalism” and the experience of ordinary people who felt left behind in the rush to globalization. When Biden was elected in 2020, Sullivan initially wanted a White House job in which he could oversee economic revitalization rather than something at the NSC.

Sullivan’s populist economics were initially out of step with the Democratic establishment. I remember chiding him in the fall of 2016 for encouraging Clinton to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a cornerstone of free trade. The conversation took place at a fancy conference in Aspen, Colorado, where, as Sullivan remembers, the hotel had a menu for dogs. He was adamant that the Democratic elite was missing something fundamental. What he was seeing on the campaign trail that year was an angry, resentful America.

Looking back, Sullivan was right to break with neoliberal orthodoxy. Paradoxically, his lasting achievement in the Biden White House might be in economic rather than foreign policy. With NSC aide Tarun Chhabra, he provided the intellectual firepower for the Chips and Science Act, supply-chain management, infrastructure legislation and other aspects of Biden’s “industrial policy.”

Sullivan had a tough first year at the NSC, which might have been a reflection of his youth and lack of experience in top-level management. He had early hopes for new security agreements with Russia, capped by a cheery summit between Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva in June 2021, that look naive in retrospect. Just as Nikita Khrushchev saw President John F. Kennedy as weak and pliable after their initial meeting in Vienna in 1961, encouraging Russia’s later adventurism in Cuba, Putin might have made similar judgment about Biden.

Then came the disaster of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Biden took office determined to remove the U.S. troops deployed there. The Pentagon resisted, arguing for a residual force of 2,500 in Kabul as a “term insurance policy” against the regime’s collapse, as retired Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained to me.

Sullivan initially shared the military’s reluctance, two close advisers told me. But he loyally tried to execute Biden’s decision to withdraw. The Afghanistan clocks unfortunately were out of sync: the Pentagon, having lost the policy argument, wanted to get out as quickly as possible, arguing that “speed is safety.” The State Department wanted to maintain a big presence at its new embassy, secured by a small military force at the Kabul airport. And unknown to all, the Taliban clock was racing toward victory, while the Kabul government’s clock was about to crack.

The result was catastrophe. Ten days after the Taliban seized its first provincial capital, Kabul fell, and the U.S.-trained Afghan army disintegrated. On. Aug. 26, 2021, a frantic evacuation from Kabul airport turned into a bloody tragedy when a terrorist suicide bomb killed 13 U.S. service members and about 170 Afghan civilians. Biden’s popularity never recovered from the aftershocks of that pell-mell retreat.

Sullivan offered to resign, several colleagues told me. Biden insisted he remain, but Afghanistan broke the early comity of his national-security team, creating tensions between Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken that have been well managed by both — especially in comparison with some past administrations — but never disappeared. Blinken was an exemplary global emissary for Biden, but his State Department was sometimes slow and bureaucratic in generating ideas. For Sullivan, the Afghanistan fiasco was a lesson in realpolitik. “You cannot end a war like Afghanistan, where you’ve built up dependencies and pathologies, without the end being complex and challenging,” he told me. “The choice was: Leave, and it would not be easy, or stay forever.” What’s more, he said, “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.”

By the fall of 2021, Sullivan’s hopes for managing the relationship with Russia had dissolved. In October, U.S. intelligence gathered firm evidence that Putin intended to invade Ukraine. To rally NATO, and perhaps give Moscow pause, Sullivan urged the unprecedented step of declassifying very sensitive U.S. intelligence and sharing it with allies.

An unlikely inspiration for Sullivan was the film “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.” Sullivan told me he felt like the character in the movie who uselessly shouts “No!” as a steamroller slowly approaches. “How do we make sure we’re controlling the narrative with Russia and denying them the element of surprise?” he wondered.

To frame the script, Sullivan devised what he called a “strategic downgrade” of highly classified information about Russian preparations to invade Ukraine — which the NSC pushed to allies and eventually the public. Sullivan had ideal partners in CIA Director William J. Burns, who had worked with him on back-channel Iran diplomacy at the Obama State Department, and Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence.

Intelligence diplomacy was a creative piece of statecraft, but it failed to stop the Russian advance. Sullivan is unapologetic. “I do not believe Putin was deterrable, unless we were prepared to go to war directly. He was determined to do it,” he said.

Sullivan created what he called “tiger teams” to manage the declassification process and the logistics for rapidly supplying weapons to Ukraine. The mandate was “to think through every possible dimension of the U.S. response and produce a ‘break glass’ playbook to guide it,” recalls Alexander Bick, who led the first team, in a recent essay.

Sullivan’s willingness to delegate and outsource this brainstorming was unusual for an NSC in which officials usually hold sensitive matters tightly. A senior Pentagon official who worked with the tiger team recalled Sullivan saying more than once: “Finer and I can’t be the only people having new ideas. Give me a different idea, a different angle.”

U.S. intelligence gave Ukraine a decisive edge in the first days after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The U.S. spy agencies knew that Russia intended to take Kyiv by landing elite troops at Hostomel Airport, northwest of the city, and moving on the capital. Ukrainian troops were there to meet them, and the Russian attack force was savaged.

Russia began a retreat that accelerated through 2022. This was a tactical triumph for Ukraine, but it led to the war’s biggest crisis. As the Kremlin panicked, it considered desperate options. U.S. intelligence analysts began warning that June that, as Russian lines collapsed, Moscow was preparing possible use of tactical nuclear weapons to save its forces.

A tiger team explored some of the chilling “what if” scenarios. Sullivan wanted to know the basics. “What is Putin thinking? What are Putin’s options? What would I do if I were Putin?” he told me.

Sullivan knew the world was moving toward an abyss. He invited Allison, the leading scholar of the Cuban missile crisis, to visit the White House on Oct. 6, 2022. Allison presented an 11-page scenario of how Kennedy escaped the wooden recommendations of his advisers to craft an “outside the box” compromise that defused that 1962 confrontation.

Kennedy’s breakthrough was a “cockamamie cocktail,” Allison believed. The White House crafted a formula that mixed public rejection of Russian missiles in Cuba with a private agreement not to invade the island — as well as a secret sweetener of promising to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey. Sullivan’s takeaway, he told me, was that “you need a multifaceted response in a crisis. If you have just one strand, it’s fragile. You need multiple paths.”

The Ukraine crisis deepened on Oct. 23 when then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made an urgent call to his U.S. counterpart, Lloyd Austin. Shoigu claimed that Russia had intelligence that Ukraine was preparing to use a “dirty bomb.” Maybe his call was a pretext, or maybe Putin really believed the Ukrainians were about to go nuclear. U.S. intelligence analysts warned that it was a “coin flip” whether Russia would use tactical nukes to avert defeat.

Sullivan pursued three channels to deter Moscow. To buy time, he asked Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to visit Ukraine to investigate Russia’s allegations. Ukraine agreed to accept Grossi, and he found nothing to support the dirty-bomb claim during visits to a Kyiv nuclear research institute, a uranium mining facility at Zhovti Vody, and a factory in Dnipro.

The second channel was direct to Russia. To warn Putin emphatically of the risks, Sullivan had already stated publicly that Russia would face “catastrophic consequences” if it used nuclear weapons. Biden sent a sharp letter to Putin, and CIA chief Burns met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Naryshkin, and told him that the United States would destroy Russia’s army in Ukraine if it went nuclear.

And third, the White House reached out to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Burns shared U.S. intelligence documenting Russia’s “active consideration” of using tactical nuclear weapons with the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, a senior official told me. Xi took the United States’ secret warnings seriously. He sent a message to Putin and warned him against use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, three knowledgeable sources said.

Xi made his warning public several weeks later when he met German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Nov. 4 in Beijing. Xi said the world should “oppose the use of or the threat to use nuclear weapons,” according to Xinhua News Agency. Biden had also asked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to press Putin, which he did at a summit in Uzbekistan that September.

It was artful diplomacy that defused a crisis. But Putin learned that by making nuclear threats, he could get Washington’s attention. From then on, Russia had what strategists call “escalation dominance” in Ukraine, and Biden calibrated subsequent U.S. miliary aid to avoid a confrontation. Sullivan’s strategy contained a paradox: Washington wanted a Russian defeat, but not one that would trigger a nuclear conflict.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned publicly in November 2022 that the stalemate that was emerging might be the best Ukraine could get — and that it was time for diplomacy. “When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it. Seize the moment,” he said in a speech in New York, amplifying remarks he had been making privately for weeks.

Sullivan publicly rejected Milley’s call for negotiations to resolve what was becoming a bloody war of attrition. He encouraged a quiet series of meetings of national security advisers in Copenhagen, Jeddah and Kyiv in 2023 to explore diplomatic options. But a close adviser explained to me that Sullivan had made a twofold decision on Ukraine: Keep supporting Ukraine to bolster its leverage and diminish Russia’s fighting force; and avoid escalation risk with Russia.

It was a sensible, cold-blooded strategy for the United States — to attrit an adversary at low cost to America, while Ukraine was paying the butcher’s bill. That’s not how Sullivan would have described it, but this was the practical effect. Kissinger would have approved.

A delicate moment came in June 2023. U.S. intelligence learned that Putin ally Yevgeniy Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group militia, was planning to march on Moscow to challenge Putin’s management of the war.

This might have been a chapter in a spy thriller: American intelligence officials knew before Putin did that the threat was coming — and that there was an opportunity for worsening his troubles, or maybe helping him escape. Sullivan and his colleagues decided the risk of failure in meddling in Russian politics was too high — and that a successful Prigozhin might be even worse than Putin. “If Putin thought we were using Prigozhin to undermine his regime, who knows the nuclear risk?” recalled Tom Wright, one of Sullivan’s top NSC advisers.

Prigozhin halted his march and accepted an offer of exile in Belarus. He died two months later in a mysterious plane crash. The Ukraine war ground on, and the number of Russian dead and wounded now exceeds 600,000. A diplomatic settlement remains Ukraine’s best chance, but it will fall to President-elect Donald Trump to negotiate it.

Critics argue that Sullivan was needlessly intimidated by Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling. Sullivan’s response, in essence, is that Biden’s dual task was to keep pumping weapons to Ukraine and avoid nuclear war. He explained to me: “If you’re national security adviser, and the intelligence community says that the risk of the use of nuclear weapons is material, you don’t have the luxury of waving that off. That’s the difference between sitting in this seat and not sitting in this seat.”

Gaza was the war that Sullivan and Biden wanted to stop but couldn’t. Like Ukraine, it involved delicate crisis management with a prickly, headstrong ally. Sullivan was traveling in France with his wife when Hamas launched its attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, so the initial crisis-management task fell to Finer and the NSC’s experienced Middle East director, Brett McGurk.

The early weeks of the war were among Biden’s finest moments as president. A dazed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the White House on Oct. 8 as Israel was counting its 1,200 dead from the horrific terrorist attack. A senior official remembered the Israeli leader’s message: “Joe, this is the Middle East. If you’re weak, you’re roadkill. Right now, we’re seen as weak.”

A jittery Israel feared that Hezbollah was poised for a Hamas-like invasion from Lebanon and on Oct. 11 was about to launch a preemptive strike. Biden spoke that day with the Israeli war cabinet, as Netanyahu and his colleagues debated options with themselves and the president. Israel had a false report that Hezbollah paragliders were in the air. Israeli jets were on the runways, poised to strike.

Biden and Sullivan wanted to “slow down Israeli time and space” before Israel leaped into what could have been a disastrous two-front war, a senior official remembered. Biden promised the war cabinet that he would fly to the region. Less than a week later, despite the danger of landing in a war zone, Biden, Sullivan and Blinken were in Jerusalem. Israel began to steady itself.

Israel struck back at Hamas and other Iranian proxies with a vengeance. More than 20,000 Gazans were killed the first three months of military operations. “Israel went crazy and shot the s--- out of Gaza,” is how one senior administration official put it.

Biden, Sullivan and Blinken demanded that Israel provide more humanitarian assistance in Gaza. Sullivan even listened to arguments about how the United States might encourage a new government to replace Netanyahu but rejected them because it would amount to regime change. The administration never budged in its fundamental support for Israel.

April 1, 2024, was a particularly difficult day. An Israeli airstrike killed seven relief workers from World Central Kitchen. An emotional chef José Andrés, founder of the humanitarian group, called Biden and beseeched him to help. Biden phoned Netanyahu and warned him, “This has to stop,” a senior official remembered. But on that same call, Biden assured the Israeli leader that the United States would provide heavy military support against an expected Iranian missile strike, which came two weeks later.

The Biden team bet on Israel, despite howls of protest at home and abroad — and significant political cost to Democrats in the 2024 election. Backed by a huge commitment of U.S. military power, Israel began to run the table against Iran and its proxies — in Gaza, then Lebanon, Syria and inside Iran itself. The result has been a transformed Middle East.

Sullivan had anticipated that China would be the Biden administration’s hardest foreign-policy challenge. And paradoxically, thanks to innovative policy, Asia is where the administration had its greatest success.

Sullivan’s first step was convincing a reluctant Kurt Campbell, a State Department colleague during the Obama years, to join the NSC staff and oversee Asia policy. Campbell was Sullivan’s opposite in temperament — open and gregarious where Sullivan could be cool and opaque. But Campbell had deep contacts and trust across Asia, and the two were a perfect strategic match.

Sullivan’s starting point on China was his insight, dating back to 2016, that the United States couldn’t compete unless it strengthened its domestic economy and rebuilt the middle class.

The threat to America was “from within,” he said in a 2022 talk. Democrats liked to tout the United States as “the indispensable nation,” he continued, “because you’re indispensable to somebody else but … what about to your own people? Where does that fit in?” Sullivan joined Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and other administration figures in pressing for big spending to improve U.S. manufacturing, technology and infrastructure, as well as for curbs on exporting technology to China.

Campbell, the Asia hand, added what he called an “outside-in” approach of building alliances and partnerships in Asia to buffer the confrontation with Beijing. Australia joined a powerful new defense alliance with Britain and the United States called AUKUS; India signed on to an expanded partnership known as the Quad; Japan and South Korea suppressed past differences to join a powerful trilateral alliance. The Philippines moved strongly into the U.S. camp; Vietnam leaned that way, too.

As the United States began to compete more aggressively, China angrily withheld diplomatic contacts. The relationship worsened after a Chinese spy balloon floated over the United States in early 2023. Officials told me the Chinese mission was to collect full-motion video and signals-intelligence about ships, port facilities and military bases in the Pacific, but the balloon drifted off course. When the United States shot it down, the relationship deflated further as a result.

Sullivan argued that Washington and Beijing needed to talk, even as they competed. With the blessing of Biden and Xi, he developed an unusual relationship with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi. The two have now had a half-dozen meetings and many more phone calls, during which they discussed the most sensitive and potentially dangerous issues.

Sullivan told me that, during his first back-channel meeting with Wang in Vienna in May 2023, he explained the logic behind the United States’ technology-export policy, describing it as a “small yard” of prohibited exports with a “high fence” of U.S. control. Wang countered that it was a “big yard with an iron curtain.”

But dialogue resumed. “We have used the channel to explain to China what we are doing, and what we are not doing,” Sullivan told me. “It is the essence of managed competition.”

Sullivan will leave some big unresolved issues for his successor in the Trump administration, Michael Waltz, a well-regarded congressman from Florida and former Green Beret. Topping the list will be a just settlement of the Ukraine war. Sullivan told me that he had expected 2025 to be a year for negotiation, regardless of who won the presidential election. The diplomatic jockeying has already begun. The Trump team will also have to manage a reconfigured Middle East — and try to stop Iran’s nuclear program through coercive diplomacy or military force.

Russian space weapons might pose the most dangerous problem ahead — and it’s one the public barely understands. Early this year, the intelligence community advised Sullivan that Russia had launched a satellite — dubbed Sputnik-S — that was configured to potentially carry a nuclear weapon. U.S. analysts feared that if a future satellite ever detonated a bomb, the radiation field would disable any satellite in low Earth orbit that wasn’t shielded.

Sullivan reached out to Putin adviser Yuri Ushakov, a Russian official who had been a back-channel contact throughout the war in Ukraine.

Sullivan gave Ushakov a stark warning about the satellite weapon. “We know what you are intending to do. We would consider this a grave threat to our national security.” He told the Russian adviser that it would be U.S. policy to “deny the strategic effect of the weapon,” a senior administration official told me.

The Biden team also reached out to China, whose unshielded low Earth orbit satellites would also be vulnerable to the Russian weapon. Beijing expressed its concerns to Moscow. But U.S. intelligence analysts today are unsure whether Russia will proceed with launching a nuclear-armed Sputnik-S or not.

Soon after Sullivan delivered his warning to Ushakov, he scheduled a briefing with the congressional and intelligence committee leaders known as the Gang of Eight. The day before the briefing, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, publicly demanded that Sullivan brief the whole Congress on a “serious national security threat” in space. Sullivan didn’t protest; he had been planning to make a public disclosure, anyway.

If Russia appears to be moving toward deployment of the Sputnik-S weapon, Trump’s NSC will have to decide how to respond. Logic suggests four possibilities: Disable the satellite on the launchpad; shoot it down as it ascends; destroy it in orbit; or threaten decisive retaliation if it’s ever used. Trump and Waltz will have to sort that out.

How should we assess Sullivan’s performance in “managing the unachievable”? He has tried to oversee national security responsibly in a world where total victory against adversaries such as Russia and China probably isn’t possible. But his critics view his caution and back-channel statecraft as weakness. They want the United States to win conflicts rather than manage them.

I put the issue to Sullivan at the end of our last conversation. He responded with a series of questions and answers that amounted to his own report card:

“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.”

A more cautious measure would be to assess “strategic solvency,” an approach proposed by Walter Lippmann in 1943. During Sullivan’s time at the NSC, were the nation’s commitments abroad matched by its power? Here, it’s hard not to find an imbalance. The United States is overextended. We can’t keep all the promises we make. “Jake has a remarkable ability to keep balls in the air, but it’s too much even for him,” Allison said.

Sullivan tried to cure this imbalance through his focus on rebuilding U.S. economic strength and the middle class. But he conceded to me, “It’s a strategy measured in decades, where elections are measured in two to four years.”

Whatever America’s imperfections, the evidence keeps mounting that its potential adversaries are in worse shape. China’s economy has significant weaknesses, Russia is caught in a no-win war, and Iran has lost a string of proxies in the Middle East.

Sullivan expressed some national-security schadenfreude when he heard about Bashar al-Assad’s fall in Syria. He said he told Finer: “We’re constantly worried about our own position and the alignment of our adversaries, but they’re in real trouble here, and it presents America with some opportunities if we play our cards right.” The next administration will be lucky if it plays that hand as well.

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. His latest novel is “Phantom Orbit.” 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/31/national-security-adviser-jake-sullivan-biden-world-crisis/