Is America Losing the High Ground?

19:49Jake Sullivan:First, to me, it's a little hard to tell from the outside when you don't have access to the actual tech or how it's being applied. The degree to which this is as real as some of the reporting suggests or is a little more hyped than the reporting suggests, and I have yet to come to a firm and settled view on that. But regardless of where things are literally today in April of 2026, we know where this is going and going very fast. And here, I think what the Anthropic Pentagon standoff really pointed out is that there is not a sufficient set of rules and norms in place in granular detail in the Pentagon that are transparent, that could be the basis for how to think about lethal, increasingly autonomous weapon systems, big data and mass surveillance that has AI enabled, these other questions that were at the heart of that dispute.

20:47Jake Sullivan:I am sympathetic to the idea that it shouldn't be the private company that's adjudicating all of that. But I'm also sympathetic to Dario's view that right now the government has not promulgated that in a very serious way. And I think that has to happen. And those arguing, well, we just can't do it because our adversaries are moving forward pell-mell, I don't discount that they are. And they're not going to apply the same level of scrutiny or rigor to standards and guardrails around these things. But nonetheless, I think it is vital for the United States to do this and to do it in a somewhat transparent way.

21:17Jake Sullivan:And the current leadership of the Pentagon, to me, does not inspire confidence about our ability to do that in a meaningful way. And that should make us all a bit nervous.

21:25Foreign Affairs Interview Host:And if we do that in a meaningful way and China doesn't or Russia doesn't or Iran doesn't, does that put us at a disadvantage in your mind?

21:32Jake Sullivan:So to a certain extent, yes. It's hard to argue that, you know, if they're just kind of moving unfettered on some military basis, they have a certain advantage. I think one, that requires us to get into this dialogue I was talking about, to try to get some agreed guardrails. Verification and enforcement is obviously a challenge, but, you know, may have at least some constraining effect on them. And two, I'm sorry, but at some level, we cannot just accept, well, whatever they're going to do, we're going to do. We have to apply a theory of human judgment and oversight, a theory of safety and values relative to the application of American military might, and power that is consistent with who we are, and then manage for whatever risks or threats come from that.

22:29Jake Sullivan:But I do not believe that we should accept a simple race to the bottom here.

22:33Foreign Affairs Interview Host:One of the other risks that runs across the various high grounds of the piece is reliance on China and other countries for critical inputs into our own tech ecosystem. For all of the focus on building chip capacity in the United States through the Biden administration, Huge percentage of high-end ships still come from Taiwan. That reliance has not diminished that much. Where's your level of anxiety on precipitous action in the Taiwan Strait on China moving quickly through either D-Day-style landing or more of a blockade strategy? But that would lead to unification in the near term.

23:07Jake Sullivan:My current read is that the Chinese leadership believes that their strategy is working. a strategy of persistent pressure, coercion, momentum, pushing Taiwan inexorably into the Beijing orbit. From their perspective, that strategy is pointing the arrow in the right direction right now, which means the odds of military action in the next couple of years, in my view, are quite low, very low. Not zero. And there could be a precipitating event that we don't even quite recognize. Or there could be something in terms of the policy of the current leadership in Taipei that provokes the leadership in Beijing to act in a certain way.

23:51Jake Sullivan:So I don't rule it out. And I think of the scenarios, the blockade scenario is the more credible one than the D-Day style landing if something were to happen in the next couple of years. I think 28 is an incredibly important year because it is the year of the next Taiwan presidential election. And I think from Beijing's perspective, they see the KMT gaining some political standing and gaining likelihood of winning that, which would only reinforce their view that their strategy is working and they can continue. If the ruling party, the DPP, the Democratic People's Party, wins that election, then they'll go, I think, take a harder look at whether they need to change course and do something more dramatic, including something potentially military.

24:36Jake Sullivan:That's also the year of the American presidential election, the last year of the Trump administration. So we should look at that time. I think it will be important. It was striking to me that the party leader of the KMT showed up in Beijing in a quite interesting posture of almost sort of supplicant, and Beijing really played that up. I think that is just a reinforcement of their idea that the tide is going their way and they should play out this string, not to mix metaphors, for a bit longer. And so that, for me, makes me think the odds of military action are not that high.

25:12Foreign Affairs Interview Host:Do you think they're right? Do you think those analysts in Beijing have the correct read of the situation?

25:16Jake Sullivan:I mean, on the politics of what's going to happen in 28, look, I have a hard time predicting anything about what's going to happen in America in 28. So for me to predict what's going to happen in Taipei would be folly. But they have evidence, they have reason to think that the current president is not that strong politically in Taiwan, that he won the last election with less than 50 percent of the vote, that the KMT has a decent shot of winning, that they have, through propaganda and payoffs and other things, China has a fair amount of influence on Taipei. that is injecting itself into the political conversation.

25:55Jake Sullivan:I think all of that is right. I do think one variable that I'm not sure how they assess it or how they weight it is just like where generationally young people in Taiwan think of themselves increasingly with an independent identity. So is there something deeper and more structural that will just make the actual realization of this Chinese strategy more difficult than they think? That's a question I have. And also there's the time horizon. I mean, how patient will China be? For example, does Xi Jinping think, I need this resolved by the time I leave? And that puts a clock on it, at least an actuarial clock, if not an actual political clock.

26:39Jake Sullivan:And so I think there's some uncertainty about years out from now how this strategy plays out. But I think over the next two to three years, the picture is a little bit clearer, and it means the risk of military action is not zero, but considerably lower, I think, than a lot of people have suggested.

26:58Foreign Affairs Interview Host:I went back and read a piece that you wrote in 2018 for Foreign Affairs called The World After Trump during the first Trump administration. We're still not in that world, I suppose. But there was a line that jumped out at me about China where you wrote that China has far greater capacity to upend the global order, but will be cautious in attempting to do so in the near term. Do you think that caution has eroded the second time around?

27:20Jake Sullivan:It's interesting. In a funny way, because America is playing the role of disruptor in living color in such a dramatic way, China is adopting a strategy of claiming to be almost the guardian of the order and the projector of stability. So I don't see them acting as a massively revisionist power right now because they're looking at the US acting as a revisionist power and positioning themselves as the protector and defender of the rights and interests of everyone else in the face of all that disruption. Now, that's not static. I don't think it means that China just wants things to go back to how they were as opposed to how China would want to push them.

28:08Jake Sullivan:But it does mean that their strategy is not cautious, but it's subtle. It's subtle shifts in what a status quo that emerges on the back end of a second Trump term looks like. It's not some radical rethink of things, but where China is increasingly at the center of the action because they are the party that can look at everyone and say, while the United States is doing all of this bull in the China shop stuff, you can count on us. You can count on us economically, technologically, diplomatically, you can count on us to be more predictable and more willing to work with you and to be respectful of you than you can count on the United States of America.

28:47Jake Sullivan:And I think they will look to convert that into more durable, strategic, and geopolitical advantage in the years that follow Trump. And they're essentially trying to take advantage of an opportunity that they see as very much open because of the way the Trump administration is acting.

29:00Foreign Affairs Interview Host:When you watch your former frequent interlocutor, Wang Yi and Xi Jinping, try to make good on this opportunity, do you think they're doing it well? Are they playing this skillfully?

29:09Jake Sullivan:Well, first, you know, it was a Napoleon who said, never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake. I don't want to overclaim just how proactive this is. I think a lot of it is falling to them quite readily and they're taking it. So they're not acting in dramatic ways. And I think in a sense, that's smart from their perspective is like not to try to overreach here. But basically, yeah, I think their style of diplomatic communication, their outreach to America's erstwhile allies in Europe and Asia, their communication to the global South, their subtle posturing on this war in the Middle East as they, you know, kind of let it be known that they're a little bit standing behind Pakistan and the like.

30:00Jake Sullivan:I think all of that is consistent with what I would have expected them to do. And from the perspective of Beijing is enhancing their strategic position.

30:12Foreign Affairs Interview Host:We'll be right back after a short break.

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32:02Foreign Affairs Interview Host:Iranians, you've thought a lot about the nuclear problem and the problem of Iranian power in the region more generally. As you look at where things stand now, what would a good deal that could plausibly be accepted by both sides look like, assuming, of course, that there is such a deal?

32:15Jake Sullivan:Well, I'll start by saying I do not think there can be a deal if the United States holds to the line that Iran has to completely surrender in perpetuity its right and capacity to enrich uranium. I think the Iranians will regard that as surrender and they will not do it. That's my conviction. If I'm proven wrong, whether this week or in the future, so be it. But I would start from the premise that you're not going to get complete surrender. So what does a deal look like? A deal looks like a limitation on enrichment. And in this case, that can be a total suspension because there is no current enrichment operating in Iran because of the 12-day war last year.

32:52Jake Sullivan:For a period of years, the disposition in some way, whether shipping out or neutralizing or downblending the highly enriched uranium stockpile that's inside Iran, the return of meaningful, verifiable inspections across the entirety of the nuclear enterprise in Iran in exchange for sanctions relief. And you know what? That looks a lot like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated in the Obama administration and that President Trump pulled out of in 2018. The timelines may be a bit different. The exact nature of the restrictions on centrifuges and enrichment capability may be a bit different, but the fundamental architecture of the deal, I think, will end up looking quite similar if there is to be a deal.

33:34Jake Sullivan:And reports suggest that that is essentially the type of deal that they are circling around, whether both sides can ultimately say yes to it. We will obviously find out here in the days and weeks ahead. So that's what I think a deal should look like on the nuclear program. And no, I do not believe we should hold that hostage to maximalist demands on missiles or on proxies. Just as we didn't do that in the Iran nuclear deal, I don't think it makes sense to do that now.

34:01Foreign Affairs Interview Host:So in the unlikely event that you got to take, I don't know, Steve Witkoff or Jared Kushner's seat in negotiations this week, you think you could get to that deal in the relatively near term?

34:11Jake Sullivan:It's hard for me to answer that because we're all basing this on the reporting that we're seeing come out of it. We're think there's a wild card on the Iranian side where their decision making has both become more harder line and also maybe a little bit less centralized because of the loss of the Supreme Leader and the change in power and so forth. So the Iranian side is a little more unpredictable to me in terms of what they would agree to. What they will not agree to is pretty predictable. What they will agree to, a bit less so. But do I think that there is a deal to be had in this neighborhood of what I've just been describing?

34:46Jake Sullivan:I do think so. One of the things that the obstacles in the way of it, honestly, is the method of negotiating that President Trump has. The Iranians are incredibly proud. They really don't like anything that smacks of them conceding or bowing in the face of pressure or bluster or military force. And President Trump, on the other hand, really likes deals in which he gets to spike the football and say, I made them eat this. So there is this kind of very practical issue with getting to yes on both sides, where if you go back and look at the JCPOA, there are a lot of sentences in that document that read like, Iran announces that it will do X.

35:33Jake Sullivan:You know, consistent with Iran's plans, it will do Y. when in reality, it's a pure prohibition on some activity, but it's written in a way that makes it sound like Iran had a voice in that. Whereas Trump likes much more to say, they're prohibited, they're barred, we made them. And I think Witkoff is more of the kind of character who would be able to do a deal that the Iranians could swallow, but the president himself does not operate that way. And so to me, it'll be interesting to see whether they can actually line things up.

36:06Foreign Affairs Interview Host:It's almost like he's willing to give ground on substance as long as he doesn't allow the other guy to save face as opposed to the inverse.

36:13Jake Sullivan:Exactly. So this is the opposite of Obama. Obama was like, whatever the wording in the document is fine as long as the substance is right. With Trump, it's like as long as the atmospherics are right, I can give some ground on the substance. And the problem is the Iranians kind of think exactly the same way as Trump. So it doesn't fit as neatly together. But there is still, I think, a structural incentive on both sides to come to a deal at some point here. I can't predict that it's going to be really soon or take a while, but that's how it looks to me.

36:42Foreign Affairs Interview Host:How significant is the Hormuz card in this at this point? I mean, we were—the Trump administration was surprised by this. They should not have been had they listened, presumably, to their own intelligence analysts who would have pointed this out to them. But Iran has played the card. There's a lot of focus on it now. I wonder how much of a long-term change in dynamics this really is, though.

37:00Jake Sullivan:So I think what's happened here is quite profound, which is a theoretical risk that Iran could close the straight up Hormuz has been demonstrated as an actual capability. And I think that changes the deterrence equation. It means that Iran's credible threat to do this in the future is that much more credible. And the necessary restraint that will impose on everyone else, I think, is quite real going forward. And that is a big loss, I think, coming out of this war. Now, do I think they can get the strait back open? I do. Will it be on some terms that are different from how things were before? Probably.

37:39Jake Sullivan:Whether it's formally tolling or not, Iran, I think, will exercise a greater degree of operational jurisdiction over the strait, perhaps in concert with other countries, than they did two months ago. I think that's just going to be a reality. So that to me is less practically important because I think all of that can be absorbed and managed. The real practical importance from a long-term point of view of deterrence and diplomacy is that now the Hormuz card is a card Iran knows it can play. And it therefore is something more powerful than it was before this entire conflict kicked off. And I'll just make one other point, which is, I really believe that the reason President Trump didn't think that Iran would do this, would close the Strait of Hormuz, would attack Gulf oil infrastructure, is because after the 12-day war last year, when Iran really didn't react in any meaningful way, he became convinced that all these arguments that those of us who were pro-diplomacy were making, hey, you get into a war, it starts to get real bad, that we were just wrong.

38:38Jake Sullivan:that we had totally messed up, that Iran was a paper tiger. They'd been proven as such that they would essentially break if we hit them and they would not fight back in a big way. He took that lesson from the 12-day war last year. I think his overall risk appetite was then even further reinforced by the Maduro raid. And so he was prepared to just go pell-mell here and was surprised that what we'd all been saying all the way back to the Iran nuclear deal, that the alternative to a deal is war, and war brings with it these very severe risks and consequences, that that's exactly how things have worn out.

39:14Foreign Affairs Interview Host:How do you read Iranian intentions on the nuclear front now, and especially when it comes to the risks that they could rush for a bomb covertly in ways that we might not be able to see, given the lack of inspectors and the uncertainty, it seems at least, about how much highly enriched uranium might be buried thousands of feet underground at Pickaxe Mountain or elsewhere.

39:35Jake Sullivan:It isn't necessarily fashionable in a lot of foreign policy circles in D.C. to lend any credence to the old supreme leader's fatwa, as people kind of like sneer at that and say, oh, how can you possibly trust that? But the fact is that the U.S. and Israel and other intelligence agencies assess that Iran had not made a decision to weaponize going all the way back to 2003. So that is more than two decades, whether in the deal or out of the deal, that there was something about the Supreme Leader's caution that was keeping Iran from sprinting for a bomb for all that time. He's dead. His son, who is much closer to the IRGC and the IRGC itself, I would think are probably more risk tolerant and more convinced that the existence of a nuclear deterrent will keep this from continuing to happen in the future.

40:27Jake Sullivan:And so I think that they are more likely to want to find a way to get to a bomb. Now, on the other hand, they're not irrational, and they recognize that going for the bomb brings risks. So they're going to play things, I think, where they might be prepared to do a nuclear deal, but they're also going to constantly be assuming that deal could fall apart at any time. and they need a theory of how they get to a bomb in relatively short order if, in fact, the deal falls apart. So I think they are actively planning for multiple pathways to try to get to a bomb, even if they're not going to dash for one in the immediate aftermath of this war.

41:08Jake Sullivan:And then what I can't quite factor in is the degree to which they think the Hormuz card alleviates a little bit the need for a bomb. I don't know. Probably not that much. But the one thing they will recognize on the Hormuz piece, closing the Strait of Hormuz is a much more kind of malleable, dialable option than actually firing a nuke at somebody.

41:31Foreign Affairs Interview Host:There's no taboo against it in this case.

41:34Jake Sullivan:Exactly. And it also can be incremented. It can be dialed up, dialed down. Some ships can come through. It can be turned on today, turned off tomorrow. So it has a reversibility element to it as well as the taboo piece. So I don't know how that factors in. But basically, I think the odds that you have Iranian leaders more determined to get a bomb today than they were determined to get a bomb a couple years ago, yeah, those odds have gone up.

42:00Foreign Affairs Interview Host:What do you think the regional order, the Middle Eastern regional order looks like in the wake of the war? How has that changed as a result of this? I think the biggest thing to watch out of all of this is actually not Iran's relationships with other countries in the region, but rather how the Saudi-UAE dynamic reemerges.

42:17Jake Sullivan:It kind of really burst into view as a serious set of tensions between these two countries in the months leading up to this war. It's been kind of on the back burner during the war. But after the war, I think how Saudi Arabia and the UAE relate to one another will have a huge impact on basically the entire rest of the region, including how each of them relate to an Iranian regime going forward, but also how they relate to the likes of Qatar and Turkey, how things play out in Iraq and Syria, and how the question of Israel plays into the relationship between the UAE and Israel and the potential relationship between Saudi and Israel.

43:00Jake Sullivan:So for me, that dynamic is the thing that I really want to take a hard look at on the back end of this and the decisions those two leaders make about how they position themselves will have a huge impact on things. And I think Iran itself will look for a period to consolidate at home to ensure the kind of general survival of its proxy networks, even if they're bruised and battered, it will take some time then to think about exactly how it re-engages and where. But meanwhile, this gulf dynamic, I think, is going to unfold in a much more rapid basis.

43:39Foreign Affairs Interview Host:On the regional picture, I want to take us back to, I suppose, an unpleasant memory for both of us, which was the line in the piece you wrote for us in 2023 when you were a national security advisor, sent off to the printer on, I think, October 3rd, 2023, a few days before October 7th, you wrote that the Middle East is quieter than it's been for decades. That was descriptively true at the time. And it was also, you know, you've taken your share of criticism for the line, but it was something that was, you know, it wasn't consensus exactly, but there were a lot of people saying that at the time.

44:09Foreign Affairs Interview Host:What do you think we were missing about regional dynamics in assessing that situation at that moment.

44:16Jake Sullivan:Well, one thing I'll say, Dan, is just kind of looking at you over Zoom here reminds me that we had a bunch of back and forth in terms of that paragraph and editing of that paragraph. And I wrote multiple different versions of it. And in one of the versions, I specifically was saying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is acute and dangerous right now. We ended up softening that down in a big way in the final piece, we being on our side, not, that wasn't you. It wasn't bad editing. Yeah, exactly. So in the piece and in public comments I made around that time, similarly, I highlighted two things that could be the reason why, yes, that was true that day, but it could change.

44:59Jake Sullivan:One being the Iranian threat and the other being the Israeli-Palestinian file. And I think the simply placing a greater weight on the likelihood of that happening, in hindsight, I should have done. But basically, it was a just terrible phrasing of a statement about a different region from the one that we had seen with respect to civil wars in the Iraq War and the war in Libya and all of the other, and the ISIS caliphate and so forth, and that in 2023, things did look differently. But my phrasing around, okay, how could this change? I should have just been more acute about these are the ways really sharply how it could change.

45:41Jake Sullivan:But it was in view to us that both Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian file were the two areas that would put the most pressure on the stability of the Middle East. And, of course, that exploded into view on October 7th.

45:58Foreign Affairs Interview Host:The Israeli-Palestinian file has receded from attention since the war in Iran started, but it is continuing to, you know, the situation has gotten much worse over even the last several weeks beyond where it was before. As you reflect back over the last two and a half years or so since October 7th, I'm curious what you make of U.S. policy over that period and what lessons you draw going forward. You know, you've talked since leaving office about being more willing to use leverage on Israelis with conditioning weapons sales and other things. You know, as you look back at the approach that, you know, you and President Biden articulated shortly after October 7th, which is based on this idea that if we, you know, hugged PB, kept the Israelis close, we would have leverage over them.

46:41Foreign Affairs Interview Host:I know you can point to plenty of examples where humanitarian access or other things were achieved as a result of that leverage. But the arc of that does not look especially good, seeing where Israelis are in Gaza and what's happening in the West Bank. What would you do differently, and how should that change the U.S. approach to Israel going forward?

47:00Jake Sullivan:So I've thought a lot about this. I've stayed awake a lot of nights. I basically think about it every day because of the suffering and the harm and the death. And everything from October 7th forward has just been a tragedy. It was a tragedy on October 7th, and it has been a tragedy for the Palestinian people since then. And, you know, one conclusion I've drawn is that we should have done more to put pressure on the Israeli government to change their approach than we did. And what I'm still working through is exactly how and when, right? Like, what specifically and when? But, you know, I will definitely say that just very straightforwardly.

47:42Jake Sullivan:We should have done more to put pressure on the Israeli government. And what we were trying to do throughout that period was get to a ceasefire and get the hostages out. And one of the things that happens when you're in the middle of negotiations like that is you kind of think, OK, there's a pathway to doing it. We can get it done this month. There's another meeting. And now we're going to make it happen. And let's not totally disrupt the dynamic. We may be able to get there. in May or June or July or August, and time just passed, we ultimately did get to a ceasefire and a hostage deal. And that was in place.

48:21Jake Sullivan:And when Israel went back to war on the back end of that, I came out and said they should end the war. And then I came out and said that we should stop sending weapons to Israel because the situation was such that there were no longer credible military objectives to try to reach. And then more recently, there's been this whole issue of the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel deciding to take our two countries to war together in Iran, I think a totally misbegotten war that we should not be in. And I advised US senators who were voting last week on these joint resolutions of disapproval to vote against sending more weapons to Israel in this context.

49:04Jake Sullivan:And so I think on a going forward basis, we have to just be very, very mindful of specifically what are U.S. interests and what are U.S. points of leverage and how do we apply them most effectively going forward. And that's a lesson that I've learned and will continue to learn as we go. Now, when it comes to the West Bank, we took the unprecedented step of creating an entire sanctions regime to sanction individuals engaged in settler violence in the West Bank. We've seen the Trump administration rescind that, And we've seen this absolute explosion of settler violence over the course of the last year or so.

49:42Jake Sullivan:And it's shocking and unacceptable. And I think the tools we put into place should, in fact, go back into place and be enhanced beyond where they were then. And that's something that I would advocate on a going forward basis.

49:54Foreign Affairs Interview Host:How should we think about the U.S.-Israel relationship? You know, I suppose we could say in 2029, this will obviously be a huge debate in the Democratic primary starting sometime soon. Andrew Miller, someone you've worked with closely, laid out, you know, one framework on our pages calling for us to treat Israel, as he put it, as kind of a normal ally rather than an exceptional one. Is that the right approach? Are there other ways of thinking about this?

50:18Jake Sullivan:I think we should focus on Israel's policy approach. And if it is the same or in the same ballpark as we see it today, then that will have a huge impact on our security assistance to them. And I've advocated in both last year and this year for withholding forms of military assistance as long as the policy remains of the kind it is. Now, if the policy changes, and frankly, if there's a different government in Israel, we're not going back to how things were before, but then we would have a different approach. And so I think it very much is context dependent, as it should be, in terms of what we are contending with.

50:59Jake Sullivan:And then we just kind of ask the question, what are America's interests? How do those relate to this partner of ours? And then we'll make policy accordingly. And in that sense, it would take the form of a more normal diplomatic relationship.

51:14Foreign Affairs Interview Host:Is the two-state solution still part of that formula?

51:17Jake Sullivan:I think it has to be. I know it's difficult, but I don't think there is an alternative.

51:22Foreign Affairs Interview Host:Let me jump around in the time we have left to a different part of the world. Russia has also been, I think, a beneficiary of the war in Iran, just given the depletion of air defense and other weapons stocks and the effect on oil prices. How do you see Ukraine playing out, given Putin's position now?

51:44Jake Sullivan:Right now, it feels to me like this war is just going to keep going, almost indefinitely. It's hard for me to see the moment of when it comes to a stop, right? Like, from Putin's perspective, stopping the war is more risky than continuing it. both in terms of Ukraine being able to consolidate as a proud and fierce independent nation that gets stronger and stronger and more integrated into Europe, and with respect to him having to bring home hundreds of thousands of disaffected soldiers and to try to explain to his people what this was all about. So in a way, he has incentive just to keep going.

52:16Jake Sullivan:And now, as you say, he has more capital to keep going because he's getting more cash for his war machine from the elevated oil prices. And I think those elevated oil prices will continue. And if I read correctly, at the end of last week, the Trump administration actually extended the waivers on sanctions for Russian oil majors, meaning, in effect, that Putin is raking in the dough. So I'm very worried that this war will just persist and that Russia will keep just trying to grind on Ukraine and Ukraine will have to continue to resist. With the support of Europe and with Orbán out of the way, I think Europe will support to a greater extent than they did before.

52:54Jake Sullivan:And I'm not sure exactly what President Trump does at this point because he's kind of consistently reverted to taking Russia's side on this conflict. Sometimes he starts leaning in the other direction and then he invariably snaps back. So unfortunately, as I look out the rest of this year, it's difficult for me to see how the war comes to a clear and clean end. And I think we will be contending with it heading into next year.

53:18Foreign Affairs Interview Host:If I could here again put you in the unlikely position of a senior official in the Trump administration, do you think a radically changed approach to the war in Ukraine could yield a different outcome? Or is that kind of forever war scenario where we would expect almost irrespective of U.S. policy at this point?

53:37Jake Sullivan:I think the war in Iran has made it more difficult to build the kind of pressure on Russia necessary to change Putin's calculus. But I think that option was available to President Trump. He started moving in that direction with the oil sanctions. We could have gone a lot further to just squeeze economically in ways that may have changed Putin's calculus. I still think that is what we should do. I don't think it's going to be a panacea. And then I think we should be providing Ukraine with a sustained and even expanded level of military and intelligence support. And then I do think that would hasten an end to the war.

54:15Jake Sullivan:It wouldn't end it tomorrow. but it would end it more rapidly and on better terms for Ukraine than the current U.S. policy is pointing toward.

54:22Foreign Affairs Interview Host:And that's a negotiated solution that involves security guarantees and some concessions on territory.

54:27Jake Sullivan:Which basically what the Ukrainians have said, more or less, that they are prepared to have as the basis for a just settlement of this war, I think we could move Russia into that zone with the right combination of support for Ukraine and pressure on Russia.

54:41Foreign Affairs Interview Host:Some of the other winner, one of the other winners of the war in Iran is North Korea. This is not a problem that we're spending a lot of time talking about right now. There are a couple of great pieces in the issue that your piece is in. You will not have read these yet, including one by Victor Cha, just noting how much the North Korean nuclear program, North Korean capabilities have been enhanced, have accelerated in the last few years. Do you think we're underrating the risk of a crisis there? Is there anything we should be doing about North Korea at this moment, just given how big a threat that could be?

55:14Jake Sullivan:You know, it's interesting. In November of 2023, late November of 2023, so not just weeks into the post-October 7th war and period of instability in the Middle East, I actually flew off to Korea for consultations with my counterparts there because even then we were starting to see some risk factors about things North Korea might consider are doing. And I wanted to make sure that even with a war in Ukraine and a war in the Middle East, we were not losing sight of North Korea. I think it remains a persistent risk for some significant event, whether it's a nuclear test or a long-range ICBM test or the testing of South Korea in some way.

55:57Jake Sullivan:And I think North Korea is a bit unpredictable in this regard. That being said, I think right now, Kim Jong-un thinks his strategic position is pretty strong. Capability is getting stronger support from the Russians, economic position bolstered by relationships with both Moscow and Beijing. And you now see the degree to which Beijing is leaning into that relationship to try to restore some degree of its influence that has eroded over time. So there are reasons to believe that Kim Jong-un feels he can just keep doing what he's doing. And we should put that into our assessment. but there's always the possibility of something out of North Korea.

56:38Jake Sullivan:And if you take your eyes off it too cleanly and for too long, something will pop off. So I think it's important for the United States to maintain focus there.

56:46Foreign Affairs Interview Host:Do you imagine if you're back in government in the 2030s, say, that we'll be contending with serious allied proliferation or proliferation risk?

56:55Jake Sullivan:I think the odds have gone up. I don't know if they've gone above 50 percent, but they've gone up materially from where they were before. And that's true both in Europe and Asia. And then that kicks into the Middle East and elsewhere. So we are in a different nuclear age in a way because the contemplation of this is just a much more central part of the conversation in all of these allied capitals. And so I think this is something for us to very much worry about and work on.

57:21Foreign Affairs Interview Host:Let me close by going back to a piece you wrote in 2018. I think the first piece you ever wrote for Foreign Affairs, that's the essay called The World After Trump. And you made the argument there that the rules-based order will survive. I know you've since decided that it's unwise to ever utter the words rules-based order because it's politically not very helpful. But if we can linger on that concept, you said then that it would survive a term of Trump, but you weren't sure it would survive too. What is your assessment now? And what do you think we're looking at in the wake of this Trump administration?

57:50Jake Sullivan:Unfortunately, I think that that basic observation is bearing out. We don't know the end of the story yet, but it is bearing out because one term was an aberration, leading to everyone say, okay, now we can get back, not to business as usual, but to something resembling the order we knew. After a second term of Trump, I think just the recalculation of the relationship with the United States by every country in the world, and not just about what's happened in the past, but about what could happen in the future, given the unpredictability and the wild swings in American politics, this is going to be a central feature of the landscape.

58:27And it makes sustaining

58:31Jake Sullivan:America's traditional leadership role much more challenging than it was before. So that doesn't mean that we don't have to hitch up our pants collectively and say, you know, we are going to play a proactive, effective, engaged role in the world. We're going to have allies. We're going to have friends. We're going to build institutions. We're going to solve problems. We have to do all that, but we're going to have to do all of that against a fundamentally different backdrop and with different cards in our hands. And that's just going to be the reality of what confronts the next administration and the one after that and the one after that, because this is going to have a long tail to it.

59:07Foreign Affairs Interview Host:That will make for interesting debate in our pages and elsewhere over the next couple of years. So we'll hope to revisit those questions as we approach that point. But for now, Jake, thanks for the great piece in our current issue. And thanks for doing this today.

59:19Jake Sullivan:Awesome. Thank you for having me, Dan.

59:26Foreign Affairs Interview Host:Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Rose Kohler and Kanesh Therroer. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Irina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.

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