The Nexus of Climate Policy and National Security

Guest

Jake Sullivan

Former US National Security Advisor

Transcript

Jake Sullivan: I think it’s wrong to trade one form of energy dependence – from decades past on fossil fuels from the Middle East and elsewhere – for another form of energy dependence to a country like China that has been prepared to weaponize that dependence in other contexts over time. And we saw from Europe’s dependence on Russia with respect to gas, just what that can do at a moment of geopolitical crisis.

Jason Bordoff: As President Biden’s National Security advisor, Jake Sullivan laid out a strategy for what he called a foreign policy for the middle class, using the metaphor of a small yard and a high fence. The Biden administration’s approach focused on reshoring critical industries and manufacturing, supporting innovation and protecting strategic technologies.

The strategy relied on economic tools including industrial policy, tariffs and sanctions, some of the same tools the Trump administration’s now using to launch a global trade war. The broad shift on both sides of the aisle to focus on national security, economic security, and supply chain resilience has enormous implications for the clean energy transition from critical minerals and solar panels to batteries and electric vehicles.

So how should we think about the relationship between economic resilience, energy security, and climate action? What lessons can be drawn from the Biden administration’s approach to countering China? And looking ahead, what should the US prioritize when it comes to energy security?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Jason Bordoff.

Today on the show, Jake Sullivan. Jake recently became the Kissinger professor of the practice of statecraft and world order at the Harvard Kennedy School. He served as President Biden’s national security advisor from 2021 to 2025. In the Obama administration, he was then-Vice President Biden’s national security advisor and deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Jake joined me on stage at the 2025 Columbia Global Energy Summit here in New York City earlier this month. We covered a number of topics including the Biden administration’s efforts to compete with China’s growing dominance in clean energy manufacturing, the war in Ukraine, and emerging security challenges from artificial intelligence.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. Thank you to Jake Sullivan for making time to be with us.

It’s an honor to have this special guest with us for this keynote fireside chat. I don’t think Jake needs an introduction. You all know he served as national security advisor in the Biden administration and has held a long range of distinguished positions in government and elsewhere, including as a senior advisor to the presidential campaign of our own faculty member at SIPA, Hillary Clinton, who called Jake a once-in-a-generation talent, and just last week he joined the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School. So now professor Jake Sullivan, thanks for being with us. I will just say as a note at the start, 30 minutes is going to go by really fast, and I say that because you all know Jake had his hands full with no lack of foreign policy crises from Ukraine to Gaza to Afghanistan, and there are also no lack of podcasts where he talks about all of those things.

And what I really want to do today, because we’re not going to get to everything, is sort of focus a bit more on issues that, in my view, tie more directly or indirectly to issues of the global economy, global energy sector, energy markets, energy security, and of course the clean energy transition. So there’s a lot of news including minutes ago about what is happening with tariffs and whether those are now put on pause. But I guess at a high level, Jake, I wanted to start by asking you, you came into the Biden administration with a big idea, a foreign policy for the middle class, and in your famous now famous Brookings speech about a small yard and a high fence, you spoke about the need to onshore jobs and domestic manufacturing, reduce our vulnerability to global supply chains, strengthen the middle class. Those are the same things I hear the Trump administration saying they’re trying to achieve with these tariffs. And so comment on the tariffs. I suspect I know a little of what you might say about them, but more broadly, is this a sharp escalation, perhaps misguided of a long-term policy shift on both sides of the aisle that has been happening for a while to how we think about whatever the neoliberal economic order is?

Jake Sullivan: Well, look, I mean one thing I will say about the Trump tariffs is he said he was doing them in the name of the American worker, and yet he was harming the American worker with the broad-based tariffs, many of which it appears he’s now suspended. He said he was doing it to improve our strategic position vis-a-vis China. I think it weakened our strategic position vis-a-vis China. The last thing we should be doing is picking fights with all our friends who should be aligning with us in the competition with China and pushing back against China’s practices. And so I think the approach that he chose to take of broad-based tariffs, and I in fact said at Brookings that I thought these kinds of indiscriminate universal tariffs harm workers and consumers and do not aid our national security. But for me, foreign policy for the middle class really comes down to three propositions.

First, we should not be dependent for critical strategic goods on any other country or on external shocks, the likes of Covid and be in a position where working people in America are harmed. And that does mean… not just reshoring in critical strategic industries like semiconductor manufacturing, clean energy, critical minerals, refining and processing, but it also means friend-shoring so that we have resilient supply chains with others. Second, that we continue to maintain our innovation edge so that America is driving the inventions and then building the inventions of the future in critical areas. And then third, that we not allow our technologies at the highest end to be used against us or our allies. And that’s why we chose to impose the semiconductor export restrictions that we did on China. Now some people say, well, the Biden administration did some tariffs and you guys talked about reshoring. Trump’s doing the same thing. So isn’t it the same? It’s to me kind of the equivalent of saying we support a tax policy at a reasonable percentage. He supports a tax policy at a crazy percentage, and we’re the same because we both support taxes. That to me doesn’t logically add up. I think he’s taken the rhetoric of resilience, reshoring, strengthening and reversing the hollowing out of the middle class and applied a policy or a strategy that makes very little sense. And I think today’s step back indicates that it’s finally starting to dawn on people in the administration that it makes very little sense.

Jason Bordoff: And so let me ask you then about a more sensible approach and what really needs to be done to achieve resilience, reshoring, diversify supply chains. I mean, you said again in your Brookings speech, which hopefully people are aware of, but they should listen to it – Google “small yard high fence” – that China hasn’t always played by the rules that some assumed when we began the process of accession to the WTO or just trying to create a more integrated global economic system. But it is also true that today there are advantages, including in areas like clean tech, that come from real cost advantages and economies of scale and innovation by companies like BYD. Short of extremely high and destructive tariffs, as you just characterize them, is it really possible to overcome the advantages that China has in any meaningful timeframe? Do we have the tools in our toolkit to do that and what are they?

Jake Sullivan: I think it’s daunting. I mean, in the Biden administration, we worked hard over four years to try to begin to close the gap with respect to some of these clean energy technologies to try to push forward on supply chain diversification. And I think we made some progress, but not nearly the progress I would’ve hoped. And China continued to race forward in key areas and I hear a lot of people asking the question, particularly when it comes to climate goals, if China can produce the major clean energy technologies at greater scale and cheaper, why not just take it and deploy it and that’ll help us drive towards the Paris goals as opposed to try to compete with that effectively? I basically have three answers to that. The first is I think it’s very difficult to tell Americans or Europeans or frankly people anywhere else in the world that they don’t have a role to play in the clean energy transition other than being the consumer.

I think that’s just a very hard argument from the point of view of democracies selling a policy over the midterm. Second, I think it’s wrong to trade one form of energy dependence from decades past on fossil fuels from the Middle East and elsewhere for another form of energy dependence to a country like China that has been prepared to weaponize that dependence in other contexts over time. And we saw from Europe’s dependence on Russia with respect to gas, just what that can do at a moment of geopolitical crisis. And then third, for what we need globally, the kind of resilience capacity production deployment, just saying, well, China will take care of all of it is no answer. There need to be other people at the cutting edge and it should be Americans who are there with the highest end most effective technologies. Now does that mean that we shouldn’t differentiate that there is no difference say between the US closing the gap on high end battery technology and what happens with solar panels?

I do think we have to distinguish between different forms of clean energy technology, but to me it is absolutely vital if we hope to have a long-term strategy to achieve our climate goals and our energy security goals in a sustainable way that the United States continue to drive at this. Frankly, we have an administration that has evinced a hostility to this strategy and that’s a real challenge. But I think if you look out over the course of the next couple of decades, this has to be a core American priority, not just from a national security perspective, not just from an economic perspective, but also from a climate perspective.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, I mean if climate is a crisis and we need to deploy clean energy much faster than we are today, presumably you want it to be as cheap as possible, China can maybe help with that. But what I hear you saying is that sort of short-term thinking given the consequences that come down the road, but you need to be smart about where you’re willing to bear that extra cost security premium. That doesn’t mean everything. This comes to the question of how small the yard really is or how big the yard is when it’s not just economic and energy security concerns. John Podesta spoke last year here about the carbon intensity of Chinese products versus our own domestic jobs. The politics of Pennsylvania and Michigan, like when you take all those together, maybe the yard’s not always as small and then you get to a lot of products that can really slow down the transition.

Jake Sullivan: Look, I acknowledge that when you embark on a strategy that involves restrictions, whether it’s on semiconductors or on electric vehicles driving on American roads, there can be a temptation to take that to its logical extreme and to take what is a small yard and make it bigger and bigger until the yard occupies the entire field. I acknowledge that that is why you need discipline and rigor. It’s also why you need transparency. You need to show your work. Why are you selecting either the products or the sectors you’re selecting? What is the criteria you are using? And in my Brookings speech, I tried to lay out a series of questions to answer that. Now that’s not going to be perfectly satisfying because there isn’t a mathematical formula. You can’t plug this into an AI and just get an answer. It requires trade-offs that are not just technical, but we have to acknowledge geopolitical and political trade-offs as well.

But that kind of approach I think is necessary because the alternative of saying, well, we’re not going to do it is and we’re going to forswear any of the trade-offs is making a choice too of a different kind that I think would leave us in a real challenge. The last panel was talking about critical minerals. I think we should all ask the question, if China chooses a strategy to manipulate frankly the price of a particular critical mineral with the impact of stopping the development of production or refining in other countries to amass greater monopoly control over it, do we think for the long-term that is good for our security? I think the answer to that is no. But beyond that, do we think that’s actually going to be good for the climate longterm? And I would say the concentration of clean energy production processing and refining capacity in one country that is also involved in a large geopolitical competition is not a sustainable way to take on the big energy climate, economic and security challenges of our time.

And there have been enough warning signs in my view that validate the strategy that we were pursuing that has to be constantly refined, constantly updated, and now we’re in a bit of an intermission from that because you have the president saying, basically, let’s go all in on coal just in the last 24 hours, but we should use this intermission collectively to say, how do we design a strategy that tries to get this formula as right as we possibly can? And that’s a conversation I want to be a part of, and I have the humility to say, we didn’t get everything right. It’s a source of constant adjustment. China has to have a seat at the table and we should not just compete with them but partner with them on climate issues. And I spent a lot of time sitting across the table from Chinese officials talking about our difficulties, but also talking about our opportunities including in the climate and energy space. And so that is the kind of conversation that I think people in this room and beyond should be having. But we should be doing it with clear eyes about the fact that it’s not as simple as just saying, let’s get the lowest cost, fastest product deployed as quickly as possible, because that brings with it a series of risks that I think will come back to haunt us.

Jason Bordoff: I used the phrase crisis a moment ago to refer to climate change, and I’m just wondering how you think about that. You had a million problems on your desk every day, big ones like Russia and Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan, so many more. When you think about climate change as a national security issue, is it like, yeah, no, it’s a real issue, but I got 80 million problems on my plate and this doesn’t rise toward the top of the list. Or should we be taking it much more seriously and should it be further toward the top of the agenda? And how do you do that if you have the crisis – fast-burning fuses versus slow burning, slower burning fuses? How do you think about that?

Jake Sullivan: Look, I acknowledge it’s very difficult. We had to maintain discipline on something that is less of a comprehensive and long-term challenge, that is the geopolitical competition with China, the discipline to focus on that because that’s not necessarily an everyday issue. The way that getting munitions to the frontline in Ukraine or dealing with humanitarian assistance in Gaza was, and then one step up from that are to me the twin challenges that will define the course of humanity over the course of the next a hundred years, the climate crisis and artificial intelligence, both of which require enormous and sustained effort and energy from across the US government and not just the climate people or the quote AI people, but the national security advisor, the national economic advisor, and of course the president of the United States. And so for me, the way I think about climate as a national security issue, one at a very basic level, what is national security?

It is the safety, lives and livelihoods of the American people and the climate crisis just at an existential level has an impact on that. But then you think about climate as a force multiplier of every security challenge that we have from resources to migration to these issues related to the geopolitics of clean energy supply chains. And all of a sudden climate is shot through everything we’re dealing with everywhere. And so if we don’t have a coherent strategy on this question, we’re not going to be able to have an effective modern industrial policy. We’re not going to be able to have an effective sort of intersection of technology and national security policy and we’re not going to have an effective outcome to the US competition with China.

Jason Bordoff: Can you say another word about the other issue? You brought up AI and how do you view that as a national security issue? What are the threats and what do we need to be thinking more about?

Jake Sullivan: Look, unlike the climate crisis, which is essentially a collection of cascading harms that we need to arrest and reverse, AI is a combination of massive benefit and opportunity and massive risk. And so we have to design a set of strategies to put it very simply to make AI work more for us than against us. What are the risks? The risks are the capability of AI in the wrong hands causing massive harm through cyber bio weapons, the democratization of basic technology like drones that no longer just nation states have their hands on and can be used to cause harm at massive scale, economic dislocation if we’re not smart about how we manage the disruptions that will be caused, an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation that will eat at the foundations of our democracy. These are all areas of genuine risk and harm and there’s attendant harm, which is to deal with them.

Do we end up heading down the road of a more, as Mustafa Suleyman put it, dystopian society where you basically just impose control and AI will provide the government with lots of tools of control so that those harms don’t turn into catastrophe. So this is what we’re up against, and by the way, we’re not up against this in 30 years. We’re up against this now presently, the present capabilities have the capacity if the guardrails are taken off in the hands of the wrong person to cause dramatic and massive harm. The capabilities exist today to disrupt millions of jobs. The capabilities exist today. So this is upon us as we speak and I just don’t think it is getting the attention that it deserves. But of course then we also have to harness the opportunities, and you heard in the last panel a question about what are the opportunities of AI when it comes to things like the critical mineral supply chain for climate. AI could be a part of the solution, a central part of the solution. It’s not good enough just to mitigate risk if we’re not unleashing the opportunity to deal with the other major challenges that confront us.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, I’m looking at my colleague David Sandalow, who’s written a lot about that. You mentioned a moment ago in terms of China, you don’t want to go from dependence on imported oil or gas to clean energy supply chains, economic resilience, economic security, and the US is now a net exporter of oil and gas. And I’m wondering just from a national security standpoint, we need to grow clean energy, for sure, for climate. Did the shale revolution enhance America’s position in the world geopolitically, or is that sort of overblown sometimes in energy conversations?

Jake Sullivan: Look, I think it’s hard to argue it didn’t. Both by reducing the capacity of an energy cartel to hold us at risk, not eliminating it by any stretch because as we’ve seen, we are subject to the global oil markets, but reducing it and that’s leverage and that enhances America’s capacity for as long as our economy runs on fossil fuels. Second, we have a very recent example, which is the United States being able to flow LNG to Europe at a time of crisis as they were rapidly moving off of Russian gas. And I think that was a genuine success story that happened fast and happened because the United States was able to do that coming out of the shale revolution. 15, 20 years ago, we would not have been able to do that, and that’s meaningful as well. So I do think it has created tools, cards for the US to play, but I also believe deeply that a clean energy transition means just that a transition, and it does mean that we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and increase the deployment of clean energy technologies because I think not only is that where the future lies from the point of view of addressing the climate crisis, but it’s also where the future lies with respect to who’s going to be on the technological edge and who’s going to be the most geopolitically consequential country in the world in 50 years.

Jason Bordoff: Does that LNG point you just made, is that inconsistent with pausing new permits or does that come to the timeframe thing you were just talking about today?

Jake Sullivan: That’s a timeframe issue. That pause was about future building of future capacity. What we had pledged to Europe and we told them, we’ll get you 18 BCM in a defined timeframe. Rarely does the president of the United States and the president of the European Commission come together and put out a white paper, and then that white paper actually becomes reality. Normally it’s just some words that you look at five years later you’re like, oh, that never really happened. We made a specific pledge about what we’d deliver. We did that to close a gap that existed because of the dislocation of the shutoff of Russian gas. We delivered it. We have continued to deliver it, and I think the whole debate about the moratorium on future permitting, it did not really impact this, although it is a trade-off and in those conversations we had to say, hey, our allies and partners have thoughts on this too, so I want to acknowledge that, but I don’t think it directly affected what we were trying to do in response to the Ukraine crisis.

Jason Bordoff: There were reports that, and this relates to energy of course too, because part of how you navigate these issues and new sanctions affects energy markets and the impact on the domestic economy. So that all I assume came into factor as you were thinking about how to approach Iran pressure on Iran for a deal and there was a deal, and then the Trump administration the first time pulled back on the Iran deal, the enrichment breakout time is now shorter than ever. Their reports negotiators will be coming together this weekend. What do you expect if anything comes of those talks and given how short that breakout time is now, what is the potential path forward?

Jake Sullivan: Look, we heard from the president with Prime Minister Netanyahu sitting next to him that he was sending his negotiator to begin dealing with the Iranians there. Some question about direct versus indirect, we’ll see how that all plays out, but the key point is negotiations between the United States and Iran over a potential diplomatic resolution of the Iranian nuclear challenge are now basically underway. And the question is, will there be a deal? And I think there is the possibility that there will be, and I think there is a possibility that that deal won’t look too different from the deal President Obama ultimately produced. The major difference will be this time some of its critics will become its supporters.

Jason Bordoff: Can you talk about also what you see happening in terms of the path forward for Ukraine, potential for a ceasefire and the Trump administration’s desire to get compensation in the form of access to critical minerals? Where does this conflict go from here? And maybe because this is an energy conference sort of comment if you can, on the role energy played in a variety of ways in how the Biden administration responded to the Ukraine crisis.

Jake Sullivan: Well, first I think it’s really important for people to understand the president and the vice president have tried to basically cast the question of Ukraine as “you’re either for war or you’re for peace,” and that is a completely false choice. The real choice is a choice between a true peace that is durable and sustainable and a false peace that involves basically a surrender to Putin. My concern about the approach the administration has taken so far, though it’s not too late to change course, is that they have adopted the Russian position on how this war started. It’s the Ukrainian’s fault. They have conceded upfront in the negotiation major points in contention, Ukraine’s role in NATO as one example of that, and the American willingness to play a part in guaranteeing any piece and in a quite dramatic and deeply unfortunate spectacle in the Oval Office, they basically squeezed Zelensky while to a large extent letting Putin off the hook.

I think that is the wrong approach. I think the right approach, which we worked to set up for in the closing months of the Biden administration, is give more leverage to Ukraine, display staying power on behalf of Ukraine, and that is more likely to generate a negotiation in which Ukraine is in a position of strength and you get that true peace that can be durable and sustainable. There is still the opportunity for President Trump to do that. And in fact, he said not long ago that if Putin continues to resist cease fire, which I predicted he would resist cease fire because he wants this war to continue, that President Trump would impose secondary tariffs on oil sales from Russia. To bring things back to the energy area, I hope that is not just idle threat. I hope if Putin continues to refuse to negotiate in good faith that the Trump administration will use sticks and not just continue to offer up carrots to President Putin.

More broadly, obviously energy played a central role in this conflict, dating back years, the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, the transshipment through the pipeline from Russia across Ukraine into Europe, the relationship between Russia and Europe when it came to cheap Russian gas as a core element of European industrial production in key countries to include Germany and the need very rapidly for us to generate resilience and robustness in the European energy picture in the face of the loss of that Russian gas. And in the early months of the conflict, you saw this massive spike in oil prices. You saw a potential energy crisis in Europe and an aggressive strategy coordinated between the US, Europe, our Asian partners, partners in the Middle East to say, we’re going to do something about this. And frankly, oil prices came down. The European energy crisis was to a substantial extent, abated, and I think that was through an incredible amount of determined statecraft led by the United States of America and is a good example of how energy diplomacy can be critical to creating the conditions for sustained support for Ukraine in this brutal war of aggression that they’re fighting.

Jason Bordoff: And physical grid security and cybersecurity and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. And I’m looking at our new distinguished visiting fellow Kadri Simson, who was squarely in the middle as Europe’s energy commissioner and managing all of that. We have a couple of questions from the audience.

Jake Sullivan: I’ll just share one story. Very early in the conflict, president Zelensky called President Biden and said, we have reports that there are essentially Russian mercenaries making their way to this Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to blow it up and we need to mobilize to stop this. You imagine president of the United States getting a call that seemed all too plausible and the catastrophic consequences of that actually coming to pass and having to think our actual tools to do something about it are limited, but we can work through channels to warn the Russians. We can work with the IAEA, we can work with the European partners, work with the Ukrainians and so forth, but a quite remarkable moment that brought home how at various points we came uncomfortably close to real catastrophe, not even getting into the question of Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons just with the Ukrainian nuclear enterprise in the context of a hot war and contested territory. I think this is something that most Americans do not appreciate how substantial that risk factor was and frankly remains to this day.

Jason Bordoff: That’s frightening. I’m going to go to the question from the audience. There’s a question about the necessity, configuration, application of a large-scale US investment fund like a sovereign wealth fund. There were reports in the New York Times, the administration had considered that. What does it mean for the US to have a sovereign wealth fund? Do we need one?

Jake Sullivan: Look, I do think the United States does not have all the tools we need to deploy capital to secure critical supply chains to secure strategic assets when necessary and a lot of other countries do have that and are able to move capital rapidly in times of crisis or as part of a strategy of building resilience. And we rely on the development finance corporation. We rely on some tools at DOD, we rely on some tools, well, we previously did at USAID that have now been more or less dismantled, but the idea of a strategic investment fund that could do investments both in the United States and abroad as part of the strategy of really securing supply chain resilience for the long-term and critical areas is something that we took a hard look at and ran a whole policy process on and it was coordinated out of the National Security Council, but we worked with obviously all of the key economic agencies, treasury, commerce, and throughout the US government.

We ran into hard questions. I think in principle, the US not having this tool is a problem. It is a gap in our capabilities. On the other hand, how you do it in a way that it doesn’t become a slush fund is a challenge. And if you put too many guardrails on it to avoid it becoming a slush fund, does it just become another sclerotic US government program that isn’t effective? So I think that there are design and execution challenges that we didn’t get all the way through, but the idea of having a flexible financing authority for critical strategic goods, supply chain features, assets along a supply chain in critical minerals, in semiconductors, in EV batteries, potentially in APIs, in advanced pharmaceutical ingredients. These are things that the United States should be figuring out so that that gap does not persist over the long term.

Jason Bordoff: I have a few minutes left. I wanted to see if you wanted to take an opportunity to respond to a mutual friend, your new colleague also Jason Furman, who wrote in Foreign Affairs recently about Bidenomics and why the embrace of industrial policy and demand side stimulus, what he perceived as a retreat from free trade and market forces caused part of the inflation crisis that featured so prominently in the November election. I’m curious if you had a response to that.

Jake Sullivan: I did not fully expect that question. I’m very, very proud to be now a colleague of Jason Furman, who I respect a great deal but am genuinely puzzled by what I feel like is a ferocious anti-Biden economics argument that does not follow his normal pattern of dispassionate rigor. I don’t quite know what’s motivating it, but I am not going to be able to respond as effectively to it as two people who have written very good pieces that are worth reading. One is Jared Bernstein, who’s the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. The other is Gene Sperling who ran the American Rescue Plan that Jason Furman says was the cause of so much inflation. And I think those two pieces lay out in detail how the core proposition that Jason puts forward, and I’m not an economist who can really comment on this. They’ve laid out the evidence that the ARP was the cause of inflation in the United States.

They really, I think, exposed the weakness of that proposition. And once you take that proposition away, there’s no longer the foundation for the critique that Jason Furman has put forward. I do think there are totally legitimate debates about industrial policy, about how to think about international economic policy in a construct in which we need to think about supply chain resilience, climate and national security, which I do think confound the traditional free trade orthodoxy. Doesn’t mean we do this crazy tariff thing. I believe in that and that’s what I laid out in my Brookings speech, but there is, it’s not even the same ballpark, frankly. It’s not even the same sport as what the Trump administration is doing right now. What we were trying to do was something much more targeted and focused to deal with particular challenges of clean energy deployment, national security and industrial reshoring, but not bringing a sock factory back to Minnesota, my home state, rather trying to bring back strategic industries that are critical for our national security and our economic resilience long term.

Jason Bordoff: I read both Jared and Gene’s piece and it would be a great panel discussion to have all three of them here. Maybe we’ll try to do that. That’d bring popcorn to that. Last question. You appeared on the Ezra Klein podcast in January. I hope people listened to it. It was great as everything you do is. He asked you a question at the very end. You said after Secretary Clinton lost, you did a lot of thinking about the lessons from that defeat that informed your foreign policy approach in the Biden administration. And then Trump won again even more convincingly, and he asked you if that had changed your understanding of the lessons you drew back in 2016. And your answer was, ask me again in six months. I need some sleep first. So it’s been three months, not six, so ask me again in three months. But you’ve gotten a little bit of sleep, so I’m wondering if you’re half slept up, do you have a response to that half an answer?

Jake Sullivan: Look, when you have a formula like foreign policy for the middle class, it sounds kind of catchy. And so people think that’s a political tagline, that’s a political argument. But for me, and if you read what I’ve written about it or spoken about it, it’s never been a political argument. It’s a substantive argument about what I think American National Security and foreign policy should prioritize and do. And I actually continue to believe that the basic formula that we implemented in the Biden administration with respect to the engines of American dynamism, industrial capacity, resilience, growth, those were the right things to do. And I think we handed off to the Trump administration a pretty good economy and a pretty good trajectory. And if you look back at the beginning of the Biden administration and you asked the question, where’s China going to be and where’s the US going to be at the end of the decade, the prediction was China would’ve surpassed us across most dimensions, including potentially surpassing us outright as the largest economy in the world.

At the end of the Biden administration, you could not say that. And I think the combination of policies we pursued will play out over time if they’re not completely destroyed or dismantled quite positively. Now, what President Trump has done most recently is so dramatically upend everything that it’s hard to tell where this all goes. Where does the American economy go? Where does the American role in the world go? But on reflection, I think there were a lot of challenges heading into 2024, chief among them, elevated price levels coming out of a Covid supply shock. But I think the basic underlying formula of investment in American capacity in the ways I’ve described, I do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that formula needs to go. That’s where I’m at in three months, but come back in three months because I’ll have adjustments to that and lessons learned and things. I would say we could have done that differently and better. And obviously we should have… The inflation question loomed so large. I think it was not about policy choices. I think it was happening everywhere in the world because of Covid. But there are things obviously in hindsight that we could have and should have done better. But on the core, unlike in 2016 where I really kind of questioned the core of where I had been, I’m not there in 2025.

Jason Bordoff: We’d love to have you back in three months after you’ve slept a little bit more. When I had the privilege of working for the National Security Advisor back in the Obama administration, I saw the teeniest little bits of how immensely demanding and challenging and difficult those jobs are. And I just want to conclude with all sincerity by saying thank you for your service.

Thank you again, Jake Sullivan, and thanks to all of you for listening to this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange.

The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. The show is hosted by me, Jason Bordoff and by Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Caroline Pitman and Kyu Lee. Sean Marquand engineered the show.

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As President Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan laid out a strategy for what he called a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Using the metaphor of a small yard and a high fence, the Biden administration’s approach focused on reshoring critical industries and manufacturing, supporting innovation, and protecting strategic technologies.

The strategy relied on industrial policy, tariffs and sanctions — some of the same economic tools the Trump administration is now using to launch a global trade war. The broad shift on both sides of the aisle to focused on national security, economic security, and supply chain resilience has enormous implications for the clean energy transition, from critical minerals and solar panels to batteries and EVs.

So how should we think about the relationship between economic resilience, energy security, and climate action? What lessons can we draw from the Biden administration’s approach to countering China? And looking ahead, what should the U.S. prioritize when it comes to energy security?

This week’s episode features a fireside chat between Jason Bordoff and Jake Sullivan from the Columbia Global Energy Summit 2025, which was hosted by the Center on Global Energy Policy, at Columbia University SIPA earlier this month.

Jake Sullivan recently became the Kissinger professor of the practice of statecraft and world order at the Harvard Kennedy School. He served as President Biden’s national security advisor from 2021 to 2025. In the Obama administration, he was then Vice President Biden’s national security advisor and deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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