One is the youngest United States National Security Advisor of the past 60 years. The other is the Chinese name associated with Beijing’s management of relations with the US. That’s who I am Jake Sullivan e Yang Jiechi, the two heads of delegation from the United States and China for the talks in Rome on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sullivan, alongside Hillary Clinton and Obama
Jake Sullivan, 45, is described as a man of much more maturity than one might imagine at his age. Also, and above all, thanks to the experience accumulated in the years in which he was the right hand of Hillary Clinton, when the former first lady, overcome the defeat of his presidential campaign in 2008 – for which the young lawyer from Minneapolis, with degrees from Yale and Oxford in international relations, had worked – became Barack Obama’s secretary of state. Called to the State Department, where he became the youngest director of the political bureau, Sullivan played a crucial role in the secret negotiations with Iran that led to the nuclear deal. An unmissable figure alongside Clinton, Sullivan in those years also recorded a record number of 111 missions alongside the former first lady around the world.
With Obama’s second term, no longer in the State Department, Sullivan is appointed National Security Advisor to then Vice President Biden, a position he will hold for 18 months, the only ones he then spent alongside Biden before joining his campaign. in 2020, after working on Clinton’s 2016 one. Overwhelmed by criticism, and even some requests for resignation, as one of the leaders of the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan, Sullivan, arrived at the White House with hawkish positions on China. In essays published a few months before the 2020 elections, he stated that “the signs that China is preparing to challenge American global leadership are indisputable and omnipresent.” He is not on his first face to face with Yang Jiechi.
The “tiger”, the man in Beijing for the USA
In the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and head of the foreign commission office of the CCP Central Committee, former Chinese ambassador to Washington and former foreign minister, Yang Jiechi72 years old,has a long relationship with the US. The “tiger” was named by George Bush Sr., whom Yang also accompanied as an interpreter to Tibet during a trip in 1977 well before Bush became president.
The last face to face between Yang and Sullivan dates back to October, after the sparks in Anchorage in March 2021 in the presence of the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the Foreign Minister of Beijing, Wang Yi, in what was the first meeting between the two powers in the Biden era to which China presented itself with its faces of reference for foreign policy that rarely travel together. A six-hour meeting, that of October in Zurich, which had paved the way for the virtual summit in November between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping.