US in 'decisive decade' in competition with China: NSA Jake Sullivan

The US has entered a "decisive decade" as it confronts its competition with China while facing challenges from climate change to energy to food security, terrorism, NSA Jake Sullivan said

The US has entered a "decisive decade" as it confronts its competition with China while facing challenges from climate change to energy to food security, international terrorism and disease, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Wednesday as the Biden administration unveiled its national security strategy.

The Biden administration on Wednesday released its national-security strategy that serves as a reference point for officials to coordinate policies across the government.

Speaking ahead of the document's official release, Sullivan said the fundamental premise of the strategy is that the US has entered a decisive decade with respect to two fundamental strategic challenges.

"The first is the competition between the major powers to shape the future of the international order. And the second is that while this competition is underway, we need to deal with a set of transnational challenges that are affecting people everywhere, including here in the United States -- from climate change to food insecurity, to communicable diseases, to terrorism, to the energy transition, to inflation, he said.

This decisive decade is critical both for defining the terms of competition, particularly with PRC, and for getting ahead of massive challenges that if we lose the time in this decade, we will not be able to keep pace with most notably the climate crisis, but other challenges as well, Sullivan said, referring to China's official name.

This strategy makes clear that these shared challenges are not marginal issues, they are not secondary to geopolitics, but they operate on a plane alongside the geopolitical competition with major powers, he noted.

Sullivan said there are tensions between trying to rally cooperation to solve these shared challenges and trying to position ourselves effectively to prevail in strategic competition. But there are also ways in which these are reinforcing.

We believe fundamentally that the core elements of what the United States must do in the years ahead are the same for both sets of challenges, he added.

Specifically, we need to invest in the underlying sources and tools of American power and influence, especially our strength here at home, both for the purpose of effective competition and for the purpose of being set up to rally the world to solve shared challenges, he said.

Second, we need to build the strongest possible coalition of nations to enhance our collective influence, both to shape the global strategic environment and to address these transnational threats that require cooperation to succeed, he told reporters.

And finally, we need to set the rules of the road for the 21st century in critical areas -- from emerging technologies in cyberspace, to trade, economics, investment, and more -- both so that the international order continues to reflect our values and our interests and so that the international order is better designed to be able to take on the challenges ahead, Sullivan said.