National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s April 27 speech at the Brookings Institution, explaining the Biden administration’s global-economy policies, is an odd piece at an important time. Mr. Sullivan covers a lot of ground in a lengthy (4,981-word) speech: “industrial strategy” and subsidies; trade and tariffs; the U.S. relationship with China; brief excursions into finance, aid, and infrastructure, and so on. Parts of it work well, in particular his passage on China policy. Some other parts less so. That on trade especially is a sort of study in breezy mis-summarization of history, muddy elucidation of current choices, and unclear future direction.
Most important, when taken as a whole and given its timing just as the 2024 presidential campaign begins, the speech seems to be politically out of tune and picking the wrong targets. It is vigorous if defensive in rebuking the Biden administration’s liberal-internationalist friends for their worries that it may be overreaching in industrial strategy and under-reaching in trade policy. It is premature at best in positing that the administration’s global-economy agenda has achieved consensus status as the “project of the 2020s and 2030s,” and does not recognize — despite warnings from allies as important and close to the subject as Japan — the strength of the Chinese counter-“project.” And while spending lots of time in an argument with the 1990s, it elides not only the recent Trump administration record but the domestic political challenge from the administration’s Trumpist/isolationist enemies — which, in a few months, will seek to end the Biden administration, and with it not only Sullivan’s version of international economics but the 80-year liberal-internationalist legacy the speech rightly praises.
