Is America Losing the High Ground? A Conversation With Jake Sullivan

About this episode

Jake Sullivan discusses the current geopolitical challenges facing the United States and the implications for American power in the future.

It is an understatement to say that the United States finds itself at a particularly fraught geopolitical juncture. The outcome of the war in Iran is still uncertain. The war in Ukraine continues with no end in sight. Add to that U.S.-Chinese competition, overlapping planetary crises, a highly erratic hegemon—the list could go on. Such an unstable world presents a formidable test for policymakers in Washington and in every other capital, and no one understands that test better than Jake Sullivan. He served as U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser for four years, after serving in a number of senior national security jobs in the Obama administration. Much of what he dealt with in those jobs, including China, Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine, remains at crisis or near-crisis levels for U.S. foreign policy today. And, as Sullivan writes in a new essay for Foreign Affairs, technological change, especially in AI, is adding new layers of complexity and risk to all of those challenges. Dan Kurtz-Phelan, who worked for Sullivan at the State Department in the first part of the Obama administration, spoke with him on Monday, April 20, about the key tests for the United States today…

People in this episode

Host: Dan Kurtz-Phelan

Guest: Jake Sullivan

Topics covered

• geopolitics
• U.S. foreign policy
• national security
• U.S.-China relations
• technological change
• Iran conflict
• Ukraine war

Keywords

• geopolitical challenges
• national security adviser
• U.S.-China competition
• AI technology
• Iran war
• Ukraine conflict
• foreign policy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Foreign Affairs, Obama administration

Places: United States, Iran, Ukraine, China

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