Why Biden’s National Security Adviser Plans To Focus On The U.S. Middle Class

“We’ve reached a point where foreign policy is domestic policy, and domestic policy is foreign policy,” incoming national security adviser Jake Sullivan told NPR over Zoom on Tuesday. “And the work that we do abroad fundamentally has to connect to making the lives of working people better, safer, fairer.”

President-elect Joe Biden talked a lot about this close connection between domestic and foreign policy during the presidential primary, often using near-identical language as Sullivan’s. And Biden wasn’t alone among the Democratic presidential contenders. The call for closer ties between domestic policies and what’s happening around the world has become an increasingly central theme of the party’s foreign policy debates.

Sullivan has played a leading role in this reorientation. He worked as a top staffer to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration, before later serving as then-Vice President Biden’s national security adviser. Sullivan was a senior policy adviser to Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and therefore had a front-row seat to her surprise loss to a candidate who ran on a nationalist and isolationist platform.