US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan Talks Gaza Deal

Published Jan 13, 2025, 3:57 PM

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said there’s a “distinct possibility” that Israel and Hamas will be able to reach a ceasefire deal before President Joe Biden leaves office in a week. Sullivan spoke about this and a wide range of subjects in Washington with Bloomberg's Jenny Leonard. 

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We have a lot to get to, but let's start with breaking news on Gaza. There's reporting that Israel and mediators have agreed to a draft and are awaiting Hamas's response. It seems like we're close, maybe closer than ever. We've also been here before. What's different this time?

Well, first, I think the accumulating pressure on Hamas has been really considerable. They have had their military formations destroyed, their top leader taken out, their main proxy allies badly decimated, and their sponsor Iran weakened and distracted. So I think the pressure is building for Hamas to come to yes. I think Israel also has achieved a huge amount of its military objectives in Gaza, and therefore they are in a position to be able to say yes. So there is a distinct possibility that we can get this deal done this week before President Biden leaves office. But as you say, we've been here before, We've been close before and haven't gotten across the finish line, so I can't make any promises or predictions. But just this morning I was on the phone with Brett McGirk, who has been basically camped out in Doha. He's been there for more than a week working the details within the framework President Biden set out last year. I spoke also this morning with the Cutty Prime Minister and with one of the key Israeli negotiators, and there is a general sense that this is moving in the right direction. The question now over the next short while is can Hamas get to yes? Can we get to a final agreement, and then can we begin implementing in the coming days.

It's there for the taking.

So the question is now can we all collectively seize the moment and.

Make this happen?

Vice President elect JD. Van said yesterday it will probably get done a day or two before you leave office. Do deadlines like this specific deadlines help or hurt them a botiations? And does rhetoric like the one employed by President elect Donald Trump? Is it useful to get Hamas to yes?

I think deadlines can serve two functions in a negotiation. When they're imposed by one party, frequently a deadline can make the other party think, hey, if I just wait till the last minute, they'll give me everything. If they're imposed by the mediators, if the Americans, the Cutteries, the Egyptians all basically say let's focus the mining, get this thing done. I think they can have a positive impact, and so I think the pressure building here towards the end of President Biden's term has been considerable and that that will help contribute to a positive outcome if we can generate that final yes from both sides.

At the same time.

This has been a circumstance in which President Biden gave direction shortly after the election to me, to Brett and to others on our team. Work closely with the incoming team. Make sure we have a united front, we have a core native message, and we have tried to do that over the course of the last several weeks, as has the Trump team that's coming in. I think this is not a partisan issue. This is an American issue to get our hostages out and all of the hostages out, bring the fighting to an end, and surge humanitarian assistance into Gaza. And I think it's how a transition should operate, and it's consistent with President Biden's worldview about his stewardship of this country.

So you don't think any of the fiery rhetoric coming from the incoming team has actually changed anything at the negotiating table.

I have been struck by this phrase about all hell to pay or all hell will break loose, because if you're a Hamas fighter sitting in Gaza, I think it'd be fair to say that you have been seeing hell rain down on you for fourteen months. The total smashing of Hamas battalions, the killing of the top three leaders Sinwar dave Issa, among others, and all of the other ways in which your entire broader network has been badly degraded in your sponsor has been so badly weakened. So the amount of firepower and pressure military pressure brought to bear on Hamas has been pretty dramatic over the course of the past fourteen months. I think it's the accumulated effect of that, combined with this looming period of transition from one president to another, that has created a circumstance where we could get to a deal.

You've spent the last year plus on the Middle East. Safe to say that's probably not the region that you thought coming in would be taken up taking up a lot of your time. How much has that taken away from your priorities? And that no Pacific and other regions in the world, or has it look.

I really think one of the things history will look back on in the Biden administration and see quite clearly is that even as we've dealt with two substantial geopolitical crises, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the outbreak of this conflict in the Middle East beginning with Hamas's brutal massacre of Israelis on October seventh, that through all of that, we have never even for a second, taken our eye off the ball with the long term competition with China, and we have taken a series of actions in supporting alliances, protecting technology, investing in our sources of strength that have left us in a position at the end of four years where we have dramatically improved America's position in the long term competition with China. And we've done so while managing the relationship so it doesn't tip over into conflict, so it doesn't make the headlines every day the way the Middle East and Ukraine does. But the record and the reality of the US China dynamic in twenty twenty five compared with twenty twenty one, especially against the expectations in twenty twenty one, I think is quite a remarkable record that president can take a great deal of pride in.

Let's talk about China for a second. You guys announced a new rule this morning on new limits on sales of advanced AI chips. Can you explain to us where did that rule originate? How did you get here? Yeah, what's the backstory?

So it originated from a basic reality, which is that the United States has to pursue two core objectives at once. The first objective is for the United States itself to maintain the lead when it comes to frontier AI technology, and that that technology should be developed in the United States and our closest allies and not offshore to the rest of the world. And second, we want the world to run on an infrastructure of American technology. We want data centers around the world that are powering AI applications with American technology and not with Chinese technology or any other technology. So how do you achieve both of those things? That was the question presented to the key departments and agencies of the US government, and so over the course of many months, we worked on a rule that could help us achieve.

Both of those objectives.

On the one hand, ensuring there were protections around the highest end compute capability, So we were building that out in America in our very closest allies, and on the other hand, making sure that we had predictable and clear.

Rules for the export.

Of high end computing capability so that other countries could reap the benefits of American technology without getting diverted to our competitors and adversaries.

That's the rule that we produced.

And it really stems from I think one of the most critical national security imperatives of the next generation, which is how we make AI work for us rather than against US and America Maintaining the lead in AI as opposed to seeding it to China is going to be decisive in making sure that it works for us. When we came into office in twenty one, there were a lot of people who said it's going to be China.

Not the US who leads the world in AI. We are in the lead today.

We're determined to protect, preserve, and extend that lead, and that's the hand we're going to pass off to the next administration.

Right so you're on your way out. The deadline for this rule is very far in the future. So you punted that, what are the consequences if the Trump administration doesn't implement this rule.

So I would take issue with the word punt. What we did is set out a comment period of one hundred and twenty days. And why did we do that. We did that because a rule of this significance needs comment from industry, from civil society, from other stakeholders, so that we make sure that we get this balance I've just described right, And so we are rigorous and systematic and thoughtful about having a process that allows that comment to come in, allows the new team to digest it and then make whatever adjustments are necessary. Now, obviously it's going to be up to them how they want to proceed, and they may have internal debates the same way we had internal debates about exactly how to calibrate the rule. I would expect nothing less, but I would be surprised sitting here today if after one hundred and twenty days they looked at the landscape as we've looked at it and said, you know, we really don't need this at all.

Let's move on to other things.

Because the more you study this question, to me, the more critical it is that you have a rule of this kind. The details to be worked to be able to secure the objectives.

That I laid out.

Everything you've been doing on the China Tech competition has been under the umbrella of small yar at high fence. Obviously it's a very dynamic landscape. So how do you ensure that regulations stay up to date and you don't unnecessarily make the yard too wide or the sense too tall.

Basically by showing our homework.

I mean, we put out our first semiconductor rule in October of twenty twenty two, and when we did it, we said, the technology is moving very rapidly, the development of high end chips, their relative amount of power and compute capability is evolving. So we're going to have to update this rule, and we did. We updated it in twenty twenty three. We've updated it again in twenty twenty four, and we expect the Trump administration will keep doing that. So a degree of predictability that there will be constant iteration and update is part of it.

And then displaying why it.

Is that we chose the parameters that we chose in excruciating detail, which not that many people read. I know you do and some of your colleagues at Bloomberg do a lot of people don't, but we are putting it all out there in a totally transparent way, and we're not just being transparent publicly. I have spent hours, if not tens of hours, sitting across the table from my Chinese counterpart Onongi, talking through why we're doing what we're doing with respect to the small yard high fence approach, what we consider in the yard inside the yard, and what we consider outside the yard, and explaining the rationale and the logic behind it, because we've got nothing to hide here, We've got nothing to apologize for. This we believe is core to America's national security, and we are going to continue to have a degree of transparency on it through the end of our time here. And I would expect the incoming team will pick up where we left off because this very much has a strong bipartisan backing. It's the kind of thing that I think can be carried forward in a new administration, and I would hope that it would be on that.

You know, obviously, all these rules take months and months to come up with. There's tons of lobbying from all sides to shape what the final rule or final outcome looks like. How worried are you when you say that the Trump administration will carry this forward? They might night not like the yards and fences that you put up, or they might also be more prone to negotiate with companies one on one. How worried are you that corporate lobbying could undo some of this framework that you set up, given how many tech billionaires are in the president elect's orbit might serve in the administration.

You know, I think you'd expect that after four years, I'd be very hard bitten, maybe quite cynical, about just about every element of American politics and policy. I actually I have to tell you that my experience in working through our technology and national security policy has been pretty hardening. I've spent a lot of time with a lot of tech leaders, the CEOs of major technology companies big tech, the innovators and entrepreneurs in small tech. And there are exceptions, none of which I will name here, But by and large, people accept the basic proposition that the United States needs technology controls for the most exquisite technology Jesus national security applications, and the debate is over the details. So I have not found a deeply cynical game being played on this By and large, I think it has been a robust and rigorous give and take. But it's interesting to see that American technology leaders have publicly said we need a kind of small yard high fence, or we need something along these lines. So I think we've built some momentum behind this notion. I think it's going to be hard to entirely knock that off. Course, I think Congress is invested in it. I think the national security community across the aisle is invested in it. So can I say I'll go to sleep at night every night totally confident that this will be carried forward in the way that I'd like to see it.

No, I can't say that.

But among the initiatives that the Biden administration has really powered and pioneered over the last four years, this is one that it would come as some measure of surprise to me if the new team threw it.

Out the window.

Your colleague Common Secretary Gina Armando told my colleagues at the Law Street Journal that quote, trying to hold China back is a fool's Errand do you agree.

I don't think it's the right way to think about what we are doing, The right way to think about it.

For me, is just common sense.

If we have a very high end technology that has deep national security applications, we don't want it to be sold to a country that can use it against us. That has been true throughout America's technology policy. Now in the Cold War, that meant basically a total technology blockade, indeed really a decoupling of the US and Soviet economies. That's not what we need today, which China we are integrated. We should continue to have trade, normal intercourse, even on technology. That's why we have a small yard high fence. The goal here is about meeting somewhere in the middle between nothing, no restraints, which has never been a part of the American form policy. We've had export controls for decades and the kind of Cold War style technology blockade we had. You've got to meet in the middle. That is not fundamentally about holding anyone back or containment or anything like that. What is about is common sense, the common sensibility to look at the American people in the eye and say, for certain critical technologies, we are not going to allow them to be in the hands of people who you use them against us.

That's how I look at it.

That can succeed, I would submit, is succeeding. But I think the other half of what Secretary of Romando is saying in that comment is our main purpose and the main thrust of our effort should be investing in ourselves. And that's been a core feature of the Biden administration. Investment in our industrial base, in our innovation base, in our supply chains, and in friend shoring. We have made I think substantial progress on that front. But that is a generational project, and I hope that in every dimension that is carried forward. I have some concerns based on the rhetoric I've heard about whether those investments will be carried forward, but I think they are profoundly in our national interest.

Our investments without export controls. The right approach, though, is one really is our investments more important to leading.

If all you have our export controls and that's it, and you're not making the dramatic investments in the sources of our own innovation and industrial capacity, then you're not going to succeed. And that's why President Biden has paired the two of them together.

Your overarching approach on China, as you mentioned, has been to responsibly manage the relationships so that competition doesn't bear into conflict. Over the last four years, but also more recently, we've seen major hacks of US telecom systems, critical infrastructure, and of course there's still continued support by Beijing for Russia's war. Would you say that your approach to China has been successful or did Beijing take advantage of the US and your willingness to talk?

So first, for me, the question is, in a long term strategic competition with China, are in a position of confidence and capacity? Are we in a stronger position in that competition than we were four years ago?

I think it's not even a close call.

The United States is in such a stronger position today than we were four years ago, and that is a mark of unalloyed success in the relationship. But then there's a second thing, is are we careening towards war with China? I think the last thing the American people want is a massive war with a nuclear earmpower. And we have also succeeded even as we have strengthened our position in the competition, in stabilizing the relationship, managing it so that it isn't tipping over into conflict. I think that is also an unalloyed success. When we came into office four years ago, the common prediction was that China's economy was inevitably, intelluctibly going to be going to surpass the American economy, maybe as soon as twenty thirty. Now there's a genuine debate about whether it will ever happen.

When we came into office.

People said it's going to be China, not the US who leads the world in AI. That's not the case today, and we should work to ensure it isn't the case. When we came into office, we did not have this strong, robust network of alliances and partnerships in the Indo Pacific that we have now built, which allows us to have much stronger deterrence in that part of the world. Again, another success China is hacking the United States. They were doing so in previous administrations, they're doing so today. And some of these recent hacks, the Salt Typhoon hack, are dramatic in their scope and scale, and we take them deadly seriously. There's the espionage part of that, like Salt Typhoon, and then there's the potential that China would actually use cyber means to physically disrupt or destroy critical infrastructure in the United States, and we've sent a clear message to China's leaders that if they did that, if they actually took a physically destructive cyber attack in the United States, that there would be severe consequences. I'm not going to go into the details of those conversations, but they have been consistent and sustained over time, and we're going to have to continue to deter China from doing that because we have seen them setting up or positioning to be able to do that in the future, and it's something the new team will have to continue to work on deterring.

Let's move to the EU. Over the last four years, you've spent a lot of time trying to negotiate with them on some trade related issues like a global steel arrangement, something on large civil aircraft. None of these came to fruition. All have been now punted because the deadlines were long to the new administration, which is not you guys. Do you think the EU missed an opportunity to work with you guys on China trade given they're going to come in and have a much more adversarial counterpart in two weeks.

Well, I think.

To answer your question, we have to start from the beginning of the Biden administration. Just a few weeks before we took office, Europe and China signed a acid trade deal, a comprehensive agreement on investment that was right at the end of the Trump administration, and to me, that was a mark of not paying attention to the EU and working with them on a common approach to China. Today, that comprehensive agreement on investment is on the shelf, it is not enforce In fact, what the European Union has done is moved into a much more convergent position with us when it comes to China's economic abuses. You saw that in how we came together with the G seven to describe a common economic approach. You saw that in living color with the imposition of tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles just a few months ago. Now it is the case that we have our own pretty limited trade issues with the EU that we've tried to manage.

On civil aircraft.

We actually took a big step forward with the Boeing Airbus settlement on steel and aluminum. We have continued these tariff rate quotas, but have not come up with the comprehensive agreement we should have. Do I think there was a missed opportunity there.

I do do. I think that's.

Entirely on the EU. I mean that's two parties trying to come to agreement. We didn't quite get there. I think as we look forward, that's something we should drive towards. The single biggest thing though, that I think the US and Europe need to work together on in the next four years is a high standards critical minerals marketplace, so that we are not dependent on China and giving them the capacity to choke off critical minerals that are important to our national security. And that's something that I have made the case to the incoming administration to really work on. We took some modest steps in that direction, but I think we have a long way to go to be secure in our supply chains on critical minerals, and I would like to see the next team build on the work that we began.

Without going into details of your conversation with your successor, do you think they're susceptible to working with the EU? We obviously know the rhetoric from the President elect, who has some strong feelings about the European Union. Do you think that there is look.

I think that there is a kind of a.

Inescapable logic to the fact that on critical issues relative to the competition with China, especially the economic and technology competition, that having a common strategy with the key market economies of the world just puts US in a much stronger position to deal effectively with China. And I think we didn't see as much of that play out in the first Trump administration. But I think that the experience of the last eight years, by the way, including COVID and what it meant for our supply chains, has had an impact of the thinking on both sides of the aisle about the centrality of working with allies and partners on supply chain resilience. And so I think there will be more opportunities to work with the EU in the coming years than maybe there were in the first two. But of course I can't predict exactly how they're going to rack and stack their priorities.

One person that's obviously loomed large over the twenty twenty four elections and will also do so in the incoming administration is Elon Musk. There's been a lot of reporting that the White House's failure to invite him to a twenty twenty one EV summit is what contributed to his shift against the Democratic Party. So they worked very hard to get Donald Trump elected. Looking back and knowing what you know now, was it a mistake to exclude him from some of these White House initiatives given he's trying to get far right leaders elected all over Europe.

Look, I'm not going to speak to another person's motives, and since motive is kind of at the heart of that question, it's difficult for me to respond to it, and also difficult for me to look back to an EV summit in twenty twenty one and who should or shouldn't be invited. All I can say is that, from the point of view of the Biden administration, what we have tried to do over these four years is work across the technology industry, as I described earlier, on a range of issues that would enhance our national security. And I think our record of working with technology leaders and the relationships that we built that I've built something that I'm proud of and want to carry forward.

Your boss. President Biden last week said that he would have won against Prisident Trump if he had stayed in the race, do you agree? And could he have served four more years?

So one of the nice things about being National Security Advisor is I get to not answer.

Questions about politics.

You're a person in.

To day would be.

One of the last few days where I get to answer a question about politics and say, hey, I'm national Security advisor.

So I can't answer that. So like in a week, you can probably ask me that question.

Let me phrase it differently. Obviously, there's been a lot of criticism from the American people about, you know, the lack of transparency about his mental decline as a national security ad One person that was in the room almost always, was there ever a concern to you from a national security standpoint?

No, absolutely not, And I don't accept the term mental decline that you put at the heart of your question. I sat with President Biden this past year on April twenty sixth, when Iran launched one hundred ballistic missiles and two or three hundred armed drones at Israel in one massive salvo over the course of an evening. I sat with him as he coordinated and organized an unprecedented coalition of countries and directed the American military itself to help shoot down those projectiles, defending the hell out of Israel, and then I sat with him late that night as he spoke with the Prime Minister of Israel about how Israel would proceed from there. That's just kind of one example of many I could give about watching the President inaction in the situation room, equally sitting just yesterday in the Oval Office as he prepared to talk to Bbnet Yahoo about closing this hostage deal. This is a person who has stewarded American policy, both domestic and foreign policy, in ways that I believe are leaving this country much stronger than he found it. And the hand we are giving the next team is a good hand, and that is because of the leadership with President Biden.

Your successor. Mike Walls was on the Sunday shows yesterday and he said on Ukraine that they will ask Ukraine to lower its conscription age to eighteen. Obviously, you had similar concerns about their manpar shortage. You never demanded anything in terms of dumb changing their laws. Why not? And do you think this pressure coming from the incoming administration is going to make as the landscape change his mind on this now?

Well, first of all, they did change their law.

Their conscription age not to eighteen, as of a year ago was twenty seven. It's kind of remarkable compared to how we do things that from eighteen to twenty seven year exempt from the draft.

They lowered it to twenty five.

They've made a series of other changes to their law to facilitate people under the age of twenty five entering. But you have to recognize that the manpower issue in Ukraine is an issue that has evolved over time. It has become more acute over the course of the past year, and the need for Ukraine to be able to fully populate its brigades and battalions as we have flowed in a massive quantity of the munitions and military equipment they need, it has grown and we've made no bones about that, and we have briefed the new team on that. So let's see what happens now on a going forward basis. That's ultimately a sovereign decision Ukraine is going to have to make. But we have been crystal clear, including publicly, that manpower is an acute concern and in something that Ukraine will have to address, even as we do our part to get them the munitions that they need.

Of all the things that the incoming president has promised to do in the foreign policy and national security space, what makes you the most nervous that keeps you up at night.

That's a good question, you know, having watched the president, the incoming president in his first term, I guess what I would say is, we don't know how rhetoric on the campaign trail or rhetoric in a transition will translate into reality of policy. And so one of the lessons I took away from that is let's wait and see, let's actually see what happens. So I am not going to lie awake at night kind of waiting. I am going to see and assess and then make my own judgments on that basis. But I also have sat in a very difficult seat for four years and have obviously been subject to a huge amount of armchair quarterbacking on every issue under the sun. That's just in the nature of the jobs. That's by no means a complaint, that's just reality on how it should be. The people who occupy these positions should be held accountable by the press, by the American people. But it definitely makes me someone who is going to be way more cautious in criticizing anything an incoming team does, because one thing I will say is that when you sit in my chair, you recognize that national security decision making is imperfect people with imperfect information facing very imperfect choices, and so at no time are you going to get perfect results. And so I will have I will, and I've said this.

To Mike Waltz.

I just have a huge amount of sympathy and goodwill towards the people who will occupy these jobs, because they're coming into the world at a time of profound change, in transition, where the post Cold War era is over and there is an intense competition underway for what comes next, and it's going to be difficult, and it has been difficult. And the real question is is America's hand getting stronger in our adversary's hands getting weaker. I think the answer to that question on the objective evidence is yes. And yes, that's what the incoming team's going to have to keep working with.

And I'm going to root for their success because their success is our success.

Looking at the clock and knowing that we're out of time, maybe let's leave on this note, and you have to be short what are you most proud of and want to be remembered for.

That's a great question.

I'm both Minnesota and Irish Catholic, and so we only like to look at like the darkness and not things we're happy about. I also believe that when someone says something nice to you, they automatically have to be full