Biden and his national-security team have often been portrayed, with some justification, as a sort of second coming of the Obama Administration, a reunion of the old gang, albeit with younger aides, such as Blinken and Sullivan, moving into principal positions. When Sullivan got married, in 2015, to Maggie Goodlander, who would go on to serve as counsel to Attorney General Merrick Garland, attendees at the wedding, which was held on Yale’s campus, included not only Clinton, who read a Bible verse in the ceremony, but also Blinken and William Burns, Biden’s future C.I.A. director. (During Obama’s Presidency, Sullivan and Burns, at that time the Deputy Secretary of State, were secretly dispatched to Oman to begin talks with Iran, which ultimately produced the Iran nuclear deal.) Tom Sullivan, the groom’s younger brother, is now Blinken’s deputy chief of staff.
Sullivan’s methodical, hyperanalytical style fits with Biden’s career-long tendency to hold on to a decision, to wait and test the angles and find a way to the political center of gravity. But the downside of that approach is evident, too.
Susan B. GlasserThere’s a real tendency to paralysis by analysis, Eric Edelman, a former Under-Secretary of Defense in the Bush Administration, said.Jake likes to look at every facet of a problem and wants to understand everything. That’s the tragedy of government—you have to make decisions behind a veil of irreducible ignorance.
This profile of US national-security adviser Jake Sullivan became infamous in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel this past October because it contained a quote – later removed – saying that the Middle East […] is quieter than it has been for decades
. I wouldn’t hold this against him that much; after all he’s only human with finite capacity to deal with everything constantly happening all over the world.
the quartermaster of the war—and everything else, a former U.S. official said. Photo illustration by David Plunkert; Source photographs from Getty
What caught my eye instead was the depiction of the administration as a gang of old acquaintances taking on new roles, which naturally raises the question: these people in position of power and immense significance to the entire would, were they selected because of merits and expertise, or simply because they happened to know and cultivate the right connections?
Sullivan turned beet red as Yermak told him that the hard-fought language in the communiqué was not enough. After Yermak informed Sullivan that he and Zelensky would soon land in Vilnius and hoped to negotiate final wording, Sullivan responded sharply: this was nato’s communiqué, he said, not Ukraine’s.
Things soon got worse. Zelensky sent out a tweet blasting the draft for placing “unprecedented and absurd” conditions on Ukraine. He also suggested that the allies were holding out to use Ukraine’s nato status as a bargaining chip in future negotiations with Russia. Sullivan, who was stunned by the tone of the tweet, left a meeting that Biden was holding with a bipartisan group of senators to call Yermak again.
We literally did this sentence to make them happy, a senior U.S. official recalled of the moment. Maybe, Sullivan said to Biden, they should remove or replace the carefully negotiated wording. What was the point if the Ukrainians didn’t like it?I was, like, this whole summit’s going to come crashing down, the senior diplomatic source said.I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jake that angry.
The article focuses quite a bit on the relationship with Ukraine and one can glimpse the cracks forming between the constant demands of President Zelensky and what the US and (most) nato members are willing to offer. With tensions in the Middle East at possibly an all-time high, the limited attention of US decisionmakers has already shifted in that direction, despite the public rhetoric.
Even a Ukrainian victory would present challenges for American foreign policy, since it would
threaten the integrity of the Russian state and the Russian regime and create instability throughout Eurasia, as one of the former U.S. officials put it to me. Ukraine’s desire to take back occupied Crimea has been a particular concern for Sullivan, who has privately noted the Administration’s assessment that this scenario carries the highest risk of Putin following through on his nuclear threats. In other words, there are few good options.
The reason they’ve been so hesitant about escalation is not exactly because they see Russian reprisal as a likely problem, the former official said.It’s not like they think, Oh, we’re going to give them atacms and then Russia is going to launch an attack against nato. It’s because they recognize that it’s not going anywhere—that they are fighting a war they can’t afford either to win or lose.
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