# Jake Sullivan

Jacob Jeremiah Sullivan (born November 28, 1976) is an American political advisor who serves as the United States National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden. He was previously a senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign and her deputy chief of staff at the Department of State, when she was Secretary of State. Sullivan was also a senior advisor to the U.S. government for the Iran nuclear negotiations and a visiting professor at Yale Law School, and unnamed foreign policy advisor.

## Quotes

* The United States still has the ability to more than hold its own in that competition, so long as it doesn’t continue along the current trajectory of self-sabotage. But the fact that China has two plausible paths to preeminence means that the contest will be more complex, and potentially more challenging, than it was during America’s last great-power rivalry.
** Hal Brands and Jake Sullivan, "China Has Two Paths to Global Domination", Foreign Policy (May 22, 2020)
* I spoke to my counterpart Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe of Denmark about the apparent sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines. The U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate and we will continue our work to safeguard Europe's energy security. 8:11 PM · Sep 27, 2022
** Quoted in [https://www.businessinsider.com/nordstream-pipelines-gas-leak-apparent-sabotage-us-involvement-2022-9 The US is supporting efforts to investigate the 'apparent sabotage' of the Nord Stream pipelines, national security advisor says, Business Insider, Sep 28, 2022
* [ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ] does have a responsibility to rein in the extremist settlers on the West Bank [who are] pouring fuel on the fire
** in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper Sullivan: Extremist settler violence in West Bank is 'totally unacceptable' (October 29, 2023)
* We are actively working to ensure the safe return of every American being held hostage and every other person being held hostage by Hamas
** Toddler among US hostages in Gaza - White House (13 November 2023) Jessica Murphy BBC News

## About Jake Sullivan

* Last Sunday... Sullivan made a claim that has drawn criticism from Republican lawmakers... [regarding] sanctions [on] the company in charge of the pipeline, Nord Stream 2 AG, and its chief executive officer... “We waived sanctions only on two, and they were not Russian. It was a German individual and a Swiss company,” Sullivan said... Sullivan’s assertion that Nord Stream 2 AG is “not Russian” is misleading. Though the company is indeed registered as a Swiss entity, it is wholly owned by Gazprom – an energy company that is majority-owned by the Russian government... a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, told us that Sullivan is “absolutely correct” that Nord Stream 2 AG is a Swiss company “as a point of law.” But we still think Sullivan went too far, regardless of his intent, when he said with no additional explanation that the company is “not Russian” even though it is, in fact, controlled by Putin’s Kremlin
** Fact check: White House national security adviser misleadingly describes pipeline company as ‘not Russian’, by Daniel Dale, CNN, June 26, 2021

### How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline, by Seymour Hersh, February 8, 2023

    (Full text February 8, 2023)
* ...As Long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia. It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan. All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge. In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.
* What became clear to participants... is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President... in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
* President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea