By Daniel Greenfield October 05, 2023 @Sultan Knish Blog
After the latest round of Chinese attacks on America, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Malta.The two men could not be more different.
Wang Yi, one of the public faces of Chinese’s hyper-aggressive style of ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’, is a 69-year-old member of China’s Communist politburo while Sullivan was a Hillary Clinton hanger-on who got lucky enough to be advising Biden on foreign policy after Hillary left.
While Wang Yi made his name by aggressively barraging enemy nations, Sullivan made his through appeasement most notably on Iran. After his shameful record on Iran under Obama, Sullivan went so far as to propose lifting sanctions on Iran under Biden on an interim basis.
But there is an interesting ‘lost years’ period in Sullivan’s life during the Trump era.
After Hillary lost, Sullivan, her deputy chief of staff at the State Department and the chief foreign policy advisor on her campaign, had to look for a new line of work.
And he found one “consulting” at Macro Advisory Partners.
Co-founded by Nader Mousavizadeh, an Iranian from Europe, who worked as a special assistant to the notoriously corrupt former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the former UN employee brought along Laila Manji, another UN veteran who had also worked for Annan.
Sir John Sawers, the former chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) joined Macro Advisory Partners and acts as its chair and general partner. David Claydon, its former co-founder and CEO, was an adviser to Britain’s Foreign Secretary.
Macro scored a coup by bringing on board not only Biden’s future national security adviser, but also Bill Burns, Biden’s somewhat unexpected choice for CIA Director. Also on board was Denis McDonough, Obama’s former national security adviser, currently acting as Biden’s VA Secretary.
The decision by future and former top United States security officials and diplomats to join an organization that has been described as being headed by former foreign spy chiefs was dubious.
Even more dubious was that Nader Mousavizadeh, its Iranian co-founder, had vocally used his platform to oppose conflict with China. Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column, the sort of nonsense read by the cognoscenti, included long quotes from Mousavizadeh on China in which the Macro boss argued against viewing China as promoting the “global spread of authoritarianism” and warned that fighting back would only make China more nationalistic.
“The danger is that we’re sleepwalking into a generational conflict that is neither necessary nor one that we in the West are prepared for, any more than the Chinese,” Mousavizadeh warned. “If the tariff war now underway culminates with removing Chinese citizens from Western businesses, and U.S. citizens from Chinese companies out of fears of espionage or theft, it will constitute an irreversible step toward generational enmity.”
Friedman, with typical dishonesty, did not mention that one of the big functions of Macro Advisory Partners was helping companies navigate regulations and sanctions when it came to doing business in and around the People’s Republic of China. Aiding in that effort are a list of MAP’s China advisors who include a former deputy national security advisor, the former acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, and the former deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia.
While Jake Sullivan’s ambit at Macro was reportedly focused on U.S. and European companies, one of them included Standard Chartered: a British multinational bank with significant financial interests in China.
When Sullivan joined the Biden administration, his assets were a towering $7.5 million to $27.5 million. Sullivan, whose father had been a University of Minnesota journalism professor, boasted what ABC News described as “a long list of residential and commercial real estate properties scattered throughout Florida and New Hampshire” which made up much of his wealth. The properties included everything from a golf course to land zoned for a church.
Officially, Sullivan had only earned in the low six figures from Macro, nonetheless he was a millionaire. Does Wang Yi have an interest in a Florida golf course? Probably not, but who knows? And when Sullivan meets with Wang, does he think of his time with Macro? Does he consider how much more profitable it would be if we stopped thinking of China as our enemy?
After an initial cover-up of the Chinese spy balloon, the Biden administration was forced to shoot it down to save face with the American public. Now the administration has released a National Intelligence Estimate claiming that the spy balloon had been blown off course and that it had not transmitted any intelligence to the People’s Republic of China. The estimate is as untrustworthy as it is unreliable. In May 2023, Sullivan was already meeting with Wang to move beyond the espionage incident. Since then, the Communist dictatorship has launched multiple hacking attacks, including some aimed directly at the State Department, with no consequences.
In July, Sullivan claimed that the Chinese hackers did not penetrate any classified information and vowed to hold them accountable. As of August, he had no further updates on any plan to hold China accountable. This has been the standard pattern for the Biden administration. China launches an attack, the administration promises to take it seriously and then buries it. In doing so, the People’s Republic of China gets the green light to escalate and do it all over again.
The Biden administration is one long extended conflict of interest so no one bothers to ask whether the national security adviser ought to be a man who worked for a consultancy focused on improving economic relations with China. And yet it’s a question that ought to be asked.
Perhaps American diplomacy could use fewer “true friends for the Chinese people” and more true friends of the American people.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
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