Corporate WATCH
Commentary by Joe SchaefferJoe Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has come out and said it, repeatedly. The tyrannical, blood-stained Chinese communist government cannot be regarded by U.S. foreign policy as similar to the USSR because Americans have too many close ties to the despotic regime.
Sullivan is a longtime former aide to Hillary Clinton who perhaps revealed his true transactional nature towards China in a shocking 2011 missive from the WikiLeaks data dump of Hillary’s emails. At that time he forwarded a New York Times op-ed to Hillary with a Subject Head labeled “INTERESTING ARTICLE.” The author’s argument? That China should be allowed to buy Taiwan from the U.S.:
"There are dozens of initiatives President Obama could undertake to strengthen our economic security. Here is one: He should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United States-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015."
Hillary replied to Sullivan, saying the grotesquely base idea was “so clever.”
Is it any wonder that the people of Taiwan overwhelmingly desired President Donald Trump’s re-election?
Sullivan has a disturbingly consistent track record of appeasement to China. In 2013, while serving as Director of Policy Planning at Hillary’s State Department under the Obama administration, he answered a reporter from state-run media outlet China Daily’s question by assuring her the U.S. would never do anything to contain China (bold added throughout rest of column):
MS. JENSEN: Our next question comes from Weihua Chen from China Daily USA: There are conflicting messages from the Obama Administration officials explaining the pivot or rebalance to Asia. Some say it’s not aimed at China, but others point to potential threats from China. Is there a consistent message from the Administration regarding this, or should we expect different ones from the State Department and Pentagon?
MR. SULLIVAN: I think here the answer is very simple: The United States has no interest in and no policy to contain China. We welcome China’s rise as a peaceful and prosperous power within a broader rules-based order for the Asia Pacific. In fact, over the last four decades and longer, it has been mostly the hard work and ingenuity of the Chinese people themselves that has driven China’s rise. But there has also been a contribution from other countries like the United States that have helped create the conditions for all of the countries, including China, to develop economically, to operate in a context of relative peace and security.
So the United States doesn’t just say that we welcome China’s rise; we’ve shown that over the course of our policies for the last many decades. What we would like to see is a relationship between the United States and China that is positive, cooperative, and comprehensive, that looks to expand the areas where we can work together to take on the great challenges of our time. And where we have differences and where there is lingering mistrust, we should work to narrow those differences and overcome that mistrust. That’s been the consistent message from the State Department, from the Pentagon, and from the White House. And any person who says otherwise doesn’t represent the views of this Administration.
In a January 2019 Dartmouth College appearance, Sullivan mocked the “body language” of a growing consensus in America that the nation needed to get tougher on China:
"I think there has been a useful corrective from this view that China would just conform to a Western-style system, either domestically or in terms of it just kind of buying in lock, stock and barrel to the international order. But I think that corrective has gone way overboard. I don't believe that we are destined for a new Cold War with China.”
In an extremely important admission, Sullivan goes on to add that he does not want to see communist China's government collapse because it would harm the "interconnected world" of today. 1.4 billion people being freed from communism would be a bad thing in his mind:
"We're not hoping for a country of 1.4 billion people to just implode the way the Soviet Union did. That would not be in our interests in the interconnected world we live in today....
"You can't build a strategy the way that we did in the Cold War viz a viz China. You have to expect it is going to be a confident, self-assured large actor on the world stage and ask yourself, 'OK, so what are the parameters of that relationship.' And from there, then, I think you try to build an effective pathway to get from where we are now to there."
Make no mistake. Sullivan truly is saying tyrannical China cannot be treated like the Soviet Union because we have too many "connections" with this brutal dictatorship in our modern globalist world today.
Here he is emphasizing his point again at the Humphrey School at the University of Minnesota in November:
"The interaction between the two great powers is different [from the Cold War USSR]. We have interconnections economically in terms of people-to-people ties, in terms of a history of diplomatic engagement going back to [Jimmy Carter’s] Vice President [Walter] Mondale's leadership and before. So we need a different formula here."
In a 2017 interview for Harvard’s Belfer Center, where he used to be a Senior Fellow, Sullivan bluntly asserted that a “thriving” China was in the best interests of America:
"Is this a zero-sum relationship or is it a relationship where we can both mutually benefit? And if your answer is it's zero-sum, that if China's succeeding economically it means we're doing something wrong, then we are in for a really bad stretch, both economically and in terms of the possibility of ending up in confrontation. My view is that the United States will be more secure and more prosperous if China is stable, and it is thriving, and playing by the rules."
Sullivan was chatting with globalist Deep State apparatchik Nicholas Burns. As we wrote in September, George Soros defender Burns’ career history, serving both Republican and Democrat administrations, presents a fascinating window into how interventionist foreign policy aggression slides seamlessly into an overall leftist agenda. Globalists make excellent cultural progressives and now cultural progressives are well into the process of becoming superb neocons.
Always remember: It’s a network. And Joe Biden and his administration are tied to this network by every string that pulls his aged, cognitively-challenged body.
Sullivan’s mindset is what happens when you see nations only as wedges in a globalist pie. In fact, this is how he sees America as well.
In a May 2020 Hudson Institute interview, Sullivan defends what his host calls the “free flow of people” as a way to grow the American economy. Sullivan offers a clearly negative explanation of Trump supporters who see America as more than just a shopping mall needing constant economic growth:
"When it comes to immigration, the evidence is pretty clear that the kind of restrictionist immigration policies being advocated and in fact carried out by the Trump administration and its allies is a net drag on U.S. economic growth and is not in fact going to somehow power native-born American wages in some way. So I think this is an area where there is a robust debate across the parties and where I think the evidence very much favors one side over the other and that a lot of what is fueling the other side is more cultural than economic. Kind of some ephemeral notion of who America is and what America's supposed to look like more than it's grounded in solid research that says it's actually having a harmful impact on American economic growth. I think quite the contrary."
This is what he opposes:
"I do think there is a nativist element to it. And what I mean by nativist is a notion of the United States as being something more than just an idea but a kind of people who look a kind of way and speak a kind of way. I think that is something that is present and in fact in your own [interviewer] writings when you describe the Jacksonian element in America, in Trumpism across the country, there is a Blood and Soil component to that."
Sullivan does not shy away from saying it of himself: He IS an internationalist.
In 2019 he penned a piece in The Atlantic in which he openly stated that U.S. foreign policy cannot only serve America's interests. It must be about serving the interests of other nations as well:
How does exceptionalism fit into this analysis? The United States cannot keep leading if it starts being seen by others as a “normal” power, interested exclusively in its narrow self-interest. America has to keep demonstrating that it is an unusual power, in terms of its attitudes, habits, methods, and ideas. Being exceptional means putting these core attributes to work for America’s own interests, yes—but also for the common good. Similarly, at home, the public will accept major investment in foreign policy only if it believes the United States is not just a normal country, with normal responsibilities. Exceptionalism is how you reconcile patriotism with internationalism.
A child can see where this feverish sense of world mission is going to lead: Interventionism on steroids. It is a prospect National Security Adviser Sullivan seems to relish. In 2017 he spoke before the Australian Lowy Institute and did not mince any words: The USA has a duty to be involved in every major issue in the world at all times:
"There is no major problem in the world today that the United States can solve on its own. Not even close. But there's also <strong>no major problem</strong> in the world today that we can see readily how the United States's complete absence won't make it more difficult to solve."
This is what the Hillary-Obama-Biden Democratic globalist nexus believes. American sovereignty is to be sacrificed on the altar of internationalist “interconnection.” And 1.4 billion suffering Chinese are to endure the horrors of tyrannical communism for the “benefit” of those getting fat on what Sullivan terms the “liberal internationalist order.” It isn’t about countries. It is about elites, and how they can harness the world to work for them.
Joe Schaeffer is the former Managing Editor of The Washington Times National Weekly Edition. His columns appear at WorldTribune.com and FreePressInternational.org.
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