The Internationalists

Chapter 1

Relearning America

November 2016—January 2021

The location was picked for what it represented. The Javits Center, a large building along the Hudson River in New York City, was wall-to-wall glass—including the ceiling. The metaphor was obvious to the thousands waiting to see Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016: they would see her shatter the highest obstacle in American politics when she was elected forty-fifth president of the United States that night.


But only hearts were breaking inside the pearl of Hell’s Kitchen that night. As Donald Trump won Ohio, and Florida, and Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Michigan, the mood turned as cool as the blustery weather outside. The once jubilant atmosphere—pregnant with promise—had soured. Sobs rang out within the center’s cavernous halls. Not until 2:00 a.m. did a member of the Clinton campaign, chairman John Podesta, come out to send the remaining hopefuls home.

“You’ve been here a long time and it’s been a long night and it’s been a long campaign,” Podesta said, his words beamed across the country and around the world. “We can wait a little longer!”

Jake Sullivan, too, would have to wait. He had worked for Clinton for years, first at the State Department and now as one of her campaign’s top policy aides. He was ready to stride back into Washington after leaving the Obama administration two years earlier, playing coy with friends and the media about whether he was plotting a return to politics. He was, and he was the odds-on favorite to be Clinton’s national security adviser— which would make him one of the most powerful people in the federal government.

What was supposed to be a dream night for him—a crowning achievement for a man who was days from turning forty—turned into a nightmare. In a Peninsula hotel room two and a half miles from the somber crowd, he watched the TV screens as the American map filled with red, not blue. When the election was called in Trump’s favor, Sullivan stood by Clinton’s side as she phoned her opponent to concede. Hearing the words “Congratulations, Mr. President-Elect,” he felt like a truck had run over him.

The former collegiate debater stayed up all night helping to craft Clinton’s concession speech, seeking an explanation for the political earthquake he had just witnessed. He grasped for anything, everything, to make sense of the moment.

Many forces combined into a perfect storm, he reasoned with himself. There was a backlash to President Barack Obama’s time in office, a demographically changing America, economic pain throughout the country, and a general animosity toward elites, such as Clinton. The inordinate focus on her emails by the media didn’t help, elevating to a national scandal what Democrats argued was at most an ill-advised administrative decision.

But in New York City, Trump’s hometown and decades-long playground, Sullivan realized that the foreign policy message from Clinton’s opponent had played a hand in his victory too. It was by no means the most vital element of Trump’s ascendancy to power, but his overall argument— that U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II hadn’t worked out so well for the “forgotten” men and women of America— had clearly hit a nerve.

And when Trump critiqued the elites responsible for forgetting those millions of people, he was unwittingly criticizing Sullivan. The Minnesota boy had allowed the wealthy, glitz-loving real estate developer to beat him at populist politics, and defeat had not been a common event in his charmed and meteoritic rise.

At Southwest High School in Minneapolis, which he graduated from in 1994, Sullivan was named “Most Likely to Succeed.” Teachers fawned over his ability to hand in flawlessly written assignments, and he led the student council while winning debate tournaments and quiz bowls. “I thought the idea of grappling with ideas and advocating for positions based on those ideas was an exciting prospect,” he told MinnPost, an online news organization, in 2016. “I didn’t think I would do it anywhere else.”

His parents, Dan Sullivan, a University of Minnesota professor, and Jean Sullivan, a guidance counselor at Jake’s high school, helped their son rise to the top of the local academic scene. “They made a point of showing us that being on top of what’s happening in the world is important to being a good citizen,” Jake Sullivan also told the local paper. “By the time I was 10 or 13, I’d learned the world capitals.” At dinners, he and his four siblings would spin a globe while racing to the bottom of a pasta bowl. When he wasn’t training his brain, he was handling pucks with friends on frozen lakes.

Sullivan left home for Yale University, where he studied political science and international relations and came in third in a national debate championship. He kept amassing knowledge, going to Yale Law School and then Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, attaining there the top seed in the world debating championship.

Despite all his success, and the rarefied air he breathed in the hallowed halls of New Haven and rural England, Sullivan never forgot his roots. “I am a dyed-in-the-wool product of the Minneapolis public school system,” he once told Minnesota’s Star Tribune.

Sullivan even came back to Minnesota for a time following a clerkship under Justice Stephen Breyer at the Supreme Court. He practiced law at Faegre & Benson, kicking back when not in the courtroom by playing on a curling team in St. Paul. But as much as Sullivan loved his home, he yearned to test himself in the cauldron of Washington, D.C.

He joined Democrat Amy Klobuchar’s Senate campaign, impressing the boss and his colleagues with a strong work ethic and an uncanny ability to quote Billy Joel lyrics and Saved by the Bell lines. When Klobuchar won, Sullivan joined her in the nation’s capital in 2007 as a policy adviser.

It didn’t take long—just over a year—before Hillary Clinton hired him as an adviser during her first bid for the presidency. Sullivan, barely five years out of law school, helped the former First Lady prepare for the debates—and when she was knocked out in the primaries, he brought his skills to Barack Obama’s successful campaign.

But Clinton didn’t let Sullivan leave her orbit for too long, luring him to the State Department as the agency’s youngest-ever policy planning director, where he would shape diplomatic strategy and develop long-term plans for U.S. foreign policy.

Even at thirty-four, Sullivan had a manner that impressed Clinton. He was wise beyond his years, she and her team believed, and he had a knack for asking the right questions at the right time. In State’s Policy Planning office, the department’s think tank, Sullivan could use his skills to prepare the new secretary and the U.S. foreign policy apparatus for what the world had in store for them.

His most impactful role, though, was kept secret for months. Clinton dispatched her little-watched aide to Oman to start talks with Iranian officials over a potential nuclear deal. He’d go on to join five other meetings alongside his colleagues. That someone so young, and so new, was trusted with that responsibility showed that he was the next big thing, not only for the administration but for the Democratic Party. “He’s essentially a once-in-a-generation talent,” Philippe Reines, a longtime Clinton staffer, said at the time.

Clinton was also Sullivan’s champion outside of work. Four years after becoming the policy planning director, Sullivan married Maggie Goodlander at Yale’s Battell Chapel in 2015, Clinton read from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans. In the audience to hear it and see the couple wed was Antony Blinken, the deputy secretary of state who regarded Sullivan as a like-minded peer in the Democratic foreign policy world.

But Sullivan’s work was noticed by more than the secretary of state. In 2012, President Obama asked Sullivan to lunch during a trip to Myanmar. Obama wanted to know about the country’s history, and it gave the nearly thirty-six-year-old a chance to impress the big boss with his preparation and skill as a briefer. Sullivan passed the test. Later, Obama called Sullivan from Air Force One with a job offer—working not with him but with Vice President Joe Biden. You should be his national security adviser, Obama said. Sullivan accepted in early 2013—how could he not?

That late spring, Sullivan told University of Minnesota graduates his own mantra for success. “Reject cynicism. Reject certitude. And don’t be a jerk,” he said, sporting his trademark parted hair and crisp white shirt. “Now, when I say ‘reject certitude,’ I don’t mean your core principles. You can and must be certain about those   But in public policy, principles simply point the way—they do not provide specific answers about what to do in specific circumstances.”

Sullivan’s principles were those of the Democratic foreign policy establishment. His and Hillary Clinton’s worldviews, for example, were nearly indistinguishable. The United States, alongside allies and partners, had first and foremost to promote and defend the liberal international order— the same post–World War II framework that Trump bashed throughout the campaign—which at its core meant working to maintain the rules and norms that govern global economics and politics. A central objective was a more globalized and interconnected world to lift all nations, making them more prosperous and, over time, more democratic.

But a flaw emerged: while the United States and other global economies flourished over the decades, gains proved unequal not only among countries but also within them. The U.S. didn’t escape that problem, opening the space for someone like Trump to blame those defending the liberal international order—like Clinton and her team—for the decimation of steel towns and rural communities.

Trump, indeed, found a receptive audience. Factory workers, mainly in white-majority counties, feared that foreigners were taking their hard-earned jobs and sided with the Republican candidate. Since 1997, after all, the United States had suffered the closure of ninety-one thousand manufacturing plants and the loss of nearly five million manufacturing jobs. Blaming people from abroad and scapegoating elites was a powerful incendiary device for any populist politician.

But now Sullivan, a top aide in Clinton’s second bid for the Oval Office, realized he and his cohort had made a grave error. They had failed to connect the high-minded ideals and practice of foreign policy to the very real needs of everyday Americans. Why should NATO matter to a farmer in Iowa? What benefit does a coal miner in Kentucky get from extending the nuclear umbrella to South Korea? How would combating climate change affect workers who rely on fossil fuels to do their work?

Being the smartest guy in the room, writing the perfect policy paper, or forming a team of veteran public servants mattered far less in a campaign than appealing to the id of the voting public. Clinton had experience and accomplishments in the realm of politics and governance. Trump had red hats that read make america great again—and he prevailed.

“We were both traumatized in really severe ways from Trump winning,” said a close confidant who worked on the Clinton campaign with Sullivan. 

The Minnesotan also realized that the wing of the Democratic Party Clinton represented and that he belonged to—the centrists, the pragmatists, the slow-and-steady-change advocates—were losing ground to the progressives. The energy was with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who challenged Clinton and painted her as the prototypical Washington insider. Democrats were in large numbers supporting someone willing to fight for government-subsidized health care and college and to spend less time fighting wars abroad. Clinton voted to go to war in Iraq during her time as a senator from New York. Sanders voted against it.

To be relevant, then, the populist elements of the electorate and the bookish orthodoxy of the Democratic foreign policy establishment had to be melded.

Trump articulated one way to do it for the Republicans. Even if he wasn’t always coherent, Trump at least wrestled with the questions families across the United States were asking about their leaders. The Democrats and others throughout Washington, D.C.’s professional class didn’t even pretend to engage their concerns.

“Jake was heavily influenced by the 2016 campaign,” someone close to him noted. “The fact that Trump could win—it had an effect on him, that you really have to be connected to what matters to the American public. You can’t adopt a policy that’s an elitist policy if that’s not where the public is.” Later, as Sullivan emptied out his campaign office and left for the last time, someone saw him with a copy of How the Irish Became White—a history of race relations between Irish Americans and African Americans— tucked under his arm.

But it was in that New York hotel room less than two blocks from Trump Tower, as he watched Trump and his family revel in the victory on screen, when Sullivan realized he needed to go back to the drawing board. Defeating Trump, a man Sullivan considered a unique danger to the world, in four years, required the next Democrat facing him to be armed with a better lexicon. The candidate would have to articulate a foreign policy vision that most Americans could support.

The next day, as Clinton was set to concede defeat, Sullivan consoled his colleagues, and they consoled him. The man for whom losing was rare made his way home, plotting once again to get back into the halls of power.

He couldn’t lose again. Not again. Not to him.

Jake Sullivan found himself in the wilderness professionally, personally, physically. He was in Myanmar in March 2017, two months into Trump’s presidency and four months after that devastating night in New York City. Beside his friend and former colleague Ben Rhodes, he helped train peace negotiators in the war-torn Southeast Asian country. They’d even meet Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratic icon of the country, who only months later would fail to speak up about the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims.

Rhodes, a national security deputy to Obama for all eight years of his administration, arrived in Myanmar with a nascent plan for the Democratic Party’s future. Weeks earlier, another former Obama-era official, Jeffrey Prescott, had come to Rhodes with an idea. Democrats needed an incubator to develop a coherent foreign policy message. It would initially help the handful of lawmakers who cared about global affairs but would prove instrumental once the 2020 primaries got under way.

There was a panoply of think tanks and advocacy groups that worked on foreign policy in the nation’s capital, Prescott asserted, but none that were solely focused on creating a winning message to beat Trump in 2016. A new organization could, after victory, serve as the intellectual bedrock for a new administration. Prescott wanted Rhodes to help him start one.

Back in their hotel, aiming to unstick their sweaty clothes from their bodies, Rhodes approached Sullivan about Prescott’s pitch. Sullivan’s eyes lit up, and as was his way, he asked multiple questions about the group’s purpose and how to get it started. Rhodes could see it: his old colleague was interested.

“We both felt obliged to do it,” Rhodes would say years later about their conversation, “like someone had to do this, and he was the Clinton guy and I was the Obama guy.” They both shuddered at the thought of having to fundraise for such a project, but there was never any doubt that they would do it.

Their conversations about what they hoped to build together continued back in Washington, D.C. During one breakfast meeting at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, came up to their table to say hello. In tow was Dina Powell, Trump’s deputy national security adviser and a former Goldman Sachs investment banker. Little did they know that the two men were actually planning how best to oust them from power. “That was awkward,” Rhodes said of the encounter.

Rhodes wasn’t a natural fit for the project. He became a lightning rod for right-wing criticism of Obama’s handling of foreign policy. A 2016 New York Times profile only added to the furor directed at him. “We created an echo chamber,” Rhodes said in the story about his efforts to sell the Iran nuclear deal to lawmakers and the public. Of the experts he got to support the administration’s views, Rhodes claimed “they were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” He also blasted members of the D.C. foreign policy establishment and the embassies that spin them as “the blob.”

But in a way, his all-American story would be a boon to the cause, for Rhodes was raised in elite circles but rejected their ideas whole cloth. He grew up in New York City with a Jewish mother and a Texan father who, once a month, took Rhodes and his brothers to the Episcopal Saint Thomas Church. Young Ben yearned to write, not become a D.C. power player. His practice with the pen paid off: an editor at Foreign Policy magazine thought he was too talented for a fact-checking job, so his résumé and writing sample were sent over to Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana representative in Congress, who needed a speechwriter.

It was there, working for Hamilton at the Wilson Center think tank in D.C., that Rhodes became steeped in national security issues. He’d go on to be Hamilton’s staffer on the 9/11 Commission and a chief notetaker on the Iraq Study Group, which slammed George W. Bush for the decision to invade the country and overthrow Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t a traditional pathway to the White House, but there was more “real America” in his background than most other people in Democratic foreign policy circles could claim.

The two men and their colleagues spent the year raising capital, finding office space, and hiring staff. What they also needed were some heavy-weights atop the group to legitimize it. When National Security Action opened up in 2018, it got Antony Blinken and Avril Haines, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and his number two at the CIA, to join the advisory board.

It was another mix of establishment and quirk: Blinken was a totem for how to work your way to the top of the party’s foreign policy roster. Haines, while well qualified, at one point ran an independent Baltimore bookstore famous for its 1990s “erotica nights.” Prescott, whose brainchild NatSec Action ultimately was, signed on to be the day-to-day executive director.

The group also brought in Ned Price, a former CIA official who gained as much notoriety for quitting the Trump administration as for his tweets attacking the Republican president. He went so far as to pen an op-ed in Politico ripping Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House official, for getting a security clearance despite his ties to senior Russian officials during the campaign.

“Jared Kushner held suspicious meetings with Russians [sic] officials and operatives that he failed to disclose when he applied for a security clearance. If he weren’t the president’s son-in-law, he’d have been frog-marched out of the White House long ago. Why does he still have access to America’s biggest secrets?” Price wrote.

In the earliest days, it wasn’t clear precisely what NatSec Action would actually do. Should it host public events on foreign policy with key Democrats? Should it assign policy papers to experts and disseminate them to campaigns, hoping staffers would read them and call the authors? Should it be a safe meeting place for all wings of the Democratic Party to discuss national security issues and hammer out their differences?

The answer was yes, yes, and yes. It would be all of the above, and it would have one target: Arm the next Democratic presidential nominee and their staff with everything they need to counter Trump’s foreign policy. “From the formation, what was implicit is that these are very likely going to be the people that make up the next administration,” Rhodes said years after the organization’s founding.

By early 2019, NatSec Action was ready to give a series of off-the-record briefings for reporters who covered national security. Sullivan, Prescott, and Price—the brains, the boss, and the communicator—each updated the press corps on their work and detailed what they hoped to accomplish. Their main pitch was simple: Trump’s foreign policy was a profound emergency for the United States, and NatSec Action was the only place working every day to counter it, forging a winning message for the coming presidential election.

They were, in effect, labeling themselves the shadow cabinet of the Trump era. It was a bold claim to stake, especially when an organization like the Center for American Progress had long believed it was the Democratic torchbearer when Republicans were in office. But, NatSec Action argued, there was a void in the party when it came to foreign policy and national security, and only their group was building the infrastructure that Democrats lacked, and would need, when 2020 came around.

An early conundrum for NatSec Action was how to counter the foreign policy story Trump was raring to tell. His administration pounded ISIS into near submission, halted North Korean missile testing, grew close to Israel, confronted rogue regimes in Venezuela and Iran, and fixed long-standing trade problems with China and North American neighbors. What could the Democrats say in response that would resonate during a campaign?

Sullivan’s counterargument to the current administration’s foreign policy successes was that it had “taken the United States in an undemocratic direction while abandoning our core allies, which makes us weaker,” he told a journalist at this time, making specific note of Trump’s desire to cozy up to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Sullivan understood the appeal of Trump’s actions: he wanted to look tough while claiming to fight for the little guy. But Sullivan argued that the only way you fight for the little guy is to secure and promote democracy around the world and at home, and work with allies to secure interests so the burden doesn’t always fall on America. Sullivan added, “and if you want to counter China, good luck doing it alone. We can’t take Beijing militarily, economically, and technologically without our allies aboard.”

This response would end up being the core foreign policy argument of a future Biden campaign.

The leaders and members of National Security Action couldn’t know Biden would eventually win the Democratic primary. So for months they prepared for any outcome, culminating in a December 2019 retreat in New Mexico to figure out what, exactly, they would present to the nominee ahead of the contest with Trump.

The group invited over one hundred of the Democratic Party’s brightest minds for an off-record, four-day session at the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort and Spa near Albuquerque, a luxurious and idyllic spot in the desert with a large mountain looming in the background. It was a risky move: the gathering took place as a tense primary season raged on. Fault lines had shown within the party, and while the candidates agreed that Trump had mishandled every element of foreign policy, they hadn’t truly offered remedies of their own.

It was also a slightly uncomfortable affair as the large field of candidates had been winnowed down to seven and the first primary votes in Iowa were mere months away. Biden was the standard-bearer for the party, challenged to his left by Sanders and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren while facing upstarts like South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg and entrepreneur Andrew Yang. Klobuchar, Jake Sullivan’s former boss, was still in the mix, as was billionaire Tom Steyer.

The field of hopefuls exposed a party adrift. Clinton, who had loomed large alongside her husband, was firmly out of the picture. Now there was a tension between finding someone who could credibly defeat Trump and someone who could refresh the party. Still, there was an opening. The ideological divides on domestic issues—health care, immigration, how to curb the COVID-19 pandemic—were clear, but there was no real consensus on what to do about the world, save for saying that Trump was ruining America’s standing on the global stage.

Sullivan and his cohort hoped that putting together the top representatives of the major campaigns would lead to agreement on at least broad pillars of a new progressive global vision. “Our goal was for whoever the candidate turned out to be, it would be useful to build out their policies. It wasn’t just for Biden; we hoped the sessions would prove helpful for Elizabeth Warren or Michael Bennet,” said one of the Albuquerque conference’s organizers.

In between red-sauce enchiladas and margaritas at community dinners, horseback rides, and spa visits, the participants found time for work. They piled into the Eagle A and B conference rooms on December 6 to find Sullivan waiting for them up front. The intention of that 4:00 p.m. opening session was to answer the private conference’s overarching question: “What is the critical challenge facing the United States right now?”

Sullivan didn’t answer; instead, he pointed toward the back of the room. “Ned, why don’t you start?” Price, by the look on his face, wasn’t expecting to go first. He mustered up an answer: polarization at home was the defining national security issue of the moment. “If we’re divided internally, we’re weaker on the world stage,” Price said. Many in the room echoed his sentiment. Distrust and disdain between the parties would make it impossible to form a united front abroad.

Rhodes took it a step further. Polarization wasn’t the problem; the radicalization of the Republican Party was. A two-party democracy couldn’t function if one party elects someone like Trump and solely aims to block the agenda of the other. America simply couldn’t do big things with Republicans in their current state.

Others chimed in. Climate change! The loss of America’s technological edge! Economic competition! These weren’t the collective answers Sullivan and his team thought they’d hear. “We were expecting Russia and China to clearly dominate,” one of the organizers told me. “People were really thinking outside their parochial area and trying to come up with something novel, something really innovative.” Rhodes told me much later that he was “struck by how many people referenced domestic political issues.” It was, after all, a retreat filled with foreign policy minds.

That discussion helped some of the attendees finalize ideas in position papers they were drafting for the group. The documents, commissioned by NatSec Action for a project titled FP2021, would collectively become a foreign policy owner’s manual for the eventual nominee.

One paper declared that the United States needed to act fast to compete effectively with China: “China’s rapid economic and military modernization have shifted the regional balance of power and eroded America’s ability to deter adversaries, reassure allies, and mobilize collective action,” it read. Another paper, on U.S. policy toward Europe, recommended that the next president “advance the transatlantic relationship as the foundation of a values-based U.S. foreign policy,” partly by developing “a U.S.– Europe climate agenda to meet shared goals’’ and a “transatlantic approach toward China that creates a strong democratic playing field for competition and cooperation.”

As for climate change: “The power of U.S. diplomacy in getting other countries to take serious climate action is dependent in part on what progress the U.S. government makes domestically.”

NatSec Action staffers always believed in the importance of their mission. But there was a gnawing feeling that all the effort, all the work, and all the months would amount to little more than an academic exercise. It ultimately didn’t mean much if the Democratic nominee failed to use the framework and materials the group placed on a silver platter. Secretly, of course, each NatSec Action member was pulling for their favorite candidate, hoping they’d be the one to receive the fruits of the group’s labor.

Any fears of irrelevance dissipated in the spring of 2020. Sullivan phoned Rhodes to tell him he was leaving NatSec Action to be Joe Biden’s lead policy adviser in the presidential campaign. Biden was talking about the need to restore the soul of the nation. And with his focus on the middle class, he was the right man for the moment and the right person to beat Trump. Sullivan felt called to help him.

The former vice president was revived at this point, having just won the South Carolina primary handily in February following losses in Iowa and New Hampshire. Biden, who had been left for dead, now emerged as the likely front-runner and eventual nominee.

All of a sudden, the group’s work was well-known to one of the most senior people in the top Democratic candidate’s campaign. “Once Jake went to Biden to run the show on policy, obviously those [papers] were going to matter,” Rhodes told me. “If Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren had won, it wouldn’t have been as complete a merger.”

A Biden administration official put it more bluntly: “What NatSec Action produced was more influential than anything the Biden foreign policy campaign team came up with.”

But Sullivan was thrust more into a domestic policy role in the campaign, not a foreign policy one. That’s what he wanted—he was growing tired of national security and felt that problems at home needed to be addressed. If they weren’t dealt with, politicians like Trump, or at least Trumpism without the man himself, would be welcomed among the electorate. Sullivan wanted to be where the action was.

He felt qualified to do the work. Sullivan had spent much of 2017 to 2020 speaking with everyday Americans about their problems and about how domestic and foreign policies could help solve them. Those people reminded him of the folks he grew up with in Minnesota and the kinds of conversations he’d had with them as a younger man. He put down his findings in a coauthored report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank in D.C. Sullivan and his colleagues were, in effect, trying to translate the language of normal conversation for an elite audience that had long lost the ability to speak plainly.

“After three decades of U.S. primacy on the world stage, America’s middle class finds itself in a precarious state. The economic challenges presented by globalization, technological change, financial imbalances, and fiscal strains have gone largely unmet,” Sullivan and his coauthors wrote about their findings in the 2020 report. “If the United States stands any chance of renewal at home, it must conceive of its role in the world differently.”

What new role might that be? Their proposal was to look at strategic decisions abroad through the lens of how they would affect the economic well-being of Americans at home. It should “better integrate U.S. foreign policy into a national policy agenda aimed at strengthening the middle class and enhancing economic and social mobility,” they suggested, breaking down the traditional silos between global and local work.

Easier said than done, though. The average American voter can intuitively grasp how tariffs and other protectionist measures help safeguard their farms and factories. But how do nuclear sanctions against Iran put more dollars into a voter’s pocket?


Throughout the campaign, Biden was receptive to what Sullivan conveyed about his reformed worldview, even if it took him a bit by surprise. Sullivan had been a more traditional thinker about the world when he served the then vice president as national security adviser. But between rope lines and restaurant visits, stump speeches and shopping trips, the two spoke at length about the ideas Sullivan had curated at NatSec Action. They matched the candidate’s own sensibilities, and helpfully hewed closely to Trump’s less adventurous foreign policy.

Biden, too, had gone through an evolution. He arrived in the Senate in 1973, a decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, the United States and the Soviet Union were duking it out in the Cold War, a battle of ideology and will, a competition to become the world’s unquestioned superpower. It was a dangerous time, and in a way a simpler one. There were many threats in the world, but Moscow was the paramount one, and the U.S. government’s time and attention focused on that grand, singular problem. The United States, by the early 1990s, proved victorious and emerged as the world’s leading nation.

Biden took that win to heart. “We no longer think in Cold War terms, for several reasons. One, no one is our equal. No one is close. Other than being crazy enough to press a button, there is nothing that Putin can do militarily to fundamentally alter American interests,” he’d told The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos in 2014 as he mulled a presidential run to succeed Obama.

That, at least, is how Biden thought about America’s place in the world following thirty-six years in the Senate and nearly eight years as vice president. But he got to that view in meandering and maddeningly contradictory ways.

As a freshman in the Senate, Biden cared less about his nation’s moral obligations and more about what he considered to be in the cold, calculated interest of the United States. “I may be the most immoral son of a gun in this room,” he said in 1975, arguing against aid to Cambodia. “I’m getting sick and tired of hearing about morality, our moral obligation. There’s a point where you are incapable of meeting moral obligations that exist worldwide.”

Unlike his future colleague John Kerry, he hadn’t been among the millions of people demonstrating to end the war in Vietnam. While he thought the war was “lousy policy,” he focused more on life as a married man and wearing “sport coats” than on spilling out into the street to protest. Other people “felt more strongly than I did about the immorality of the war,” he told reporters in 1988.

Instead, Biden spent much of his time during the Cold War pushing to broker arms-control deals with the Soviet Union. He traveled back and forth to the country throughout the 1970s, eventually sealing a Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty in 1979. But Republicans and some right-leaning Democrats were skeptical of the pact. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late December that year, the prospects for approval in Congress died. Importantly, though, both nations still adhered to the limitations on their strategic forces through the end of 1985.

There were few lawmakers more hopeful that Washington and Moscow could coexist during perilous times, as long as they found ways to cooperate. “I think the prospects of Soviet–American relations are good,” Biden told a Soviet television station during a 1979 visit to the USSR. Once the wounds between the two nations started to heal after the invasion, Biden returned to the Soviet Union in 1984 to discuss more arms control, at the behest of President Ronald Reagan.

As he mulled a presidential bid in 1988, Biden was telling reporters in Washington that his foreign policy experience made him a stronger candidate than the others.

The narrative of Biden’s foreign policy prowess would take a hit in 1991. President George H. W. Bush wanted to send in forces alongside United Nations member states to push Iraq’s military out of Kuwait, and sought congressional approval for the mission. The Delaware senator was skeptical from the start. “What vital interests of the United States justify sending Americans to their deaths in the sands of Saudi Arabia?” he asked rhetorically about the proposed campaign. The war resolution was hotly debated, but it eventually passed the Senate by a close 52–47 vote. Biden was among the 47. His concern was that the United States–led coalition soon heading to the Middle East “has allowed us to take on 95 percent of the sacrifice across the board.”

Something changed in Biden once he saw the success of Desert Storm. For six weeks, the coalition flew “more than 116,000 combat air sorties and dropped 88,500 tons of bombs” on enemy positions, according to a U.S. Air Force history. That set the table for the ground campaign, launched on February 24, which lasted only four days once Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait. Two years later, in 1993, Biden looked back on his opposition to the war: “I think I was proven to be wrong.” He’d go on to chastise Bush for not pushing further, saying the president’s failure to depose Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was a “fundamental mistake.”

That experience seemed to turn Biden from a hard-nosed realist into an interventionist, citing human rights and morality as his rallying cries. In 1992, Serbia and its proxies launched a war in Bosnia, leading the United Nations to place an embargo impacting both Belgrade’s military might and Sarajevo’s ability to defend itself.

This framework enraged Biden, who blasted American inaction as war crimes were committed in southern Europe. “We have turned our backs on aggression. We have turned our backs on atrocity,” he said in 1993 after a trip to the Balkans. “We have turned our backs on conscience.” He also penned a stark op-ed in The New York Times that summer, urging then president Bill Clinton to act before Serb loyalists traversed the continent like Nazi Germany decades earlier.

“Is this a civil war? Only if you think Austria and Czechoslovakia had civil wars in 1938. Will it be a civil war when Serb fascism rampages into Kosovo and Macedonia, bringing Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey into the war? If not in Bosnia, will we respond to aggression then? Or anywhere else?” he wrote. Five years later, during the Kosovo crisis, Biden claimed in a Senate Foreign Relations hearing that he had advocated for direct American military action in Bosnia. “I was suggesting we bomb Belgrade. I was suggesting that we send American pilots in and blow up all of the bridges on the Drina,” the senator said. U.S. warplanes, on Clinton’s orders, began dropping bombs on Serbian nationalist forces in 1994.

Biden’s pro-intervention streak continued during another Iraq debate. This time, George W. Bush, like his father, sought a war resolution to send the U.S. military into the country. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, perpetrated by Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, the administration’s focus shifted in the summer of 2002 to forcing Iraq’s Hussein to dismantle his suspected weapons of mass destruction program.

Biden was convinced by the Bush administration’s case for war. “In my judgment, President Bush is right to be concerned about Saddam Hussein’s relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that he may use them or share them with terrorists,” Biden said during an August hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a panel he chaired. “These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power,” he continued, adding, “President Bush has stated his determination to remove Saddam from power, a view many in Congress share.”

While Biden did support a narrower authorization, one that allowed force only for the removal of WMDs, the resolution up for a vote that October was on whether to give the president Congress’s full backing to use the military as he “determines to be necessary and appropriate.” Biden ended up endorsing the measure. “I do not believe it is a rush to war but a march to peace and security,” he said on the Senate floor. “I believe failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war would occur.”

The authorization passed by a vote of 77–23, with 21 Democrats, including Biden, in favor. Biden would later say that he supported the resolution because it would strengthen Bush’s hand in diplomatic negotiations to get inspectors to search for WMDs inside Iraq. He’d criticize the administration’s handling of the war, insisting that Bush’s team sent thousands of U.S. troops into the fight “under funded and under manned.”

“We’re so woefully unprepared because of judgments made from the failure to plan before we went in of what we were going to do in the after-math,” he said in 2003. Even so, Biden had backed a war that found no weapons of mass destruction and saw 4,500 Americans die—though Saddam Hussein had finally been driven from power, just as Biden had wished a decade earlier.

Despite Biden’s complicated foreign policy history, his overall support for American might, and for the nation’s ability to underwrite the international liberal order, made Jake Sullivan a natural disciple. But Sullivan had changed during the Trump years after working to define a progressive foreign policy, one that would appeal to denizens of the heartland as well as the well-heeled and well-intentioned urban elites. The Democratic candidate, having watched his opponent in the Oval Office and on the campaign trail, had also come to the conclusion that the usual message on foreign policy needed a first-page rewrite.

It was one thing to have a well-reasoned foreign policy. It would be another to sell it to the American people as Biden debated Trump. Biden and Sullivan hoped the challenger couldn’t be painted as some warmongering hawk. That stigma had plagued Hillary Clinton during her bout with Trump, and there was some concern about the former senator’s past support for the Iraq War.

Biden added his own flair to Sullivan’s framework. Trump’s presidency tarnished America’s image as the world’s leading democracy when he back-slapped with strongmen, namely Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. At home, Trump also wanted troops to quell protests and riots for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, while his party sought to limit access to the vote.

Biden felt strongly that the way to contrast himself with Trump—and give his presidency an overarching theme—was to say that the world’s greatest challenge was one of autocracies versus democracies. Sullivan loved the concept. As the campaign went forward, he and Blinken, Biden’s longtime right-hand man, helped pen a July 2020 campaign speech to road test it.

Turning back the tide of rising authoritarianism “means repairing and reinvigorating our own democracy, even as we strengthen the coalition of democracies that stand with us on every continent,” Biden said. “I will start by putting our own house in order—remaking our education system so that a child’s opportunity in life isn’t determined by their zip code or race; reforming our criminal justice system to eliminate inequitable disparities; putting the teeth back in the Voting Rights Act.”

This was a wholly different message not just for Biden, not just for Democrats, but for the American foreign policy establishment. It underscored just how successful National Security Action was: it shifted the thinking of one of America’s most traditional foreign policy minds, and by his side placed Sullivan, one of the Democratic Party’s new intellectual leaders.

“We did pretty well,” said a former NatSec Action staffer now in government.

What began as a reaction to, and soul-searching after, the election of Donald Trump had become key talking points for the forty-sixth president of the United States. And in time these tenets would coalesce into a new muscular, Democratic approach to foreign policy. Whether one called it Bidenism or the Biden Doctrine, the new administration would conduct its international relations in a different way than even Barack Obama.

While many of Biden’s closest advisers had cut their teeth during the Obama years, they were now embarking on something new, something that could change the way America saw its role in the world. Force would be used only when the foundations of the world that the United States had helped build since 1945 were at risk. Otherwise, the guns would be holstered if the cause was not clearly and directly in the American interest. If Obama was guided by his head, Biden was guided by his gut and by a rock-ribbed belief that the average American needed a champion in Washington.

U.S. foreign policy is never the handiwork of one author. Instead, each of the key players in an administration bring both their ideals and their life experiences to bear. To understand what the Biden Doctrine is, one first has to understand what each of its architects contributed. How would Sullivan’s “foreign policy for the middle class” permeate every aspect of the way the administration handled global affairs? What lessons had Antony Blinken learned under Biden in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and then in Obama’s White House and State Department, to counter great powers like China and Russia?

And how would Biden, a president who came of age in a time when America was the shining city upon a hill, attempt to make it genuinely great again—respected and trusted by its allies, feared by its enemies, and no longer willing to bend to despots?

Doctrines don’t just emerge shiny and new off a think tank’s assembly line. They need to be road tested, and before Biden would reach the half-way mark of his term, his administration’s approach would be faced with a new bloody wave of discontent between Israel and Palestine, a calamitous withdrawal from a decades-long conflict, and the greatest land war in Europe since World War II.

Four years after watching Hillary Clinton lose to Donald Trump, Jake Sullivan was once again watching the television in despair. Moments earlier, an aide had walked into a conference room of the Biden transition’s office in Wilmington, Delaware, to tell him that the Capitol in Washington, D.C., was under attack. Donald Trump had incited a mob of supporters to stop the certification of the election result in the Senate. Sullivan completed his video conference with the Mexican foreign minister and watched the scenes on the news.

What he saw—the violence, the anger, the destruction—didn’t seem like the country with which he had just gotten reacquainted. The scenes were reminiscent of the political chaos facing other nations, not America. It was otherworldly to him.

Sullivan got in touch with Biden and other colleagues in the wake of the January 6, 2021, insurrection—exactly two weeks before the inauguration. The future national security adviser, with Antony Blinken and others, agreed that the campaign had gotten its broad theme right: the democratic world was under attack, and it was clear that the largest threat to American democracy came from within, even if a small group of extremists didn’t reflect the United States as a whole. The job now wasn’t just to save the world from Trump. It was also to save America from the forces he had unleashed.

At least this time Sullivan could do something about it.

It helped that transition documents and position papers whizzing around the transition’s offices already included language Sullivan had helped cultivate at National Security Action. “They were basically carbon copies,” a transition official told me. The shadow cabinet was moving into the White House.

What Biden hadn’t expected was that the sitting president would forcibly try to remain the sitting president. That changed the tenor of the transition leading up to the inauguration. Sullivan, Blinken, and other incoming officials offered their thoughts on the address the new president would give to the nation. This was how Biden was going to save the world.

“We can make America, once again, the leading force for good in the world,” Biden said from the steps of the recently attacked Capitol as Sullivan watched from the White House’s Situation Room. “We will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example. We will be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”

This time, watching a president speak to the country he led, Sullivan didn’t watch with horror or despair. He watched with hope.