Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken delivers a foreign policy speech after being introduced by President-elect Joe Biden at the Queen Theatre on November 24, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)

Following the inauguration of President Biden this week, attention is naturally turning to the administration's appointments and the individuals who will guide U.S. engagement with the world.

In the months leading up to the presidential election, Hudson hosted a number of Biden policy insiders who have now been nominated to key leadership positions. Secretary of State nominee Antony "Tony" Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and incoming National Security Council official Kurt Campbell joined Walter Russell Mead for his Dialogues on American Foreign Policy and World Affairs event series this past year. They shared their perspectives on the challenges facing the free world; how the U.S. should respond to threats from China, Iran, and other adversarial nations; and what they viewed as the key priorities for a potential Biden administration.

Read these key quotes from Walter's discussions with Secretary of State nominee Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and watch Walter's interview with incoming NSC official Kurt Campbell, for a glimpse of what we can expect from President Biden's foreign policy team.

Tony Blinken at Hudson

Key quotes from Tony Blinken in virtual conversation with Walter Russell Mead at Hudson Institute.  Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

1. The rebalanced foreign policy priorities of a Biden administration:

Presumably, in a Biden administration, we would see more emphasis on the Indo-Pacific, more emphasis on our own hemisphere as well as some sustained engagement with Africa. Obviously, Europe remains a partner of first resort and not of last resort when it comes to contending with the challenges we face. Just as a matter of time allocation and budget priorities, I think we would be doing less not more in the Middle East.

2. How America will compete with China:

We need to invest in our own competitiveness. That means making some very fundamental reorientation of resources and priorities when it comes to investing in American infrastructure, American education, the health care system, our workers and their competitiveness.

We need to rally our allies and partners instead of alienating them to deal with some of the challenges that China poses. For example, on trade, we're about 25% of world GDP alone. When we're working with allies and partners, depending on who we bring into the mix, it's 50 or 60% of GDP. That's a lot more weight and a lot harder for China to ignore. The strength of our democracy at home is directly tied to our ability to be a force for progress, to mobilize collective action around the world.

Our abdication of standing up for our own values and in Asia and with regard to China's actions, has, I think, given the government in Beijing a sense of greater impunity when it comes to cracking down on democracy in Hong Kong and abusing the human rights of Uyghurs in China. Our own democracy, when it is weak, when it looks like it's in disarray, when it seems not to be delivering from for its people when people are questioning its legitimacy, that is arguably good for China because our model looks less attractive than it otherwise would.

3. Israel remains a foundational partner even as regional priorities shift:

There are certain fundamentals that remain constant, starting with our relationship with Israel as the anchor and foundation for democracy in the region. That won't change. The commitment to Israel's security is not going away, but in terms of the amount of time and resources, we need to be thinking about how we allocate them to best match our interests. Again, I think that suggests more in the Asia-Pacific, more in our own hemisphere and the sustained engagement in Europe.

4. The Biden administration's interest in re-entering the Iran nuclear deal:

[Currently] we're heading right back to where we were before the agreement, which is a really terrible binary choice between either taking action to stop the program of all of the potential unintended consequences or doing nothing and allowing Iran to be in a breakout position where it can develop a nuclear weapon on very, very short order.

If Iran comes back into compliance with its obligations, Joe Biden said, "We should too and we would too," and then having brought the allies back on our side but now they keep asserting an equivalence between Iran and the United States, pretty extraordinary, asking us both to calm down.

With our partners and allies back on our side and with the agreement enforced, we're in a much better position jointly to confront Iran's actions and provocations that we don't like. Right now, most of our partners are spending all of their time trying to figure out how to keep the nuclear agreement alive, not working with us to deal with Iran's excesses in the region.

5. On America’s international alliances and a destabilized Libya:

I think revaluing these alliances starting with NATO is going to be very, very important to a Biden administration. Similarly, with the EU, it can and should be a vital partner for the United States, again in dealing with very difficult challenging situations like Libya.

Libya is a particularly challenging one and I have to acknowledge that we obviously did not succeed in the Obama-Biden administration in getting that right, in part, I think one of the things that we hadn't seen as clearly as we should have, arguably, is that Gaddafi had done a brilliant job making sure that there was nothing that could rise to challenge his power over the years. There was virtually no functional bureaucracy or administrative state with which to partner after he was gone from the scene. That made it very difficult to get anything done.

In the intervening time, we've had vacuums [which have] been filled by bad things, and we have Libya as a terrain of a proxy contest for other powers. That's going to be very, very hard to untangle but again, [we’ll be] using the institutions that allow us to collaborate and find joint approaches to hard problems.

Jake Sullivan at Hudson

Key quotes from Jake Sullivan in virtual conversation with Walter Russell Mead at Hudson Institute.  Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

1. Taiwan deserves closer attention from policy experts:

Taiwan is an issue that is not getting the level of attention that I believe it deserves today from American observers of the regional situation. The possibility of some asymmetric move [by China] vis a vis Taiwan, either this year or next year, or the year following, is very real. And so, it’s something that requires a deep level of attention.

Taiwan has been a surprising bipartisan success story where the U.S. and China have managed to have not cratered the relationship, but the U.S. has also managed to support a vibrant democratic Taiwan. That success story is going to come under some pressure in the years ahead. And I think it’s something that we should all be paying more close attention to than we have.

2. The “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran and the Biden administration's plans:

Both sides of this debate were wrong about a critical thing. Advocates and defenders of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], myself included, thought when the Trump administration pulled out and imposed unilateral sanctions, that those sanctions were not likely to be as effective, because the Trump administration wasn’t bringing the rest of the world along with them. That didn’t turn out to be true. Actually, those sanctions have been very effective in the narrow sense of causing deep economic pain in Iran.

But they weren’t able to muster an enormous amount of economic pressure, more than I and those of us who were defenders of the JCPOA would have anticipated. Snapback turned out to be a fairly straightforward thing—the power of the U.S. dollar. And the U.S. financial system was sufficient to take Iran from 2.5 million barrels a day of oil down to 500,000 or wherever we are at this point. So, I actually think it has vindicated the basic principle behind the JCPOA.

My view would be that a Democratic administration should immediately reengage nuclear diplomacy with Iran and look to establish something along the lines of the JCPOA, but immediately begin the process of negotiating a follow-on agreement. And I don’t think there’s anything inconsistent with negotiating a follow-on agreement and believing the JCPOA was good on its own terms.

3. Addressing Iran’s disruptive behavior across the Middle East:

I acknowledge that the Iran deal did not cover Iran’s regional behavior and that Iran’s regional behavior continued to be bad after the JCPOA was struck in the summer of 2015. I noticed that. The Iran deal didn’t say one thing one way or the other. It neither constrained Iranian behavior nor constrained America’s capacity to push back against Iranian bad behavior.

The real issue with Iran, the real limitation on Iran in the region, has not been the availability of cash. It’s been the availability of opportunity. Where opportunities have arisen, they’ve taken them. And that was true in the ’80s. It was true in the ’90s. It was true in the 2000s. It was during the 2010s. It remains true today. And even under massive sanctions, the Iranians have gotten more aggressive in the Gulf, have remained just as aggressive in Syria and Lebanon, have increased their activities in respect to the Houthis in Yemen, and all of that while under massive economic sanction from the United States.

4. How a Biden administration might pursue a nuclear track and a regional track with Iran:

If you can take one of the big threats off the board, the Iranian nuclear program, take it off the board, and then use the tools available at your disposal – none of which were stripped from us by the JCPOA – to go after Iran in the region. And to the extent you want to make diplomacy the central feature of stopping Iran’s malign activities, get the regional actors at the table with the Iranians and stand behind them with some pressure to try to produce a de-escalation, say between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

And I believe that the next administration should be thinking very seriously about how to run these two tracks in parallel, a nuclear track and a regional track. But the regional track is not going to be the P5+1 sitting with the Iranians and carving up the Middle East.

5. On U.S.-China competition:

Vice President [Biden] has a strong view that in any competition with China, we are going to be most effective if we’re running faster. And the way you run faster is to invest in yourself. So, his domestic policy would look a lot different from a Donald Trump’s domestic policy. It wouldn’t be the $2 trillion tax cut. It would be massive investments in infrastructure, innovation, education, human capital, the things that for the long-term will make the United States more able to effectively compete.

One issue that has changed quite a bit over the past several years that will feel different in complexion from 2009 to 2016 is the technology issue. And that goes both for the kinds of investments U.S. has to make to remain ahead in foundational technologies. [There’s the issue of an] appropriate level of restrictionism and balance with respect to the U.S.-China technology relationship. And frankly, the Chinese technology relationship with other countries around the world as well.

The U.S. needs to elevate its engagement across every dimension in the Asia Pacific. That [engagement] has to have a military component, an economic component and a diplomatic component. And that it is centrally about not just China but about strengthening the U.S. as a resident power on every dimension in the entire Asia Pacific, which would put us in a better position to deal with China.

Go Deeper: The Next Four Years