Rash: At home, Jake Sullivan reflects on events abroad

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Before addressing a capacity crowd at a Humphrey School event on Thursday, Jake Sullivan, national security adviser in the Biden administration, spoke to some students from Minneapolis’ Southwest High School, Sullivan’s alma mater (along with Yale and Oxford). One of them, rising senior Keira Dahlquist, said “it was inspiring to see someone who had started at a similar place that I have go on to such heights.”

Or depths, as Sullivan described his tenure contending with concurrent crises in the Mideast, Eastern Europe and East Asia.

“I think every national security adviser, after they leave, will say that their time in the seat was the most difficult, most challenging, most pressurized, most consequential time,” Sullivan told the moderator, Professor Larry Jacobs.

“But in my case, it’s actually true,” Sullivan joked, in a respite of levity amid the leaden international scene he described.

Indeed, it may have been — and remains so in the first tumultuous months of the Trump administration. In his Humphrey School appearance and in an interview beforehand, Sullivan pondered this profound era of international — and even national — challenges.

Ukraine’s recent drone attack on military assets deep inside Russia, Sullivan told me, was a “really remarkable display of inventiveness, of resilience, of, frankly, operational and tactical skill that was an 11 out of 10 on a scale of impressiveness.”

The “democratization of lethal technology,” Sullivan said, “to small states or nonstates — terrorist groups, criminal groups, angry individuals — is going to be a feature of national security over the coming decades. For very little money, you can have a drone that packs a lethal punch, that is highly precise, that is easily concealed, and that can fly a very long way.”

And it’s not just allies but adversaries like Yemeni Houthis using them, Sullivan said, adding: “Project out 10 years, those will be able to fly further, be smaller, have more powerful explosives and be even more precise. And I think that is something we have to think about, not just in terms of our fielded forces around the world but frankly as a homeland threat.”

Ukrainians deserve the credit for the extraordinary strikes, Sullivan said, but the Biden administration got “the resources to them that helped grow their drone program and helped create the kind of incredible technology and capacity they have built over the last couple of years, because we saw a while ago that the traditional tools on the battlefield were not going to be sufficient, and [that] this was truly going to be a 21st century war.”

Responding to the criticism that, however well intentioned, President Joe Biden’s balkiness on sending 20th century materiel crimped Ukraine, Sullivan defended the administration’s “sheer scope, scale and speed of the effort to supply Ukraine military equipment,” which he said “exceeded anyone’s logical expectations from February 2022” (the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion).

That kind of effort, along with multilateral, multilevel diplomacy, will be needed to keep East Asia from full-scale war, be it a conflagration from conflict in the South China Sea or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a specter Sullivan told me would be “a cataclysm for the world.” For Taiwanese, most existentially, but indirectly for Americans as well because a resulting massive interruption to international trade depending on the Taiwan Strait could mean “we would be talking about almost depression-level economic impacts.”

And so, he understandably and understatedly said, “We have to avoid that conflict.”

Sullivan said he believes that “war is not inevitable” but “it is incumbent upon the United States to do two things: one, continue to support Taiwan with self-defense military equipment and the capacity, basically, to deter China from [invading]. And two, engage in diplomacy — and I personally engaged in intensive diplomacy, including on this cross-Strait issue with China — to try to lower the temperature and reduce the risk of conflict. So a combination of deterrence and diplomacy is the right formula to avoid war.”

Based on the recent trip to the region by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, deterrence is still being emphasized. But diplomacy — with Beijing but also with Seoul, Tokyo and other allied capitals — is compromised. “I think the alliance system in Asia is under pressure because of the president’s trade war,” Sullivan said, speaking of the threat of tariffs.

Regarding the Mideast, Sullivan told the attendees (including some pro-Palestinian protesters present in the Humphrey School audience) that “I strongly support the right of people to stand up and speak out and say what they feel about this, because that’s what Americans all have.” It was, Sullivan said, “a tragedy on Oct. 7, when we saw the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust, and it has been a tragedy every day since.”

Sullivan told me that the most concerning conflict on everyone’s radar is China-Taiwan. When asked what off-the-radar conflict is equally concerning, he named India-Pakistan, two nuclear-armed nations repeatedly on the brink.

At the end of his thoughtful, thorough comments to attendees, Sullivan discussed “America’s advantages” built on a “few foundational pillars” — our alliances (“the envy of the world”) and globally open system (“we lose that, we erode that, that’s structural”). And then he mentioned “the pillar underpinning all pillars,” the rule of law and the Constitution.

“You go without that, and it just puts everything else about this country, this democracy, this society, at risk,” Sullivan warned. The “thing that keeps me up at night are these deep, core and fundamental aspects of the United States of America and our constitutional democracy that are being put at risk, and that is something that collectively, across the board, needs to be pushed back against very vigorously.”

Sullivan stressed to the Southwest students that “open-mindedness” is the “single most valuable habit” to form. But when speaking about our constitutional democracy he spoke with conviction, which he told the scholars is “the core of who you are and shouldn’t change.”

It’s also the core of what America is. It shouldn’t change, either.