According to multiple reports, including that of the Washington Examiner’s Naomi Lim, later on Monday, President-elect Joe Biden will announce that Jake Sullivan will serve as his national security adviser.
Such a selection would replicate President Trump’s first foreign policy mistake in appointing an official ill-suited to this most critical position.
Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser between 2013 and 2014, and Hillary Clinton’s top foreign policy adviser in 2016, Sullivan is a smart guy and a dedicated patriot. Still, I believe his selection will be received favorably in Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing for all the wrong reasons (North Korea is a curveball). That may seem like an unfair jab at the 43-year-old, but based on his record and the present national security priorities of each of those governments, it’s not an unfair one. After all, Sullivan was a key architect of the Obama administration’s too-deferential foreign policy structures. Which is to say, its willingness to play softball in the 2013-2015 nuclear negotiations, which culminated with the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, its appeasement of China, and its failure to counter exponential increases in Russian aggression. Let’s examine Sullivan’s record toward each nation.
First up, Russia.
As the New York Times’s rather generous profile on Sunday helpfully ignored, Sullivan’s Russia record is very weak. To be sure, Sullivan is a dedicated multilateralist who believes in building shared alliances to counter aggression. That sounds good to the D.C. crowd. If true, it’s also ultimately a very good thing. Structures such as NATO and the newly developed Indo-Pacific “Quad” are critical servants in a common cause of human freedom and the basic rule of international law. They serve America. But just as they deserve more than Trump’s questioning of NATO’s Article Five mutual defense commitment, allies need more than words and a blind eye to their defense spending. When the dark days come, they need more than kind words and the memory of recently clinked champagne glasses. For all of his idiotic praise of Vladimir Putin, Trump has presided over a strengthened NATO, the delivery of lethal arms to Ukraine (which Obama opposed), and the authorization of more aggressive intelligence operations against Moscow.
Sullivan has a less auspicious record toward Vladimir’s crew. For all the talking points that Trump is Putin’s pet, Sullivan seems to offer a formal weakness towards the KGB Tsar. in an August 2016 interview with the New Yorker, Sullivan offered absurdly optimistic tones on how the U.S. could compromise with Moscow. He said this even as he noted that the Russians were interfering with the 2016 election. Why no call to shutdown the GRU’s mainframes? Or expel the Russian ambassador? Or at least leave some reciprocal gifts in the D.C. apartments of Russian intelligence officers?
Regardless, considering what Sullivan knew, then, about what the Russians were doing to U.S. diplomats, intelligence officers, and the civilian bodies of our allies years before this interview, his 2016 commentary offers powerful evidence of a standing impulse toward delusional optimism and wilful appeasement. Putin is a realist, but one who requires the occasional fastball to the body. Nothing in Sullivan’s record suggests he will offer corollary advice to the incoming president. Nor does anything in his record suggest he will keep up the pressure on America’s European allies to bear their fair share of the NATO burden. That fair share is the key to a NATO that can deter and defeat external aggression.
Then there’s Iran.
As noted, Sullivan was a key architect of the JCPOA nuclear deal. That means he was part of a deal that gave Iran a month to hide materials on notice of an inspection request, contained no constraints on Iranian ballistic missile activities (a slight problem), and has, in the past twelve months alone, allowed Iran to repeatedly breach the agreement with no sanctions snapback. Sullivan offers only the heightened prospect of a regional arms race by two pathological, paranoid, and theologically vested enemies (buckle up), and/or Israeli military strikes. Those who suggest that America’s returning to the Iran nuclear deal means easy stability are either people who have never heard of Baghdad (criticisms of Trump could also be made here), or Beirut, or who care little about avoiding war.
China provides perhaps Sullivan’s brightest spot out of the three countries.
Even then, his record must be judged against the Vice President he was the chief national security adviser to. Because for all Biden’s claims to the contrary, the president-elect’s record on China is one of appeasement and hesitation. A record that China will very quickly seek to take advantage of. Positively, Sullivan has more recently written in favor of taking challenging China on matters of technology and trade. And I would suggest his favor towards the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement is apt (Trump is wrong, here). Yet, what China is now doing in the South China Sea, in trade manipulation, in human rights desecration, and in online malevolence, is not just a major challenge. These actions represent a deliberate and coordinated effort to replace the U.S.-led liberal international order with a Beijing-centered feudal mercantile order. If allowed to advance, that Chinese Communist order will make the world – and Americans – poorer and less free. As a most basic minimum, confidence that our government will counter China requires said government’s willingness to describe China as an adversary. Sullivan won’t do that.
Where does this leave us?
Well, that this is a good man who wants to do what’s best for America. But a man who is wrong on the core concerns. A man who is more comfortable with addressing American enemies with words than confrontation, and with building alliances on the back of requests rather than reciprocity-driven action. In an August conference call, Sullivan hinted that he had little humility or concerns over the Obama administration’s failures. Instead, he said, that administration offered an example for Biden to follow, because it recognized that the choice to “leverage diplomacy backed by pressure, is the kind of formula that can work again to make progress, not just on the core nuclear issues but on some of [the] other challenges as well.”
Just as alliances require surety, pressure doesn’t count for much if it is unbound from unyielding expectation and associated consequence.
