Latest news with #JakeSullivan

Wall Street Journal

26-05-2025

Politics
Wall Street Journal

‘Original Sin' and Foreign Policy

It came at a high price, but Joe Biden finally drove his successor off the front pages last week. First came the steady drip of devastating stories about Mr. Biden's closest aides' conspiracy to conceal his mental and physical decline, culminating with the publication of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's 'Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.' On top of that came the news that Mr. Biden has stage 4 prostate cancer. The most remarkable thing about 'Original Sin' to this reader was the near-total absence of President Biden's foreign-policy team from the account. This isn't because they weren't around or in the know. Messrs. Tapper and Thompson emphasize that both Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan had better and more regular access to the increasingly walled-off president than any other cabinet secretaries or senior aides beyond the inner ring of Biden loyalists that the authors call the Politburo. We also know from many sources that European leaders were worried and puzzled by Mr. Biden's irregular behavior at international meetings. Yet 'Original Sin' focuses much less scrutiny on Mr. Biden's foreign policy team's actions and omissions than on those of his domestic advisers.

Yahoo

21-05-2025

Politics
Yahoo

Mortal Sin

In an interview last week, Joe Biden's national security adviser claimed he was stunned to see his boss' disastrous debate performance in June 2024. 'What happened in that debate was a shock to me,' Jake Sullivan said. 'I think it was a shock to everybody.' Seeing the president incapable of completing sentences and lost in a tangle of words may have been shocking for someone who routinely avoids the news. But it wasn't surprising to anyone paying even casual attention to Biden over the past several years. And it certainly wasn't a surprise to Jake Sullivan. On December 9, 2022, more than 18 months before the debate that would end his political career, Biden forgot the names of two White House senior officials. One of them was Jake Sullivan. Standing in the Outer Oval with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Kate Bedingfield, his communications director, he couldn't come up with either of their names, according to one witness. 'Steve …' he said to Sullivan. 'Steve …' he continued, obviously struggling to recall Jake's name. He turned to Bedingfield. 'Press,' he called her, as he beckoned them into the Oval Office. This incident comes to us in a new book from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson that has had Washington buzzing over the past week, titled Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. It's one new anecdote among dozens that, taken together, provide an authoritative, detailed, and devastating account of one of the most consequential scandals in modern American history: The president of the United States was unfit to perform the duties of the job, and those close to him went to extraordinary lengths to hide his deterioration. 'Joe Biden knows my name,' Sullivan insisted last week, saying he doesn't recall the episode described in the book. But for Sullivan to have truly been surprised by Biden's confusion and incoherence at the election's only presidential debate would have required his ignorance of dozens of similar incidents, many of them public, as well as sweeping changes to the way the White House staff and the Biden campaign handled the president to hide his decline. Beginning early in his presidency, top White House advisers and Biden family members devised plans to accommodate his decline. As the president's limitations became clearer, according to Tapper and Thompson, White House speechwriters 'were slowly adapting to Biden's diminished capabilities.' The communications team dramatically limited his public appearances and media interviews. Internal conversations with staff and members of his Cabinet were scripted for Biden—including discussions that took place beyond the eyes of the White House press corps. Biden's staff imposed tight limits on his daily schedule, often restricting his meetings and activities to midday hours when Biden was thought to be at his best. As his gait became more unsteady, and after some embarrassing falls, his team sought to shorten distances he'd walk and recommended changes to his footwear that would provide the president with additional stability. Biden's fundraisers were reprogrammed with strict limits on the number of questions Biden took from his audiences and little time for spontaneous interaction with those funding his reelection. All the while, top Biden advisers insisted to reporters that the president was fine—as sharp as ever, in command of facts, energetic in meetings, perfectly capable not only of running for reelection but serving another four years. The public gaffes were anomalous, they insisted, indicative of nothing more than the occasional brain fart, and we all have those, right? His literal missteps? Okay, he's getting a little older and he has arthritis in his feet, they would concede, but none of this has any effect on his ability to do the job. If a reporter was imprudent enough to ask about Biden's increasing number of blunders, they'd be quietly threatened with revoked access to White House sources and sometimes attacked in public. The main contribution Original Sin makes to the public debate about Biden is providing new, authoritative reporting on the president's decline and the concerted behind-the-scenes effort by top Democrats to conceal it. But for the average reader, the most powerful part of the book comes in a six-page section called 'Special Counsel Robert Hur, Part Two,' when the authors retell a story already in the public domain. The battle over the report by special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden's alleged mishandling of classified information, was widely covered at the time. Hur and his team listened to recordings of conversations Biden had with Mark Zwonitzer, a writer who helped him with the book he wrote after serving as vice president. The recordings were important for two reasons: Biden discussed his possession of classified materials and seemed to have shared them with his co-writer, and the former vice president, in the words of Tapper and Thompson, 'sounded very old and quite diminished. In 2017.' In the fall of 2023, Hur interviewed Biden twice for a total of more than five hours. The special counsel concluded that, while the president may have committed crimes by knowingly keeping and discussing classified information after his service as vice president, he shouldn't be prosecuted—in part because a jury would likely find him a 'sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.' Top Democrats and sympathetic media personalities insisted that Hur was exaggerating the president's mental deterioration and savaged him as a right-wing hack motivated by politics. For several days, they subjected Hur to an unceasing stream of withering attacks on his character and motives. But a closer look at the interviews (and the actual audio, released publicly by Axios over the weekend) made clear that if anything, Hur was understating Biden's struggles. The special counsel's questioning of Biden was gentle, not adversarial. Tapper and Thompson republish excerpts of the transcripts nearly verbatim, and the result is an extraordinarily uncomfortable read. There is a relentlessness to Biden's confusion—'I'm, at this stage, in 2009, am I still vice president?' Biden wonders aloud—that leaves the reader hoping for someone to intervene. And at one point, in the middle of a long Biden digression on losing his son, Beau, to cancer, Hur does just that. 'Sir, I'm wondering if this is a good time to take a break briefly,' Hur said. 'Would that be—' But Biden kept going. No one who had read these transcripts—let alone worked closely with the president daily on crucial matters of national security, as Jake Sullivan had—should have been surprised by Biden's debate performance a few months later. With so much public evidence of Biden's decline and so many Democrats with a window into the president's deterioration, why did the establishment media pay so little attention to the story? It's not true, as some professional right-wing outrage merchants have claimed, that the establishment media failed to report on Biden's mental acuity altogether. But major investigations were rare enough that we can tally them on one hand and have digits left over—and it could be argued that we can count them with the same finger many Americans extend in our direction when asked about their views of contemporary American journalism. On June 5, 2024, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes headlined, 'Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.' The story relied on interviews with 'more than 45 people over several months' and reported that people who have worked with Biden, 'including Democrats and some who have known him back to his time as vice president, described a president who appears slower now, someone who has both good moments and bad ones.' Anyone who follows politics understands when the Washington press corps is obsessed with a story. Take, for example, the New York Times' coverage of the Al Qa'qaa weapons depot in the week leading up to the 2004 election. The Times reported on October 25 that the U.S. military had allowed 380 tons of high explosives held at Al Qa'qaa to go missing, demonstrating the incompetence of the Bush administration's oversight of Iraq. The Times alone ran about two dozen stories about Al Qa'qaa over the next week, and there were 823 mentions of Al Qa'qaa in English-language media over the same period. The coverage of Biden's deterioration never reached that fever pitch—until the debate. Prior to that night, the approach to covering Biden's age and cognitive fitness was often timid and apologetic—more 'let's do this story we don't want to do,' than 'let's go all-in on this big scandal.' There are several reasons for this: general ideological bias, fear of helping Donald Trump, worries about access to the White House, and more. A Republican with such extensive public evidence of cognitive decline would have undoubtedly been subject to relentless questioning by the country's leading political journalists. The failure to include cognitive test results on his medical disclosure forms would have been taken as prima facie evidence of a cover-up. White House press briefings would have featured hostile exchanges with a press secretary denying observable reality, and background sources would have been badgered to acknowledge public concern reflected in polling. Even without this everyday coverage, voters consistently told pollsters they had concerns about Biden's age and his mental fitness. In the spring of 2023, only 32 percent of voters surveyed in a Washington Post/ABC News poll said they believed Biden had the 'mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president.' An NBC News poll taken in June of that same year found that 55 percent of voters had 'major' concerns about Biden having the physical and mental health to serve as president. The media failure went beyond sins of omission to sins of commission, too. Perceptions of Biden's struggles were explained away in reported pieces as the result of misleading 'cheap fakes' or downplayed as problems anyone might have. Biden partisans denigrated anyone who raised concerns. The attack on Robert Hur from Jennifer Rubin, then a Washington Post columnist, was typical. 'But it was Hur's gratuitous smear about Biden's age and memory—most egregiously, his far-fetched allegation that Biden could not recall the date of his son Beau's death—that transformed a snide report into a political screed,' Rubin wrote. (In fact, Hur's claim about Biden's memory was not at all gratuitous, his allegation that Biden didn't recall the dates of Beau's death was accurate, and his report was neither snide nor a political screed.) MSNBC's Joe Scarborough did the same and later lashed out at anyone who might question Biden's abilities. 'Start your tape right now because I'm about to tell you the truth,' he said. 'And 'F' you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.' Scarborough stood by those comments in an interview this week. Few people who aren't related to Joe Biden or on his payroll are making that case today. In an appearance on 'The View' two weeks ago, Biden was asked by Alyssa Farah Griffin about reporting on his diminished mental acuity. 'Mr. President, since you left office, there have been a number of books that have come out—deeply sourced from Democratic sources—that claim in your final year, there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities, in the final year of your presidency,' Griffin said. 'What is your response to these allegations? And are these sources wrong?' Biden began his response. 'They are wrong,' he said. 'There's nothing to sustain that, number one. Number two, you know, think of what we were left with. We were left with a circumstance where we had a, ah, in insurrection where I started—we, that, not since the Civil War. We were in a circumstance where we were in a position where—well, I'll—pandemic, because of the incompetence of the last outfit end up over a million people dying, a million people dying. And we're also in a situation where we found ourselves, ah, unable to deal with, ah, a lot of just basic issues, which I won't go into—interest of time. And so we went to work, and we got it done. And, you know, one of the things that, that—well, I talked too long.' As Biden struggled, his wife, sitting by his side, jumped in to answer the question. 'And Alyssa, one of the things I think is that the people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us,' Jill Biden said. 'And they didn't see how hard Joe worked—every single day. I mean, he'd get up, he'd put in a full day, and then at night'—the camera cut away to a shot of Joe Biden, his face frozen in the distant stare so familiar to families who have dealt with loved ones struggling with cognitive issues—'I'd be in bed reading my book and he was still the one on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff. I mean, it was nonstop. The White House, being the president, is not like a job; it's a lifestyle. It's a life that you live. You live it 24 hours a day. That phone can ring at 11 o'clock at night or two in the morning. It's constant. You never leave it. And Joe worked really hard. I think he was a great president. And if you look at things today, give me Joe Biden anytime.' One can understand why Jill Biden would stand by her man and try to defend her husband's legacy. But it's precisely because the presidency is more than a job—because 'it's a life that you live … 24 hours a day'—that the cover-up in which she and others in Biden's inner circle participated is such a disgrace. The recent news that the former president was diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer only exacerbates how dire the situation truly was. Good days and bad days at the end of Grandpa's life are heartbreaking. But good days and bad days at the end of an American presidency are dangerous—and the effort to conceal them is a scandal of the first order.

Who's speaking at commencement events around N.H.?

Boston Globe

13-05-2025

Politics
Boston Globe

Who's speaking at commencement events around N.H.?

May 16 at 4 p.m. ( ) Jake Sullivan, national security advisor to former president Joe Biden who is married to Representative Maggie Goodlander, will address law school graduates at White Park in Concord. In August, he will join the UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law faculty as a senior fellow. University of New Hampshire May 17 at 9 a.m., 12:30 p.m., and 4 p.m. ( ) Scott 'Kidd' Poteet is a retired U.S. Air Force veteran who Get N.H. Morning Report A weekday newsletter delivering the N.H. news you need to know right to your inbox. Enter Email Sign Up Saint Anselm College ( ) Advertisement May 17 at 10 a.m. Carlos Lozada is a Peruvian journalist who won the Dartmouth College June 15 at 9:30 a.m. ( ) Sandra Oh is an actor and Advertisement This story first appeared in Globe NH | Morning Report, our free newsletter focused on the news you need to know about New Hampshire, including great coverage from the Boston Globe and links to interesting articles from other places. If you'd like to receive it via e-mail Monday through Friday, Amanda Gokee can be reached at

Joseph Nye, Political Scientist Who Extolled ‘Soft Power,' Dies at 88

New York Times

08-05-2025

Politics
New York Times

Joseph Nye, Political Scientist Who Extolled ‘Soft Power,' Dies at 88

Joseph S. Nye Jr., an influential figure in shaping American national security policy, who wrote seminal books on foreign affairs, held top jobs at Harvard and in government, and coined the term 'soft power' — the idea that America's global influence was more than its military might — died on Tuesday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 88. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Daniel. Sometimes considered the dean of American political science, Mr. Nye led the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and held senior jobs in the Carter and Clinton administrations. His thinking radiated far outside the Ivory Tower: He influenced diplomats and national security officials, and, as a soft-spoken, fatherly figure, he was a mentor to many who made careers in government. 'Joe Nye was a giant: a giant because his ideas shaped the worldviews of multiple generations of policymakers — but even more so a giant because his personal touch shaped our life choices,' Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said in a text message. Mr. Nye developed the concept of soft power in the late 1980s to explain how America's ability to get other nations to do what it wanted rested on more than the power of its military or economy; it also derived from American values. 'Seduction is always more effective than coercion,' he explained in a 2005 interview. 'And many of our values, such as democracy, human rights and individual opportunity, are deeply seductive.' Soft power tools include diplomacy, economic assistance and trustworthy information, such as that provided in Voice of America broadcasts. He laid out his thinking in a 2004 book, 'Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.' Mr. Nye's insight gained wide currency with political leaders across ideological and national borders. It was cited favorably by the conservative Republican Newt Gingrich and the president of China, in 2007. Mr. Nye was invited to dinner in Beijing, where the foreign minister asked him how China could increase its soft power. Australia revised its diplomacy to incorporate soft power, telling the story of Australian culture to the world. 'Joe's seminal book on soft power is one of the very few books by a political scientist on international relations that had an impact on the real world beyond academia,' Derek Shearer, a professor of diplomacy at Occidental College in Los Angeles, said in an email. In 2009, during her confirmation hearings as the nominee for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton used the term 'smart power' 13 times — another concept Mr. Nye developed, meaning a combination of the tools of hard and soft power — in explaining how she would combat Islamic terrorism in the world. Mr. Nye's influence could be gauged by the tributes to him that were posted on social media immediately after his death. Antony Blinken, secretary of state in the Biden administration, described him as 'a friend and mentor to so many including me.' Admiral James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of NATO, said, 'Joe Nye was incredibly kind to me throughout my life.' Mr. Nye first worked in government in the Carter administration as a deputy under secretary of state from 1977 to 1979. He returned to Washington under President Bill Clinton in 1993 to chair the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates intelligence estimates for the president. In 1994, he was appointed assistant secretary for international security affairs at the Pentagon, where he and colleagues developed a new Asia policy at a low point of U.S.-Japan relations. What became known as the 'Nye initiative' affirmed America's military commitment to Asia and the U.S.-Japan alliance as a bulwark against China and North Korea. Mr. Nye was also known as an intellectual father of neoliberalism in foreign policy. A 1977 book that he wrote with Robert Keohane, 'Power and Interdependence,' emphasized that military power was a declining force and that nations could ensure a peaceful world through global institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. The book was assigned to graduate students of government for four decades. Mr. Nye, who joined the Harvard faculty in 1964, was dean of the Kennedy School of Government from 1995 to 2004. He pushed for more women and Republican voices in its ranks. 'He helped build this institution into what it is today, while transforming the field of international relations,' Jeremy Weinstein, the current Kennedy School dean, wrote to colleagues in an email this week. In his ideas and his professional roles, Mr. Nye was a charter member of America's foreign policy establishment, a term sometimes used pejoratively to mean a bipartisan consensus by Republicans and Democrats about the importance of globalization in economic and world affairs. He was a leader of international nongovernmental organizations such as the Trilateral Commission, the Aspen Strategy Group and the Atlantic Council. President Trump, since he first rode a populist wave to power in 2016, has denounced mainstream national security professionals, dismissing them as a Washington elite desperate to hold on to power. Mr. Nye saw an America in decline under Mr. Trump. Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. was born on Jan. 19, 1937, in South Orange, N.J. His father was a bond trader on Wall Street, and his mother, Else (Ashwell) Nye, had been a secretary when she met her future husband. A Puritan ancestor, Benjamin Nye, arrived in Massachusetts in 1639. Joe, as Mr. Nye was called, graduated from Morristown Prep, now the Morristown Beard School, in Morristown, N.J., and from Princeton University, where he earned a B.A. in 1958. He won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where he did graduate work. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard with a dissertation about East Africa emerging from colonialism. In 1961, he married Mary Harding, known as Molly, whom he had met when they were teenagers. She ran an art gallery in Lexington, Mass., and then became a docent at the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington when the couple lived in the capital. Their principal residence was a home on Lexington Battle Green, in Lexington, Mass. They also owned a 900-acre farm in North Sandwich, N.H., where Mr. Nye grew vegetables, hunted deer and made maple syrup. Ms. Nye died in December 2024. Besides his son Daniel, Mr. Nye is survived by two other sons, John and Benjamin, and nine grandchildren. Mr. Nye conceived of soft power while working at his kitchen table on a response to a best-selling 1988 book by the British historian Paul Kennedy, 'The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,' which argued that the United States was in long-term decline. Mr. Nye did not accept that bleak conclusion. He laid out his response in a 1990 book, 'Bound to Lead,' and later more fully in 'Soft Power,' which argued that America exerts a seductive appeal to the world not just because of Coca-Cola or Hollywood movies, but also because it stands for democracy, the rule of law and, at its best, humanitarianism. This year, Mr. Nye watched in deep dismay as President Trump, less restrained than in his first term, gutted basic instruments of U.S. soft power, including food and medical aid to foreign countries and the Voice of America. 'I'm afraid President Trump doesn't understand soft power,' Mr. Nye told CNN in an interview days before his death. 'Think back on the Cold War — American nuclear deterrence and American troops in Europe were crucial. But when the Berlin Wall went down, it didn't go down under a barrage of artillery. It went down under hammers and bulldozers wielded by people whose minds had been changed by the Voice of America and the BBC.'

[Contribution] Defining the 'yard' in the age of economic security

Korea Herald

28-04-2025

Business
Korea Herald

[Contribution] Defining the 'yard' in the age of economic security

President of Chey Institute for Advanced Studies As globalization gives way to a new era of economic security, the phrase 'small yard, high fence' has become a strategic touchstone. Before building ever-higher fences — through tariffs, export controls and other protectionist tools — we must first define the yard we intend to protect. For the United States and its allies, including South Korea, this requires not just a defensive posture, but strategic clarity on what technologies and industries are truly worth safeguarding and growing. The strategic turn Popularized by former US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the concept of 'small yard, high fence' traces back to the first Trump administration, when Chinese tech firms like Huawei and ZTE were targeted. Now, with President Donald Trump's return to office, protectionism has been re-energized — not just as policy, but as a political and industrial rallying cry. At stake is the revival of American manufacturing and the middle class. Yet amid rising fences, a deeper question remains: What exactly belongs in the yard? Three principles for defining the yard: Strategic necessity Certain capabilities — like shipbuilding or steelmaking — are vital for national defense and economic independence, even if they lack short-term commercial efficiency. The US shipbuilding sector, despite the Jones Act, has declined precipitously. The UK, too, is scrambling to save its last virgin steel facility. These cases illustrate how easily core industrial capacity can erode without clear strategic prioritization. Honest assessment of enduring strengths The US leads in software, cloud, semiconductor design and academic research. But it lags in advanced manufacturing, battery supply chains and rare earth processing. Protecting sectors purely out of nostalgia or overlooking structural weaknesses undermines strategic credibility. And allied coordination No country can secure the future of critical technologies alone. Deep cooperation is essential, especially in areas like AI, small modular reactors, biotech and semiconductor packaging. For the US, Japan and South Korea, aligning comparative strengths and building shared 'yards' will be key to success. A high fence only matters if it surrounds something worth defending. Over-expanding the yard risks incoherence; over-tightening the fence risks stagnation and diplomatic backlash. The ultimate goal should be a resilient and forward-looking ecosystem — nurtured through investment, innovation and alliances. True national resilience begins not with exclusion, but with clarity of purpose. The US and its allies must focus not only on what to protect, but what to grow. A yard well-defined and well-tended needs no towering fence to justify its value. Kim Yoo-suk is president of Chey Institute for Advanced Studies, a think tank affiliated with SK Group. -- Ed.