A Russian Defeat in Ukraine Could Save Taiwan
Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, told me at the Aspen Security Forum on Friday that he worries China may be learning the wrong lessons from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Many people assume that China, observing Russia’s inability to conquer Ukraine, might be newly hesitant to invade Taiwan: “Hey, maybe we should completely rethink this” is the thought that Sullivan hopes enters Chinese minds. “But the thinking could also be How do we do it better than [Russia] if we had to do it?” Sullivan said.
It is both Sullivan’s job and his natural inclination to worry, but in our conversation, he did note that Russia’s inability to have its way in Ukraine has been enormously consequential for the West. “Russia was not able to achieve the basic strategic objectives that President [Vladimir] Putin set out, which were to seize the capital city of Kyiv and to end Ukraine as a going concern,” he said. “And instead the Ukrainians won the battle of Kyiv. They beat Russia back from Kharkiv. They stopped Russia from being able to make a bum’s rush to Odesa. And they essentially stymied the Russian effort to get beyond a swath of territory in the south and east of the country. And now we’re in a circumstance in which Russia is facing significant difficulties constituting the kind of force necessary for them to achieve their objectives.”
Our conversation at the security forum, a three-and-a-half-day Burning Man for the national-security set, sponsored by the Aspen Security Group, was held before an audience that included three former national security advisers—Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Tom Donilon. Sullivan could not have found this particularly relaxing, but he provided thought-provoking answers about subjects as varied as strategic ambiguity and American exceptionalism, and parried questions about the hardest subjects he confronts, including the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan and U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia. On Afghanistan, he said, in advance of the first anniversary next month of the American withdrawal, “It had to come to an end.”
What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited by me for concision and clarity:
Jeffrey Goldberg: Let’s talk about the Middle East trip, specifically about the most controversial aspect of this trip, the meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. President Biden called him a pariah earlier, and now he went to meet him. Was it a mistake to call him a pariah?
Jake Sullivan: I think what’s interesting about the way that this has been covered is that time seemed to stop between this debate comment made in October of 2019, and the president traveling to Saudi Arabia in July of 2022. A lot happened in between.
When President Biden came into office, he made a fundamental strategic judgment that we were going to recalibrate, but not rupture, our relationship with Saudi Arabia. And so this wasn’t a decision that he made in the weeks leading up to this trip. This is a decision he made
