Prior to taking the job of national security advisor to President Joe Biden almost five years ago, Jake Sullivan taught a seminar at Dartmouth that looked at the intersection of geopolitics, technology, climate, and public health in the current turbulent era.
“I didn’t realize when I was teaching the class that I would go sit in the middle of that world a few months later as national security advisor,” Sullivan told an audience of 200 in Cook Auditorium, with 85 watching online.
Sullivan was on campus as the inaugural speaker of the new on Nov. 4. The institute, which was launched this spring, is a nonpartisan center that aims to forge innovative approaches to international security research.
, the Norman E. McCulloch Jr. Director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, introduced Sullivan, and , associate professor of government, moderated the 90-minute talk.
Sullivan said he knew when he came on board in the Biden administration that several issues would dominate foreign policy: the rise of China, the advance of artificial intelligence and other cyber technologies, and ending the American occupation of Afghanistan, one of the so-called “forever wars” that had preoccupied U.S. domestic and international policy since 2001. Add to that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the already complex job of national security advisor became even more demanding.
He likened the statecraft of geopolitical negotiation to looking at the tip of an iceberg. “And that whole area below the water line is all of the factors shaping the negotiation, from military force to economic coercion to public opinion—you name it,” Sullivan said.
During a wide-ranging discussion, Sullivan, who, at 44, was the youngest person to be named national security advisor, took on the economic and military competition between the U.S. and China.
He also acknowledged the criticisms leveled at the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza but defended the administration’s record in pushing for more aid and a ceasefire; assessed the intentions of Russia in its war with Ukraine; and pointed to the pitfalls of overrelying on AI in diplomacy.
Sullivan focused in particular on the Sino-American relationship. While it is true that China under President Xi Jinping wants to “surpass the United States as the world’s leading economic, tech, logical, diplomatic and military power,” Sullivan said, it is also true that neither country is going to willingly cede dominance to the other.
“So we start from that premise, and that leads us to the following conclusion. We’re going to have to compete vigorously, but we will have to manage that competition so it doesn’t tip over into conflict or confrontation,” Sullivan said.
The two major powers will have to cooperate on issues of mutual interest, such as climate change, public health, fentanyl, and harnessing AI. And that involves the time-consuming, behind-the-scenes art of statecraft.
“We made clear to them we were going to continue to compete, but we were very much open for the diplomacy necessary to manage that competition,” Sullivan said.
As to the prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the Biden administration came to the conclusion “that the Russians were not interested in a serious discussion about ending the war,” Sullivan said.
While there was public fear about the threat of nuclear war after the Russians launched their invasion, that potential escalation was not what most concerned the Biden administration, Sullivan said.
Rather, Sullivan said, “it was forms of hybrid warfare, where Russia begins to put pressure on Europe or the United States through cyber sabotage, cable cutting, or just to give you a hypothetical, many drones over Poland, and begins to press in various ways, short of outright conventional war against NATO and against the United States. And of course, that did happen.”
The question then becomes, Sullivan said, “how do we manage that risk? Push back against that risk, to turn that risk?”
Sullivan also said he didn’t think Biden got enough credit for ending the war in Afghanistan, while also acknowledging the 13 American soldiers and scores of Afghan civilians killed at the Kabul airport during the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
“If we were still at war in Afghanistan today, the end of 2025, we’d be entering our 26th year of war to the detriment of our ability to keep this country safe and to keep this country strong. And so I believe that that decision was the right decision,” Sullivan said.
He also said he had worked with the incoming Trump national security advisor, as well as other senior Trump administration officials, to ease the transition after last November’s election.
“We talked them through how we were approaching things, things that hadn’t been in the news, that no one else really knew. Our job is to try to set (the incoming president) up for success to the greatest extent possible.”
In answer to a query from a student, Sullivan was skeptical that AI can replace human experience and judgment in diplomacy.
“We should not hand that over to AI. I would say, there is a long way to go before I would be of the view that consequential policy decisions should be allocated to AI, given the fact that the technology is deeply imperfect, deeply biased, and also subject to various forms of misuse,” said Sullivan, who noted that Biden and Xi had agreed that any decision to use a nuclear weapon should be made by a human being, not AI.
Aidan Chapas ’29 asked Sullivan how he reconciled his convictions and morals with such foreign policy decisions as shipping weapons to Israel that have been used on the civilian population of Gaza.
“I’m human. And I see those images and they break my heart. It is God awful,” Sullivan said.
The moral dilemmas are inescapable, he said. What is the balance between protecting American interests but also alleviating suffering?
“When you sit in my seat and you contribute to the decisions being made by a president, you have to stare that square in the face. You have to constantly ask yourself, what’s the right thing to do?”
Sullivan frankly described how, during his term as national security advisor, he had gone without sleep, aged considerably in the job, battled constant mental and physical stress, and taken refuge in reality TV shows and Hallmark Christmas movies.
A , Sullivan met with undergraduate Great Issues Scholars, War and Peace Fellows, and earlier in the day. Currently a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, he also served as deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the Obama administration, and now lives in New Hampshire with his wife, U.S. Rep. Maggie Goodlander, D-N.H.
For students in the audience interested in going into government or foreign policy, Sullivan advised them “to have the discipline to know the difference between your convictions and your opinions, to hold fast to your convictions, but to change your opinions when you are presented with good arguments and new evidence. And occasionally say, hey, you know what? I was wrong about that.”
After the his talk, Sophia Kohmann ’28 said that Sullivan did “a really good job of opening the curtain” on the behind-the-scenes work of American foreign policy. She liked the advice Sullivan gave and the fact that he covered a wide breadth of topics. “It was well thought-out and concise, and not superficial,” Kohmann said.
Chapas appreciated Sullivan’s candor. “It’s easy to forget the humanity of those who make such difficult decisions, and I believe that his talk was a valuable insight into the mindset of our leaders during times of crisis.”
Holt, the Dickey Center director and who also served in the State Department during the Obama administration, said that Sullivan “was able to answer very personal questions that are difficult for somebody who’s in government to answer. And when you’re out of government you can often deflect them—and he didn’t. He didn’t just talk about the big politics, he talked about the human side of diplomacy and government service, which does take a toll.”
