Sullivan Defends Biden's Decisions on Russia Sanctions, China Tech Competition
Former U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan defended the Biden administration's final weeks of moves that imposed sanctions against Russia and export controls on China, saying they set up the current administration for success.
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Sullivan, speaking during an event last week hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said President Joe Biden's administration waited until January to issue a large sanctions package targeting Russia’s energy sector because it was concerned that imposing those sanctions earlier would have done too much damage to the U.S. economy and crippled support for Ukraine.
Sullivan noted that “a lot of people called for us to” impose those sanctions, and “understandably.” That included current Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who called the January sanctions package a “craven political move” to increase pressure on Russia “on the way out the door” (see 2503070035).
But Sullivan said that imposing the massive package of restrictions any earlier “would have driven up” gas prices too high in the U.S., since it targeted major Russian oil producers and the provision of U.S. petroleum services to parties in Russia. The subsequent price hikes would have “imperiled our ability to sustain support for Ukraine over the long term.”
“Now, when that supply environment changed, when the overall price of oil came down, we were in a position to then be able to impose oil sanctions on Russia,” he said. “And that was a trade-off we had to make.”
He called it a “hard choice” but said he would do it again. “But I get why some people would say, ‘Hey, you should have moved earlier on oil sanctions,’” Sullivan said. “It's a huge source of revenue for Russia and would have put more of a squeeze on them economically than the squeeze we put on.”
Sullivan also defended the Biden administration’s “strong competitive actions” against China, specifically mentioning artificial intelligence. The administration tried to “compete like hell while managing competition so that it doesn't tip over into conflict,” and “that's what we did.”
The Biden administration issued multiple complex export control-related rules in its final months, including new regulations to place worldwide export controls on advanced computing chips and certain closed artificial intelligence model weights (see 2501130026) and a rule that introduced new license obligations on a broader set of foreign-made chip tools (see 2412020016).
When Biden first took office, Sullivan said, China was believed to be on track to “surpass the United States economically by the end of this decade” and dominate the global AI industry. But “now the conventional wisdom is they may never surpass the United States” economically, he said, adding that he believes the U.S. “has the best hand to be able to shape the future of artificial intelligence.”
He also noted that the administration was able to coordinate some of its chip-related export restrictions with allies.
“So, from my perspective, I think the approach that we took to China and the position we had put the United States in in 2025, looking back to where we were in 2021, I feel very good about our policy on China,” Sullivan said.
Asked how the U.S. can best deter China from potentially invading Taiwan, Sullivan said the U.S. needs to combine diplomacy with “deterrence.” The Biden administration “did a lot of work” to facilitate arms sales and exports to the island (see 2307310020), he said, adding that the administration also was prepared to impose sanctions, alongside allies, against China in response to a possible invasion.
Part of the U.S. strategy was to “indicate to the [People’s Republic of China] that a war would also bring economic catastrophe for China, and that means working on a set of economic countermeasures and showing that we would be prepared to use them alongside friends,” Sullivan said. “And so deterrence is really important.”