[Published on SCF July 30th, 2022.] In October 2019, Jake Sullivan, who became U.S. National Security Advisor in 2021, stated in an interview that the U.S. needed a clear threat to rally the world and play the role of saviour of mankind and that China could be that organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy. In the 2019 interview, he acknowledges that the problem was that people were not going to believe that China is a global threat, that their view of China is too positive and that the United States would need a “Pearl Harbour moment,” a real focusing event to change their minds, something he calmly stated that “would scare the hell out of the American people.”
I've been wondering why the insistence on Pelosi in Taiwan. Your analysis, Cynthia, is the first thing I've seen to make sense of it. If her 'trip' doesn't happen, it will be because of strategic rather than moral reasons.
The prospect that US is deliberately instigating an incident over Taiwan in order to change attitudes at home and abroad against China and for US, ... this follows the same same pattern as what they have done in Europe, arming Ukraine to force Russia into a war that has cut Russia off from all of Western Europe and made then turn to the US once again. Its the same game plan. US is doing what it deems necessary to maintain empire, its world dominance. That is what the State Department does. That is its mission. And they have had a lot of practice. They are good at it.
It was that freaky interviewer Jordan Schneider who referenced instrumentalising a Pearl Harbour event, which Sullivan immediately rebutted:
"...as one senator said to Harry Truman 'You gotta scare the hell out of the American people'. This would require an active bipartisan effort to basically turn China into the enemy in the eyes of the people. I think that is a profound mistake."
In the interview Sullivan says he sees American foreign policy as saving the world from threats like climate change and Ebola, and he references the film Independence Day as an (dorky) example of how a single event could spur America to bring the world together and overcome an existential threat. It's naive and dumb and laughably remote from US foreign policy in practise, but he didn't say the thing you said he did.
John, I am not sure if you listened to the entire interview but it is made very clear, despite Sullivan saying that some of the US policies toward China he thinks would be "a profound mistake" that everything Sullivan is discussing in this interview is about what he has been working towards with Hillary Clinton towards that very thing. It is very common for people to use this sort of speech. They will often say something quite extreme as a future orientation point, and then try to soften the blow by saying that they are not exactly thrilled by such an idea but always finish with, but I think we have no choice but to head in that direction. This way of speaking is often understood by the people as if that person themselves were warning of such dangers. In the case of people like Sullivan, this is not true, and we can understand this to be the case since what their actual career and actions attest to is toward that very thing.
At the beginning of the interview he references how he was serving as Director of Policy Planning for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (under the Obama Administration). Sullivan references Hillary Clinton’s article “America’s Pacific Century” and that was per Sullivan, “the first and major statement of US policy that President Obama then carried forward at the leader level, of the rebalance, the pivot [referencing Obama’s Pivot to Asia policy]…this kind of view that the United States was underweighted in Asia and overweighted in the Middle East and we had to shift that balance. And China loomed large in that.” (the article was written in october 2011).
He also makes the point that China was underestimated as a "threat" because, basically they thought China was going to be in their pocket. Instead President Xi Jinping is chosen to lead the Chinese people, and all of a sudden the US is caught with its pants down against a leadership that will no longer kowtow to US foreign policy and will focus on their right to self-determination. Sullivan does not say those words exaclty but his below admission sums up this thought.
“I do think that we underestimated just how different a leader Xi Jinping was going to be from his predecessor.”
Around the 19:00 minute mark of the interview where Jake Sullivan discusses US Foreign Policy as if he were writing a Hollywood Blockbuster move. His sole focus is on the choice of “narratives” to favour the orientation of the US, which has never been justified but is just accepted to be the moral compass of the world:
Interviewer: “You said in a talk that [quoting Sullivan] ‘the US had a story about America’s role in the world throughout the Cold War that was based on a defined enemy and a defined mission. Since the end of the Cold War, that tank has run out of gas. We need a new story for people of the world what it is that we are all about. And I don’t think we have done that yet.’ So my question for you is is it possible to have a strategy that gets people to care but isn’t alarmist, idealistic to a fault, or the sort of red-blooded Jacksonian nationalism that could actually end up making situations around the world worse?”
Sullivan: “I don’t know. We don’t actually have a successful example of this in US history. The two moments where the United States really rallied to internationalism were first in the era of Teddy Roosevelt, which was basically about jingoism and imperialism and so forth, and then, in the Cold War, when we had a great enemy.
So it’s either calling forth Manifest Destiny [under the vision of a Teddy Roosevelt] and a kind of crudely racialized view of American superiority and American destiny or its an all encompassing conflict against an ideological foe. Those are the two examples we have. So is there an alternative strategy, and part of the reason that people are so into the idea of turning China into that next great enemy, well there is something in it for everyone honestly. I mean, there is something in it for the people writing articles in foreign affairs…there is something in it for progressives, who want to see much more domestic investment in the US…So, I think that this is the direction we are heading in, because there is something in it for everyone. But that very much concerns me, I would like to say that there is an alternative which is much more focused on a set of threats and challenges that require the United States to rally the world a la “Independence Day” the movie, you know, like aliens are coming…Yeah right, so like I’m thinking, you know, if aliens came down, uh yeah, we’d rally the world and that would be a great story. And I think people would get totally psyched up for it to avoid global annihilation. So how do you do the same thing with a series of issues that actually do represent genuine threats but that are not nearly as poignant as aliens; climate change, disease, the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction, the possibility of global economic depression. Things that really do require the US to rally and marshal the resources of the globe to, you know, defend our way of life. But it’s sooo abstract. No aliens. So, I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer, and because I don’t have a good answer and I have not heard one from others, I think we are creeping towards turning China into that answer. And just saying, you know what we are going to do to have an organising principle for US foreign policy, it’s gonna be China.”
Interviewer: “Sure, um, you know Ryan Hasse, the former NSC Director for China, he has this point that basically [pauses] people aren’t buying it. The polling numbers of the US population in respect to China are generally positive and on the ranking of what’s important is like number 8 to 10. Um, so, you know, is this just an elite thing, will this get translated at some point, um, will it take a, well I don’t know, not a Pearl Harbour incident, but a real focusing event. And if not, do we just sort of muddle along and not care about the world. Is the world ok? There are a lot of threats there so.”
Sullivan: "No, no, but there is an interesting dynamic going on between the national security community and the political world of Washington on the one hand and the American public on the other. And one of them is the post 9/11 era of terrorism and the other is China. In the post 9/11 era of terrorism the demand signal for mobilising everything around the terrorist threat that’s coming from people who were freaked out and the national security community and even a lot of political leaders while they responded to that, if you got them on a lie detector, they would say is this threat really as big as everyone is making it out to be. The dynamic is kind of the reverse, right now today, when it comes to China. The national security community is freaked out, the political leadership in Washington is freaked out and the American people are a bit more relaxed about the whole thing thinking well, what do you mean China is their enemy. I don’t get that, I didn’t get that memo [speaking from the perspective of the American people]…So the question is, can there be a convergence, can the American people be rallied to that, mobilised or motivated to that, and the answer is only yes in my view if something similar to what happened after the second world war happens which is, um, as one senator said to Harry Truman, you got to scare the hell out of the American people. This would require active bi-partisan effort to basically turn China into the enemy in the eyes of the people. I think that that is a profound mistake, but again, I think that there will be forces pushing in that direction. And while I agree with Ryan’s assessment of a snapshot of today, ah, whether or not ten years from now we will look at that public opinion data and see a much deeper strain of antipathy towards China, that is an open question right now…."
The point is on this reliance of "narratives" in the way Sullivan is speaking, Pearl Harbour is one of the more powerful tools for narrative formation which I discussed in this article and 9/11 was modeled off of this. Sullivan is speaking about what will be the optimal narrative to use that will sell the American people, on basically a war with China or Cold War 2.0 with China. Not because this is necessary, not because this is for anyone's necessary benefit or good, but simply so that the US can continue to be regarded as the moral compass of the world. I would also note that this interviewer is a student of the elitist view on foreign policy. He is not speaking in his own words but uses the phrases that he knows will be well received from this elite group of policy shapers. Thus, his words should be understood in this context. Sullivan also by the way carries forward what the interviewer was asking but in a much more nuanced way. There was no disagreement.
His reference to Truman is in reference to the justification for the Truman Doctrine was informally extended to become the basis of American Cold War policy throughout Europe and around the world. It shifted American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union from an anti-fascist alliance to a policy of containment of Soviet expansion as advocated by diplomat George Kennan.
Sullivan is quoting Truman, because it is much safer to quote a provocative quote than to say the words yourself, however, it is essentially what Sullivan wishes to directly communicate.
Sullivan is clearly detached from reality in this interview, and it is evident that he does not actually care about the future of the world's global citizens let alone American citizens. All he cares about is finding the narrative that will suit what they have been meaning to do this entire time, which is to bring China down to its knees, no matter the numbers of lives and livelihoods it will cost.
I did listen to the whole interview, and for the record I largely share your negative assessment of American foreign policy as well as Sullivan's role in it.
Thanks for your response, and sharing the transcript of that part of the conversation. I don't understand how you say that there was no disagreement from Sullivan. He effectively says scaring your own population so as to create a foreign enemy can work, that there is a plurality of domestic stakeholders pushing in this direction, but finally he does in fact reject it. Maybe he was lying, maybe he is delusional, I don't know. Certainly now as a member of the administration he is an active participant in the demonisation of China.
My only point is your opening paragraph is quite striking - did Sullivan really say the quiet part out loud back in 2019? I listened to it, and on the contrary, he largely espouses the typical high-minded feel-good foreign policy vision one is used to hearing. The quotation marks are frankly misleading: Sullivan never even utters the words "Pearl Harbour", and the reason I'm commenting is that, when challenging the mainstream narrative, my intuition is that it is important to be impeccable so as to defend against the inevitable charges of misinformation et cetera. I understand your point that you elaborated in the comment that Sullivan is employing a subtle rhetorical strategy, but that is not what is conveyed in the opening paragraph.
Anyway what do I know, thank you for your reporting, it's much appreciated.
Perhaps there was an actual disagreement within the Pentagon to provoke China in such a risky way. But there is no doubt that there are an unsettling number of people within the pentagon and government who are in favor of another 'pearl harbor moment.' There was a lot of support for war by both the conservatives and democrats.
I've been wondering why the insistence on Pelosi in Taiwan. Your analysis, Cynthia, is the first thing I've seen to make sense of it. If her 'trip' doesn't happen, it will be because of strategic rather than moral reasons.
Cynthia,
The prospect that US is deliberately instigating an incident over Taiwan in order to change attitudes at home and abroad against China and for US, ... this follows the same same pattern as what they have done in Europe, arming Ukraine to force Russia into a war that has cut Russia off from all of Western Europe and made then turn to the US once again. Its the same game plan. US is doing what it deems necessary to maintain empire, its world dominance. That is what the State Department does. That is its mission. And they have had a lot of practice. They are good at it.
If Pelosi's plane does go down, I bet Pelosi will not be on it.
It was that freaky interviewer Jordan Schneider who referenced instrumentalising a Pearl Harbour event, which Sullivan immediately rebutted:
"...as one senator said to Harry Truman 'You gotta scare the hell out of the American people'. This would require an active bipartisan effort to basically turn China into the enemy in the eyes of the people. I think that is a profound mistake."
In the interview Sullivan says he sees American foreign policy as saving the world from threats like climate change and Ebola, and he references the film Independence Day as an (dorky) example of how a single event could spur America to bring the world together and overcome an existential threat. It's naive and dumb and laughably remote from US foreign policy in practise, but he didn't say the thing you said he did.
John, I am not sure if you listened to the entire interview but it is made very clear, despite Sullivan saying that some of the US policies toward China he thinks would be "a profound mistake" that everything Sullivan is discussing in this interview is about what he has been working towards with Hillary Clinton towards that very thing. It is very common for people to use this sort of speech. They will often say something quite extreme as a future orientation point, and then try to soften the blow by saying that they are not exactly thrilled by such an idea but always finish with, but I think we have no choice but to head in that direction. This way of speaking is often understood by the people as if that person themselves were warning of such dangers. In the case of people like Sullivan, this is not true, and we can understand this to be the case since what their actual career and actions attest to is toward that very thing.
At the beginning of the interview he references how he was serving as Director of Policy Planning for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (under the Obama Administration). Sullivan references Hillary Clinton’s article “America’s Pacific Century” and that was per Sullivan, “the first and major statement of US policy that President Obama then carried forward at the leader level, of the rebalance, the pivot [referencing Obama’s Pivot to Asia policy]…this kind of view that the United States was underweighted in Asia and overweighted in the Middle East and we had to shift that balance. And China loomed large in that.” (the article was written in october 2011).
He also makes the point that China was underestimated as a "threat" because, basically they thought China was going to be in their pocket. Instead President Xi Jinping is chosen to lead the Chinese people, and all of a sudden the US is caught with its pants down against a leadership that will no longer kowtow to US foreign policy and will focus on their right to self-determination. Sullivan does not say those words exaclty but his below admission sums up this thought.
“I do think that we underestimated just how different a leader Xi Jinping was going to be from his predecessor.”
Around the 19:00 minute mark of the interview where Jake Sullivan discusses US Foreign Policy as if he were writing a Hollywood Blockbuster move. His sole focus is on the choice of “narratives” to favour the orientation of the US, which has never been justified but is just accepted to be the moral compass of the world:
Interviewer: “You said in a talk that [quoting Sullivan] ‘the US had a story about America’s role in the world throughout the Cold War that was based on a defined enemy and a defined mission. Since the end of the Cold War, that tank has run out of gas. We need a new story for people of the world what it is that we are all about. And I don’t think we have done that yet.’ So my question for you is is it possible to have a strategy that gets people to care but isn’t alarmist, idealistic to a fault, or the sort of red-blooded Jacksonian nationalism that could actually end up making situations around the world worse?”
Sullivan: “I don’t know. We don’t actually have a successful example of this in US history. The two moments where the United States really rallied to internationalism were first in the era of Teddy Roosevelt, which was basically about jingoism and imperialism and so forth, and then, in the Cold War, when we had a great enemy.
So it’s either calling forth Manifest Destiny [under the vision of a Teddy Roosevelt] and a kind of crudely racialized view of American superiority and American destiny or its an all encompassing conflict against an ideological foe. Those are the two examples we have. So is there an alternative strategy, and part of the reason that people are so into the idea of turning China into that next great enemy, well there is something in it for everyone honestly. I mean, there is something in it for the people writing articles in foreign affairs…there is something in it for progressives, who want to see much more domestic investment in the US…So, I think that this is the direction we are heading in, because there is something in it for everyone. But that very much concerns me, I would like to say that there is an alternative which is much more focused on a set of threats and challenges that require the United States to rally the world a la “Independence Day” the movie, you know, like aliens are coming…Yeah right, so like I’m thinking, you know, if aliens came down, uh yeah, we’d rally the world and that would be a great story. And I think people would get totally psyched up for it to avoid global annihilation. So how do you do the same thing with a series of issues that actually do represent genuine threats but that are not nearly as poignant as aliens; climate change, disease, the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction, the possibility of global economic depression. Things that really do require the US to rally and marshal the resources of the globe to, you know, defend our way of life. But it’s sooo abstract. No aliens. So, I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer, and because I don’t have a good answer and I have not heard one from others, I think we are creeping towards turning China into that answer. And just saying, you know what we are going to do to have an organising principle for US foreign policy, it’s gonna be China.”
Interviewer: “Sure, um, you know Ryan Hasse, the former NSC Director for China, he has this point that basically [pauses] people aren’t buying it. The polling numbers of the US population in respect to China are generally positive and on the ranking of what’s important is like number 8 to 10. Um, so, you know, is this just an elite thing, will this get translated at some point, um, will it take a, well I don’t know, not a Pearl Harbour incident, but a real focusing event. And if not, do we just sort of muddle along and not care about the world. Is the world ok? There are a lot of threats there so.”
Sullivan: "No, no, but there is an interesting dynamic going on between the national security community and the political world of Washington on the one hand and the American public on the other. And one of them is the post 9/11 era of terrorism and the other is China. In the post 9/11 era of terrorism the demand signal for mobilising everything around the terrorist threat that’s coming from people who were freaked out and the national security community and even a lot of political leaders while they responded to that, if you got them on a lie detector, they would say is this threat really as big as everyone is making it out to be. The dynamic is kind of the reverse, right now today, when it comes to China. The national security community is freaked out, the political leadership in Washington is freaked out and the American people are a bit more relaxed about the whole thing thinking well, what do you mean China is their enemy. I don’t get that, I didn’t get that memo [speaking from the perspective of the American people]…So the question is, can there be a convergence, can the American people be rallied to that, mobilised or motivated to that, and the answer is only yes in my view if something similar to what happened after the second world war happens which is, um, as one senator said to Harry Truman, you got to scare the hell out of the American people. This would require active bi-partisan effort to basically turn China into the enemy in the eyes of the people. I think that that is a profound mistake, but again, I think that there will be forces pushing in that direction. And while I agree with Ryan’s assessment of a snapshot of today, ah, whether or not ten years from now we will look at that public opinion data and see a much deeper strain of antipathy towards China, that is an open question right now…."
The point is on this reliance of "narratives" in the way Sullivan is speaking, Pearl Harbour is one of the more powerful tools for narrative formation which I discussed in this article and 9/11 was modeled off of this. Sullivan is speaking about what will be the optimal narrative to use that will sell the American people, on basically a war with China or Cold War 2.0 with China. Not because this is necessary, not because this is for anyone's necessary benefit or good, but simply so that the US can continue to be regarded as the moral compass of the world. I would also note that this interviewer is a student of the elitist view on foreign policy. He is not speaking in his own words but uses the phrases that he knows will be well received from this elite group of policy shapers. Thus, his words should be understood in this context. Sullivan also by the way carries forward what the interviewer was asking but in a much more nuanced way. There was no disagreement.
His reference to Truman is in reference to the justification for the Truman Doctrine was informally extended to become the basis of American Cold War policy throughout Europe and around the world. It shifted American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union from an anti-fascist alliance to a policy of containment of Soviet expansion as advocated by diplomat George Kennan.
Sullivan is quoting Truman, because it is much safer to quote a provocative quote than to say the words yourself, however, it is essentially what Sullivan wishes to directly communicate.
Sullivan is clearly detached from reality in this interview, and it is evident that he does not actually care about the future of the world's global citizens let alone American citizens. All he cares about is finding the narrative that will suit what they have been meaning to do this entire time, which is to bring China down to its knees, no matter the numbers of lives and livelihoods it will cost.
I did listen to the whole interview, and for the record I largely share your negative assessment of American foreign policy as well as Sullivan's role in it.
Thanks for your response, and sharing the transcript of that part of the conversation. I don't understand how you say that there was no disagreement from Sullivan. He effectively says scaring your own population so as to create a foreign enemy can work, that there is a plurality of domestic stakeholders pushing in this direction, but finally he does in fact reject it. Maybe he was lying, maybe he is delusional, I don't know. Certainly now as a member of the administration he is an active participant in the demonisation of China.
My only point is your opening paragraph is quite striking - did Sullivan really say the quiet part out loud back in 2019? I listened to it, and on the contrary, he largely espouses the typical high-minded feel-good foreign policy vision one is used to hearing. The quotation marks are frankly misleading: Sullivan never even utters the words "Pearl Harbour", and the reason I'm commenting is that, when challenging the mainstream narrative, my intuition is that it is important to be impeccable so as to defend against the inevitable charges of misinformation et cetera. I understand your point that you elaborated in the comment that Sullivan is employing a subtle rhetorical strategy, but that is not what is conveyed in the opening paragraph.
Anyway what do I know, thank you for your reporting, it's much appreciated.
Pelosi has announced she's not going to visit Twain.
According to CNN one hour ago, they write "Pelosi expected to visit Taiwan, Taiwanese and US officials say" https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/01/politics/nancy-pelosi-taiwan-visit/index.html
CNN, the warmonger propagandist organization?
Cynthia thank you for your real factual historical articles,ditto Matt
Perhaps there was an actual disagreement within the Pentagon to provoke China in such a risky way. But there is no doubt that there are an unsettling number of people within the pentagon and government who are in favor of another 'pearl harbor moment.' There was a lot of support for war by both the conservatives and democrats.