The United States and its allies need each other more than ever. That’s the overarching message U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sought to convey to an audience in Washington—and beyond—in one of his final public addresses in his current role just two weeks before the U.S. presidential election.
Speaking at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday, Sullivan defended what he referred to—more than half a dozen times in his roughly 30-minute speech—as the “positive sum” approach to industrial policy and global technology supply chains that the Biden administration has put in place over the last four years.
The United States and its allies need each other more than ever. That’s the overarching message U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sought to convey to an audience in Washington—and beyond—in one of his final public addresses in his current role just two weeks before the U.S. presidential election.
Speaking at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday, Sullivan defended what he referred to—more than half a dozen times in his roughly 30-minute speech—as the “positive sum” approach to industrial policy and global technology supply chains that the Biden administration has put in place over the last four years.
And while those policies have primarily targeted China and its technology sector, Sullivan’s emphasis was more on the collective of U.S. allies and partners that the Biden administration sees itself as successfully reinvigorating. “President Biden implemented a modern industrial strategy premised on investing at home in ourselves, in our national strength, and on shifting the energies of U.S. foreign policy to help our partners around the world do the same,” Sullivan said.
He also attempted to draw a distinction between the more isolationist “America First” approach of Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump—who is bidding for a second term in office on Nov. 5—and the Biden administration’s curbs on Chinese technology, such as export controls and tariffs. “Does our new approach mean that we’re walking away from a positive-sum view of the world? That America is just in it for itself at the expense of everyone else? In a word: No. It doesn’t,” he said. “In fact, we’re returning to a tradition that made American international leadership such a durable force.”
The speech was a follow-up to a seminal speech Sullivan gave a year and a half ago at Brookings in which he originally laid out the core tenets of the Biden administration’s conjoined economic and national security strategy. These elements included de-risking—not decoupling—from China and restricting core technologies with national security implications in what Sullivan dubbed a “small yard, high fence” approach. The speech was met with mixed reactions in Washington, including concerns about whether U.S. allies would embrace the Biden approach.
“Sullivan’s speech may overweight the price other countries are willing to pay in service of American leadership. Virtually no other country holds the same threat perception of China as the United States,” Ryan Hass, now the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, wrote at the time.
Wednesday’s speech was billed as a chance for Sullivan to review the progress made on the vision he laid out in 2023 and address some of these critiques. He described how U.S. policy is working to protect economic and national security interests in a targeted way—citing tariffs imposed this year on Chinese goods worth $18 billion that focused on “unfair practices in strategic sectors.” He also pointed to figures that showed the United States had more than doubled its lead over China in terms of GDP since Biden took office while being the leading source of outbound foreign direct investment and the leading recipient of inbound investment. And he sought to make the case that allies and partners have come around to Washington’s way of thinking, noting policies across Europe, Latin America, and Asia that mirror the U.S. approach on climate investments, technology, and critical minerals.
Ultimately, Sullivan made a pitch to allies that although the administration’s positive-sum approach is rooted in “what is good for America,” Washington recognizes that it cannot go it alone. “We want and need our partners to join us,” he said, “and given the demand signal we hear back from them, we think that in the next decade, American leadership will be measured by our ability to help our partners pull off similar approaches.”
Overall, though, Sullivan spent more time once again making the case for the Biden plan than he did answering its critics.
On the core message—that the new U.S.-led economic order is positive-sum—he said more about how the United States benefits from allies adopting the Biden approach than how allies themselves benefit. Sullivan argued that several key allies around the world share the U.S. national security rationale for de-risking from China. However, he didn’t say much to allay their concerns about damaging economic relations with China.
In one recent example, Japan has been hesitant to join the United States in a new round of proposed semiconductor export controls after receiving threats from Chinese officials that they would cut off critical mineral supplies in retaliation, according to Bloomberg.
“Retaliation in particular, I think, is much more salient with U.S. allies than it is for us, and that makes this challenging. I didn’t really see anything there that would assuage their concerns,” said Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow who focuses on China at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
On a related question—how far the United States is planning to go in restricting its trade with China—Sullivan also reiterated lines that increasingly feel outdated. “The yard is small, and we are not looking to expand it needlessly,” he said, while acknowledging that the Biden administration is targeting new areas such as data flows to China and Chinese smart car technologies. Allies might take some comfort, though, from Sullivan’s articulation of a four-part framework that the administration is using to consider how much further the yard will expand, Chorzempa said.
The topic of rebalancing overall trade with China on economic, rather than national security, grounds also saw Sullivan fall into some contradictions. He said the U.S. approach is not broad-based decoupling, but he dodged when asked why the Biden administration chose to maintain the Trump-era tariffs. A Jean-Paul Sartre quote he’d paraphrased earlier in the speech, “not to choose is also a choice,” boomeranged back in that moment.
Sullivan notably did directly speak to the trade-offs involved in this new era of de-risking. But when he did so, he treated trade-offs as an inevitable feature of tough policymaking, balancing among critical priorities from national security to climate change and inflation. “The sanity of a policy actually rests in the fact that it is grappling with trade-offs and tensions,” he said. However, Sullivan avoided engaging deeply with some of the most consequential ones—for instance, the climate costs of blocking the import of Chinese cars on national security grounds.
Though much of the speech was outward-looking—either about allies or adversaries such as China—Sullivan did dedicate a portion of it to a decidedly domestic audience of U.S. lawmakers. He pointed out that Congress has yet to fund several key Biden policies, including scientific research under the CHIPS and Science Act, investments to improve the lending capacity of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and key agencies within the Commerce Department and the Treasury Department that focus on export control enforcement. “Holding back small sums of money has the effect of pulling back large sums from the developing world, which effectively cedes the field to other countries like [China],” he said. “If Congress is serious about America competing and winning, we need to be able to draw on America’s very best.”
Perhaps predictably, he would not be drawn into conversations around the upcoming election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, though he took a swipe at one of Trump’s signature proposals by saying that “indiscriminate, broad-based tariffs will harm workers, consumers, and businesses in the United States and our partners.”
He was noncommittal about his own next steps beyond the Biden administration when asked by Foreign Policy whether he would be willing to serve another four years if the opportunity arises. “I unfortunately have no comment on my future,” he said.
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