Jake Sullivan on power, production, and the remaking of the global order

The hardest to watch, perhaps, are not the reversals, but the continuities: where the current US administration is pursuing the same diagnosis Sullivan reached, but with tools he finds damaging.

Both Biden and Trump accepted that America had made a flawed bet: that it could sustain “innovation dominance” while offshoring production. China understood something the US did not. “Building at scale would increasingly allow it to make innovation gains,” Sullivan said. “The United States has to concern itself with being able to build.”

That conviction shaped the targeted chip export controls Sullivan designed: a “small yard, high fence” that restricted a narrow set of critical technologies rather than blocking trade outright.

He points to the conflict with Iran as an example of a world becoming more volatile. A diplomatic off-ramp resembling the nuclear deal he helped negotiate under President Barack Obama had been, in his view, available before the conflict. Trump launched what Sullivan describes as “entirely a war of choice, an elective war.”

One consequence looks permanent. Iran has converted a theoretical capability, closing the Strait of Hormuz, into a proven one. The breakdown of key alliances under the Trump administration is where Sullivan sees the greatest cost, arguing that the president “does not believe that allies are assets; he thinks they are liabilities.”

He rejects the idea that trust can be restored through a single summit or symbolic reset. Future leaders, he argues, should focus on areas of cooperation, working through disagreements issue by issue to “put some wins on the board”.

Sullivan believes a new social compact, connecting technology, tax, and manufacturing, is required: “We need fundamentally new answers. Where does the human fit in, in an age of exploding technology?”

What comes next, he believes, is still there to be shaped. “That’s going to determine whether this is an era headed toward far deeper disorder, or one in which we’re able to build a new order.”