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In the fight to save democracies from the grips of autocrats, defenders of democratic values must partner with people who would otherwise be their political opponents. In this episode, host Garry Kasparov seeks to demonstrate this lesson by welcoming former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan as his guest. Their long-held and many disagreements aside, Garry and Jake find common ground in standing up to the forces that are working to undermine the rule of law and endanger American democracy.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
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Garry Kasparov: In a fight as important as the one to save American democracy from the grips of would-be autocrats and dictators, we must partner with people who would otherwise be our political opponents. We must welcome them to the cause and put aside other disagreements, at least for the time being.
This is a lesson dissidents in unfree places understand well, but not one that comes easy to Americans. It is a lesson I hope to personally demonstrate in today’s episode.
From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Garry Kasparov.
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My guest today is Jake Sullivan, the former National Security Adviser for President Joe Biden, and before that, a top adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state and when she ran for president.
My disagreements with him are too numerous to detail in full, but I will offer this summary. Sullivan and the presidential administrations he has worked for have too often failed to understand and predict the threats facing the world and misjudged what those threats mean for America and its democracy. They have been flat-footed time and again in Afghanistan, in Ukraine, in the Middle East. The list goes on.
In 2023, I called for congressional hearings into Sullivan’s leadership at the National Security Council, and I even wrote that Biden should fire him to be replaced with someone who understood the meaning of deterrence. But even with all those many disagreements, Jake and I still see eye to eye on the threat to American democracy, and that’s why I asked him to join me for this conversation.
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Kasparov: Hello, Jake. Welcome to the show.
Jake Sullivan: Hi, Garry. Thank you for having me.
Kasparov: I want to first say thank you very much for accepting my invitation to speak, given that you know I was one of your fiercest critics and that I’m about to ask you some very difficult questions. Thank you for your courage, which is so important and necessary now as we face challenges that may feel insurmountable.
I, of course, want to ask you to analyze the war in Ukraine as it stands now, but first let’s add some context to the conversation. Let’s go back to the early 2000s. Vladimir Putin rose to power, and every subsequent U.S. president has had to deal with him. Tell me how you view America’s foreign policy, specifically its Russia policy in this quarter century.
Sullivan: Well, what’s clear is that Vladimir Putin has become an increasing menace to his neighbors, to the world, to his people, and neither the United States nor anyone else has been able to reverse that trend. And it is certainly the case over the course of the past quarter century that President Putin, Vladimir Putin has just kept growing his appetite for death and destruction, disruption. And I think it’s fair to say that the sum total of U.S. policy from the late ’90s through the 2000s and the 2010s was not able to turn that around.
Kasparov: Let’s go back to the early days of Vladimir Putin’s rise. Why does every new administration seem to fall into the same mistake with Putin, negotiating with him as though he’s someone who would keep his word?
Sullivan: Well, it’s harder for me to speak—I wasn’t in the Clinton administration or the Bush administration. I did serve at the State Department and then as National Security Adviser to then–Vice President Biden during the [Barack] Obama administration. And of course the Obama administration had the reset [in Russia]. That was when you had President [Dmitry] Medvedev technically leading the country, though of course we knew that Vladimir Putin remained the power behind the throne.
Interestingly, Garry, when I was the director of policy planning at the State Department from 2011 to 2013—and thanks, actually, to some really, really smart Russia experts on my team—I actually produced a memo for Secretary Clinton in 2012 that basically said, This is going to go in a very dark direction as President Putin comes back to power, and we have to be ready for a very aggressive and assertive Russia.
And in fact, Secretary Clinton ended up sending her own memo over to the White House, essentially making that case at the end of 2012. That was when, watching Putin come back into power, that I really saw the threat and challenge that he posed. And I put that down on paper and made my views clear at the time.
Kasparov: You mentioned Hillary Clinton and the reset policy, the failed reset policy. So I was always wondering, and maybe you can tell us a secret. Whose idea was it for Hillary Clinton to give a reset button to her counterpart, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, in 2009?
Sullivan: (Laughs.) Well, that was not mine. You know, that’s not for me to say. That’s for others to say. All I could say is it was not my idea. But that was a policy that Secretary Clinton was carrying out, of course. The original concept of the reset had emerged in the transition, then was enunciated by the White House, and then of course carried forward by the State Department as well.
Kasparov: So then you moved to the White House to work with then–Vice President Biden. And that was the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine. So I understand that Vice President Biden wanted Obama to give at least some lethal attack weapons to Ukraine, like the Javelin anti-tank weapon. What was your advice to Biden?
Sullivan: Well, of course, I’m very careful not to share my private advice to principals. I think it’s important that I not do that. What I can say is that [then–Vice] President Biden was very clear about his view that the United States should step forward and supply that defensive assistance, defensive equipment to Ukraine at the time. And of course, President Obama didn’t agree and chose a different course, but that was the advice coming out of the office of the vice president.
Kasparov: Okay. Now, we can miss four years of [Donald] Trump’s presidency. I still want to ask you: How do you evaluate Trump’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia and Ukraine at the time?
Sullivan: I think basically President Trump was focused on just trying to maintain a decent relationship with President Putin, for reasons I don’t fully understand. And I think he had people working for him who were very active in wanting to support Ukraine. And I think steps like the provision of Javelins were good. But writ large, I felt that his approach vis-à-vis Putin, as we saw on display in Helsinki, for example, was one that Secretary Clinton had predicted, which is him basically cozying up to President Putin in ways that I did not think advanced U.S. interests.
What’s fascinating, though, is that he has been prepared to take very tough action against friends. He’s been prepared to take very tough action against competitors, like the 145 percent tariffs on China. But at no point has he been prepared to take tough action against Putin’s Russia. Even when he applied tariffs across the board—almost every country in the world, even Ukraine, for goodness sake—he did not impose tariffs on Russia. It is a very strange, consistent feature of his approach to foreign policy that Putin tends to get a pass.
Kasparov: Okay. Now go back to your tenure as the National Security Adviser. So you are in the office, and at what point do you recognize that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would be inevitable?
Sullivan: I don’t know about inevitable, but we were concerned about the possibility of an invasion of Ukraine in the spring.
Kasparov: Spring 2021?
Sullivan: Yes, in the spring of 2021, the large buildup of Russian forces. Actually one of the reasons that President Biden met with President Putin in a summit in Geneva in the summer was because there had been a big buildup of forces on the border of Ukraine that spring, and it certainly didn’t look like a drill.
Kasparov: So what are the results of this summit, and why are you convinced that Putin would attack Ukraine?
Sullivan: Part of the purpose of those was to lay out what the consequences would be with respect to A) the economic sanctions we would impose, B) the support we would provide Ukraine, and C) the way in which we would rally the world against Russia. And President Biden made no bones about that. He laid all that out for President Putin to let him know that this is what would unfold. So we made an effort, of course, which was not successful, to avert, to head off—even though we knew it was a long shot.
Kasparov: No, it seems that he was not impressed by the consequences.
Sullivan: Well, not impressed by the consequences, or simply—as many of our Russia experts in the intelligence community noted—determined to invade Ukraine no matter the cost. And of course, as we see today, with more than a million Russian dead and wounded and the economy under massive pressure, and Russia having mortgaged its future, he is still determined, because this is something that President Putin has decided is the most important thing for him to do.
Kasparov: Jake, I see the little gap in the story, because if you were convinced back in June, July 2021 that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was very likely, if not inevitable, and then—
Sullivan: Sorry, no. I didn’t say in June, July we thought an invasion was likely or inevitable. Sorry, I’m not making that claim. What I’m saying is that the risks—the concern over what Putin would do with respect to Ukraine was present in March and April, because he did a huge buildup. We had the summit; had no real outcomes on Ukraine. So the concern remained—where’s this all going? But it wasn’t until we saw the intelligence in the fall that we became convinced that this was going to happen.
Kasparov: Okay. Fall. But then, why did the United States decide not to provide Ukraine with any lethal weapons in this period? You still had four, five months to beef up Ukrainian defenses.
Sullivan: As I recall, we did provide Ukraine with defensive assistance that fall.
Kasparov: It’s what? Javelins and Stingers? I mean, it’s not any heavy weapons that could have been very useful, facing a Russian invasion.
Sullivan: Well, I think in fact the Javelins and Stingers were what helped the incredible and brave Ukrainian defenders save Kyiv.
Kasparov: Throughout the war—so this is 2022—Ukrainians, demonstrating heroism and determination, survived, defended Kyiv, inflicted huge losses to the Russian force attack in Kyiv. It was a big victory. Liberated territories near Kyiv. And then they had a massive counterattack in August 2022. And then there was the moment in 2023, in June: the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive that unfortunately did not work. So tell us why the United States was always very slow in providing Ukraine with more weapons that, as we know, were available.
Sullivan: You know, Garry, I’ve heard this critique obviously many times, including from you. And I’d like to divide between two elements, just so we’re at least on the same page with what the argument is. And then we can respectfully disagree, or maybe we come to agreement.
One is that we were slow generally in supplying weapons. The other is there were certain weapons systems that we were slow in providing. The way you just put the question, it made it sound like we just were slow in giving them stuff generally. I don’t accept that at all. I think we moved incredibly rapidly to supply at speed and scale a massive amount of military equipment to Ukraine, far beyond what anyone would’ve expected when the war broke out in February.
And in fact, we built an efficient pipeline in Poland that not only supplied American military equipment but was able to draw in military equipment from around the world and supply it. So that by the time the counter-offensive started in June, everything that had been agreed between the U.S. military and the Ukrainian military in terms of their needs was provided. So I would just disagree with the premise of the question in that regard.
Then we can talk about the particular weapon systems that are the source of criticism, one of which was the A1 Abrams tanks. And there, basically, our military said these tanks are not going to be useful. They don’t—they need Bradleys, which we supplied at at great scale. Those are a much more effective fighting vehicle than the Abrams. But to this day, Garry, the Abrams have never been a particularly useful or central weapon in this war. So that’s the Abrams.
Then there are the F-16s. President Biden approved the F-16 transfers in May of 2023. You and I are talking here in September of 2025, more than two years later. And there’s really only a handful of these planes in Ukraine, and that’s because it’s very hard to build an air force, which was the argument our military was making against doing it: Put the money and the effort toward other systems that you can actually get in, because you’re not going to be able to build the whole F-16 air force in Ukraine.
And then of course there was the issue of the ATACMs [Army Tactical Missile Systems]. And on the ATACMs, what the Pentagon consistently argued was, We have a limited number of these. We need to keep a certain reserve for America’s combatant commands, and we just don’t have enough to give Ukraine for it to make a material difference on the front line in the battlefield. That was an argument that they consistently made. Eventually, we were able to give them; they were used. And they were used to good effect operationally, but obviously they’re not a silver bullet for changing the course of the war. And so I think there has been an overemphasis on these particular weapon systems at the expense of looking at the full suite of material. Every single dollar Congress gave us we spent, on time and in full, to push weapons into Ukraine. And we were, in my view, really resourceful in doing so. And we went way beyond just the kinds of things that were on the front page of the paper on a given month. In fact, from the beginning we played a critical role and helped stand up Ukraine’s drone program that now is operating to such good effect.
We sourced and developed entirely new capabilities that had never been fielded before to transfer to Ukraine. I was holding a meeting every single day in my office, basically trying to figure out how we could get more, faster, better to Ukraine, and I did that from the first day to the last.
Am I satisfied? No. I would’ve obviously liked to get more money from Congress, give more stuff to Ukraine. But I think that there has been a kind of view among a certain group of critics that somehow we were sitting there, holding back, being cautious, not providing. And frankly, I just don’t think the record actually reflects that, or the enormous effort that was put into this coordinated from the NSC.
Kasparov: Did Russians explicitly threaten to use nukes?
Sullivan: Well, you saw them publicly, constantly—
Kasparov: I’m talking about conversations. Public stories are one level. But was the threat used in the negotiations between your team and the Russian counterparts?
Sullivan: Well, we didn’t have, really, negotiations with our Russian counterparts.
Kasparov: Okay, conversations.
Sullivan: But yes, we did have engagements with them. I would say they were not saying to us, Hey, we’re about to use nuclear weapons. What the most senior people at the CIA and the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] presented to the president was that if there was a catastrophic collapse of Russian lines, it was a coin flip as to whether Russia would use tactical nuclear weapons to respond to that. That was the information given to President Biden. That’s what he had to contend with in terms of the risk. And that was based on, well, it was based on things I can’t go into in this podcast.
Kasparov: Okay. Now we are where we are now. September 2025. And the war keeps going on; more people are being killed. So what do you expect?
Sullivan: I guess there’s a difference between what I hope and what I expect, because I’m just not sure what to expect, honestly, from President Trump. I don’t know if he’ll follow through and finally impose pressure. But there’s an obvious road map here, and the road map is that the Russian economy is very weak, and oil markets are pretty permissive. And that means there is room to really squeeze Russian oil revenues in a way that puts a hurt on Putin’s pocketbook. And I think if we combine that with a further surge of military assistance to Ukraine, we can create the conditions in which a real negotiation for a real, just, and sustainable peace could take place. That’s what I would like to see happen.
Kasparov: I remember that in August 2023, I was in Denmark. I met the Danish foreign minister and his team, and I asked them why Denmark was so shy not to shut these two key straits controlled by Denmark that are vital for Russia’s oil export, because more than half of Russia’s oil export goes through the north. And after giving me some nonsense about the WTO, they just ended up saying, Look, we can’t do it because Americans don’t want to see oil prices going up.
Sullivan: I can tell you, Garry, I don’t recall any conversations with the Danes about closing the straits and stopping all Russian ships going through.
Kasparov: But what about—
Sullivan: I don’t know if that happened somewhere else, but I don’t remember that. However, I will acknowledge—I have acknowledged publicly before, as have others—that the reason that we didn’t impose all of the sanctions that we could on Russia’s oil program was because we had to balance sustaining American support to provide weapons to Ukraine with taking money away from Russia. And if you tell Americans Your gas prices are gonna go up by $2, $3, $4 [a] gallon, then, you know, our judgment—not my personal judgment, but the administration’s judgment—was that that would crater U.S. support for the war.
Those are the kinds of hard decisions you have to make if you’re president. You’re looking at this, you’re saying, I’m gonna need to continue to ask the Congress and the American people for tens of billions of dollars for Ukraine. And if I’m creating a policy that is hitting Americans hard in their pocketbook, I’m not likely to be able to achieve that.
So it wasn’t actually until late in ’24—remember in ’22, ’23, oil prices were really high, the oil market was really tight. By the end of ’24, the oil market had become a lot more slack. And so President Biden said, Let’s go. Let’s tighten oil sanctions. Because he was trying to put the maximum amount of pressure on Russia without creating the kind of backlash in a democracy in the United States that could leave Ukraine without the support that it would need ongoing. And that’s part of the reason I said that it’s not just that Russia’s economy is weak right now. It’s in fact that the oil market is permissive. We could do this without harming the American people while hurting the Putin war machine. And that’s why the moment is ripe for this to happen, and I hope it does happen.
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Kasparov: We’ll be right back.
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Kasparov: Okay, so I want to ask a key geopolitical question. It’s about American isolationism. It is a strain of thought that has run through the last decades. Obama saying he would end foreign wars. Trump, of course, was America First and, again, ending all the wars. Biden to a great extent as well, in my view. Now Trump again. Can America afford this isolationist instinct? Is it a self-destructive policy?
Sullivan: Well, it depends on what you mean by isolationism. If what you mean is this kind of, you know, We have no responsibility for anything in the world, we shun our friends, we don’t stand up to bullies, all that kind of thing, then no. We can’t afford that. If what you’re saying is, can we effectively pursue a principled foreign policy without putting the U.S., and U.S. men and women, directly at war? I do believe there is a way to proceed without ending up in deep and extended military entanglements overseas, while discharging our responsibilities to our own people and to the cause of a more just, more free, more prosperous world as well.
So what I would like to see is investments in the sources of American strength and power, including military power, so that we can deter wars, so that we can have strong allies, and so that we can effectively win the competition against our competitors and adversaries, so that the world works for us rather than against us. And that does require an active, engaged America—not an isolated America, not this kind of America alone, America F everybody approach that President Trump is taking.
Kasparov: But a couple weeks ago, we saw the demonstration of the unity of nondemocratic leaders—okay, authoritarian. Call it brotherhood, Dictators Inc., led by Xi Jinping. So clearly he’s calling the mantle of the global leader of this anti-Western alliance. Is it the result of the vacuum created by the United States?
Sullivan: To be honest with you, I think in many ways it’s the result of the United States pulling together the free world. Why did Xi start going down this road? It’s because he saw President Biden rally NATO, grow NATO, add Finland and Sweden, rally Japan and South Korea. An unprecedented level of military and other forms of cooperation. And link Europe and Asia. And then, of course, deepen the relationship with India. Xi looks at all of that and says, I need an answer to this, to a certain extent. So do I think that there is a real competition underway? I do. Do I believe that if we stick with our strategy of rallying like-minded democracies across every dimension—defense, technology, economics, supply chains, you name it—that we have the winning hand? I really do believe that.
And I think the hand we passed on to Trump—alliances at all-time high in Europe and Asia—what he’s chosen to do with that in the last eight months is a whole other deal, and I think it has made the Chinese in particular look and say, Holy cow. He’s doing our work for us. And I think that that’s a shame, because I think that works really strongly to America’s strategic disadvantage.
Kasparov: Now, I want to shift from foreign policy back to domestic issues, because all the issues we argue about, all the disagreements, they pale in comparison to the challenge of the threat to American democracy. One question I can’t avoid asking: Was it a mistake for President Biden to declare that he would run again instead of looking for a more viable candidate to oppose Donald Trump?
Sullivan: Well, I think it’s important to divide between two issues that I think have gotten very much conflated. One is, should President Biden have run again? I mean, he left the race, so obviously no, he shouldn’t have run again. The other is, did I have concerns about him actually doing the job of president while he was president? No, I did not. But the way things played out, obviously he left the race, and—
Kasparov: But was it too late?
Sullivan: Yes, and I think that answers your question.
Kasparov: Okay. So that’s too late. And the mood in the administration? I mean, it’s this—how did the team, you and others surrounding President Biden, evaluate the chance of Donald Trump coming back and causing this tremendous damage both to American democracy and to global stability?
Sullivan: Look, we were extremely concerned about it. And, just to take one example, what it would mean for the war in Ukraine. When President Trump was elected, we had 78 days to surge equipment into Ukraine as rapidly and fully as we possibly could. But as soon as President Trump was reelected, I was deeply concerned, because they had laid out a playbook in Project 2025 and beyond—saying the kinds of things they were gonna do to chip away, not just at the institutions of democracy in America, but at many of the things that are America’s fundamental enduring strengths and qualities. Our ability to attract talent, our innovation ecosystem, even our manufacturing base, where we’ve actually lost manufacturing jobs over the course of the past several months.
Kasparov: Okay. Jake, you were at the NSA [National Security Agency]. You know much more about the global threats to America than almost anyone. Do you agree that the greatest threat to American security now comes from within?
Sullivan: I do. Yes.
Kasparov: So tell me about the threats as you see them.
Sullivan: Look, we face real threats and challenges from abroad. Deep, long-term strategic competition with China, the threat that Russia poses, the threat that North Korea poses. And then there are threats like the climate crisis and nuclear proliferation, pandemics, and the like. But we ourselves are our greatest threat. That is, you know, us turning on the things that made our country great. And that starts with the foundational principle of the rule of law. When that gets challenged, everything’s up for grabs.
And all of the elements that have made America the most dynamic, the most prosperous, the most innovative, the most free nation in the world—each of the pillars that built that are being chipped away at systematically. And that is so much greater a threat to the long-term health and vitality of the American way of life than anything that emanates from abroad.
Kasparov: I believe that people around Donald Trump are openly preparing to seize power in the midterm elections. It may not be free and fair elections, for the first time in American history. So how do you see this challenge of the 2026 election season, where I’m afraid that the FBI and DOJ could play a crucial role in securing the result Donald Trump wants to see?
Sullivan: I think that it is imperative on everyone—whatever your platform, whatever your voice—to speak out on the essential principle of a free and fair election in 2026, and to call out every step that is taken, that goes in the wrong direction as far as that’s concerned. And I think we should be collectively pushing back against any effort to stack the deck or unlevel the playing field or do even more extreme things. And that’s not just the candidates or the party that needs to do that. That is everyone. And I think, especially, it’s important to pin down people in the president’s own party to say what’s too far. I think we’ve already gone too far in many respects, but there has not been pushback from the Republican party. And so I think there should be a constant question to members of Congress, senators, governors who are Republican, to draw some line, say No, you will not allow it to go beyond this. And I think that work has to start now.
Kasparov: Do you think the Democratic Party is properly equipped to do the job?
Sullivan: I think that the jury is out right now. We don’t know. Do I think that there are a sufficient number of really smart, dedicated, competent people who could, if they were empowered and stepped up? Do we have it within ourselves—not just the Democratic Party, but all of those folks who are concerned about what might come to pass? Do we have the tools? Do we have the capacity? We do. We just need to make sure that we exercise it effectively in pushing back against the backsliding, the democratic backsliding that we’re seeing.
Kasparov: Are you optimistic?
Sullivan: You know, I’ve said this before, but I’m Sullivan. I’m Irish. It is said of Irish people that we have an abiding sense of tragedy that sustains us through temporary periods of joy. So I’m never very optimistic about anything. But my abiding sense of tragedy, on the one hand, and my concern about what I’m seeing is, to a certain extent, offset by a genuinely deep belief in the American people: that they’re not going to tolerate a dramatic effort to upend our democracy. They’re just not gonna tolerate it, and that that will ultimately be a break. But it’s not good enough just to assert that. Everyone’s gotta do the work.
Kasparov: Now, back to Trump. Trump doesn’t have a vision, in my view. It’s just, it’s all transactional. But Trumpism as a concept offers a vision—a wrong one, but it’s a vision. So what is your vision? What to do with Europe, with China, with Russia? Say you come back in 2028: What’s the right course for America to recover from all the failures and all the mistakes made since the end of the Cold War? So make the case for how it will be better than it was when Biden was president or Obama was president. Or, of course, much better than when Trump was president.
Sullivan: So I think that there are a few basic elements, and it’s all about the execution. No. 1: We need to invest in the sources of our own strength. We need to make sure that we fully rebuild our industrial capacity. And we made strides in the Biden administration, real strides that we hadn’t seen in a long time. But it wasn’t enough, and it was because we faced all kinds of bureaucratic and technical obstacles to really finish the job.
No. 2: We gotta overhaul our defense-industrial base, drag it into the 21st century in a real way. Again, we made some progress in the Biden administration. I think we arrested the decline, but we didn’t build up everything we needed to. And that’s a long-term project. We need to rebuild our innovation ecosystem—which Trump is destroying by going at universities and science funding and the like—so that we continue to have the most dynamic and innovative economy in the world. If the United States is tending to the sources of its own strength at home, we are going to be a very powerful nation in the world. So that’s one.
Two, we need to get back in the game when it comes to strong, robust, diversified alliances. And I think if we do that, then we’re playing with a hand that is much stronger than our authoritarian competitors and adversaries are.
And so for me, it’s executing those elements in a full-throated, robust, and effective way. And then finally, the U.S. has to get back in the game of mobilizing collective action across a range of countries to get after these underlying dynamics like the climate crisis, like AI risk, like the possibility of a future pandemic that’s even worse than COVID-19. And we’ve got to be at the head of the table in organizing a collective effort to make those risks—to reduce them so they don’t come to bite Americans down the road.
That’s how I see an effective foreign policy. And, from my perspective, a piece of that is making sure that we have built up our deterrent and defensive capabilities in Europe and Asia, but that we’ve asked our allies to step up to do their part. And part of it is that we’ve built a technology ecosystem among like-minded countries so that technology works for us rather than against us, and that China’s not writing the rules of technology for the rest of this century and beyond.
So that’s what I would argue for. And I think that that is within our grasp. And I actually think it’s what most Americans want, at the end of the day—something rooted in their interests, but enlightened self-interest. That is, we all do better if we all do better working in common cause with other countries who share our values. And that’s exactly what Trump has torn up out of the playbook and I think that we have to put back together.
Kasparov: Just a couple of questions, to clarify. So would you demand the reform of the United Nations? In my view, it’s an outdated institution that has to be reformed.
Sullivan: That’s a complicated question. It operates on consensus and in some cases, on veto in other cases. But no, I’m not gonna say that the U.N. as currently constructed is fit for purpose, and it could use an update and overhaul.
Kasparov: And what about NATO?
Sullivan: Well, one thing I think that NATO has to do, which we took a lot of strides forward on, in my view, is think about security in a very holistic way. So we really introduced cyber as a critical component of NATO. It hadn’t been there very much before President Biden came in. Thinking about issues like defense-industrial base coordination—how are we all collectively going to have the magazine depth so that we can credibly fight and win a war? And because we can credibly fight and win a war, we can deter a war. We need NATO to think about broader supply-chain resilience in everything from critical minerals to semiconductors so that we’re not exposed to being squeezed by China or anybody else. So I think NATO needs to have a more holistic picture of security, and a greater degree of resilience against the type of hybrid warfare and gray-zone activities that we see from the Russians and, increasingly, from other adversaries, as well. All of that I think we took steps on, but we didn’t get far enough, and there’s a lot more to do.
Kasparov: Will you take Ukraine into NATO?
Sullivan: Well, we said at the end of the Biden administration—of course, the Trump administration has essentially taken that off the table—that Ukraine’s future is in NATO. And I stand by that.
Kasparov: And will you offer ironclad guarantees to, say, Baltic nations—that they will be protected by all-American military might if Russia crosses the border?
Sullivan: That’s what Article V says.
Kasparov: And yeah, Article V is still a piece of paper.
Sullivan: It needs to mean that. It needs to mean that without any question whatsoever, coming and going. Absolute sacred obligation to follow through on Article V.
Kasparov: So a new administration, a new Democratic administration in 2028, very likely will bring America back, and with all the commitments. And will not be shy of using force if necessary. Correct?
Sullivan: Well, I cannot predict what a new Democratic administration will do by any stretch.
Kasparov: No, no, no. We’re talking about the vision of Jake Sullivan. I believe you will play a role in formulating these new concepts. Probably one of the most renowned experts in the party. So would you suggest that America will play this leading role and will not be shy of using force if necessary to protect the allies and the global stability?
Sullivan: I think that we need to send a clear message that when we make a security guarantee to a country through Article V—whether in the NATO context or our allies in Asia—that we will follow through on it coming and going, and that we mean business. And I think the most important thing in that is not the assertion. It’s having the capacity through our defense-industrial base, through our technology, and through the strength and robustness and burden-sharing of our alliances, that we can make that a very credible and real deterrent.
[Music]
Kasparov: I think we should close with reflection about how people who find themselves at odds with one another politically should still find common ground in supporting the values that will preserve our democracy. And it would seem that you and I found ourselves in this particular situation. Thank you very much for joining the show, Jake, and good luck.
Sullivan: Thank you, Garry. And thank you for everything that you’re doing day in, day out to fight for the values you love in this country that we both love.
Kasparov: This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene Arevalo. Our editor is Dave Shaw. Original music by Rob Smierciak. Mix by Erica Huang. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado. Special thanks to Polina Kasparova and Mig Greengard. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Next time on Autocracy in America:
Bret Stephens: We’ve moved from a world where the difference is between liberal and conservative to a world where the difference is between liberal and illiberal. Because I think the Republican party, to a great extent, has become an illiberal party, not a conservative party. There’s an important distinction.
Kasparov: I’m Garry Kasparov. See you back here next week.
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