President Biden is preparing to host the first-ever in-person summit of leaders from the so-called "Quad" countries the U.S., India, Japan and Australia in a sign of growing momentum behind what began as a Trump-era push to rally Asia's most powerful democracies into a more formal grouping to confront and contain communist China.
The New York Times’
Helene Cooper. Through keynote and panel conversations, our speakers will examine President Biden’s efforts to modernize the U.S. military for the conflicts of tomorrow, address its biggest foreign policy challenges including China and Russia, craft a foreign policy for the middle class, and much more.
About Our Speakers:
Jake Sullivan, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs
Jake Sullivan is Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Previously, Mr. Sullivan was a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Sullivan also served as National Security Adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden and Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State, as well as Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He was the Senior Policy Adviser on Secretary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Mr. Biegun, who also was deputy secretary of state for the past two years, left the State Department on Jan. 20. While it remains to be seen who will replace him, the Biden administration has quietly named a handful of key Asia policy officials in recent days.
There was no formal announcement by the administration, but former CIA analyst Jung H. Pak tweeted this week that she has “joined [the State Department] as Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian Pacific Affairs.”
Ms. Pak, most recently a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies, has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump’s attempt to redefine U.S. policy toward North Korea through top-down summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.