Jake Sullivan’s Three Arrows: How the National Security Adviser Redefined America’s Tech War With China
Jake Sullivan stood in the center of his sun-drenched, open-concept West Wing corner office, his hands hanging awkwardly at his sides like he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. It was the perfunctory three-minute office tour that comes standard with almost every magazine profile — a tired cliché that Sullivan, I’d been told, actively avoids, especially when the profile is about him.
As White House national security adviser, Sullivan has long been known as a man of unwavering seriousness, a trait that traces back to his Minnesota childhood. By age 14, he’d memorized every world capital; by 35, he’d visited 112 of those countries as a top aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. A Rhodes Scholar and world-ranked competitive debater, he dodges uncomfortable questions by dissecting their core premise, speaking in polished, cohesive paragraphs that echo the rhetorical style of his old boss, former President Barack Obama. One senior White House official I spoke with summed up his intellectual edge simply: “a relentless mind.”
The pageantry of magazine profiles — where reporters overanalyze every detail of a subject’s drink or wardrobe — feels particularly out of place for Sullivan, who has long cultivated a reputation for depth over flash. Almost always, he wears a slightly oversized black suit paired with a small rotation of solid, wide neckties. That May afternoon, as he gamely walked me through his space for a quick round of show-and-tell, even I found the ritual a little cringeworthy. After all, the very next day he was flying to Saudi Arabia to meet with the crown prince to map out a path to Middle East peace. Yet here we were, talking about a photo of the old shed behind his childhood home.
I hadn’t come for the office trivia, though. I was there to see one specific object I’d heard about ahead of our meeting. Tucked away on a corner bookshelf, it sat exactly where I’d been told it would: a small swatch of white fabric, stitched with three red arrows at its center, encased in a plain square frame.
It was a gift Sullivan had prepared for his Japanese and Dutch counterparts ahead of a high-stakes, closed-door meeting in Washington last January. The three arrows referenced a classic Japanese parable: a father teaches his three sons a lesson about unity by asking each to break a single arrow, which snaps easily. When he binds three arrows together, none of the sons can break the bundle. The moral is clear: unity creates strength. Sullivan knew his guests would grasp the subtext immediately. They were gathered to coordinate a joint plan to cut off China’s access to the world’s most advanced semiconductors and the manufacturing equipment needed to build them.
That meeting was part of a tectonic shift in U.S. China policy that began during the Trump administration, but it also marked a major personal shift for Sullivan. Once, he subscribed to the long-held Washington consensus that integrating China into the global free trade system would cultivate peace and shared prosperity around the world. That belief has since been completely upended. Under President Xi Jinping, China has used U.S.-made advanced chips to power supercomputers that surveil Muslim minority groups and train artificial intelligence systems to boost its military capabilities. At the same time, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has dramatically expanded military drills off the coast of Taiwan, which produces the vast majority of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. U.S. intelligence assesses China could be prepared to invade the island by 2027; such an attack would trigger a catastrophic global chip shortage, disrupting everything from smartphones and medical devices to military weapons systems. Beijing has never hidden its goal of displacing the U.S. as the world’s leading technological superpower, and blocking that outcome has become one of Sullivan’s top priorities.
Sullivan knew he could not pull this off alone. While U.S. firms like Nvidia design the world’s most powerful chips, these graphics processing units rely on a sprawling, interconnected global supply chain to be manufactured. Most of the core equipment used in Taiwanese semiconductor fabs comes from the Netherlands, Japan, and the U.S. The U.S. had already blocked exports of its most advanced chips to China, but like that single arrow in the parable, those restrictions would collapse if China could still buy chip-making machinery from other countries.
Over several hours of talks in a meeting room at Blair House, the 200-year-old D.C. guest house for visiting foreign dignitaries, the three officials hammered out the exact details of each country’s export restrictions, finalizing which technology would be covered and what timeline each nation would follow to implement the rules. By the end of the meeting, they had a binding agreement in place — and Sullivan’s framed arrow swatch, a quiet reminder of what would happen if any party backed out.
No official involved has ever spoken publicly about the closed-door discussions, and Sullivan declined to comment on it when I asked during my visit. But it’s not hard to see why he keeps the memento on display, or why a man as wary of magazine profiles as Sullivan agreed to this one. That small piece of fabric embodies much of what he has set out to achieve in his role, and what will be his lasting legacy when he leaves office.
Even before President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, odds were slim Sullivan would stay on for a second term. He is already set to become the longest-serving national security adviser in nearly 20 years; no holder of the job since Henry Kissinger has lasted much longer than one term, and none of Donald Trump’s national security advisers made it past two years.
When historians write the history of the Biden administration, the overlapping crises of the past four years — the COVID-19 pandemic, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza — will rightfully take center stage. But the technological competition with China will also loom large, a mission Sullivan frames as both existentially important to the U.S. and deeply personal. “If technology is used more for harm than good, if the global rules of the road are set by authoritarian competitors, if the technologies of the future are invented elsewhere instead of here, that means less security, fewer jobs, and lower productivity for the United States,” he told me. “I don’t want to see that world.”
It’s a clear, patriotic framing, but the reality of Sullivan’s project is far more complicated. Some analysts warn that isolating China will only speed up Beijing’s development of its own domestic advanced tech industry. Others point out that in its rush to counter one authoritarian power, the U.S. has ended up courting other authoritarian regimes. Sullivan’s approach is built on the idea that closer economic ties with new global partners will push the world toward shared values of democracy, justice, and human rights. But that is not so different from the bet the U.S. once made on China — the same losing wager Sullivan is now working to undo.
Sullivan grew up in Minneapolis, one of five children in a large Irish-Catholic family. His father worked in the newspaper industry, his mother was a school counselor, and both instilled a lifelong curiosity about global affairs in their kids. As Sullivan once told Minnesota outlet MinnPost, his parents kept a globe on the kitchen table, which they used to turn dinnertime conversations into informal geopolitics lessons. This was the 1980s and 1990s, a period of massive global upheaval: China opening to the world market, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, new democracies emerging across the globe. (It is no coincidence that Sullivan’s younger brother also went on to become a senior adviser to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.)
In high school, he was voted “most likely to succeed,” and a former teacher told the school paper he was “one of the most intense students I have ever had in class.” He went on to Yale, then won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, then returned to Yale for law school, racking up awards as a competitive debater along the way. His career trajectory continued its steep climb: a clerkship at the U.S. Supreme Court, a stint as chief counsel for Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, a role on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign, then joined the Obama administration. He became the youngest director of policy planning in State Department history, and when Clinton needed a trusted aide to lead secret talks that would eventually produce the Iran nuclear deal, Sullivan was one of the first people she tapped. By 2013, President Obama personally recruited Sullivan to work at the White House as then-Vice President Biden’s national security adviser. He was just 36 years old.
Even Sullivan, who despite his serious demeanor occasionally leans into the self-deprecating “aw-shucks” warmth of his Midwestern upbringing, has said he sometimes could not believe how far he’d come. His first time in the White House Situation Room, he recalled thinking there must be “another room down the hall” where the actual big decisions got made. “And then you realize there isn’t another room,” he said. “There’s only us.”
During the Obama administration, Sullivan was known for his even, upbeat temperament — at his State Department going-away party, colleagues nicknamed him “Mr. Sunshine.” He approached disagreements with a nearly Socratic style: he never raised his voice, instead working through counterarguments one by one until every logical flaw was exposed, probing his debate partners with respectful but incisive questions.
Jennifer Harris, then a policy planner at the State Department, recalled that she often shared what were, at the time, “heretical” views about free trade and globalization with Sullivan. For decades, mainstream Washington policy experts argued that governments should take a hands-off approach to global trade, letting the “invisible hand” of the market balance outcomes. But Harris watched as China gutted U.S. industries by pouring state subsidies into domestic competitors, all while stealing American intellectual property. The U.S. government, she argued, needed to push back.
Sullivan was one of the few administration officials who actually took the time to listen to her arguments, and would then ask her for reading material to learn more. “He really worries about blind spots,” Harris said.
But while Sullivan was open to rethinking the consensus on free trade, he had not yet fully embraced Harris’s arguments. When Clinton ran for president in 2016, Sullivan joined her campaign, touting the benefits of the “liberal international order” and open markets. Pundits widely predicted he would become the youngest national security adviser in history if Clinton won. But voters had other plans. The morning after Trump’s election victory, a drawn, despondent Sullivan sat between Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and Clinton’s closest aide Huma Abedin as Clinton delivered her concession speech.
Sullivan pushes back on the idea that the Trump years were a period of deep soul-searching for him (“that’s pretty existential for an Irish guy”), but he did process Clinton’s loss in his own way. From his new post at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — one of many roles he held during this period — he researched, conducted interviews, and wrote extensively. He eventually came to the conclusion that he had a blind spot, and a big one. Somewhere along the way, he and the rest of the Washington foreign policy establishment had failed to effectively explain how decades of globalization benefited the average American. Worse, they had failed to grapple with all the ways it did not help working people at all. Donald Trump, for all his clumsiness, had made that case effectively.
Sullivan’s blind spot was not limited to economics. While the U.S. was sending jobs and industries overseas, it was also giving China open access to sensitive American technology. You didn’t need a Rhodes degree to see the problem. “If you ask someone where I grew up, ‘Hey, do you think we should give computer chips for use in Chinese nuclear weapons?’ They will be like, ‘No,’” Sullivan told me. “Somehow, we missed out on that common sense proposition.”
By 2020, when he joined Biden’s presidential campaign, Sullivan believed securing U.S. leadership in emerging technologies was the clearest path to creating American jobs and countering China’s competitive threat. It turned out to be good politics, too.
Six months into the Biden administration, Sullivan stood behind a podium in a gilded ballroom at Washington’s historic Mayflower Hotel, surrounded by hundreds of tech executives and government officials seated at white-linen tables sipping coffee and boxed water, to announce he would lead a revolution in U.S. foreign policy. This was no iconic Brandenburg Gate moment of dramatic historic change, but what Sullivan laid out that day would reshape global tech flows for decades to come.
He opened his speech with a brief history of decades of technological development, which he divided into two waves. The first wave saw the spread of the internet, which many believed would be a democratizing force across the globe. The second wave saw authoritarian regimes hijack those same tools to spy on, harass, and suppress billions of people. During that second wave, Sullivan argued, China did not just build a massive domestic censorship and surveillance network; it also invested heavily in “hard infrastructure” like semiconductor manufacturing, a sector the U.S. had long taken for granted. If the U.S. and its allies did not act together, Sullivan warned, the future would “grow darker.”
What the world needed was a third wave of technological development, shaped by U.S. leadership. “The question before us today is whether we have the will and determination to usher in that third wave,” he said. “Whether we can reboot and ensure that critical and emerging technologies work for, not against, our democracies and our security.”
Back at the White House, Sullivan had already stood up a new directorate at the National Security Council focused on advanced chips, quantum computing, and other cutting-edge technologies. If the U.S. was going to compete seriously with China, he reasoned, the NSC needed a dedicated team focused on that goal, just as it had dedicated teams for counterterrorism and climate change. Without that, the entire project would be swallowed up by the constant stream of other crises.
And there was no shortage of those. A month after Sullivan’s Mayflower speech, the Taliban seized Kabul as the U.S. wrapped up its withdrawal from the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Just over a week later, Sullivan was in the Situation Room with the president when word came of a suicide bombing outside the Kabul airport, where Afghan refugees were being evacuated. The attack killed 183 people, including 13 U.S. service members, and Sullivan bore much of the public blame for the chaotic withdrawal. That September, U.S. intelligence detected a massive Russian military buildup along Ukraine’s border, a preview of the full-scale invasion that has consumed much of Sullivan’s time every day since.
All these crises have taken a toll on Sullivan, sharpening his edges and darkening the circles under his sleep-deprived eyes. “Mr. Sunshine” has quickly become one of the Biden administration’s weariest warriors. He still prefers to win arguments on their merits, but as he once told an administration colleague, he has learned that when opponents pound the table and yell, sometimes “you’ve got to pound on the table and yell right back.” It’s a gradual transformation he has noticed in himself. “Government’s hard,” he told me. “So you just become hard.”
But Sullivan never took his eye off China. To lead the new NSC emerging technology directorate, he tapped Tarun Chhabra, a former Obama NSC official who spent the Trump years at leading think tanks writing about how the U.S. and its allies could gain an edge over China’s growing technological influence. Sullivan and Chhabra used that existing work as a blueprint for their agenda, which Sullivan monitored closely. “What I find with Jake is that, while there could be crisis moments where he’s 100 percent absorbed,” Chhabra said, “he’s always coming to us saying, ‘What are we doing about this piece of reporting on semiconductors?’”
In Sullivan’s office, he keeps a whiteboard listing his top priorities, which shift constantly with global events. “There was always a line for China, and tech competition was one of the bullets under China,” said Peter Harrell, former senior director for international economics at the NSC and the National Economic Council. “It was the one thing that never got taken off.”
One of the first major wins for the Biden administration’s tech agenda was passing the CHIPS and Science Act through Congress. The bipartisan bill allocated more than $52 billion for domestic semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., including $39 billion to fund dozens of new and upgraded chip facilities across the country. President Biden signed it into law at a triumphant ceremony on the White House South Lawn in August 2022. “The United States must lead the world in the production of these advanced chips,” Biden said. “This law will do exactly that.”
But even as Congress worked to boost the U.S. semiconductor sector through the CHIPS Act, Sullivan, Chhabra, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo were finalizing a plan to hobble China’s chip sector. Much of the framework for this plan originated in the Trump administration. In 2019, Trump added Chinese telecom giant Huawei — which the administration believed served as a front for Chinese intelligence — to the Commerce Department’s entity list, effectively blocking U.S. companies from doing any business with Huawei. Then in 2020, Trump officials went a step further, invoking a little-used regulation called the foreign direct product rule. Under that rule, Huawei was blocked from accessing not just U.S.-made chips, but any foreign chip made with U.S. technology or software — which meant nearly all chips on the global market.
The Biden administration set out to massively expand this model, creating an unprecedented, sprawling blockade that would keep the most advanced chips designed by Nvidia and AMD out of Chinese supercomputers. But from the start, it was clear the U.S. needed its allies on board to make the plan work. Throughout 2022, as the U.S. hammered out the details of its own export controls, Sullivan held private, secure calls with his Japanese and Dutch counterparts to coordinate parallel restrictions.
A key focus of those talks was Dutch firm ASML, the only company in the world that produces extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, which are used to etch tiny circuits into the most advanced chips. The Trump administration had already pressured the Dutch government to restrict Chinese access to these top-of-the-line EUV machines; Sullivan wanted to expand restrictions even further to include ASML’s less precise but still powerful deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines.
Harrell, who worked with Sullivan and Chhabra on the U.S. export controls, said Sullivan’s personal, direct involvement in these conversations was critical. “The U.S. government asks our allies and partners to do lots and lots of things,” he said. “Hearing about something in a sustained way from the national security adviser really signals seriousness.”
While both Japan and the Netherlands recognized the risk of China’s growing technological and military power, they were also wary of cutting too deeply into their own industries’ access to the Chinese market or provoking retali