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- Yascha
Jake Sullivan served as national security advisor under President Biden.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jake Sullivan discuss the record of President Biden’s administration, the future of Ukraine, and how it feels to be making decisions under pressure in the Situation Room.
Note: This episode was recorded on February 12, 2025.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: One thing I wonder about as somebody who is a political scientist by training, who writes about the news, is that I think it's very easy to backseat quarterback everything that happens in power. It's sometimes hard to actually imagine what the constraints are when you're in the seat of power. What do you think the smartest, most well-informed people get wrong about what it's like to sit in the Situation Room, to be national security advisor, to take these high stakes political decisions?
Jake Sullivan: First, I think people do not and cannot fully comprehend just how human policymaking is. It's composed of human beings with all of their skills and attributes and all of their faults and their frailties too. And frankly, with all of their weaknesses and blind spots. So what you have when you're facing a given hard policy decision is imperfect people with imperfect information, dealing with imperfect choices. In almost every context, you're going to get imperfect results.
I think when people look back on a given decision, they tend to shed the humanity and the difficulty of swimming through information, of trying to balance trade-offs with choices, none of which are particularly good. And they strip things down to abstractions, which, frankly, makes it a lot easier to criticize. One thing that I've said publicly, even since I've left the job, is that having faced a lot of armchair quarterbacks over the last four years, I don't intend to be one because I recognize just how deeply human the entire process is. I think that, in fact, that's accelerated in the modern information environment. I think it's accelerated at a plastic moment in the world where there is change and turbulence and contestation. I think we're in an even more extreme gap right now between what the expectation is of the platonic ideal of policymaking and what policymaking can actually be like in light of all of the constraints and factors I just described.
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Mounk: One of the things that always annoys me when I hear, partially from journalists and often from academics, who really should know better is, that, when you're in office, you have option A and option B for what to do and you realize that option A comes with good things K and bad things L and M, and option B comes with good things X and bad things Y and Z. And for whatever reason, you decide that on the whole, A is better despite the drawbacks. Then somebody outside of power says, you idiot, what about these drawbacks? Were you too stupid to see that? What were the moments when you felt most frustrated about the gap between those constraints, where you made a decision that you thought was best all things considered despite your awareness of the drawbacks, and the public perception of what you and the administration were doing?
Sullivan: One thing that comes to mind is the course we had to navigate with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was between a set of people who argued that supporting Ukraine was courting disaster and was going to drive us into World War III, and people on the other side who said, how could you even possibly contemplate the risk of nuclear escalation? That's a 0% chance. And anything you do to take that into account in your decision making is simply self-deterrence. We had to work between those two. I would just say that if you're actually sitting in the seat of national security advisor, and the intelligence community comes to you and says, there's a real risk, it's not overwhelming, but a genuine material risk of the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, it would be irresponsible as national security advisor to say, ah, that's just BS, I assign that zero weight.
Now, if you're an academic or you're an advocate or you're a journalist, you can say with little accountability, no, no, no, that's all just a bluff by Putin, he'll never do it, etc. If you're in the seat, you have to properly discount the risk if you think there are reasons why it's not as real as maybe the intelligence community has said so, but you cannot completely ignore it. What we tried to do on Ukraine was continue to provide absolutely robust support, to never at any moment be paralyzed by any of the threats or the risks that were being presented to us by the intelligence community or by public statements by the Russians or by the Europeans or others on the one hand, but, on the other hand, act in a way where we factored all of that into our decision-making. And that is a course we had to navigate over the entire conflict. And frankly, it is now a course that the Trump administration is going to have to navigate in the weeks and months ahead.
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Mounk: How do you balance those things? I mean, I have a background in political theory and have taken my fair share of courses in moral philosophy and so on. And there's obviously a very extensive literature on those things. But it just strikes me as absolutely impossible in practice. I mean, let's say that you're told the chance of actual nuclear escalation is 0.1%. Or make it 0.01%, right? That is a very small risk of an absolutely catastrophic outcome. So that seems to weigh very, very heavily, because, even though it's unlikely, it is such a bad outcome that we should do anything possible in the world to avoid it.
Of course, on the other end of that is that if you let that guide your decisions, it means that a foreign adversary just has complete dominance over your foreign policy and over your decision-making, because they can always create the miniscule risk of nuclear escalation. (At least nuclear powers can.) If you give that absolute weight, as in some ways surely you should, it means they can dictate to you what you're going to do. So I assume you didn't sit down and draw trolley problems, but how do you actually confront this incredibly serious moral decision in a way that is both true to the genuine moral stakes and avoids getting paralyzed?
Sullivan: I think implied in your question is the really important starting proposition that there's no scientific formula for this. There's no algorithm. There's nothing where you can just punch in the inputs and get an outcome which says, here's the exact design of the policy that balances all of these considerations in the perfect way. This is part of what I mean by human. It's judgment. It's feel. It's trying to apply discretion to balance these competing considerations and then to make adjustments along the way. Probably the single biggest device I tried to rely upon in helping coordinate the process to produce these decisions or produce recommendations to the president who ultimately made the decisions was to avoid the extremes where it was either you're going to have nuclear war or Kyiv is going to be under Russian dominion. Like, okay, Mr. President, you just have to choose these extremes. It was to narrow the band so that you could find a way forward that dramatically reduced the downside risk without giving up the fundamental objectives you were trying to obtain.
In Ukraine, that meant, yes, taking into consideration escalation with the Russians, but also making sure at no point we were going to leave Ukraine in a position where it was going to be absolutely overrun and the country wiped off the map. So it was about trying, through a series of policy decisions, to escape the trap of, it's either nuclear war or conquest, and to get to a place that actually allowed you to proceed to a policy objective of a sovereign, independent, free Ukraine rooted in the West without creating the risk of nuclear war in a way that created an unacceptable degree of risk.
Mounk: I'm well aware that perhaps I’m about to fall into the academic trap. But while this path of moderation, this path of always weighing up competing considerations is clearly the reasonable one in many circumstances, I wonder whether it can also have risks. To cite a very different example, I thought at certain points during the euro crisis that Germany should either have gone much further in supporting Greece and helping to bring the structural crisis to an earlier end, allowing Greece to grow again and so on. Or perhaps at some point it should have said, look, we need to find ways for some countries to be able to leave the euro and perhaps we don't give them bailouts at all. The middle path ensured that the country was in a very deep economic stagnation for a very long time.
Leaving that particular example aside, is there a case that on Ukraine we ended up with a wrong middle path? That what we've ended up doing is always giving Ukraine enough support at each stage to make sure that the country doesn't get overrun and Russian troops don't enter Kyiv, which is of course an incredibly important goal, but without ever giving Ukraine the weaponry, the support, the money they needed to actually win this war and push Russian troops fully off of their territory? And so, as a result, we have had, after a very eventful first weeks and months of the conflict, a relatively stagnant contract for a long time in which very little territory moves, that there's great loss of human life on the Ukrainian side—this is obviously not the fault in any way of the United States, but rather of the decision-maker in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin—the loss of 18, 19-year-old Russian soldiers who are being drafted to fight in this terrible conflict as well. Should we have either done even more to support Ukraine or done more earlier on to bring this war to some kind of negotiated conclusion?
Sullivan: On one side of that is, should we have just pushed Ukraine to the negotiating table and said, we're done with supporting you unless you just agree to cut some deal? I think that was not a credibly available option based on the values that President Biden brought to this fight, that he was not going to grind Ukraine down into capitulation, that this was their country, their territory, their troops, and therefore their decision about whether they wanted to continue to prosecute this war. Our job was to put them in the best possible position when they ultimately wanted to negotiate.
Mounk: Articulate to me what you mean by that, right? So I think that obviously my values and I think the values of the United States mean that we should come to the robust defense of a country that is the victim of an unprovoked attack, a war of territorial expansion. If we're to become genuinely convinced—if you and your office with the information available to you had become genuinely convinced—that Ukraine's military forces aren't going to be enough, that the support going to Ukraine isn't going to be enough for them to win, then objectively, we face a choice between coming to the negotiating table and making very painful compromises, which involve some loss of territory today, or doing that two and a half years later, where the nature of the ultimate deal is likely to look the same, but a lot more people have died. What about our values would stop us from doing that?
Sullivan: I think the question really is: Who should be the ultimate decision maker on that set of trade-offs? Should it be the United States of America? And if so, why? Is it because we provide military support, we provide funding? Or should the decision-maker be the democratically elected Ukrainian government whose territorial integrity, whose troops, whose people are the ones really at stake in the fight? I would simply say that the right decision-maker for that totally logical question is Kyiv and not Washington, D.C. That they should be the ones to say, do we want to keep going even in the face of the challenges that we see ahead? And that the United States—if we had troops in the fight, it would be a different thing. Or if the risk of nuclear armageddon got so extreme that it created different stakes for the American people. Maybe that calculus shifts, but in light of what we were doing, which in my view was a sustainable level of support to the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian military, and then give our best advice, guidance, information, share with them everything so that they were making decisions, but they were making informed decisions.
Ultimately, that final call should be the Ukrainian people's to make, not a bunch of folks sitting in Washington or Brussels or in other capitals in Europe. That's how I see the situation. And so what's the value there? The value there is living in a world in which the question of sovereignty and territorial integrity is answered chiefly by the people whose sovereignty and territorial integrity is under attack and not by outside powers who are imposing outcomes over their heads, which I have some concerns about. It may be the ultimate outcome here, but I think a world in which the agency for these kinds of very hard decisions—and you posed a very hard decision—is carried out by the people who have the deepest stakes in it. And in this case, that's the people of Ukraine. That's how I see the situation.
I understand why an academic or someone else would say, it's illogical. Why don't they just stop? Or why don't the Americans just make them stop? But I think in the real world of saying whatever your view on the question of whether to go to the table or not go to the table, the real question is who should be the ultimate decision-maker on that? Should it be imposed on the Ukrainians or should the information be given to the Ukrainians to make their own decision? And we judged the latter. I will continue to defend that because I think it has been the correct way for us to operate. And frankly, I believe the current administration should be trying to give them the maximum leverage so that they can ultimately make an informed decision about when and how to go to the table.
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Mounk: After pooh-poohing moral philosophy, I'm going to make a distinction in moral philosophy here. Ukraine is a sovereign nation and the Ukrainian people deserve to make their own choices about what they do on their territory. And that includes obviously preserving and fighting for the territorial integrity of their country. The reason why this war was so deeply immoral is that Vladimir Putin decided to violate their territorial integrity and to try and annex possibly the whole country, certainly a big part of the country, and he succeeded in annexing some part of that country.
If the reality is that Ukraine is not going to be able to reconquer that territory, that decision has been taken from them by this war and by those Russian troops, and we know we're not going to do enough to allow them to retake all of that territory, I don't feel as morally strongly about who needs to acknowledge that that is the reality. And in some ways, of course, it could be liberating to the democratically-elected government of Ukraine for the United States to impose that, which is to say that if they realize, we're never going to get that territory back, but if I'm the one to admit that, my head will roll, rather than for somebody else to step in and say, hey, this is the objective reality of it, then that doesn't seem to me—I mean, all of the moral injustices involved in this war, of which the first is the violation of Ukrainian territorial integrity, being the person to point out, I'm really sorry, you're not going to be able to win the territory back, we really think you should go to the negotiating table now rather than later—that doesn't seem to me where the moral weight lies in the situation.
Sullivan: Well, I would just say first, if what you're talking about is advice, then there's a certain logic in being honest behind closed doors about your view of the situation. And certainly we had many honest conversations with Ukrainians over two and a half years about all aspects of their strategy. But I kind of took your question to be something we impose, i.e. we say, we're done—no more support for you unless you go to the table. An actual exercise of brutal leverage to say, time's up, we’re not going to continue to supply you the instruments you need to effectively defend yourself. There, I think you have shifted from saying something logical and reasonable, even if debatable, to making a decision for other people about the nature of their country and their territory and their sovereignty. There, I see a challenge practically taking a step like that: imposing that kind of leverage is a hell of a signal to the enemy. Keep going, keep fighting, because now you've created a major breach between Ukraine and its backers. And now we don't need to be satisfied with just stopping here. We can go all the way to Kyiv. So there is also a practical challenge with engaging in that kind of exercise of leverage that I think is very real.
Then the last point I would make is at what moment in the calendar do you say, okay, now we know today it's over. There's a kind of confident abstraction to that that you could say, we've now concluded that Ukraine must quit today because this is as good as they're going to do. How are you deriving that judgment? On what basis? Using what inputs? And with what degree of confidence are you making that statement? And then when people come into the room from the military or the intelligence, we say, I see it differently. I actually think they could do this or they could do that. How do you weigh that? And I think that uncertainty about what the actual reality of the battlefield dynamics are, which goes to more than just inputs like man and material, goes to things like morale, staying power, etc. I think that also complicates the argument, hey, we just could wake up one day, punch in the calculator, see this should be over, and therefore we're going to declare it over. And I think when I talk about decision-making being human, information being imperfect, inputs being imperfect, this is an example of how that actually plays out in practice.
Mounk: What about the criticism on the other side? So the other solution to the dilemma—which I want to acknowledge was an incredible dilemma, and I realize that obviously the nature of this kind of interview is to be backseat driving after the fact—are there more things that the United States and of course other Western allies could have done to support Ukraine more strongly from the beginning? Was it a mistake to evacuate the American embassy in Kyiv at the outset of the war and the run-up to the war? Was it a mistake to wait to acquiesce to various Ukrainian requests of what kind of weapons we would get them, what kind of use of those weapons we would allow. If we weren't willing to tell them, hey, we'll do enough to make sure that Kyiv doesn't fall, but we know that eventually you're not going to be able to reconquer the territory, should we from the beginning have actually given them the means to reconquer the territory and to actually repel Russia to a greater extent than Ukraine has been able to?
Sullivan: First, I just want to start from a baseline that the broad expectation of academics, journalists, brilliant people the world over was that the Russian military would conquer Kyiv and in doing so basically conquer Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks. And they did not do so. And that is in fact, thanks to, first and foremost, the bravery and skill of Ukrainian fighters, but right behind it, a close second, the massive, incredible degree of sustained support the United States rallied, not just from ourselves, but from the whole world has kept Ukraine strong and free. Kyiv stands. And Kyiv has, I believe, a bright future rooted in the West at the end of this war, despite the tremendous suffering that has unfolded.
All of that we have accomplished without putting American boots on the ground and thus far without ending up in a war that has spread beyond Ukraine. And I consider that to be an incredibly proud achievement over two and a half years. And I feel it's important for me to lay that down because I think the questions you're asking are totally fair and right, but they should start from a premise which says, this could have gone in extremely dark directions. And in fact, people predicted it would. I think we have ended up in a much better situation than we otherwise could have ended up in, in part because of bold, sustained decision-making by the United States to rally the world to supply Ukraine with an enormous amount of material to stay in this fight. Now, the premise of your question is there was something we could have pulled out and handed Ukraine, and if we had done that, they would have taken back all their territory and won the war. And I don't think that the record validates that premise. There are three basic weapons systems that I think people really have focused on to say if you had just given them earlier or with fewer restraints, things would be different.
The first is F-16s. President Biden ultimately authorized the provision of F-16s to Ukraine in May of 2023. It is now February of 2025. Ukraine has something like 18 F-16s and 16 pilots. And it's been going on for two years. And that is because actually, as we said at the time, putting the money behind that isn't going to be as valuable as artillery and HIMARS and other things, because it's very difficult to build an Air Force from scratch with a new platform. And that has not borne out, not because of constraints imposed by the United States, but because of a small pipeline of Ukrainian pilots. And those pilots that are trained are essentially using those planes for defense, not for offense. So that's F-16s. The idea that if we had given F-16s one year earlier, you'd be looking at a significantly different war, I think is absolutely not borne out by the evidence. The second is Abrams tanks. We gave a battalion of Abrams tanks to Ukraine. They have never asked for a second battalion because we told them at the time, these are not the right tanks for what you're trying to accomplish. The much more valuable fighting system for them, which nobody made a huge deal about, which we just gave, were Bradleys, and we have continued to give Bradleys over three years because those infantry fighting vehicles have been incredibly useful on the front. And then the third is ATACMS. And we said all along that we only had a certain number and had readiness issues and that this was not going to be a silver bullet that was going to fundamentally change the course of the conflict.
In 2024, Ukraine fired hundreds of ATACMS and I would defy anyone to show me how that has had a dramatic impact on the nature of the battlefield. So we are giving more systems, more complex systems, more sophisticated systems, more lethal systems. Had we done this a little earlier, would it have had some marginal impact? Were there vigorous debates within our administration about what to give when? Yes, there are people of good faith with different positions on this issue. Do I have my own opinions about ATACMS or this or that? I do. But the idea that these three systems—which is really what people are, I think, arguing when they say, why didn't you give more—that the provision of them at different times or in different ways would have radically altered the nature of the battlefield. I'm open to the argument because a lot of people just make it, but I haven't seen the substance behind it that would back that up. So I respect the hell out of people who were advocating from the start, give F-16s and ATACMS and so forth. And I think they have been right about a lot in this war, including some of those folks who thought, hey, actually Ukraine can stand up for themselves.
We also learned over time in testing the issue of how far we could push the boundaries relative to escalation, relative to what the Ukrainian military could absorb. All these different considerations, we learned over time. There's more we can give. Also, the nature of the conflict changed and therefore the nature of what we felt we had to give changed, up to and including a decision to give them anti-personnel landmines recently because of the way the Russians had adjusted their tactics to dismounted infantry attacks. So, these were things we looked hard at, we worked hard at, we debated hard, we lifted up to the president. He made the calls. And I do think people can have legitimate debates about the calls, but I find it hard to see a serious argument that giving these systems at a different point in time would have made such a profound difference in the outcome.
Mounk: I think this has been a really interesting exchange in part because it shows the complexity of decision-making and the variety of pressures that you obviously face when you're in an administration. I could push you on a bunch of other subjects on the U.S.’ relationship with China, on obviously the conflict in the Middle East, the October 7th attack on Israel and the situation in Gaza, on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I hope to get to some of those things later in the conversation. But taking a step back, I want to think a little bit about the overall trajectory of American foreign policy and where we stand with it.
Now, you've said repeatedly that it was a formative moment for you when you gave a talk speaking about the importance of the liberal international order, and a voter told you, I don’t know what that is, and I don't like any of those terms. So there is a sense in which we've had an international system shaped by the United States in some way since World War II and in a much more clear way since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both were relatively effective at setting the rules of how the world works and had bipartisan support among policy elites, as well as perhaps some amount of genuine popular support within the United States. And that now seems to have eroded. We can debate the exact reasons for it, perhaps because the history of a genuine threat to the United States from an equal rival like the Soviet Union is now long ago. Perhaps because we've made some genuine mistakes in our foreign policy, like the Iraq War and like other conflicts where Americans no longer saw a justification for risking the lives of American soldiers and expending American money. But whatever exactly the causes are, it feels as though it is very hard to make the case for America's engagement in the world on those old terms at the moment.
Now, when you reflected on that, your solution was to say we have to do a foreign policy for the middle class, that we need to show how that foreign policy is crucial to the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans. Now, I think there's two questions here. The first question is whether substantively it is true that everything that the United States does in the world at the moment really is helpful to the pocketbooks of Americans in that kind of way. But there's also a kind of political question about that theory. Is it realistic that Americans are going to pay enough attention to foreign policy that they see the kinds of changes that might be inspired by the changed paradigm? Will they be able to draw the causal link between such a foreign policy and some form of increased prosperity and actually going when they vote to reward the political forces which have led to that material improvement?
Even if there is a genuine causal effect there, even if there's a genuine signal, isn't that just going to be overwhelmed by all kinds of noise, like the happenstance of whether you happen to be at the top or the bottom of a business cycle, in the middle of a boom or a recession when people go to vote? So a number of years after you came up with it, do you still think that this idea of a foreign policy for the middle class is what should guide American foreign policy morally? Do you think it remains a plausible theory for how we can actually build the domestic support we need for America's engagement in the world in order to uphold that unpopular term of a liberal international order?
Sullivan: I guess I would start by saying that, while foreign policy for the middle class has a certain slogany quality to it, I acknowledge that. And therefore, one would think, that's really a political device. I actually never really intended for that to be the kind of primary proposition. My proposition was more about the substance of the matter, as you put it, the moral value of it. What should American policy be for? What are we actually trying to do when we conduct foreign policy globally? And making the lives of working people, middle class people in America better, safer, and easier for me is the answer to that question. And in the Situation Room or in the Oval Office, that should be at the center of the discussion at all times. Now, do I think that translates into electoral outcomes?
In almost all cases, no, because foreign policy is not the dominant issue on which people vote, unless you're talking about a major war involving American troops or some catastrophic event like 9/11. In general, no, they're not going to vote on foreign policy. They're going to vote on the economy. They're going to vote on social or cultural issues. They're going to vote on the relative likability of the candidate. And foreign policy will play a role at the margins, but only at the margin. So I do not want to over-claim that foreign policy for the middle class is the ticket to ride to win a presidential election or a congressional election. My proposition on foreign policy for the middle class is that it's actually the right way for us to think about organizing the priorities and the conduct of our foreign policy, and that for too long we were not doing that. Now, this liberal international order concept, I think it's a little bit painting with too broad a brush to say we had this liberal international order from 1945 until recently because what did we actually have? We had, frankly, a bifurcated economic order from 1945 to 1991, where we didn't trade with the Soviet Union and its allies at all. We had a kind of global security order through the UN Security Council, and then an alliance system that the U.S. built that became the bedrock of our security provision. And then in the political order, we had a massive contest between communism and democracy. Then after the fall of the Soviet Union, the economic order went global.
The political order basically looks fairly similar, the continuation of the American alliance system, the UN Security Council being a mixed bag of sometimes doing things and sometimes being paralyzed. And on the political order, you never really went global with countries buying into it across the board. We hoped, we prayed, we advocated that everyone would buy into a basic concept of liberal democracy. But of course, China never did. And Russia went in the other direction over time, as well as other countries.
So I actually think that the issue of global order has been much more contested over time. And the main argument I was making with foreign policy for the middle class was not that we shouldn't have a global economic order, but that the global economic order that evolved from the 1990s to today was not sufficiently rooted in the needs of the American middle class and therefore needed adjustments. Not being thrown out, not talking about upending the international economic system, ending trade, destroying the Bretton Woods institutions, but adjusting to take account of the fact that national security has become more central to economics, that climate has become more central to economics, and, frankly, the distribution of the gains from globalization has been concentrated in the hands of too few and too many people have been left out. So that is a substantive case, much more than a political case. I believe that it is the correct substantive case. And frankly, I think there is more of a bipartisan basis upon which to take this forward than maybe many people appreciate.
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Mounk: So help me clarify how strong a claim the idea of a foreign policy for the middle class is making about the role that that value should play in the overall set of coordinates guiding our actions. Because perhaps I've been confused about that throughout the very interesting debate about this important contribution? So on one concept, one key thing we should be thinking about in making foreign policy is whether that benefits the American middle class. And more interestingly as a claim, we have failed to do that sufficiently in the past. Perhaps we failed to do that sufficiently in part because of wrong information, wrong expectations when we admitted China to the WTO and various other steps, right? But there's all kinds of things we should have done to protect the American middle class which we failed to do. And so we acknowledge that we went wrong on this and we pledge to do better on that going forward. But there's all kinds of other values we care about as well.
On the more ambitious account, this is the sole or at least the key value. Everything we're doing, we need to look at through this kind of lens. And that really is the overall determination of what we're doing. I worry that if what you arguing is the latter, then I worry that all that adds up to is to sort of dress up other considerations and other reasons in the clothes of a foreign policy for the middle class, right? So, is protecting Taiwan really what's necessary for the economic well-being of the middle class in the United States? I understand that they have very advanced semiconductors and microchips and perhaps there's an argument to be made there. But frankly, in that case, perhaps we should do what Trump is doing, which is to really pressure Taiwan on putting some of the technology in Japan and the United States, as you did as well. And then we just give up on Taiwan because really how directly does the well-being of that island and their ability to be politically sovereign correlate with the income of working class, middle class people in Michigan, I'm a little bit skeptical, right?
Going back to your debate about Ukraine that we were having earlier, I don't want to re-litigate that, I thought that was a really interesting exchange, but is our aversion to Americans telling Ukrainians how they should think about their national sovereignty and what kind of sacrifices they should be willing to make—is that really connected in any meaningful way to the economic well-being of the middle class in the United States? No, that seems to me to come from a different value that I think for good reason you are giving weight to in your decision making. I can find some creative way of dressing that up as relating back to the economic well-being of people in Michigan, but it just kind of ends up sounding like you're squeezing it through that verbal lens because that's what you're committed to. So where do you fall nowadays?
Sullivan: I'm going to give a slightly unsatisfying answer to this question because I believe that, as I said before, answering the questions, what is American policy for? why do we do foreign policy? I think there should be a simple, unifying answer to those questions: to make the lives of ordinary Americans better, safer and easier. That is a comprehensive answer to those questions. Now, I completely accept the critique that, by itself, that is insufficient because you can connect literally any foreign policy decision up to that to include what you choose to do or not do and development aid and supporting another country in an alliance system in Taiwan, anything. So it's insufficient. But that is the overall organizing principle. Then below that, the proposition I would make is as a matter of priority of where we are putting our energy, our investment, our propulsion that the lead issue should be, how do we strengthen the underlying foundation of the American middle class? And what did that mean in the Biden administration? It meant building out the industrial innovation base of this country, which was being hollowed out. It meant protecting our technology from being used against our people through innovative export controls on high-end chips. It meant reshoring strategic industries to the United States to include a build out of TSMC fabs, which I just recently went and visited actually in Arizona, where we now have leading edge semiconductor production in the United States for the first time in a very long time.
It meant securing diverse and resilient supply chains so they can't be cut off by adversaries or by external events and that the American people can rely upon getting medical inputs or critical minerals, energy, etc. That whole project was not something people were talking about in 2018 or 2008 or 1998. That to me is an incredibly important part of our national security going forward. Now, it does leave another question, which is, OK, but what about Ukraine? Well, partly you could answer the Ukraine question with this. Critical minerals in Ukraine have now become linked by this conversation over whether Ukraine's critical minerals could be provided to the West or to the United States and so forth. Who went out in the streets with Ukrainian flags and hung them from their front porches? It wasn't just the globalist elite of DC and LA and New York, it was people in my hometown in New Hampshire, where I grew up in Minneapolis, all over the place, everywhere. And if you look over the course of the conflict, there was a surprising resilience to support for continuing to provide aid to Ukraine, despite a lot of actual elites saying, the American people are never going to continue to go for that.
So what I would advocate is that part of being American middle class is also believing that America is for the good guys and against the bad guys. And so I actually don't think there is an inconsistency with standing up and supporting Ukraine and foreign policy for the middle class. Although I acknowledge I'm not saying they're precisely overlapping, I don't think one is at odds with the other or in tension with the other. It's all part of an idea that, yes, we want to make sure our foreign policy is delivering for us. And also we want to feel good about the United States being a force for good in the world. That's part of who we are as a country, a people, an ethos. I think that's super important and something that too many people have frankly been intimidated from articulating because it's more in fashion now to talk about Americans as being isolationists or whatever. I just don't really buy that. And I think the Ukraine example actually reinforces my instinct on this.
Mounk: I acknowledge that you are saying that you're making a substantive argument rather than an electoral argument, but I wonder whether this frame of a foreign policy for the middle class doesn't precisely make us insufficiently focused on and sufficiently bullish about appealing to values in that kind of way? So you can both explain widespread American support for Ukraine and try to appeal to widespread American support for Ukraine in a more idealistic way, which is for Americans who care more about domestic policy than foreign policy, and certainly don't want to endlessly expend American money or treasure or risk American lives for places that are far away, but that they have a sense of justice. And when they see a peaceful country being attacked, invaded by a foreign dictator, risking having a big portion of their territory annexed by that foreign dictator, they're sympathetic to that country and we can appeal to that politically.
I worry that if we become over-focused on these very practical bread and butter arguments, we're going to be saying, well, it so happens that actually Ukraine produces a lot of cereals and therefore it's connected to world food prices. And unless we defend Ukraine the bread in your supermarket is going to get more expensive. And that just strikes me as kind of too clever by half, because the people who are already inclined to support Ukraine perhaps will buy and acknowledge that argument. The people who are not are going to say, I don't believe anything you say. I don't think that us spending money on Ukraine is somehow going to make me richer. So isn't it better to make the moral and the normative argument directly?
Sullivan: I guess basically my answer to that is yes. And I certainly never intended for every time we see something happening in the world anywhere at any time, the immediate word we say is foreign policy for the middle class. I mean that to be an organizing principle for why we do what we do and for what we prioritize. But I believe, as I just said in the answer to your last question deeply, that part of that is, I grew up in the middle class in Minnesota in the 1980s with Red Dawn and Rocky IV and “tear down that wall” and an idea of the United States standing up on behalf of values and principles and freedom. And I believe that to this day still. And so I believe tens of millions, hundreds of millions of Americans, believe that still. And we should call to that quite directly and not make some tortured argument about grain prices or critical minerals, but rather say there is good and there is evil in this conflict and we are going to be on the side of good. Now, I think there is a second argument that is very important to make to people because Americans are practical people, which is that if you let a dictator overrun one country in Europe, history has taught us they could overrun more countries in Europe. And the last two times we've gone down that road, we've ended up directly at war with Americans fighting and dying. And part of supporting Ukraine and standing up on behalf of Ukraine here is about averting an outcome in which we get dragged into yet another war on the European continent. I think we should also make that argument. We did make that argument. I think the American people intuitively rallied to both of those, to the argument about defending the little guy and to the argument about standing up to the aggressor on a very practical basis.
I don't see anything even remotely inconsistent between making that set of arguments and also standing firmly behind the idea that a foreign policy for the middle class has got to be a central organizing principle of American foreign policy. In fact, I think the two of them kind of rhyme because they get us rooted back in the perspective of your ordinary person growing up in Minneapolis or wherever and thinking, what do I want the people making decisions about my foreign policy to be doing? And so for me, there's not really, as I said before, a tension between these things that we're enforcing, but I do acknowledge that I'm not claiming foreign policy of the middle class is the unified theory of everything from a response to a cyber attack or a terrorist attack to Russia's invasion to critical supply chains. It has its place and its purpose. And it has an overarching theme that covers everything about the centrality of, of middle-class working families in America being the key lodestar at the Situation Room table. So that's how I look at this. But I think you're pressing on this in important ways that require a degree of discipline for me personally and how I talk about this and for the playing out of this policy over the course of time.
Mounk: I've been reflecting recently about the distinction between a kind of positive-sum mindset and a zero-sum mindset in our politics. It seems to me that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, in certain respects, actually George W. Bush, had positive-sum mindsets about foreign policy. A lot of their major decisions were shaped by the idea that we can have a form of alliance with our strategic partners, where they end up being better off and we also end up getting better off. As a side note, I actually think even a genuine mistake or blunder like the Iraq War can be analyzed as an excess of positive-sum thinking, right? I mean, at the more idealistic ends of the Bush administration, they thought, yes, it's a war and there's going to be some people who die and so on, but it's going to be a short war. We're going to be greeted as liberators. Iraq will become a flourishing democracy. It'll be an example for other countries in the Middle East. Basically, everybody's going to be better off, right? It is actually an excess of positive-sum thinking that got at least the more idealistic end of the neocons into that quagmire.
Now, one way of thinking about Donald Trump is as the quintessential representation of zero-sum thinking. As the guy who thinks that in any negotiation, there's going to be a winner and a loser. And as they say about poker, if you've been at the table for half an hour and you don't know who the sucker is, it's you. If you don't know that your opponent in the negotiation is unhappy and they feel like they've lost, well, then you've probably lost. You better make sure that the other people feel like they've lost in order for you to win. By inclination, by ideology, by conviction, I'm a positive-sum thinker. But I wonder whether we haven't sometimes gone wrong in overrelying on positive-sum thinking. The Iraq War is obviously one example, if you want to count that as an example of that. Obama's optimism in going to Cairo in 2009 and holding a speech addressing the Arab world and the hope that it really would reset American relations with the Middle East. Arguably the Iran deal. Arguably the idea that for a long time we can have very close trade with China as they were doing a number of things to benefit themselves and harm the United States.
Therefore I wonder whether part of the appeal of Donald Trump is as this proud incarnation of the zero-sum mindset. It’s that he's telling people, I'm going to fight for you like hell. I don't care if other people are upset. In fact, I want them to be upset because that's what's going to show me that we are really winning. That obviously comes with genuine risks as well, if you're alienating Denmark and Panama and Canada and Mexico and all kinds of other long-term traditional partners, they might have to submit to you in the short run, but in the long run, they might look around for other partners. So, there are obvious problems with zero-sum conflict that I'll be the first to go on about and enumerate. But were we naive? Were we too convinced of the benefits of positive-sum thinking in various elements of our foreign policy and is that something that we need to correct?
Sullivan: First of all, I think positive-sum thinking is really fundamental to the United States of America, not even just our foreign policy. It's kind of who we are as a people. It's how we get massive innovation breakthroughs. It's how we build community. It's frankly how we built this country. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America about what he called self-interest, rightly understood as kind of enlightened self-interest. He said the Americans really get the idea that if the neighbor is doing better, they're doing better in really important ways. And so I think if we give up on positive-sum thinking as a country, we're going to have a lot bigger problems than just a bad foreign policy. It's going to strip us of our core identity of who we are as a people and frankly, in my view, what makes us special.
Second, I would divide between forms of positive-sum thinking in your examples. Positive-sum thinking relative to alliances, having strong, capable partners who are pledged to defend us and who are pledged to defend and help. I think the record is extremely robust in showing that is a good thing for America. And frankly, Russia and China would love to have what we have and they don't have it. And I would defend that. I think the idea of undermining or casting aside or suggesting these alliances have brought some great harm to America, the evidence is just not there to back it up. So I do not believe we've either been naive or taken for a ride or anything else on that front. And by the way, I'm all about burden-sharing. If you look at NATO as an example, when Donald Trump left the presidency, nine NATO allies paid 2% of their GDP for defense. When Joe Biden left the presidency, that number was 23. So we were focused on getting countries to pay more. Then there's the positive-sum piece of should we make investments in health and stability in other parts of the world? PEPFAR is a good example of that, aid programs in Africa, Latin America, Asia, et cetera. And I believe there too, we've not been naive. Those investments create conditions that reduce threats to the United States of America. And I think that's been proven out on a bipartisan basis over decades. Then there's, I think, the examples you were giving of things like the Iran deal or how we deal with China, dealing with adversaries or competitors.
China is a good example of this. The positive-sum mindset is a little bit the right frame than just a simple practical mindset, which is that we have to compete like hell with China and we make no bones about that. We're also going to have to live alongside China as a major power in the world. It's not going anywhere. Thinking we just need to crush them, destroy them, whatever, I don't think is as effective a mode of building a strategy as accepting these two basic points. Intense competition, but also we're to have to figure out some mode of living alongside one another so that things don't, the bottom doesn't just drop out. And there, I think we probably were too focused on win-win cooperation with China through some period of years following the end of the Cold War. That has been adjusted. And now I think our approach on China is both very clear-eyed but also practical.
The Iran nuclear deal is a similar example for me, which is that there is a problem, Iran's nuclear program. There are two solutions to that problem. Put it in a box diplomatically or have to deal with it, ultimately militarily. The diplomatic solution is better than the military solution, even if imperfect. So we should have that. And frankly, I think President Trump is likely this year to get back into negotiations with Iran over a nuclear deal because he will see the logic of that. Although the risk of a military confrontation with Iran remains quite real as well. So that's kind of how I see it on this question of positive-sum. And I think the core mistake that one could make is to go from saying we got to be tough with our enemies to we have to be equally tough and stubborn with our closest friends. That, I think, is a category mistake that could lead us into a very difficult set of situations.
Mounk: Is there something to the madman theory of international relations? Is there something to the idea that since Trump is genuinely unpredictable, erratic, and probably irresponsible, it makes adversaries of the United States more cautious in how they might provoke him?
Sullivan: It's a very good question. I've thought a lot about it. I guess I have a very maybe answer to it. It's just a maybe. I don't know. I mean, I guess my instinct is that does predictability potentially generate some tactical wins? Probably. In the risk benefit analysis, do the benefits stack up enough to offset what are the very real risks that things could go wrong? I would say probably not, but let's see.
Mounk: So Donald Trump is one kind of leader and I'd love to talk more about him in a little bit. Joe Biden, of course, was the inverse in many ways. He was somebody who had very clearly articulated values, a very long-standing foreign policy record, and who was very predictable. To put this question another way, in what areas do you think that was a strength of the administration and in what areas was that a challenge?
Sullivan: When you say that, you mean being more consistent and predictable as opposed to unpredictable?
Mounk: Yeah, both consistent and predictable, sort of another way of asking the question about the Madman theory: are there strengths that Donald Trump has because he really might impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and that would likely have some significant negative consequences for the United States? So with a different kind of leader in the White House, the Canadian and Mexican counterparts might say, well they’re just never going to do that; with one where they believe that he really might do it, they might be motivated to give a lot more concessions to the United States because he could really go there. Conversely, with somebody like Joe Biden, where what his beliefs are, what his values are, how he's going to act, is much more predictable. He might press Germany to increase military spending. And I'm sure you had those conversations with your German counterparts. But they know you're not going to blow up NATO, so why take it too seriously? When you're dealing with Donald Trump and you're worried that he really might blow up NATO tomorrow, perhaps that negotiation with your finance minister about how much we can increase the military budget within Germany suddenly takes on a different urgency.
Sullivan: It's hard for me to answer this question exactly because so far I think we've seen more theater than we've seen things play out in a real way. So, let's look for a body of evidence to determine whether this type of strategy actually pays dividends for the American people. What have we seen so far? First, just on the Germany example, Germany didn't pay 2% when Trump was president. They went to 2% when Joe Biden was president—whatever the relative threats and saber rattling were, the reality is that Biden got the outcome. Second, Colombia to me is a great example of how I think people are over-reading the strategy to a certain extent. So Trump says, if you don't take my repatriation flights where I'm sending Colombians back to Colombia who have tried to emigrate to the United States, I'm going to impose 25% tariffs. The president of Colombia resists and then ultimately says, fine, I'll take your repatriation flights. Okay. That seems like a clear win for this strategy, except for one important thing, which is that last year, 2024, there were dozens and dozens of repatriation flights from the U.S. to Colombia. No one talked about them, there were no threats about them. It just happened. And similarly in the Canada and Mexico cases, what Trump was asking for were things the Canadians and Mexicans were prepared to do anyway, and in many cases were things they were already doing anyway.
So I think we need a case where it is a threat and an act that is of demonstrable value to the American people that is actually generated. I've not seen that yet. And I worry that instead this cavalcade of threats merely creates corrosive impacts on relationships that at first are imperceptible and are a little hard to quantify, but over time come at a real cost. Look, it's early days, and I'm trying to avoid hot takes. I guess I just gave a hot take on Columbia. I'm also trying to give leeway to this team to do what they want to try to do in some aspects of foreign policy. Other things they're doing are obviously deeply objectionable. That's why I said maybe. It's because I think people are talking with too much conviction of, aha, look, this guy's come in and look what he's doing. The jury is very much out on this. The risks are real. The potential gains, I see the logic of what is being argued. Now I want to see how it actually plays out in practice.
Mounk: I don't want to tempt you to do hot takes about Donald Trump. But what are a few areas where you think people are not worried enough about where our foreign policy could go off the rails in the next four years? And perhaps conversely, what are some areas where you see a lot of popular concern, but you think that's something we don't need to be as concerned about as people are—in general in terms of what's around the historical corner, or specifically in terms of what Trump might do.
Sullivan: Look, I think the most world-changing threat and opportunity is artificial intelligence and the speed with which it is evolving, and that will have dramatic impacts on every aspect of our lives. And I think that will happen during Donald Trump's term as president in the next four years. And that goes from military and security applications to the issues of job dislocation to disinformation, to bias, to frankly just the alienation of humans from one another because of the advent of this extraordinary new capability. Here, I think the United States needs to be in the lead in both ensuring we're ahead in the technology itself, but also we're ahead in shaping the norms around the technology. And I worry that abandoning the project of placing any guardrails around this, just saying it's a complete free-for-all, comes replete with very real risk. We're in a funny situation, where we're in a race with China, and we need to win that race, but we also need to make sure that this technology works for us and not against us in terms of how it's applied, and somehow we're going to have to do both at the same time. For me, that is the biggest issue out there. I don't have off the top of my head something that I think is not as big a risk as people think it is. But that's something I will give more thought to.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jake discuss different perceptions of Biden’s cognitive decline, and how recent shifts in American foreign policy will affect the country’s relationship with international allies. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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