After five long years since his last ChinaTalk appearance, Jake Sullivan returns to the show.

We discuss…

• Sullivan’s experience managing crises, implementing grand strategy, and cultivating leadership skills during the Biden administration,

• The art of crafting aggressive industrial policy, from chips to rare earths to infrastructure,

• The risk of miscalculation in the Taiwan Strait, and whether Pelosi’s Taipei visit was a mistake,

• Russia’s nuclear brinkmanship and the development of Biden’s posture on Ukraine,

• Whether Trump can succeed at ratcheting down tensions with China.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube.

A reminder: this is the conversation I wanted to have with Jake, not the one you want me to have. For other recent interviews that get more into the Biden administration around the withdrawal of Afghanistan, the pace of arming Ukraine, and America’s handling of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, see all these other shows he’s done this year.

Playing to Win

Jordan Schneider: Jake Sullivan, Biden’s former National Security Advisor, currently a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and my near peer in podcasting. Jake, welcome to ChinaTalk.

Jake Sullivan: Thank you for having me. Now I have a whole different vantage point on being a guest on a podcast, so I’ll spend my time silently judging you.

Jordan Schneider: Great, we’ll have an impromptu masterclass.

You’re calling your new show The Long Game. What are your reflections on how crises interact with the goal of maximizing national power, or however you want to define the long game?

Jake Sullivan: Part of the reason we’re calling it The Long Game is that it’s incredibly important for us to lift our heads up and out of the smoke of immediate crises and ask, how do we put the US on the strongest strategic footing going forward? That really is the ultimate essence of the long game — how do we marshal and husband the sources of American power in service of our national security, our prosperity, and our values? That’s the ethos behind The Long Game.

Now, to your question about the interaction between crises and the long game — it takes an enormous amount of discipline, especially in my time in the seat when we were dealing with a lot of crises and a lot of different types of incoming, to say we’re going to set aside the time, the effort, the resources,