Jake Sullivan was standing in the middle of his office, which occupies an airy, sunlit corner of the West Wing, looking like he didn’t quite know what to do with his hands. He was taking me on a perfunctory three-minute tour of the space, even though the office tour is, perhaps, the most tired trope of the magazine profile—and, I’d been warned, Sullivan is not a fan of magazine profiles. At least, not the ones that are about him.
The White House national security adviser is a most serious person and, by most accounts, always has been—a Minnesota kid who had memorized world capitals before the age of 14 and, by 35, had traveled to 112 of those countries as then secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s close adviser. A former Rhodes Scholar and world-class debater, he deftly swats away questions he dislikes by challenging their premise and speaks in polished paragraphs, not unlike his old boss, President Barack Obama. One White House official I spoke to described Sullivan as having a “relentless mind.”
The pageantry of the magazine profile—the part where reporters read too much into whatever the subject is drinking or wearing, which in Sullivan’s case is almost always a slightly oversize black suit with a limited rotation of solid, wide ties—can seem a little fluffy for someone who has so carefully cultivated a reputation for depth and substance. So as he walked me around the room that afternoon in May, gamely humoring me in a bit of high-speed show-and-tell, even I cringed a bit. The next day, he was headed to Saudi Arabia to discuss a pathway to Middle East peace with the Crown Prince, but had I seen the photo of the old shed behind the house where he grew up?
In defense of this particular office tour, I was there not for color but to scope out one specific item I’d heard about before coming to meet Sullivan. Tucked up on a corner bookshelf, there it was: a small patch of white fabric embroidered with three red arrows in the center, encased in a simple square frame.
It was a gift Sullivan had made for his counterparts from Japan and the Netherlands in preparation for a high-stakes, hush-hush meeting in Washington last January. The arrows were a nod to an old Japanese parable, in which a father teaches his three sons a lesson by handing each of them an arrow and instructing them to break it. One by one, the arrows snap. Next, he ties three new arrows together and tells them to try again. Bound together, the arrows hold firm. Strength, the story teaches, comes from unity. Sullivan trusted his guests to grasp the message as they met to orchestrate their own quiet show of solidarity: a plan to keep the world’s most advanced semiconductors and the machines that make them out of China’s hands.
The meeting was part of a tectonic shift for America’s China policy that began under the Trump administration. But it was also a shift for Sullivan, who had once subscribed to the mainstream belief that free trade with China was the way to seed peace and prosperity in the world. He had since been disabused of that notion. Under President Xi Jinping, China had used advanced chips from the US to power supercomputers that surveilled Muslim minorities and trained AI systems that could enhance its military capabilities. At the same time, the Chinese armed forces had conspicuously expanded its military drills off the coast of Taiwan, which produces most of the world’s advanced semiconductors. If China were to invade the island, as US intelligence predicted it could be ready to do by 2027, it could create a catastrophic chip shortage, impacting everything from smartphones to medical devices to weaponry. The Chinese government had made no secret of its interest in replacing the US as a technological superpower. Preventing that scenario had become one of Sullivan’s top priorities.
He couldn’t do it alone. While American firms such as Nvidia design the most powerful chips in the world, those chips—called graphics processing units—are made on the back of a vast and interconnected global supply chain. Much of the equipment in Taiwanese semiconductor factories comes from the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States. The US had already begun blocking its most advanced chips from being exported to China. But like the proverbial lone arrow, those controls would all break down if China could still buy the machinery to make chips elsewhere.
“Government’s hard,” Sullivan says about how the job has changed him. “So you just become hard.”
Photograph: Stephen Voss
Over the course of several hours, sitting inside a meeting room at Blair House, the two-century-old DC townhome where foreign dignitaries stay on official business, the three men ironed out the precise contours of each country’s controls, finalizing what would be included and how long they would have to act. By the time they left, they had a firm understanding in place—and Sullivan’s gift, as a reminder of the costs of backing out.
None of the officials involved in the meeting have ever spoken publicly about their discussions, and Sullivan was not about to when I asked him about it during my visit. But it wasn’t hard to see why he keeps this particular item on display—or why a person as wary of magazine profiles as Sullivan actually agreed to this one. That fabric swatch represents a big part of what he’s set out to accomplish in this office and what he’ll leave behind when it’s time to move out.
Even before President Joe Biden announced he was stepping back from the presidential race, the odds of Sullivan sticking around for another term seemed slim. Already, he is poised to be the longest serving national security adviser in nearly 20 years. None of his predecessors since Henry Kissinger has ever lasted much longer than one term. None of former President Donald Trump’s national security advisers made it past two years.
When the history of the Biden administration gets written, the compounding crises of the past four years—the pandemic, the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine—will feature prominently. But the technology competition with China will, too. It’s a mission Sullivan views in both existential and personal terms. “If technology is being used more for ill than for good, if the rules of the road are being set by authoritarian competitors, if the technologies of the future are invented elsewhere and not here, that’s going to mean less security, less jobs, and less productivity in the United States,” he told me. “I don’t want to see that world.”
It’s a neat, flag-waving narrative, but the reality, of course, is more complicated. Some fear that in isolating China, the US will only accelerate the development of China’s own, homegrown technologies. Others worry that in its haste to stand up to one authoritarian regime, the US has wound up courting others. Sullivan’s revolution is premised in part on the idea that closer economic ties to new global partners might nudge the world toward a shared set of values: democracy, justice, and human rights. But that’s not altogether unlike the bet that the United States once made on China—the same losing wager Sullivan has been trying to win back.
Sullivan grew up in Minneapolis as one of five siblings in a big Irish-Catholic household. His dad worked in the newspaper industry, his mom a school counselor, and the two of them instilled in their children a curiosity about the world. As Sullivan once told the MinnPost, his parents kept a globe on the kitchen table, which they’d use as inspiration for dinnertime lessons in geopolitics. This being the 1980s, there was a lot to talk about China opening up to the world market, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union collapsing, new democracies sprouting up all over the planet. (Not coincidentally, Sullivan’s younger brother would also go on to be a senior adviser to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.)
In high school, Sullivan was voted “most likely to succeed.” A former teacher described him in the school newspaper as “one of the most intense students I have ever had in class.” Later, he boomeranged from Yale to a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford and back to Yale for law school, collecting accolades along the way as a competitive debater. The accomplishments kept coming: a Supreme Court clerkship, a stint as chief counsel to Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, a role on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary campaign, then Barack Obama’s. He became the youngest director of policy planning in State Department history, and when Secretary Clinton needed someone to begin secret talks that would lead to the Iran nuclear deal, Sullivan was one of the people she tapped for the job. By 2013, President Obama himself poached Sullivan to work in the White House as then vice president Biden’s national security adviser. He was 36.
There were times when even Sullivan—who, despite his gravitas, occasionally dips into Midwestern aw-shucksisms—couldn’t believe the life he was living. His first time in the Situation Room, he has said, he felt like there had to be “another room down the hall” where the real decisions got made. “And then you realize there isn’t another room,” he said. “There’s only us.”
During the Obama years, Sullivan was known for his upbeat and even disposition—at a going-away party for him at State, he was tagged with the moniker “Mr. Sunshine.” He had an almost Socratic approach to navigating disagreements. Without ever raising his voice, he would turn over counterarguments until every logical flaw had been exposed and probe his sparring partners with respectful but incisive questions.
Jennifer Harris, then a policy planner at State, said she would often share with Sullivan what were, at the time, “heretical” views about free trade and globalization. For decades, the mainstream policy wonks had said it was best for governments to take a hands-off approach to global trade—let the invisible hand balance the scales. But Harris was watching China hollow out US industries by plowing money and stolen American IP into homegrown competitors. The US government, Harris argued, needed to hit back.
Sullivan was one of the few people in the administration who would actually hear her out. Then, Harris recalled, he’d ask her for reading assignments. “He really worries about blind spots,” she said.
But if Sullivan was open to rethinking free trade, he hadn’t yet fully embraced Harris’ arguments. When Clinton ran for president in the 2016 election, Sullivan joined her on the campaign trail, talking up the merits of the “liberal international order” and open markets. Pundits predicted he would become the youngest national security adviser in history when Clinton took office. But voters had a different plan. The morning after Trump’s victory, looking drawn and despondent, Sullivan sat between Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, and Huma Abedin, her closest aide, as Clinton delivered her concession speech.
Sullivan balks at the suggestion that the Trump years were some period of soul-searching for him (“that’s pretty existential for an Irish guy”), but he did process Clinton’s loss in his own way. From a new perch at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—one of many hats he wore during this time—he researched, conducted interviews, and wrote extensively. Sullivan came to realize that he’d had a blind spot—a big one. Somewhere along the line, he and the rest of the Washington foreign policy establishment had failed to effectively make the case for how decades of globalism benefited the average American. Perhaps worse, they’d failed to really grapple with the ways in which it didn’t benefit regular people at all. Donald Trump had made that case, however sloppily.
A former star debater, Sullivan is known for his Socratic approach to navigating disagreements.
Photograph: Stephen Voss
Sullivan’s blind spot wasn’t just about economics. While the US was shipping jobs and industries overseas, it was also providing China open access to sensitive technologies. It didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to see the problem. “If you ask someone where I grew up, ‘Hey, do you think we should give computer chips for use in Chinese nuclear weapons?’ They will be like, ‘No,’” Sullivan told me. “Somehow, we missed out on the common sense proposition.”
By the time he joined Biden’s campaign for president in 2020, Sullivan believed securing the United States’ lead in emerging technologies was the clearest path to creating American jobs and fending off China’s competitive threat. As it turned out, it was also good politics.
The Biden administration was only six months old when its national security adviser—Sullivan—announced his intention to lead a revolution. He was standing behind a podium in a gilded ballroom inside DC’s historic Mayflower Hotel while hundreds of tech executives and government officials sipped coffee and boxed water at white-linened tables. The Brandenburg Gate this was not.
Sullivan began his remarks with a brief history of the past few decades of technological development. As he described it, that history could be broken up into two waves: the first, when the proliferation of the internet looked like it would be a democratizing force for the world, and the second, when authoritarian regimes used those same tools to spy on, harass, and suppress billions of people. During that second wave, China didn’t just create a vast censorship and surveillance network, Sullivan said; it also began investing heavily in the “hard infrastructure,” like semiconductor manufacturing, that the US had for too long taken for granted. If the US and its friends didn’t band together and act, Sullivan warned, the outlook would “grow darker.”
What the world needed was a third wave, one shaped by US leadership. “The question before us today is whether we have the will and determination to usher in that third wave,” Sullivan said. “Whether we can reboot and ensure that critical and emerging technologies work for, not against, our democracies and our security.”
At the White House, Sullivan had already set up a new directorate at the National Security Council focused on advanced chips, quantum computing, and other cutting-edge tech. If the US was to get serious about competing with China, there needed to be a team at the NSC actually dedicated to that, just as there were teams dedicated to counterterrorism and climate change. Otherwise, the whole project risked getting swallowed up by other crises.
And there were many. A month after Sullivan issued his call for a digital revolution, the Taliban seized control of Kabul. The US was in the middle of withdrawing from its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and Sullivan was in the Situation Room with the president just over a week later when he got word of a suicide bombing just outside the airport where Afghan refugees were being evacuated. The attack killed 183 people, including 13 US service members. Sullivan bore the brunt of the blame. Then, in September, US intelligence officials picked up on a major Russian military exercise along the Ukrainian border, a preview of the invasion to come, which has occupied a significant portion of Sullivan’s time every day since.
All of it exacted a toll on Sullivan, sharpening his elbows ever so slightly and darkening the circles under his sleepless eyes. Mr. Sunshine was fast becoming one of the Biden administration’s weariest warriors. He still preferred to win an argument on the merits, but as he once told an administration official, he was learning that when people pound on the table and yell, sometimes “you’ve got to pound on the table and yell right back.” It was a gradual transformation that even Sullivan noticed in himself. “Government’s hard,” he told me. “So you just become hard.”
But Sullivan never took his eye off China. To lead the new NSC office on emerging tech, he had tapped Tarun Chhabra, a former Obama NSC official who had spent the Trump years at leading think tanks, writing about how the US and its allies could secure an advantage over China’s growing technological reach. Sullivan and Chhabra used that work as a blueprint for their own to-do list, which Sullivan monitored fastidiously. “What I find with Jake is that, while there could be crisis moments where he’s 100 percent absorbed,” Chhabra said, “he’s always coming to us saying, ‘What are we doing about this piece of reporting on semiconductors?’”
In his office, Sullivan keeps a white board filled with his biggest priorities, which are constantly shifting along with world events. “There was always a line for China, and tech competition was one of the bullets under China,” said Peter Harrell, former senior director for international economics at the NSC and the National Economic Council. “It was the one thing that never got taken off.”
One of the first big wins in the Biden administration’s tech agenda was getting the CHIPS and Science Act through Congress. The bipartisan bill allocated, among other things, more than $52 billion for domestic semiconductor manufacturing—including $39 billion worth of funding for dozens of new and modernized chip facilities across the country. President Biden signed it in a triumphant ceremony on the South Lawn in August 2022. “The United States must lead the world in the production of these advanced chips,” the president said. “This law will do exactly that.”
But even as Congress was working on boosting the US semiconductor sector through the CHIPS Act, Sullivan and Chhabra—along with a key partner in Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo—were closing in on a plan to cripple China’s.
One unlikely inspiration for this work was the Trump administration. In 2019, it added the Chinese telecom giant Huawei—which the administration believed was a conduit to the Chinese government—to the Commerce Department’s entity list. That move essentially blocked US companies from doing business with Huawei altogether. Then, in 2020, Trump officials went a step further by invoking what had been an obscure regulation called the foreign direct product rule. Huawei was prohibited from accessing not only American companies’ chips but also any foreign chips that had been made with American technology or software, which is to say, effectively all of them.
The Biden administration was now eyeing a massive expansion of that model, creating a vast and unprecedented blockade that would prevent the most powerful chips designed by Nvidia and AMD from reaching Chinese supercomputers. But it was clear from the start that the US needed allies on board. Over the course of 2022, as the US was hammering out the details of its own controls, Sullivan was quietly discussing a parallel set of controls over secure calls with his counterparts in the Netherlands and Japan. One focal point of those discussions was the Dutch firm ASML, which is the only company in the world that makes the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to etch microscopic patterns into leading-edge chips. The Trump administration had already pressured the Dutch government to restrict Chinese licenses on those EUV machines—its most advanced technology. Sullivan wanted to expand the restrictions even further, to ASML’s deep ultraviolet lithography machines, which are less precise, but still powerful.
Harrell, who worked with Sullivan and Chhabra on the US export controls, said Sullivan’s direct involvement in conversations like these was key. “The US government asks our allies and partners to do lots and lots of things,” he said. “Hearing about something in a sustained way from the national security adviser really signals seriousness.”
While both countries understood the risks of China’s growing technological and military capabilities, they were also wary of cutting too far into their industries’ market share or facing Beijing’s wrath. To get any deal over the edge, Harrell said, it was sometimes “easier, and indeed necessary, for the US to act first.”
In October 2022, the Commerce Department forged ahead with its new export controls, a moment that was seen in some circles as a dramatic escalation in a second cold war. China accused the US of trying to “maintain its sci-tech hegemony” and issued restrictions in retaliation. But in stepping out on a limb, the US also gave its allies cover to follow. Not that they had much choice: The far-reaching controls constrained any company in the world whose technology required US components, software, or workers to build.
So when the Dutch and Japanese officials walked into Blair House to meet with Sullivan the following January, they were ostensibly there to finalize a mutual agreement. But the United States had left scarce room for negotiation. As Rem Korteweg, a leading Dutch foreign policy researcher, told me, “It wasn’t a conversation among equals.”
The Dutch and the Japanese would go on to unveil their own sweeping controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment, including ASML’s DUV machines and almost two dozen tools produced in Japan. Both countries have sworn ever since that they were acting in their own—very real—national security interests. (A spokesperson for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs said much the same thing to WIRED, and Japan’s foreign ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.) But to anyone paying attention, Sullivan’s influence was obvious.
Just a few days after the Blair House meeting, Sullivan was down the road, sitting inside yet another storied Washington, DC, institution—this time, the US Chamber of Commerce. The building’s intricate interior murals commemorate renowned explorers responsible for breakthroughs in global trade. Now Sullivan was also trying to chart new territory.
Seated just a few feet away from him was Indian national security adviser Ajit Doval. Nicknamed the James Bond of India, Doval is a mustached former spy nearly twice Sullivan’s age, but the two men had struck up an unexpectedly close relationship over the course of the Biden years. This meeting, the kickoff event for a new tech partnership between the US and India, was a product of their bond.
If the first prong of the Biden tech agenda was all about protecting sensitive technologies from reaching China, the second was about promoting the US tech ecosystem just about everywhere else.
The Biden administration saw India as a top prospect. It is the world’s largest democracy, and as China’s next-door neighbor, has actually battled the Chinese military over disputes along the border. What better partner to resist President Xi’s half-concealed threats about an inevitable “reunification” with Taiwan?
At the Chamber of Commerce, senior officials from both countries and top tech executives gathered at long tables configured into a giant square. Together, they brainstormed how to break down the old trade barriers that still stood in the way of closer collaboration. Sullivan encouraged the group to think big, saying he wanted “a list of firsts.”
By the time Indian prime minister Narendra Modi traveled to Washington for a state visit five months later, the White House was ready to roll out that list, including collaborations in Micron semiconductor assembly, GE jet engine production, and even NASA space missions. “On the issues that matter most and that will define the future,” President Biden said in a joint press conference with Modi, “our nations look to one another.”
Sullivan’s pursuit of tech partnerships with countries like India and Vietnam has also drawn criticism, thanks to those countries’ less than stellar records on internet freedoms.
Photograph: Stephen Voss
But this moment of solidarity between two old Cold War adversaries masked a messy tangle of compromises. Even as the US was touting India as a key partner in building the technologies of the future, its government was steadily abusing technologies of today. Under Modi’s leadership, India has amended laws to increase online censorship, led the world in internet shutdowns since 2016, and allegedly used spyware in attempts to hack journalists and dissidents.
There was little evidence that the White House’s overtures to Modi’s government had any moderating effect on these authoritarian tendencies. “If anything, India has continued to move in a direction that’s against US foreign policy interests with respect to tech,” said Jason Pielemeier, a former State Department special adviser and the current executive director of the nonprofit Global Network Initiative, which works on digital rights issues.
About a week after Modi’s visit, in fact, Czech authorities arrested a man who was allegedly hired by an Indian government employee to orchestrate the assassination of a US citizen in New York. The target of the alleged plot had been a vocal critic of Modi’s government. The Washington Post later reported that the scheme was allegedly directed by India’s spy service, which is ultimately overseen by Doval. (Charges have not been filed against any other individuals. The Indian government called allegations connecting the plot to government officials “unwarranted and unsubstantiated” but has been conducting an ongoing investigation into the matter.)
The White House expressed concerns about the allegations but mostly handled those concerns quietly, drawing accusations that the United States’ strengthened ties to India had also tied its hands. When I asked Sullivan about this critique, he trained his eyes on me in rebuke. “I think it’s worth reversing that question and saying, What does India feel it has to do in response to the uncovering of that plot because of its investment in the relationship with the United States?” he said. A relationship doesn’t have to be a trap, he argued. It can also be an opportunity to have a more constructive conversation when things go wrong.
Besides, Sullivan argued, India is still a democracy, and the nice thing about democracies is that the people actually get to decide who they want in power and what policies they want to support. That, Sullivan said, is a far more effective way of enacting change than for the US to go around wagging its finger at other governments, “particularly given the fact that we’ve got plenty of work to do with respect to our own democracy.”
Sullivan has continued launching tech partnerships with other governments, and they’ve almost all come with similar trade-offs. Vietnam ranks among the worst countries in the world for digital freedom, with a “bamboo firewall” that emulates China’s internet censorship regime and a nasty habit of arresting activists who speak out against the government online. Yet last year, the White House struck a new deal to help develop the semiconductor ecosystem in Vietnam—a partnership that proved key to persuading Hanoi to officially recognize the United States as one of its top diplomatic partners. It was a bureaucratic move in an arcane system, but it was a historic victory for Sullivan. Russia and China were already some of Vietnam’s closest friends. Now, the US was one, too.
“Jake said: Put technology on the table. Let’s make sure that they understand what we might be able to do together in 5G and in semiconductors,” said Kurt Campbell, the current deputy secretary of state, who helped negotiate the Vietnam partnership while he was working at the NSC. The prospect of greater technological collaboration was, Campbell said, “the great differentiator.”
Sullivan similarly helped pave the way to a $1.5 billion investment deal that went through earlier this year between Microsoft and the Abu Dhabi–based AI giant G42. The company, which is chaired by Sullivan’s Emirati counterpart, was believed to have built part of its technical stack on top of Huawei technology. Though the White House didn’t directly engineer the deal, Sullivan did make clear that no deal with any US company would be possible unless G42 cut its ties to China. The ultimatum worked.
Microsoft president Brad Smith, who led the G42 deal, said he believes Sullivan has crafted perhaps the most comprehensive technology and national security strategy in US history, one that acknowledges the importance of pulling new parts of the world into the United States’ orbit. “Each country has a strong incentive to win over as much of the world as it can,” Smith said of the race between the US and China, “but you cannot win over the world unless you take your technology to the countries you’re trying to enlist on your side.”
But the UAE’s track record on using tech as a tool of repression is also bleak. Sullivan acknowledges there’s a “healthy debate” about which countries belong under the US tent. “We could say: We won’t work with any country other than, basically, NATO and Japan, Korea, and Australia. But essentially, at that point, you’re writing off a huge amount of the world with all its capacity, resources, energy, and ambition,” he said. “We’re not going to turn away the opportunity to work with countries who don’t share our values on everything.”
It’s not just who Sullivan is working with that has stoked debate, but what he’s ultimately working to achieve. Not everyone is convinced that China having access to advanced chips is the grave national security threat that Sullivan and the Biden administration claim.
There are also plenty of people, even some close to Sullivan, who remain skeptical of the idea that the US tech sector is somehow innately more virtuous than China’s. “I totally agree with a policy that enables the US to lead the third technological revolution, so long as we remember that American dominance of something doesn’t necessarily lead to the best outcomes,” said former US representative Tom Malinowski from New Jersey, who worked with Sullivan when he was Washington director for Human Rights Watch. Malinowski attended Sullivan’s 2015 wedding to Maggie Goodlander, a former adviser to senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain. In a group photo of the big day, Malinowski’s face peeks out just between the bride and groom, who stand beaming beside Secretary Clinton.
When I relayed Malinowski’s critique to Sullivan, he responded with a sheepish laugh. “Thanks, Tom.” He conceded his old friend made a fair point and rattled off a list of ways the Biden administration has sought to keep American tech giants in check. “But let’s be real,” he said. “We have challenges with American tech, to be sure. But if the world were dominated by Chinese or Russian or Iranian tech, those problems would be infinitely worse.”
In a phone call with President Biden this past spring, Xi Jinping warned that if the US continued trying to stall China’s technological development, he would not “sit back and watch.” And he hasn’t. Already, China has answered the US export controls—and its corresponding deals with other countries—by imposing its own restrictions on critical minerals used to make semiconductors and by hoovering up older chips and manufacturing equipment it is still allowed to buy. For the past several quarters, in fact, China was the top customer for ASML and a number of Japanese chip companies.
A robust black market for banned chips has also emerged in China. According to a recent New York Times investigation, some of the Chinese companies that have been barred from accessing American chips through US export controls have set up new corporations to evade those bans. (These companies have claimed no connection to the ones who’ve been banned.) This has reportedly enabled Chinese entities with ties to the military to obtain small amounts of Nvidia’s high-powered chips. Nvidia, meanwhile, has responded to the US actions by developing new China-specific chips that don’t run afoul of the US controls but don’t exactly thrill the Biden administration either.
For the White House and Commerce Department, keeping pace with all of these workarounds has been a constant game of cat and mouse. In 2023, the US introduced the first round of updates to its export controls. This September, it released another—an announcement that was quickly followed by a similar expansion of controls by the Dutch.
“We are building something that is not political and partisan,” says Sullivan, and some of his work will endure regardless of who wins the 2024 election.
Photograph: Stephen Voss
Some observers have speculated that the Biden administration’s actions have only made China more determined to invest in its advanced tech sector. And there’s clearly some truth to that. But it’s also true that China has been trying to become self-sufficient since long before Biden entered office. Since 2014, it has plowed nearly $100 billion into its domestic chip sector. “That was the world we walked into,” Sullivan said. “Not the world we created through our export controls.” The United States’ actions, he argues, have only made accomplishing that mission that much tougher and costlier for Beijing. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger estimated earlier this year that there’s a “10-year gap” between the most powerful chips being made by Chinese chipmakers like SMIC and the ones Intel and Nvidia are working on, thanks in part to the export controls.
If the measure of Sullivan’s success is how effectively the United States has constrained China’s advancement, it’s hard to argue with the evidence. “It’s probably one of the biggest achievements of the entire Biden administration,” said Martijn Rasser, managing director of Datenna, a leading intelligence firm focused on China. Rasser said the impact of the US export controls alone “will endure for decades.”
But if you’re judging Sullivan’s success by his more idealistic promises regarding the future of technology—the idea that the US can usher in an era of progress dominated by democratic values—well, that’s a far tougher test. In many ways, the world, and the way advanced technologies are poised to shape it, feels more unsettled than ever. Four years was always going to be too short for Sullivan to deliver on that promise. The question is whether whoever’s sitting in Sullivan’s seat next will pick up where he left off.
Sullivan, for one, isn’t saying what his plans are for next year, but at least one new role seems secure: His wife is heavily favored to win a House seat in New Hampshire, which would, at the very least, make Sullivan a particularly prominent congressional spouse.
When I asked Sullivan what would happen to all of his outstanding bets if, indeed, someone else were in his shoes next year, he didn’t bother to push back. Instead he said he believed they would still pay off. “We are building something that is not political and partisan,” he said, and “therefore has a really good chance of being embedded as a durable part of US foreign policy going forward.”
It was the only answer someone in his position could give, but there may be some truth to it yet. While campaigning for president, Vice President Kamala Harris said US–China policy should be about “making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century.” And it was the Trump administration that kicked off the trade war with China that Sullivan built upon, albeit with a far more isolationist approach than Sullivan’s. Some of the work Sullivan started internationally—be it persuading other countries to institute their own export controls or paving the way to deals between multinational tech giants—won’t be easily undone. In so many ways, the past four years have bound these global players together. The next four will test whether that has really made them stronger.
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