Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave himself high marks for his work in implementing former President Joe Biden’s policy on China during a talk at Harvard University on Tuesday, boasting of the “many, many hours” he spent with the Chinese Foreign Ministry and predicting there is no “end” to the U.S.-China competition.
Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, relied heavily on Sullivan to advance Biden’s China policy, which was largely conciliatory towards the genocidal communist regime. Sullivan joined Blinken during one of the most embarrassing moments of the Biden presidency: a summit in Anchorage, Alaska, with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and former top Politburo Yang Jiechi in which the latter spent 16 minutes berating the Americans over Black Lives Matter. No reports of the summit indicated that Sullivan or Blinken similarly condemned China for its ongoing genocide of the Uyghur and other Turkic people of occupied East Turkistan or for the litany of human rights atrocities the Communist Party regularly commits.
Sullivan went on to engage both Wang and genocidal dictator Xi Jinping on multiple occasions. During his last visit with Xi in August 2024, Xi reportedly berated Sullivan, saying he should pressure America to adopt a “right strategic perception” about China and view the repressive communist regime “in a positive and rational light.”
Asked to assess the best and worst moments of the Biden administration, and his role in it, Sullivan immediately identified his work with China as arguably his top achievement.
“One thing that I am very proud to have been able to do was play a central role in the management of the competition with China at an incredibly consequential, even decisive moment in that competition,” Sullivan said. “And to manage in a way in which I think we improved America’s strategic position … creating the space where we could work together with China on consequential issues where the U.S. and China simply must work together.”
Sullivan joked that his answer to his top successes was “not a policy that can be subject to a bumper sticker,” but it nonetheless was among the most important. He boasted that he spent “many, many hours with Wang Yi,” who served as foreign minister before the disappearance of Qin Gang and returned to the position in 2023.
His discussions with Wang “weren’t happy talk or BS,” Sullivan said. “They were substantive, they were serious, they were occasionally contentious – not in the sense that we raised our voices but in the sense that we disagreed.”
Sullivan expressed alarm at the abrupt shift away from Biden’s China-friendly policies following the inauguration of President Donald Trump, telling the audience that he had “concerns as we approach 100 days in about the erosion of some of the core advantages America has in that competition.” He specifically objected to Trump’s imposition of tariffs on countries that trade with America to prompt renegotiations of bilateral agreements, which at press time has resulted in a pause in tariffs on every affected country except China.
“The decision on the tariffs has put the United States at something of a strategic disadvantage vis a vis China,” Sullivan claimed, “which is ironic given that now a big part of the stated purpose of this whole tariff policy was to try to align other countries around a common approach to the PRC [China].”
Asked how he sees the relationship between China and America ending, Sullivan answered that he did not see an end to the relationship at all.
“No matter what happens in that competition, we’re both going to be there in the world as countries so there’s not an end state that just resolves all of this,” Sullivan predicted. “There’s rather a steady state of managed competition where we should be investing in the sources of our strength, protecting ourselves from harm, keeping lines of communication open.”
“There are people in Washington who would say, ‘Jake, you’re wrong. The end state is we win, they lose, we crush them,'” he continued. “I do not think that those voices have an accurate read of either how to balance U.S. interests in this regard, or what is a plausible outcome that serves us all, so I come to the answer: It’s not an end state — it’s a steady state.”
Sullivan made his debut at the Harvard Institute of Politics on Tuesday after being hired in April following the end of the Biden administration and granted the title of “Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order.” His new colleagues referred to Sullivan as a “generational talent” following the news of his hiring.
Biden spent much of his administration, with prominent help from Sullivan, attempting to improve communication with the genocidal communist state of China. As one of his first acts in office, Biden organized the infamous Alaska summit, in which Blinken and Sullivan tolerated Yang flagrantly violating the rules of the meeting to berate them for 16 minutes on alleged racism in America. Each participant had agreed prior to the meeting to a two-minute time limit.
“China has made steady progress in human rights and the fact is that there are many problems within the United States regarding human rights,” Yang claimed, failing to address the rampant slavery, forced disappearances, genocide, organ harvesting and other crimes his government is engaging in. “The challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter.”
The Chinese government found the meeting to be such a victory for their foreign policy that Chinese companies began selling phone cases, tote bags, and other souvenirs emblazoned with Yang’s rant from the meeting.
Elsewhere in his remarks on Tuesday, Sullivan addressed Biden’s catastrophic loss of the Afghan War, his expensive financing of the Ukraine war, and the war between Israel and the genocidal terrorist organization Hamas. The Institute of Politics welcomed Sullivan with banners surrounding the discussion venue boasting anti-Israel and pro-Hamas slogans reportedly placed there by a student group called “Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine.”
