The American Who Waged a Tech War on ChinaNEWS | 14 November 2024Jake 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.Author: Mark Harris. Issie Lapowsky. Lauren Goode. Steven Levy. Zach Dorfman. Makena Kelly. James Fallows. Meriem Mahdhi. Morgan Meaker. Tess Owen. Source
