Jake Sullivan

a resolution in Ukraine matter anytime the foreseeable future? Any possibility of a truce or some kind of agreement that you think could end this war in the next few months or so? You never say never. There's always a chance and we've been clear from the beginning that we would support a diplomatic solution that vindicated Ukraine's right to sovereignty and territorial integrity. But the odds of it in

the next few months, I think, are quite low. On China, the President United States has not met with G G Ping for covid related reasons, but there isn't possibility they might meet in the upcoming meeting. Do you have any plans to have a UM agreement or any kind of proposed settlements of any issues that are now ongoing between the two countries, or is it just more more or less and meet and greet with no advanced planning of

any great consequence? Well, right now there's no meeting planned but, as you say, they will both be in Bali, Indonesia, for the g twenty in November and it would afford an opportunity for the two of them to sit down in person. Actually, despite the fact that they've spent a huge amount of time together when Joe Biden was vice president, they've not met in person since President Biden became president, and that's because Si jimping has basically not left China

in two years due to covid nineteen. So this would be their first real chance to sit face to face and talk through the full range of issues in the relationship. I wouldn't expect major agreements to come out of that, but if they do actually sit and again that's hasn't been decided Um, I would expect that we would see some progress on some issues where the two countries interest DU align. As we talk today, it's come out that President Putin will be meeting with President Shei Jiping, most

likely somewhere in Europe not too long from now. was that a surprise to you, and what do you think they're going to be talking about? Well, it's not a surprise. President she and President Putin have met frequently over the course of each of their tenure and in fact President Putin went to Beijing earlier this year and met in person with president she in February when they rolled out this new partnership between the two countries. So I think that they'll talk about the full range of issues in

their relationship. But I would note two things. First, before president she goes to Uzbekistan to meet with President Uh Putin on the sidelines of another summit, he's going to Kazakhstan, and Kazakhstan is a place where actually China and Russia compete for influence. So it's an indication that this is a relationship not without its complications. And then second, China has actually stood back from fully getting in the hind the Russians when it comes to their war in Ukraine.

We have not seen them provide large scale support in terms of weapons or industrial scale efforts to undermine western sanctions. So from our perspective, this relationship is something that bears close watching, but again, is not without its complications. As we talk, if there's also reports that North Korea is selling weapons to Russia, was that a surprise to the administration? Well, what it indicates actually is that Russia doesn't have a lot of options. It appears to be running short of

its own munitions. It looks around the world and doesn't find a lot of countries willing to sell it munition, so it has to look to states like Iran and North Korea to get ammunition and other forms of weaponry to be able to sustain its conflict in Ukraine. This is not, in our view, a demonstration of strength by Russia. Now the negotiations with Iran to restore, if that's the right verb, the nuclear agreement is ongoing. It's been going

going for quite some time. Do you see any resolution of that in the near future, and not in the coming days? Uh, the Iranians have come back with a set of counter proposals which we are still taking a look at, but it doesn't suggest that an agreement is

uh imminent right away. That being said, we do believe that there still is a pathway to a compliance for compliance returned to the J C P O a. We will continue to work on that with our partners, particularly our European partners, and if Iran is prepared to do its part to get back into the J C P O A, we stand ready to do so. And as we talk, the new Prime Minister of UK has been announced. Previously involved in foreign policy. H Have you met her before?

I have met her before. I've met her here in the White House, right down the hall from where we are right now, when she was foreign secretary. She's transitioned from being essentially their secretary of state to being their prime minister and actually just yesterday President Biden had the opportunity to have a long phone call with her just hours after she had assumed her new position. And do you expect any change in the UK US policy as

a result of her becoming prime minister? At a foundational level? No, uh, you know, this is a special relationship. The two of them reaffirmed their commitment to the strength and vitality of the U S UK alliance and I think on all of the major issues, whether it's Russia or China or iron you'll see the same kind of Um, deep consultation and engagement between the two countries that you've seen before,

regardless of whose president, regardless of whose prime minister. So I don't expect that there will be any fundamental changes in the relationship. But you know, there will be issues that we have to work through, of course, as there always are. Now, as we talk, the U N General Assembly will be meeting not too long from now in New York, as it does every year. Um, do you think the U N has still a useful purpose in diplomacy, because it doesn't seem to be able to solve any problems?

Ongoing war problems that we now see in us are Ukraine or Russia. What do you think is the U N's main purpose at this point? Well, the UN actually has proved its continued effectiveness in actually being able to bring about diplomatic agreements in very difficult circumstances. I'll give you just two examples from the past few months. First,

on Russia Ukraine. It was the U N Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who played a central role in getting a deal between Russia and Ukraine for the export of grain from both Ukrainian ports and Russian ports in the Black Sea. That's helping the entire world with respect to lowering food

prices and expanding access to food stuffs at a critical moment. Second, it was a UN mediator, working with our US envoy, the Saudis and marats and the Yemenis who helped produce, earlier this year, a ceasefire in the war and Yemen, which had been the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world. That ceasefire is now going on six months, the longest period of peace in seven years in Yemen, and the UN played a key role in that. So it is

not without its difficulties and complications. It is a big bureaucracy in need of constant reform, but the UN is still there on key issues, in diplomacy, in delivering on global health, Global Food Security and other issues, and all of that will be on display in New York in two weeks now. Recently the president made a major speech on democracy, and in it he talked about the values of democracy, which is large part of our foreign policy,

which is to promote democracy around the world. Our events in the United States or the last year or so making it more difficult for the US to stay to other countries looking how wonderful our democracy has worked, and therefore you should be following some of the things we

do well. It does require a degree of humility. I mean the United States does need to acknowledge that we have our own difficulties and challenges within our own democracy, even as we tout and promote democratic institutions, rule of

law human rights around the world. But I think President Biden is actually a very good messenger for that, someone who can speak honestly and clearly to the American people about the strains in our democracy and then someone who can speak honestly and clearly to the world about how, despite all of its imperfections, democracy remains the best form of government for delivering for citizens and for promoting human dignity. Let's talk a moment about your own background. You are

not generally out there promoting your background. It's quite impressive and I just want to let people know about it a bit. You grew up in Minnesota, that's right, and I guess you were a superstar in elementary school, junior high school, high school. You're a president of your class, President Student Government. Is there anything you failed to do in high school that you wanted to do? Well, uh, I didn't win all the cross country races that I

wanted to win. I guess. Yeah, but you went to Yale. Yeah, and Yale you must have done. Reasonaly, while you were elected as a Rhodes scholar and from Oxford, you later came back and went to Yale law school and you were a top editor there and became a Supreme Court clerk for Justice Brier. So did you, when you're having this career, do you ever think that you could make a mistake or your career could kind of go off the deep end or something, because everything was working out

perfectly well? It's true that I have had these incredible opportunities, but at every one of those stages I went through the same fears and growing pains and slip ups and stumbles that everybody did. And you know, that was true with respect to academic work that was far from perfect. It was true with respect to relationships that didn't work out.

You know, it's I I had what I think was, you know, an incredibly lucky childhood and upbringing, but one that it was not too different from the way a lot of other people who grew up in the Midwest in the nineteen eighties and and then, you know, got to have these chances. Your father and mother, what did they do? So my father worked on the business side of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which was the major newspaper in Minneapolis. My mother was a teacher and a guidance

counselor in the Minneapolis public schools. And I'm one of five. I'm the second of five kids and we all went to the Minneapolis public schools, graduated from Southwest High School. And your siblings do they say look, you're too good, you're a Rhodes scholar, you're a Yett Law Journal and everything are there's no sibling rivalries. I mean actually, I would say my sister is probably the most impressive among us.

She's a pediatrician. She was a two sports division one athlete and Um, she's got five kids, uh, and is currently working at the Department of Health and Human Services on covid nineteen and other UM pandemic responses. So I'm like kind of middle of the pack in terms of my siblings. There was another person who was a Rhodes scholar, went the law school who became President United States, Bill Clinton. So have you ever thought of running for office yourself?

I used to think about it but honestly, over the course of the years I think my skills are better suited to public service in a not elected format Um and I'd rather help other people who I think would be better suited for actually running for office these talk for a moment about what it's like to be the nation security advisor. The NA security advisor office was set up, I think, in the Eisenhower administration, more or less, though

President Truman had a Nashecurity advisor as well. Your job, as they get in early every day, make sure there's no crisis or there is a crisis, tell the president. Are you seeing the president early in the morning and briefing him? Is that what you do, as as many

have done before? Yes, so in the morning we have something called the President's daily brief that takes place in the Oval Office and it's myself, my two deputies and then the director of national intelligence who are there every day, and then we also bring in other cabinet members depending on what the subjects are being briefed so that he gets the president gets exposure to his full national security team over the course of the week and we talked

to him about things that have developed overnight around the world and we also talked to him about longer term trends that he expresses interest in and wants to stay on top of. So it's a mix of both the immediate term and the long term and it gives him a full picture of the challenges and Opportunities in the world for American form. And then, during a typical day, do you see him a couple other times and do

you see him at the end of the day as well? Well, you know, just to take yesterday as an example, in addition to the PDB UH Secretary B Lincoln and I had the opportunity to just sit with him informally uh for a little while before the cabinet meeting so we could talk through a kind of tick list of issues that had been building up over the course of the

last couple of weeks. And then later in the afternoon we had this call with the British Prime Minister and and that involved some amount of time to talk through what he wanted to accomplish in that phone call, what we expected she would say to him, and then I sat there with him while he did the phone call.

So that would be a typical day seeing the president two three times and then spending time with the other principles of the National Security Council the the cabinet secretary, Secretary of Defense, the secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of State and talking through the big decisions that we would need to tee up for the president to make on everything from global food security to Taiwan to the chips act, you know, the new law that's been

passed to invest in advanced microchips here in the United States. We cover the waterfront. So sometimes presidents I observe lose their temper and they yell ums. President Biden a yeller when he's not happy, or he just calmly just says here's what I think. He's not a yeller. Uh. You know, he's somebody who is disciplined and direct and holds us to a high standard and he will challenge us to make sure that we have nailed down the details of everything we are presenting to him and if we haven't,

he'll tell us do better. But he does so in a totally respectful, straightforward way, the same way that everybody has seen him in public life. So when I work in the White House under President Carter, there were frequent disputes between the secretaries, Si Vance and the NASCUR advisor. Is a big Braginsky, and it's a great tradition. It seems in our government that the secretary of state the NASCUR advisor are always sparring one where the other leaking

to the press. In this administration I haven't seen a lot of leaks from your office or the secretary's Office uh criticizing the other person's office. So how have you avoided that problem? Well, a lot of it has to do which is deep mutual respect and straight up friendship between myself and the secretary state. Tony and I've known each other for years. We're good friends. Are Families or friends? Um, that doesn't mean that there aren't debates. We don't have

disputes because we have it an open operating style. I think we both try to be nice people, but we

do have debates. We disagree on certain issues and the thing that I take very seriously is my responsibility to run a process that is open, humane, fair, transparent, H and above board, and I try to do that so that his perspective, the Secretary Defense is perspective, the Attorney General Perspective, depending on the issue, are all teed up to the president in a way in which they get their say and then we work it out, and that has, in my view, work quite effectively over the course of

the past nineteen months and I consider it one of the central uh responsibilities of my position to ensure that that process is fair and effective. What would you like to see as your legacy, or what the ININTIATION's legacy would be as a result of what you're doing? I would say um to basic foundations to the legacy that I would like to leave working, obviously on behalf of

the president. First is to leave our alliances with like minded democracies at a high water mark in Europe, in the end of Pacific and elsewhere around the world, because those are the force multipliers for everything we do, whether it's competition with China or trying to solve the challenge of climate change. And the second is making sure that our national security enterprise is investing in the sources of American strength at home, and the chips act is a

great example of that. or a young person who might like to have a career like yours, what would you recommend? How can you prepare to be an abscured advisor or to serve your government in some way? The biggest piece of advice I try to give young people is um to reject certitude. What I mean by that is that no matter how good you think your argument is, or your policy position or your proposed course of action, it almost certainly has weaknesses or blind spots, and you should

acknowledge those. I think actually sometimes saying you know what, I was wrong, you were right, is actually a more powerful show of intellectual strength than just sticking firmly by your position. Doesn't mean you should compromise your principles or your values, but the easy decisions do not rise to the White House. The hard decisions do, and those hard decisions have two sides Um that are not a hundred zero. You see a lot of people in Washington saying I

was wrong. No, I think that's I think that's a problem and I think the people who do people are willing to change their minds, update their assumptions, alter their perspective based on new information or new developments in the world. Those are the people that lead the best mark on history and, even more importantly, those are the people who are a pleasure to work with. Let's go around the world for a couple of trouble spots. North Korea, Um, and a progress so on getting them to give up

their nuclear testing or is that difficult to do? It's difficult, obviously. Through multiple presidents, going back to the Clinton administration, the North Koreans have continued to move forward with their nuclear weapons program in the course of the past year they

have conducted a number of long range missile tests. We have been warning about the possibility of a seventh nuclear test testivate nuclear weapon, and we still think that that is something that is likely to happen in the coming months. We have also indicated to the North Koreans that we are prepared to sit down in a serious way to conduct diplomacy to, on a step by step basis, work towards the nuclearization of Korean Peninsula. So far, the North

grants have evince no interest in that. China and Taiwan, there's been a lot of rhetoric from the U S side, a lot of rhetoric from the Chinese side, vision any real problem occurring where the Chinese might actually invade Taiwan.

I think it remains a distinct threat that there could be a military contingency around Taiwan and the People's Republic of China has actually stated as official policy that it is not taking the invasion of Taiwan off the table, that that remains one of the potential options for the reunification of Taiwan. Their position has been changing over time in terms of their disturbance of the status quo across the Taiwan Strait actions that they are taking with their

military to undermine peace and stability. The American position has remained steadfast and consistent. One China Policy Taiwan Relations Act, three joint communic caves that we agreed with China back in the nineties, seventies and eighties that laid out that, from our perspective, there should be no unilateral changes to the status quo across the Taiwan straight we continue to believe that and we will continue to push back against

any effort to change the status quo by force. Now there is legislation now moving forward through Congress to kind of toughen up the existing support the US has for Taiwan. This administration adopted a position on that legislation yet. Well, I'm actually gonna have the opportunity later today, literally later today, to go up to the hill to talk to some members about this legislation. I'd prefer to have the opportunity to lay it out for them before I lay it

out on TV, but I will just say this. There are elements of that legislation with respect to how we can strengthen our security assistance for Taiwan that are quite effective and robust that will improve Taiwan security. There are other elements that give us some concern. Let's go back

to Ukraine for a moment. In hindsight, which was always is there anything the administration could have done to prevent Putin from invading or told the allies more forcefully that the invasion was going to occur, to convince them, because it seems as if they didn't really believe it was going to happen? What would you have done, or would you think you should have done in hindsight, if anything,

differently than you did? Given that we're still in the middle of this unfolding crisis, it's hard to get the kind of level of perspective to look back and say, Hey, maybe we could have done this instead of that. There's

always something you could improve upon. I would never say no, no no, no, we did everything absolutely perfectly, but six months into this invasion I'm fairly well convinced that Putin was going to do this no matter what, that he considered this central to his legacy as president of Russia and he was not going to be knocked off course.

The only thing that was going to stop him was the physical might of the Ukrainian forces, holding back his ability to take Kiev and take other major cities, backed by the weapons that we provided them. That was the strategy we executed. I think we executed it well and I think Ukraine is in a position now today to ensure that they will remain a strong, sovereign, viable independent state, even as they continue to try to resist Russian aggression

on a portion of their territory. In terms of the Allies, Um, you know, we took unprecedented measures, quite novel measures, to declassify information, to make presentations both to our allies and to the international community, and I think over time that actually did build a sense of unity that continues to this day. An Allied Unity, Trans Atlantic unity, has been

a huge thorn in the side for Vladimir Putinus. He's tried to to break that and tried to to produce a weaker, less cohesive NATO, when in fact what he's gotten as the exact opposite. So what you're referring to, I think, is that, to my surprise, when I was reading the New York Times about this was going on, information that seemed like it was white old UH information was declassified and, in effect given to the press about

the troop movements of the Russians. Was that a complicated decision to come to, controversial within the administration, to say we're going to declassify and leak our best intelligence about

what the Russians are doing? It definitely took a whole process of us thinking about all of the risks and benefits of doing that, especially since it was uncharted territory, and that involved me sitting with our intelligence professionals, are diplomats, and ultimately with the president to bless a strategy that would involve the systematic declassification of information so that no one would be surprised and so that Russia could not

try to generate pretexts for what it was doing. And I think it turned out to be an effective method of putting Russia on the back foot, putting the Western alliance on the front foot and giving us the opportunity to build a coalition that is currently supporting Ukraine. So as I said earlier, hindsight's always in hindsight. Would you

have um actual Afghanistan differently than the way you did it? Well, at the end of the day, um, anytime you have a circumstance where you're ending a twenty year war, with twenty years of decisions and mistakes that have piled up through multiple administrations, the exit would not be easy. There was no clean, easy exit and I think the strategic decision to go to end that war after twenty years

was absolutely the correct decision. Where there are things that we could have done differently, I think the answer to that is always yes, and there will be time, as I end up looking back and reflecting on that period, to pinpoint what some of those might have been. But from my perspective, the underlying decision to end the war in Afghanistan, which the president took, I think, in a quite courageous way, was the correct decision and one year later, to me, Um, it is the time that has passed

is only reinforced the correctness of that. To many people held your job have a burnout after a few years. Um, you look like you're in good shape and you're young. You're the second youngest person ever have this job. so you anticipate doing this for an entire four year period of this first term? If there was another term, let's say this four year period of time. Well, I serve at the pleasure of the president, but I feel passionate about the work that I'm doing. I feel blessed to

be part of this team. I feel blessed to be able to serve President Biden and I'd like to keep doing it. Thanks for listening. To hear more of my interviews, you can subscribe and download my podcast on spotify, apple or wherever you listen.