As White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan coordinated China policy for President Biden over four years. He traveled to Vienna, Malta, Bangkok and elsewhere to meet with Wang Yi, the top Chinese foreign policy official, and he talked with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in Beijing last August.
I sat down with him recently in a conference room in the West Wing to discuss the administration’s approach to China. Here are some of his comments, which have been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
On the first Trump administration’s approach to China, and the Biden team’s policy:
Mr. Sullivan said the Biden administration tried “to shift from a strategy of hub-and-spoke and just pure bilateral alliances” to “creating this latticework, or this network of relationships, across the region.”
That included rejuvenating the nonmilitary Quad coalition with Australia, India and Japan, as well as creating three new U.S. security arrangements with Japan and South Korea; Japan and the Philippines; and Australia and Britain.
The Trump administration “had begun an effort with respect to semiconductor manufacturing equipment around E.U.V. [extreme ultraviolet lithography] technology … that was quite informal, that was essentially an informal understanding with the Dutch government and so on.”
“We thought we actually needed an export control regime that gets put into place and then built upon. … They were pointing in the right direction, but there was no real systematic undertaking on that front.”
“Honestly, we felt a huge gap in our defense industrial base. We just were not making the investments in either munitions or platforms necessary, and so we worked to try to arrest the slide and put us on a long-term trajectory to be healthy, fully healthy at magazine depth and submarine defense, industrial base, that kind of thing.”
“The other thing is that Covid exposed to us the broader supply-chain challenge in a very visceral, quite evocative way … They were grappling with Covid through 2020, so that’s another thing that I think we all came to a realization together, the outgoing and incoming administration in 2020. But it was left to us to really begin the work of a critical supply-chain strategy, both as it applies to the defense industrial base, but then also this broader issue of critical minerals, semiconductors, E.V. [electric vehicle] batteries, that sort of thing. So that was something that we were kind of building from scratch, coming in from ’21.”
On trying to coordinate on China with allies:
The administration set up two “big tent poles” of policy, he said: “investments at home to try to change the dynamic with respect to the relative trajectories of the U.S. and China when it comes to industrial and innovation capacity; and investments in alliances and partnerships, so that we broaden China strategy to really be a regional and global strategy.”
“We also recognized the need to engage Europe on China in a way to get that ship to turn.”
On technology competition with China and export controls on advanced semiconductor chips and equipment:
“What we assess is that their inability to access the high-end equipment means that there is a ceiling on their ability to make the most cutting-edge semiconductors in China, and then their inability to access the various highest-end G.P.U.’s [graphics processing units] restricts their capacity at the frontier of A.I. [artificial intelligence]. And we think both of those have been effective.”
Mr. Sullivan said critics of the export controls make two arguments, both of which he discounts.
One is on the difficulty of enforcement.
The other is whether the Biden administration’s policies pushed China to accelerate innovation. “My answer to that question is quite straightforward: It gets the chronology wrong. Our semiconductor export controls were actually a reaction to China’s very overtly, very systematically stated policy that they were going to indigenize their semiconductor manufacturing capability.”
On dealing with nations that want to work with both the United States and China on advanced technology:
“One level has less to do with China and more to do with: Will the United States be the place where the main build-out of frontier A.I. infrastructure occurs, or will that get outsourced? So set aside China. When we think about the Gulf or India, do we want a world in which we are trading dependence on foreign sources for energy today, or dependence on foreign sources for A.I. data centers tomorrow? And that has less to do with China, and that requires a theory of ensuring that a sufficient amount of the capacity for A.I. compute is built in the United States. And that has to have an impact on how we think about the export of A.I. models, A.I. semiconductors and so forth. That’s one level.”
“The second level is about diversion. So if you have high-end technology in a third country, can it slip out the backdoor to China? Either the hardware or the know-how, or the model weights.”
“That to me, I think, has a practical answer, which is government-to-government agreements that emplace effective security safeguards and transparency around the hardware, the model weights and the know-how, and that’s what we have worked through in our M.O.U. [memorandum of understanding] with the U.A.E., and I believe that is a sustainable model for having a strong technology partnership with that country, as well as other countries, that gives the U.S. a series of both economic and strategic advantages, where the alternative is to have them go into the Chinese technology orbit, which we do not want.”
On the kinds of trade agreements that Asian nations want:
“What countries are looking for, in my view, has become increasingly bespoke. It’s not just about a kind of broad market access. It’s the particular needs of a country thinking about its economic model for the future. And so the economic dialogues we were having with these countries and the attractiveness of the United States is about a lot more than just: Can we lower barriers to market access?”
“So let me give you some examples. With Japan, they really wanted the critical minerals M.O.U. so that they had a route into the benefits of the I.R.A. [Inflation Reduction Act]. That was kind of their number one ask, much more important to them than some broader-based trade deal. With Indonesia, it’s quite similar. That’s what Indonesia is looking for. Fundamentally, they want to work out a high-standards, critical minerals agreement so that there can be a flow of Indonesian nickel into American electric-vehicle manufacturing, batteries and so forth with other countries.”
On whether American workers and industries benefited from earlier free-trade agreements:
“So where did workers fit into that? Now you could say, well, workers fit into that. They’re going to get lower-cost goods, and that’s good for them and, to a certain extent, that’s right, so I’m not averse to free trade. But it has to have some element of a theory for how the U.S. industrial base, the capacity to build here, is sustained, and that’s why I actually think things like the I.R.A. [Inflation Reduction Act] and a critical minerals agreement with Japan are a more rational way to think about free trade going forward.”
On what Mr. Sullivan learned from his meetings with Mr. Xi and Mr. Wang:
“The single biggest thing that jumps out at me comes out of the meeting with Xi — and it was reinforced in the meeting that President Biden had with Xi, and very much in the meetings with Wang Yi as well, but punctuated — which is my view that when we came into office, the Chinese view was: If you are going to compete with us, then we will not cooperate with you, and we will not have lines of communication. You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose. And we’ve just stuck with our theory, which is managed competition: We’re going to compete, we’re going to compete vigorously, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t find areas to work together where it’s in our mutual interest at the same time that we’re competing. And, in order to compete responsibly, we have to have communication at all levels, including sustaining military-to-military communication.”
“As we leave, the P.R.C. [People’s Republic of China] has, at least for the time being, adopted, not in the way they talk, but in the way the relationship is conducted, managed competition. We have found areas to work together: on counternarcotics, A.I., nuclear risk and climate. We have sustained communication, including military-to-military communication, and we are competing, obviously competing vigorously, and yet still the relationship has an element of stability so that we’re not presently on the brink of a downward spiral. That is a significant evolution over four years for how the relationship is managed on both sides, and it is consistent with our theory of management of the relationship that the P.R.C. has now mirrored.”
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