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EXCLUSIVE: An Interview with outgoing US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan
America’s adversaries are looking to exploit the transition period between the Biden and Trump Administrations, China has a fateful choice to make about its own role in the world, and the biggest challenge for US foreign policy might have more to do with clean energy than hard power, according to outgoing US National security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
Sullivan, speaking with Ian Bremmer before a live audience at 92Y in New York on Tuesday as part of a special episode of our nationally-syndicated television show GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, shared his views on key US foreign policy issues at what he said was “a huge, plastic moment of turbulence and transition” in global politics.
A few highlights:
On the transition to Trump. Despite huge differences of opinion about policy, he said, Team Biden has been working hard to ensure that with Team Trump everyone is “singing from the same song sheet” on key risks, in particular the prospect of a weakened Iran accelerating its nuclear program.
The unexpectedly swift collapse of the Assad regime, he said, is a moment of “promise but also profound risk” in which the US must work both with its Kurdish allies in the country as well as with other outside powers to ensure that the country doesn’t become a power vacuum and a haven for international terrorism.
A “just peace” in Ukraine should be “up to the Ukrainians.” He said he hoped Trump will “continue to provide Ukraine with the defensive capacity so that Ukraine's in the best possible position on the battlefield, which will put them in a better position at the negotiating table.”
Russia is more beat up than it looks. High inflation, unsustainable spending, and staggering combat losses in Ukraine are taking a toll, he said. “The conventional wisdom from a few months ago was ‘Russia's got it made in the shade economically, they can do this indefinitely’ – I don't think the economic signals we're seeing right now bear that out.”
China has a big choice to make. Does it want to slip deeper into an axis of reactionary powers like Russia, Iran, and North Korea, or does it want to assume a more constructive global role, even as it competes with the US? “The world,” he said, “should put the onus on China to make the right choice.”
What worries him most? “The one thing that makes me nervous,” he said, “is the need for us to deploy clean energy rapidly enough to power the computing power necessary to stay at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence.”
For more of the conversation: including what Sullivan learned from spending hundreds of hours with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, why he thinks Joe Biden’s foreign policy planted seeds that will bear fruit “for a generation”, and how an American invasion of Canada might compare with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, keep an eye out for Ian’s GZERO newsletter, dropping later today.
And to catch the whole interview: tune in to GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airing on PBS-affiliates nationwide starting Friday. More info here.
Opinion: The biggest problem for Syria's new rulers
The rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, who toppled the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad less than a week ago, have a lot of things to do now: restore order, provide security, manage all the external powers that are jockeying for position in the new Syria.
But while they’re doing all of that they also have to deal with the flags guy.
As a Financial Times piece from Damascus this week describes, HTS rebels have been canvassing various government ministries to figure out who does what in the country they now control. One guy they met runs the Department of Flags. The responsibility of this “department” is, apparently, to hang flags for visiting foreign dignitaries.
Sure, the hanging of flags doesn’t seem like the most pressing item on the agenda right now, but the episode highlights something important: HTS is dealing with the problem that all successful revolutionaries do – now that they run the show, who’s going to … actually run the show?
After all, revolutions are carried out by fighters, but governments are run by bureaucrats. And most hardened militants aren’t particularly good at coordinating trash collection routes, running power plants, processing tax returns, organizing school curricula, or renewing driver's licenses – that is to say, doing all of the mundane things that affect most people’s lives most of the time.
Alongside the grander and more telegenic sweeps of a revolution – the triumphant entries and soaring speeches — there’s the more mundane work of governing well. A Syria broken and weary from more than a decade of war deserves at least as much.
So who’s going to do it? There are tens of thousands of people who worked the institutions of the state under Assad, but whom to keep, whom to fire, and whom to put on trial is the question.
That last part is particularly important in Syria today. All governments are evil in the eyes of the revolutionaries who topple them. But few were as fanatically brutal as the Assad regime and the Baath party institutions that supported it.
Even before the civil war began in 2011, the Soviet-inspired Assad regime had massacred or arrested tens of thousands of people in crackdowns on political opponents or religious movements. After the conflict erupted, Assad’s security forces “disappeared” more than 100,000 people, and tortured at least 15,000 people to death, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
A colleague of mine in Damascus described visiting the infamous Sednaya Prison there this week, where he saw a “person-sized hydraulic press” that was, detainees say, used to torture prisoners and crush dead bodies beyond recognition.
The Syrian people will rightly expect someone to pay for those crimes. But how widely to cast the net of responsibility now puts HTS in fraught territory.
If they purge or prosecute too few people, they risk enraging a population that wants justice. Purge too many, and the state institutions can fall apart. Or, worse, those fired can end up forming a new nucleus of aggrieved opposition to the government.
This is what happened in Iraq after 2003, where the US organized a clumsily executed “Debaathification” campaign, purging thousands of officials in a bid to rid the government of any and all Saddam Hussein loyalists.
HTS leader Ahmed al-Shara – aka Abu Mohammed al-Golani, one of GZERO’s top political game changers of 2024 – probably remembers that well: The Islamic State that he was once a part of got a huge boost from Iraqi Baathists who were driven out of their government jobs.
So far, al-Shara has said he plans to close the Assad regime’s most notorious prisons, dissolve its security forces, and prosecute those responsible for human rights abuses.
Hanging over all of this is the question of what kind of government al-Shara really intends to impose. He casts himself as a reformed jihadist interested primarily in the good governance of Syria. But his Salafist pedigree – and the presence of unreformed hardliners under the HTS umbrella – raises justifiable concerns about the treatment of religious minorities, non-religious people, and women in the new Syria.
And that’s where flag guys come back into the picture. When Syria’s new HTS-appointed Prime Minister Mohammed Bashir gave his first public address this week, he stood next to two flags. One was the green, white, and black flag of the anti-Assad opposition. The other was emblazoned with the shahada, the Islamic oath of faith, a flag used by HTS and other Sunni extremist groups.
The backlash about that second flag was immediate among more secular-minded or non-Sunni Syrians, fearful about the prospect of strict Islamic rule. The US, meanwhile, which is weighing whether to lift terror-related sanctions against HTS, has also said that Washington would only recognize the new government of Syria if it respects minority rights.
A day later, Bashir gave an interview to Al-Jazeera. Behind him was just one flag: the Syrian national one. Was this just an easy aesthetic concession to the critics? Or is HTS really going to try to build a reasonably inclusive Syria?
Nobody knows yet. But one thing’s for sure: It’s worth keeping an eye on the flag guys.
Opinion: Donald Trump is about to be something most voters can't stand
Donald Trump has broken more norms than I have space to detail in 700 words. But suffice it to say that he is a politician who thrives on challenging, and often overcoming, assumptions about how politics work in a democracy.
So how do politics work in democracies these days? It’s a question that we had a lot of fodder to answer this year, being that more people voted in elections in 2024 than ever before. By some measures, some two billion eligible voters weighed their options across more than 70 countries.
One big thing we learned is that where voters have a real choice, they want to “throw the bums out” almost immediately. In election after election, incumbent leaders or parties got thrashed. The licking was even worse for many “establishment” parties.
In the UK, Tory PM Rishi Sunak surrendered power to the Labour Party for the first time in 14 years. In France, only a strange bedfellows tie-up with the resurgent hard left kept Emmanuel Macron’s centrists from losing to the far-right party of Marine Le Pen. And in the EU Parliament, rightwing anti-establishment groups made big gains too.
Meanwhile, South Korea’s midterm elections delivered a rebuke to conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol that was so resounding that this week he tried to pull off a coup just to marginalize the opposition. (Spoiler: It didn’t last long or go well.)
In some places, long-ruling incumbents held on but were taken down a peg. In India, home to the “largest election on earth,” popular PM Narendra Modi’s BJP-led alliance, now in power for a decade, won the contest but still fell more than 100 seats shy of its expectations.
And in South Africa, the African National Congress lost its absolute majority for the first time since bringing down Apartheid 30 years ago – capping what one observer has called “an annus horribilis for parties of power in Africa’s democracies.”
With the exception of Mexico, where an immensely popular populist managed to bequeath his magic to a preferred successor, incumbents in democracies had a lousy time.
Why is that? Naturally, each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way. But writ large, voters are simply pissed off and impatient. Prices are rising, and trust in governments is falling.
The catastrophic social and economic shocks of the pandemic are still working their way through societies around the globe. Once-fringe criticisms of free trade, alliances, and immigration are now mainstream.
Trust in institutions of all kinds – government, media, experts – continues to plummet, and anger at “the establishment” is a defining feature of our time.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in what was, globally speaking, the most consequential election of all. Trump, felony convictions and all, handily defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, who was unable to escape the sense that the Biden administration had presided over “bad times.”
But now Trump faces a familiar challenge: Elected by people who are unhappy about the way things are going, he will soon be the person responsible for the way things are going.
That’s even more true since his Republican Party will (narrowly) control both chambers of Congress, and the Supreme Court features the conservative-leaning bench that he helped to shape during his first term.
Trump will, of course, have immense leeway to pursue the radical agenda that people voted for: imposing hefty tariffs to bend trading partners to US terms, deporting potentially millions of undocumented migrants from towns and cities across America, taking a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy.
But these are plans that, even in the best scenarios, will inflict significant short-term disruptions on America’s economy and society. Take tariffs, for example. Even if you accept the argument – and you don’t have to! – that in the longer term they will help to secure better trade deals and resuscitate manufacturing jobs in the US, they are virtually certain to nudge up inflation, one of the key grievances that caused people to break so strongly Trumpward in November.
If prices go up, will it be Trump’s fault? Or will he be able to pin it on the usual suspects: The Deep State, The Media, The Radical Left?
It’s a delicate balancing act for a leader known for many things other than delicacy. But if the buck stops at all now, it’ll stop with Trump. Will he face a comeuppance in the 2026 midterms? Will whoever he chooses to carry the mantle of MAGA into the 2028 race be able to buck the trend of anti-incumbent outrage?
Or might the new rules of democracy – where no one keeps power for long – help the Democrats to find a way back from their richly deserved wilderness sooner than they think?
Experts say social media has a "Funhouse Mirror" effect on our perceptions of the offline world.
Opinion: Social media warped my perception of reality
Over the past week, the algorithms that shape my social media feeds have been serving up tons of content about the Major League Baseball playoffs. This because the algorithms know that I am a fan of the Mets, who have been -- you should know -- on a surreal playoff run for the last two weeks.
A lot of that content is the usual: sportswriter opinion pieces or interviews with players talking about how their teams are “a great group of guys just trying to go out there and win one game at a time,” or team accounts rallying their fan bases with slick highlight videos or “drip reports” on the players’ fashion choices.
But there’s been a lot of uglier stuff too: Padres and Dodgers fan pages threatening each other after some on-field tension between the two teams and their opposing fanbases last week. Or a Mets fan page declaring “war” on Phillies fans who had been filmed chanting “f*ck the Mets” on their way out of their home stadium after a win. Or a clip of a Philly fan’s podcast in which he mocked Mets fans for failing to make Phillies fans feel "fear" at the Mets' ballpark.
As a person who writes often about political polarization for a living, my first thought upon seeing all this stuff was: aha, further evidence that polarization is fueling a deep anger and violence in American life, which is now bleeding into sports, making players more aggressive and fans more violent.
But in fact, there isn’t much evidence for this. Baseball games and crowds are actually safer now than in the past.
I had fallen for social media reflections of the real world that were distorted. It’s what some experts call “The Funhouse Mirror” aspect of the internet.
One of those experts is Claire Robertson, a postgraduate research fellow in political psychology at NYU and the University of Toronto, who studies how the online world warps our understanding of the offline world.
Since Robertson recently published a new paper on precisely this subject, I called her up to ask why it’s so easy for social media to trick us into believing that things are worse than they actually are.
Part of the problem, she says, is that “the things that get the most attention on social media tend to be the most extreme ones.” And that’s because of a nasty feedback loop between two things: first, an incentive structure for social media where profits depend on attention and engagement; and second, our natural inclination as human beings to pay the most attention to the most sensational, provocative, or alarming content.
“We’ve evolved to pay attention to things that are threatening,” says Robertson. “So it makes more sense for us to pay attention to a snake in the grass than to a squirrel.”
And as it happens, a huge amount of those snakes are released into social media by a very small number of people. “A lot of people use social media,” says Robertson, “but far fewer actually post – and the most ideologically extreme people are the most likely to post.”
People with moderate opinions, which is actually most people, tend to fare poorly on social media, says Robertson. One study, of Reddit, showed that 33% of all content was generated by just 3% of accounts, which spew hate. Another revealed that 80% of fake news on Facebook came from just 0.1% of all accounts.
“But the interesting thing,” she says, “is, what’s happening to the 99.9% of people that aren’t sharing fake news? What's happening to the good actors? How does the structure of the internet, quite frankly, screw them over?”
In fact, we screw ourselves over, and we can’t help it. Blame our brains. For the sake of efficiency, our gray matter is wired to take some shortcuts when we seek to form views about groups of people in the world. And social media is where a lot of us go to form those opinions.
When we get there, we are bombarded, endlessly, with the most extreme versions of people and groups – “Socialist Democrats” or “Fascist Republicans” or “Pro-Hamas Arabs” or “Genocidal Jews” or “immigrant criminals” or “racist cops.” As a result, we start to see all members of these groups as hopelessly extreme, bad, and threatening in the real world too.
Small wonder that Democrats’ and Republicans’ opinions of each other in the abstract have, over the past two decades, gotten so much worse. We don’t see each other as ideological opponents with different views but, increasingly, as existential threats to each other and our society.
Of course, it only makes matters worse when people in the actual real world are committed to spreading known lies – say, that elections are stolen or that legal immigrants who are going hungry are actually illegal immigrants who are eating cats.
But what’s the fix for all of this? Regulators in many countries are turning to tighter rules on content moderation. But Robertson says that’s not effective. For one thing, it raises “knotty” philosophical questions about what should be moderated and by whom. But beyond that, it’s not practical.
“It's a hydra,” she says. “If you moderate content on Twitter, people who want to see extreme content are going to go to FourChan. If you moderate the content on FourChan, they're going to go somewhere else.”
Rather than trying to kill the supply of toxic crap on social media directly, Robertson wants to reduce the demand for it, by getting the rest of us to think more critically about what we see online. Part of that means stopping to compare what we see online with what we know about the actual human beings in our lives – family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates.
Do all “Republicans” really believe the loony theory that Hurricane Milton is a man-made weather event? Or is that just the opinion of one particularly fringe Republican? Do all people calling for an end to the suffering in Gaza really “support Hamas,” or is that the view of a small fringe with outsized exposure on social media?
“When you see something that’s really extreme and you start to think everybody must think that, really think: ‘Does my mom believe that? Do my friends believe that? Do my classmates believe that?’ It will help you realize that what you are seeing online is not actually a true reflection of reality.”
An Israeli infantry soldier inside a Jewish home in Kibbutz Be’eri that was destroyed by Hamas in their October 7, 2023 infiltration of southern Israeli communities. This community was attacked by Hamas infiltrators who killed some 100 people out of 1000 who lived in this community on October 7, 2023.
Seven key consequences of the Oct. 7 attack
A year ago today, Hamas militants shot and paraglided their way out of the Gaza Strip and went on a rampage through southern Israel, murdering more than 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages.
The attack set off a geopolitical earthquake in a region that a top US official had described, just a week earlier, as “quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
The noise ever since has been deafening.
Israel responded by unleashing a ferocious air and ground campaign in Gaza that sought to destroy Hamas and liberate the hostages. About half of them have been freed, the majority of those in a prisoner swap deal. Ninety-seven hostages are still in Gaza.
Israeli forces have weakened Hamas as a fighting force in a campaign that has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to local, Hamas-run health authorities. The dead include thousands of children. Close to two million Gazans, or nearly 90% of the pre-war population, have been displaced from their homes, and Israel has faced accusations of war crimes, including genocide, in international courts.
Meanwhile, months of cross-border clashes with Iran-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon have recently escalated – Israel last week assassinated the group’s leader and launched an invasion of Lebanon.
Tensions between Israel and Iran are reaching a crescendo as well. Iran recently fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel, which has vowed to respond, potentially by striking Iranian oil facilities, in a move that could rock oil markets and the global economy.
We take a brief look at how the past year has shaped prospects for seven key players in this story:
1. The Palestinians. Their plight is most certainly back on the global agenda after years of being overlooked as Israel moved toward normalizing its relations with more Arab powers – especially Saudi Arabia – in deals that paid only lip service to eventual Palestinian statehood. Global sympathy for the Palestinian cause has risen, particularly among young people in the West. But Gaza has suffered immense destruction, and the occupation of the West Bank has only deepened over the past year. Support for a Palestinian state among Israelis, already waning in recent years, has plummeted, while the forces most hostile to that outcome in Israel are on a roll these days.
2. Benjamin Netanyahu. Before Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli prime minister was on the ropes, facing corruption trials and mass protests over his judicial reforms. Then, the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust occurred on his watch, cratering his support further. For months, he seemed to be on borrowed time, an unloved leader kept in power only by Israelis’ reluctance to change horses in mid-war. He faced criticism at home over failure to secure the release of more hostages, but also from far-right ministers who wanted to see even harsher reprisals in Gaza. Shifting the focus to defeating longtime foe Hezbollah, a policy 90% of Israelis support, has paid dividends: He is rising in the polls again. Just how far an emboldened Netanyahu is willing to go now is a big question in a region on fire.
3. Hamas. The terror group has lost thousands of its fighters and two of its most senior officials over the past year. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar may still be alive, likely confined to a tunnel beneath the rubble of Gaza. Still, he miscalculated if he thought that global pressure would force Israel to negotiate a cease-fire, or that Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel from the North would cause Netanyahu to ease up on Gaza in the South. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the idea of Hamas, as an ideology of armed resistance against Israel, has been defeated, especially after the destruction that the IDF has visited upon the Palestinians over the past year. Over the next year, it will be crucial to see if the remainder of Hamas can shape any aspect of a post-war Gaza and whether it reconstitutes itself in any way.
4. Iran. Did Iran miscalculate too? Surely in the days after Oct. 7, Tehran didn’t expect that a year later Israel would be going on an offensive like this, smashing Iran’s No. 1 proxy in the region (Hezbollah) and mulling a major strike on Iran itself. That puts Iran in a tricky spot. As the leader of the “axis of resistance” against Israel, it has to keep resisting via its proxies. But with those proxies getting rolled up by Israel now, “Iran is exposed,” says Cliff Kupchan, head of research at Eurasia Group. “Iran misjudged power dynamics and sentiment in Israel. The IDF killed Nasrallah and severely degraded Hezbollah. Iran’s forward deterrence is gone.” That, he says, means Iran is likely to lean more heavily into its nuclear program now. That program, of course, is something Netanyahu is famously eager to try to destroy.
5. United States. The Biden administration has been largely unwavering in its rhetorical, military, and financial support for Israel, although it has also occasionally angered Israel and Israel supporters by pushing – ineffectively – for a cease-fire, or by raising concerns about the civilian death toll in Gaza. Partisan splits over Israel’s action in Gaza won’t be central to the upcoming presidential election – it will be decided by concerns about the economy, abortion access, and immigration. But the issue could affect the vote at the very margins, with some progressives and Arab-American voters in key swing states pledging not to vote at all in protest of the Biden administration’s support for Israel. The outcome of the election itself will matter on the ground: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both strong supporters of Israel, but Trump would give Netanyahu a much freer hand in dealings with the Palestinians, with Hezbollah, and with Iran.
6. Russia. It certainly hasn’t hurt Vladimir Putin to see so much of the world’s attention drawn away from his invasion of Ukraine. And to the extent that the US gets wound into an intractable conflict in the Middle East, so much the better from his perch, especially if regional jitters push up oil prices. But the Kremlin has to be careful. If Israel severely weakens Hezbollah, it could shake things loose in Syria, where the group’s fighters are a major ground force for Russia’s protégé, Bashar Assad. And if a wider Israel-Iran war erupts, Moscow could get drawn more deeply into a messy situation than it likes – after all, Putin’s already fighting a war of his own closer to home.
7. The Arab world. Popular opinion is strongly critical of Israel and the US. That has been a particular challenge for regimes in Egypt and Jordan, which have peace treaties with Israel and are close partners of the US. In Jordan, for example, even in a recent tightly controlled election, Islamist opposition parties that support Hamas surged in the polls. Saudi Arabia, arguably the preeminent Arab power now, is warily watching as Israel-Iran tensions escalate. Saudi Arabia and Iran are longtime rivals, but ties have been improving recently, and Riyadh has no interest in a wider war as it tries to move ahead with an ambitious domestic economic and social modernization drive. But Israel may yet have other ideas.