Jake Sullivan, whom Joe Biden has chosen this week as his future national security adviser, has frequently praised China’s rising international prominence.
Sullivan worked as a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and also served in the Obama administration.
While speaking with CBS News Senior National Security Contributor Michael Morell on the Intelligence Matters podcast, he insisted that the U.S. facilitating China’s rise is a “success.”
“We helped create the conditions of stability and security in East Asia that allowed China to have this remarkable economic rise. So that it’s rising, in a way, is not the failure of American foreign policy; it’s the success of creating those stable conditions,” Sullivan declared.
He made similar remarks while speaking at the Lowy Institute in 2017.
“We need to strike a middle course — one that encourages China’s rise in a manner consistent with an open, fair, rules-based, regional order,” Sullivan said. “This will require care and prudence and strategic foresight, and maybe even more basically it will require sustained attention. It may not have escaped your notice that these are not in ample supply in Washington right now.”
During the same lecture, Sullivan asserted that China policy needs to be about more than just bilateral ties, “it needs to be about our ties to the region that create an environment more conducive to a peaceful and positive sum Chinese rise.”
Sullivan’s comments are in line with those made by Biden in 2011: “I’ve held the view for so many years and continue to hold the view that a rising China is a positive development.”
The attitude of Biden toward China is the polar opposite of President Trump, who has treated China as a rival that seeks to diminish America’s power and national security while siphoning off its business and industry.
High-level members of the Trump administration have repeatedly sounded the alarm about the threats on multiple levels posed by Communist China.
“The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has launched an orchestrated campaign, across all of its many tentacles in Chinese government and society, to exploit the openness of our institutions in order to destroy them,” Attorney General Bill Barr has said. He contended that the communist nation is using “a wide array of predatory and often unlawful tactics,” including currency manipulation, cyberattacks, espionage, and intellectual property theft.
He added that China “has systematically preyed on American companies” by imposing health market obstacles like price limitations and counterfeiting. The attorney general noted that Chinese nationals employed at American pharmaceutical companies have been caught stealing secrets in both the U.S. and abroad.
“The ultimate ambition of China’s rulers isn’t to trade with the United States. “It is to raid the United States.”
Even FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is by no means a Trump loyalist, has been outspoken about the China threat.
It’s the people of the United States who are the victims of what amounts to Chinese theft on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history,” he asserted at an event in July, adding that “the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality, is the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China. It’s a threat to our economic security — and, by extension, to our national security.”
The FBI director went on to warn that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “believes it is in a generational fight to surpass our country in economic and technological leadership” — a fight that is not being waged by “legitimate” means, but rather “engaged in a whole-of-state effort to become the world’s only superpower by any means necessary.”
But you can’t expect Biden to speak ill of his partners in crime.
After all, his son, Hunter, was involved in dealings that helped China acquire American technology with potential military applications. The young Biden also got rich off Chinese coal even while his father was in the White House declaring war on American coal.
Is it any surprise that China has celebrated Biden’s supposed “victory” over President Trump? Xi Jinping and the elites of the CCP must be ecstatic at the prospect of having one of their longtime assets safely installed at the reins of their chief rival nation.
