Jake Sullivan, White House National Security Adviser, Reflects on China Policy

“That to me, I think, has a practical answer, which is government-to-government agreements that emplace effective security safeguards and transparency around the hardware, the model weights and the know-how, and that’s what we have worked through in our M.O.U. [memorandum of understanding] with the U.A.E., and I believe that is a sustainable model for having a strong technology partnership with that country, as well as other countries, that gives the U.S. a series of both economic and strategic advantages, where the alternative is to have them go into the Chinese technology orbit, which we do not want.”

On the kinds of trade agreements that Asian nations want:

“What countries are looking for, in my view, has become increasingly bespoke. It’s not just about a kind of broad market access. It’s the particular needs of a country thinking about its economic model for the future. And so the economic dialogues we were having with these countries and the attractiveness of the United States is about a lot more than just: Can we lower barriers to market access?”

“So let me give you some examples. With Japan, they really wanted the critical minerals M.O.U. so that they had a route into the benefits of the I.R.A. [Inflation Reduction Act]. That was kind of their number one ask, much more important to them than some broader-based trade deal. With Indonesia, it’s quite similar. That’s what Indonesia is looking for. Fundamentally, they want to work out a high-standards, critical minerals agreement so that there can be a flow of Indonesian nickel into American electric-vehicle manufacturing, batteries and so forth with other countries.”

On whether American workers and industries benefited from earlier free-trade agreements:

“So where did workers fit into that? Now you could say, well, workers fit into that. They’re going to get lower-cost goods, and that’s good for them and, to a certain extent, that’s right, so I’m not averse to free trade. But it has to have some element of a theory for how the U.S. industrial base, the capacity to build here, is sustained, and that’s why I actually think things like the I.R.A. [Inflation Reduction Act] and a critical minerals agreement with Japan are a more rational way to think about free trade going forward.”

On what Mr. Sullivan learned from his meetings with Mr. Xi and Mr. Wang:

“The single biggest thing that jumps out at me comes out of the meeting with Xi — and it was reinforced in the meeting that President Biden had with Xi, and very much in the meetings with Wang Yi as well, but punctuated — which is my view that when we came into office, the Chinese view was: If you are going to compete with us, then we will not cooperate with you, and we will not have lines of communication. You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose. And we’ve just stuck with our theory, which is managed competition: We’re going to compete, we’re going to compete vigorously, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t find areas to work together where it’s in our mutual interest at the same time that we’re competing. And, in order to compete responsibly, we have to have communication at all levels, including sustaining military-to-military communication.”

“As we leave, the P.R.C. [People’s Republic of China] has, at least for the time being, adopted, not in the way they talk, but in the way the relationship is conducted, managed competition. We have found areas to work together: on counternarcotics, A.I., nuclear risk and climate. We have sustained communication, including military-to-military communication, and we are competing, obviously competing vigorously, and yet still the relationship has an element of stability so that we’re not presently on the brink of a downward spiral. That is a significant evolution over four years for how the relationship is managed on both sides, and it is consistent with our theory of management of the relationship that the P.R.C. has now mirrored.”