What Keeps Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan Up at Night

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1:50Explore more at 4imprint.com. 4imprint. 4certain. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. One of the most difficult and demanding jobs in any White House is that of National Security Advisor. It comes with a long list of responsibilities. You're a counselor to the president and someone who coordinates with policymakers and intelligence officials and governments all over the world. It's as close to a 24-7 job as you can find. And it's one that's been held by Condoleezza Rice, Henry Kissinger and Jake Sullivan. You know, one thing I've learned over four years as national security advisor is that the most persistent question that one faces in a job like that is, OK, then what?

2:40There is no downtime. You're always thinking about what will happen next. During Sullivan's tenure, war erupted in the Middle East and the conflict escalated in Ukraine. There was chaos as the U.S. withdrew its forces from Afghanistan. Since January, Sullivan has had a chance to gather his thoughts and to catch his breath. He's fielded questions about decisions he made. And in interviews like this one on the Rockman Review podcast from the Financial Times, he's been asked about the president he worked for and that presidential debate in June of 2024, which led to Joe Biden stepping aside. So the debate, I mean, it was bad.

3:21Did it come as a shock to you? Yeah, it came as a shock to everybody. I mean, it was shocking. And it was shocking to me. I thought it was something I had not seen before, that kind of response. I don't have a good explanation. And I mean, I think some part of it has to be the stakes of that performance and, you know, how people get in their own heads. But that's just armchair. Yeah. You know, I don't know. Yeah. But I watched that and I thought that is something I have not seen from Joe Biden before, nor had other people. In an interview at the Aspen Security Forum, Jake Sullivan and I talked about regrets he has and about his time in the Biden White House.

4:10Sullivan also shared his perspective on today's foreign policy and national security challenges, which he is now watching play out from the sidelines as a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. And on that note, before we talked policy, I asked him something I'd wondered about. What happens when you leave a job that is so all-consuming, like National Security Advisor? What happens when you're done? Well, in the most immediate sense, I had a security detail, big Secret Service detail. They were with me 24-7. And at 12 noon on January 20th of this year, they dropped me off at a bar and walked away.

4:48I mean, shook my hand. And I said thank you to them. And then they walked away. And I went to the bar and joined friends and had an early drink. That's the short answer, the longer answer. that it's obviously a huge shift from the point of view of adrenaline, stress, intensity, and it takes some getting used to. I'm David Gura, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, my conversation with former National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.

5:24At a time when there is so much conflict around the world, when longstanding alliances are under strain and President Trump is waging a trade war, I asked former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan what concerns he has about the U.S. national security apparatus he helped oversee. I would say I have two major concerns. One of them is immediate to some of the decisions taken by this administration in the last few months, one of which is more longstanding. The immediate one is that I really do believe there has been basically all out assault on the professionalism, the patriotism of incredible public servants at multiple different agencies.

6:09And I think Doge drove a lot of that, but it's continued beyond Doge, attacking people who gave their career at USAID or the State Department or other federal agencies. And I think this is something deeply corrosive. It is going to reduce the extent to which people are inspired to get into public service. And I think that will come at both an immediate cost to us because of all the talent capacity we've lost and all the institutional memory and know-how we've lost. But I think it will come as a longer term challenge as well. And then the more longstanding thing is that I fundamentally agree with the critique that says we cannot move fast enough, big enough when it comes to solving some of the key challenges that we face.

6:53Fixing our defense industrial base, solving our reliance on rare earth minerals from China, other things like that where do I feel we made progress in the Biden administration? Absolutely. More than we'd seen before. Do I feel we solved the problem? No. These are generational problems, but we don't have a generation to solve them. We got to solve them much more rapidly. Let me take those in kind and start with your first concern, and that is the level of expertise that's left government. Has it trickled down from Washington to the rest of this country? Do they see the damage that you say has been done?

7:26You know, I think it's really hard to ask somebody who is working a job, taking care of their family, thinking about their aging parents, trying to make ends meet, to care deeply about a reduction in force at the State Department. And I would never profess to do that. But I do believe that there are going to be practical, real-world manifestations of the hollowing out of government capacity. and you know i think we'll see those when crisis hits i think we'll see those when it comes to people being able to rely on government to deliver the services that are required and then i also think that there's something else going on here which isn't quite so transactional am i getting exactly what i want from government that's a little bit more about a sense of pride and purpose in our country if you run down and denigrate public servants constantly you say they're in it for the wrong reasons.

8:25They're criminals in certain cases. I think you undermine a basic sense of cohesion and common purpose in our country that I think has all kinds of lingering effects that aren't about a particular agency not having a particular level of expertise. It's that more ineffable quality that I think is eroding the kind of deep sense of American can do and the sense that, you know, we're out for a larger purpose that, you know, really will leave a mark. I think a lot of people saw the videos from a few days ago of career employees leaving the State Department for the last time to the applause of their colleagues.

9:08When you look at the cuts that have been made, both to funding and to staff, are you optimistic that that can be reversed in a future administration or is the damage going to be irrevocable? You can rebuild these muscles, but it takes longer to rebuild them than it takes to destroy them. And that's true in our lives. Like if you lay off exercising for a while, it just takes you that much longer to get back in shape. And I think that's going to be true with government as well. And I want to be clear, I'm not arguing there is no scope for streamlining or personnel reform or programmatic reform or budget savings.

9:41I'm not arguing that at all. What I'm arguing is something more fundamental, which is the method by which this has been approached has been, in my view, basically to borrow a Taylor Swift line. It's been casually cruel in the name of being honest. They say, oh, we're just doing what's right and we're telling it like it is. No, there's a cruelty to this that I think is totally unnecessary. And I think it also means it's not rigorous, targeted, focused on genuine reform, genuine streamlining. It's using a bludgeon sledgehammer where I believe that much more precise tools are required to improve the function of government.

10:22Let's talk about a few hotspots. And you spent a lot of time shuttling back and forth between Washington and the Middle East, certainly after October the 7th. And I'm curious, how reconfigured the Middle East is today than before that attack that Hamas launched? How different does the Middle East look today than it did? It's considerably different. So first, when we left office, and even more so now, Iran is at its weakest point since 1979. It's lost its main proxies. It's lost its main client state Assad. It's lost its conventional military deterrent. And now its nuclear program has been set back, but not completely eliminated.

11:02And we are going to have to continue to solve for that. So that remains a constant, the need for a deal to solve Iran's nuclear program. Then you look at the possibilities that exist in both Lebanon and Syria, but they're attendant with really significant risks as well. And so to me, the most important thing that can happen at this point is to get an end to the war in Gaza and then to get a credible pathway to a Palestinian state. because without a credible pathway to a Palestinian state, I do not see a future for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia and other of its Arab neighbors. And I do not see a way of building on the promise of a new Middle East.

11:43I think we may just get into further cycles of instability and challenge. And what we've seen, for example, just in the last few days in Syria is a reminder that this is not just going to be some smooth pathway to a better future for Syria or for other countries. It's going to require hard decisions, and it's going to require connecting military actions today to a strategic endgame tomorrow that is sustainable and just. And so far, I haven't seen from this Israeli government a willingness to do that. So Israel has attacked Syria in recent days. Do you share this administration's optimism about the path forward for Syria?

12:18I believe that it is right to give this new government and Syria a chance. And in fact, the Assad regime fell in the closing weeks of the Biden administration. And almost immediately, we sent a senior official to go meet with al-Shara, the new leader of Syria. We began the process of lifting some sanctions. And we set a pathway, which then President Trump took a huge step forward on a quite significant step in basically saying we're going to normalize relations and lift all the sanctions. And I applauded that at the time. And I think that that is the right thing. Does that mean I share optimism?

12:50As an Irishman, I'm going to reserve anything remotely resembling optimism here. What I would say is there is an opportunity and we should do our best to test and pursue that opportunity. But we also should be strong in pushing back against actions, including actions by Israel that could potentially take this fragile opportunity and make it more difficult to consummate. The last time you spoke with Bloomberg was in January. And you said of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, there could be a deal maybe in a matter of weeks. Here we are many months since then. What's it going to take to get one as you see it?

13:26Well, first of all, there was a deal within a matter of weeks after I made that comment. There was a deal consummated in the closing days of the Biden administration. It was a ceasefire. The ceasefire consisted of six weeks of an end to all of the military action on both sides, the return of many hostages, and a surge in humanitarian assistance. And it also included a key provision that said during those six weeks, Israel and Hamas should begin a serious negotiation through third parties to turn that temporary ceasefire into a permanent ceasefire. That's what we handed off to the Trump administration.

14:03That's what they inherited on day one, a ceasefire in place for six weeks with a provision, not only that they should use the six weeks to turn it into a permanent ceasefire, but And also that the six weeks could be extended indefinitely if they were making progress. After 42 days, instead of working diligently towards a permanent ceasefire, Israel went back to the conflict. And so here we sit today in July after many more months. And the answer is quite straightforward, which it is time to bring an end to this war, to bring the hostages home, to get humanitarian assistance in and to work towards a two state solution.

14:42And I believe that the Trump administration, having taken the action they took in Iran, should use all of their capacity and clout to try to bring that about. But my hope is, and I can't say it's my expectation because I don't know what will happen, but my hope is that in the coming period, a ceasefire will get in place and it will stick. How did you navigate the thorniness of Israeli domestic politics during all the negotiations that you were party to and trying to encourage? So we've seen this very comprehensive piece in the New York Times laying out the timetable from October 7th to today, when there were deals on the table, when they weren't, when they were scuttled.

15:19And an overarching theme of that is that Prime Minister Netanyahu's domestic concerns played a sizable role in how all of this has evolved. Is it going to continue to play that bigger role going forward, do you think? Well, it has over the course of the past several months. It did under President Biden. It has under President Trump. That's a fixed variable. Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to focus on his political position. That's what he's done. That's what he will continue to do. But I think I have to say that even though I never found Prime Minister Netanyahu particularly enthusiastic about doing a deal, Hamas was not enthusiastic about doing a deal either.

15:58And there were many months where Israel had actually said yes to a basic framework where Hamas really didn't want to negotiate seriously. Now, do I think that that means it's all Hamas's fault and not the prime minister's? That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you had on the one hand a prime minister who was not particularly keen on closing a deal. But on the other hand, you really didn't have a party in Hamas that was serious about closing a deal. And that was also a factor we had to contend with in the Biden administration. I remember speaking with Secretary of State Antony Blinken days before he left office, and it was clear to me in that conversation how much diplomacy surrounding the war in Gaza was weighing on him, the moral stakes of that chiefly.

16:41Is that something that you think a lot about? How difficult is it to, on the one hand, undergo the diplomacy, the work of it, and then have the other complement to that, the moral aspect of that weighing on you? Of course. I mean, you wouldn't be human if the tragedy of October 7th and its aftermath and the war between Israel and Hamas, if that didn't weigh on you. And it weighs on me every day. It keeps me up at night. I mean, it's just a god awful tragedy. The suffering, the death of innocents, the holding of hostages, the struggle of civilians. Yes, it's policymaking at the end of the day is about human beings occupying these jobs, not automatons.

17:34And it's about the human stakes and consequences of things. And nowhere is that more true than in the war in Gaza. And of course, I wish that things had turned out differently so that so many civilians, innocent people hadn't died so that we could have gotten even more humanitarian assistance in while we were there. Although I worked every day and so did Tony and others to get more humanitarian assistance in and to stave off a famine. And I think about many other decisions, too, that have human stakes and consequences. And you'd be an unthinking and unfeeling person if you didn't ask yourself, what could I have done?

18:15Could I have made this decision differently or that decision differently? But one thing I will say is that when we handed off to the Trump administration through all of the challenges and Difficulties that we confronted over a four-year period of great turbulence I felt that we handed off a circumstance in which our alliances were stronger our adversaries were weaker The engines of our national power had been enhanced and we were no longer at war and so I felt we handed off a a country that was in good shape. And for that, I'm immensely proud, even as I continue to turn over in my head many of these difficult issues, among them very much centrally among them, the issue of Gaza.

19:02My conversation with former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan continues after the break. Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, And some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful.

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21:49During a wide-ranging conversation with former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, we talked about many global conflicts, including the ongoing war in Ukraine. I'm curious, as you look at President Putin and his approach to this conflict from the beginning through today, what do you see as the mechanism, the thing that's going to get him to withdraw, step back from the conflict? He seems unmoved by loss of life. The economic situation in Russia has been worsening. What's going to make a difference, do you think, in the status of that conflict? I think fundamentally, Putin needs to be convinced that time is not on his side.

22:26And in order to convince him of that, he needs to be convinced that the United States and its allies are going to stand behind Ukraine and continue to increase support for Ukraine and continue to increase pressure on Russia. So grind on. I wouldn't even say grind on. What I would say is display clearly and emphatically that Ukraine can rely on us for the necessary material to hold their ground and can rely on us to turn up the dial, particularly when it comes to oil sanctions on Russia. And what was more difficult two years ago because of a very tight global oil market is now much more straightforward.

23:06The supply is there and therefore the opportunity is there to take Russian barrels off the market and in doing so reduce the revenues to Putin's war machine. And if President Trump took that step alongside really doubling down on the provision of military assistance to Ukraine, I think you can begin to make Putin see that the long-term trajectory of this conflict is not going in his favor. And that would set the conditions for a more favorable negotiation for Ukraine. Now, a big question is, will President Trump see that through? And that is a question we will have to watch play out here over the course of the next few weeks.

23:46So let me posit that over the last few weeks, we've seen a different President Trump in the context of NATO. He went to the NATO summit and was talking differently about that alliance than he has in the past. It seems like he's talking differently about his relationship with President Putin as well. Do you detect a similar change? And if so, do you expect that to stay? Definitely. I don't know if it will stay. I hope so. but it's absolutely president trump singing a different tune on both nato and on the russia ukraine war and in both cases i think he has moved in the right direction interestingly in both cases i think he's moved in the direction of the american people the american people support nato and the american people support ukraine in the face of russian aggression and they do so on a bipartisan basis so my hope is that it will continue and when he takes steps like that i I will stand up and say, that's a good thing.

24:37Let's keep going. But the question is, does Putin think President Trump's going to stick with this? President Trump needs to prove to him that he will. And I think one key step he could take to do that would be to tighten these oil sanctions that he's threatened. He should actually put them on. I want to ask you about that more generally, because of course, the Biden administration, like the Obama administration, indeed, like the first Trump administration did rely on sanctions as a tool of national security. There are some who question the efficacy of them, see means by which countries can get around them.

25:07Now that you're out of government, how do you think about the role that they play, the utility of that tool in an administration's toolbox? It's not a silver bullet. You're not going to solve an international crisis or compel an adversary to particular behavior merely through the use of sanctions. But it is one in a range of tools that we can bring to bear in defense of our interests and our values and to try to shape the behavior of our competitors and adversaries. And thinking about how to apply it in the most effective and coordinated way with allies and partners is a critical part of state craft and I think will remain so.

25:45And by the way, I should just say on the Russian economy, it's definitely true that the Russian economy has been more resilient, that sanctions alone have not stop them in their tracks. I acknowledge that. It is also true that the Russian economy is facing particular headwinds and pressures right now as we speak that I think are going to have to weigh on Putin's decision-making. And in that respect, you can see how it's a tool that can be of some considerable use. I mentioned that NATO summit, and I'd love to get your perspective on the integrity of that alliance, how you're feeling about its current strength, its prospects going forward in light of the higher commitment these countries have made to financing their defense budgets.