Jake Sullivan on American Strategy

When Jake Sullivan returned to Dartmouth on November 4th, he was hardly a stranger stepping onto campus. Long before he became one of the most influential national security thinkers of his generation, Sullivan spent stretches of his career in Hanover: first in 2019 as a Montgomery Fellow, then in 2020 at the Dickey Center, where he taught courses on diplomacy and the future of the international order. Now a Senior Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding, Sullivan headlined the inaugural event of The Davidson Institute for Global Security’s new series on global critical issues, moderated by Dartmouth government professor Jeffrey A. Friedman.

The former National Security Advisor’s resume reads like the platonic ideal of academic achievement. A Yale double graduate (BA, JD), Sullivan also holds an MPhil from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court and served in multiple senior roles during the Obama years, including as Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to then Vice President Biden. He has been a senior figure at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has taught at Yale Law School and the University of New Hampshire. His personal biography is also interwoven with American political life: he is married to Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander, another Dartmouth scholar.

The Art of Managing Escalation

The conversation began with the ongoing Russia—Ukraine conflict. Friedman asked how he and President Biden approached the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Sullivan described the situation as a landscape without precedent. For the first time in eight decades, there was a major manned war on the European continent. Critically, the belligerents included a nuclear superpower and a state armed and supported by the United States.

Quantifying the escalation risk posed an extremely difficult challenge, mainly because there is no algorithm or formula that governs the logic of “if this, then that.” This marked true uncharted territory, since the prevailing notion at the start of the war was that any U.S. involvement would lead to escalation. President Biden, Sullivan said, framed the entire problem with two straightforward instructions. First, make sure Ukraine does not fall. Second, take every reasonable measure to avoid World War III.

Consequently, Sullivan described the main question the U.S. had to ask itself: if we keep supplying and feeding the Ukrainian war machine, what are the Russians going to do about it? At what point would their actions lead to the scenario they wanted to avoid at all costs: a direct shooting war between Russia and the U.S.? Above all, the omnipresent nuclear question loomed. Intelligence reports in the fall of 2022 suggested a fifty percent chance for Russia to use nuclear weapons should Ukraine cause a catastrophic collapse of Russian lines. While some voices in Washington and across Europe shrugged off these warnings, Sullivan insisted that he and the National Security Council had no such luxury, stating “it was our solemn responsibility to worry about it.”

Managing that responsibility required disentangling different layers of escalation risk. Interestingly, the most dramatic concern—nuclear weapons—was not, in Sullivan’s view, the most probable one. Instead, hybrid forms of retaliation were more likely: undersea cable sabotage, cyberattacks, drone harassment of ports and energy infrastructure against European states. These “grey zone” tactics could impose enormous costs while staying comfortably below the nuclear threshold.

But then there was the “big moment” in November 2022, when explosions hit a village in eastern Poland near the Ukrainian border. Early reports suggested a Russian missile had landed on NATO soil. At that moment, President Biden was attending the G20 summit in Bali; Sullivan remembered the frantic phone calls, the Poles insisting they believed it was a Russian strike, and the hours it took to piece together what actually happened. In the end, it turned out that the explosion was caused by a Ukrainian interceptor that had veered off course while attempting to stop a Russian barrage in western Ukraine—another case where the fog of war may very well have led to peril.

To navigate all this, the administration relied heavily on quiet diplomacy. Sullivan revealed that during the most perilous nuclear moments, the United States reached out through private channels simultaneously to the Russians, the Chinese, and the Indians, of which the latter two “were all sufficiently freaked out,” Sullivan said, “that they went to Putin.” Washington also intensified communication with European allies to keep the alliance synchronized and calm. Looking back, Sullivan expressed pride that the administration treated escalation risk with the gravity it deserved, without allowing it to paralyze support for Ukraine. He closed the segment with a pointed hope directed at the current administration: that President Trump would continue to ensure that the United States does not drift, through accident or bravado, into a direct conflict.

China, Strategy, and the Discipline of Uncertainty

While Russia was the urgent problem of the moment, China was the structural one. Friedman pressed Sullivan on the hardest question that sits at the core of statecraft: how did the Biden administration assess Beijing’s long-term intentions? Sullivan stated that the U.S. government grounded its strategy on two explicit premises. First, under Xi Jinping, China seeks to surpass the United States as the dominant economic, technological, diplomatic, and military power in the world. Second, that regardless of who rises or falls in that competition, both the United States and China are not going anywhere. Ergo, they will have to live alongside one another as major powers.

The logic flows from these premises: the U.S. must compete vigorously, while managing the competition so it does not tip into conflict. And because both nations also share a planet, spaces for cooperation must be upheld, such as on issues regarding climate, public health, and emerging technologies such as AI. Sullivan personally does not believe that China has imperial-like ambitions like the Japanese Empire in the 1930s. But at the same time, it is imperative to allow for the possibility of both premises not being correct. For this reason, Sullivan is a firm believer in stating the premises of your strategy explicitly so that people can come and raise questions about them. His dogma is to do the best you can in conditions of uncertainty by trying to establish premises that are rooted in evidence and are periodically revisited.

Sullivan recalls that when Biden entered office, the Chinese foreign policy approach was to convince the President to return relations back to the pre-competition aura of Clinton, Bush, and Obama through conditional cooperation: if the United States continued to take competitive actions of any kind—export controls, alliances, military deterrence—Beijing would shut down cooperative channels entirely. But the U.S. held firm. It would compete and manage, and Sullivan credits this stance for forming the dynamic that developed over the four years. Over time, he said, Beijing adjusted. Military-to-military channels reopened. Joint work resumed on climate and fentanyl. Biden and Xi met repeatedly. The two countries even issued a joint statement on AI risk and nuclear weapons, an outcome which seemed improbable after a period of extreme tension.

This “managed competition,” Sullivan argued, remains the only responsible course for a world where neither power can wish the other away. Correspondingly, he lamented the current administration’s approach of starting a massive trade war out of the gate that has led to a very different dynamic, much to the United States’ strategic detriment, in his view.

The Return of Industrial Strategy

Sullivan also reflected on the economic shift that has taken place within U.S. policy. The CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act collectively marked an American return to industrial policy, with the goal to rebuild America’s technological base. These tools helped jump-start key industries and supply chains after decades of neglect, and the early successes are visible: a TSMC semiconductor fab in Arizona, battery production, and clean-energy build-out. But Sullivan stresses that the U.S. still lags badly in critical minerals and rare earths, where both Biden and Trump made progress but “nowhere near enough.” That bottleneck, Sullivan warned, remains the most serious economic vulnerability in the competition with China.

The United States, Sullivan argued, must learn how to move faster. “Ten people can say yes to something,” he noted, “and one person can say no, and the whole thing stops.” At the same time, industrial policy must remain cautious enough to not swallow the innovative and dynamic market economy that has made the U.S. the country it is today.

Advice to the Next Generation

Sullivan, the youngest National Security Advisor in six decades, closed with advice for students who hope one day to shape American strategy. First, understand technology—not at a Ph.D. level, but beyond what daily news offers. This is because the field of national security is broader than ever before. We are in the midst of a technological revolution, and AI, synthetic biology, and related fields are reshaping every dimension of national security. Second, understand markets: where they fail, what role the government plays in markets, and the ways interdependence can be weaponized. Last but not least, cultivate the discipline to distinguish convictions from opinions. “Hold fast to convictions,” he said, “but change your opinions when confronted with new facts. The odds you’re right about everything are very low.