America’s Greatest Threat to Democracy Comes From Within

Garry Kasparov

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In the fight to save democracies from the grips of autocrats, defenders of democratic values must partner with people who would otherwise be their political opponents. In this episode, host Garry Kasparov seeks to demonstrate this lesson by welcoming former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan as his guest. Their long-held and many disagreements aside, Garry and Jake find common ground in standing up to the forces that are working to undermine the rule of law and endanger American democracy.

Garry Kasparov: In a fight as important as the one to save American democracy from the grips of would-be autocrats and dictators, we must partner with people who would otherwise be our political opponents. We must welcome them to the cause and put aside other disagreements, at least for the time being.

This is a lesson dissidents in unfree places understand well, but not one that comes easy to Americans. It is a lesson I hope to personally demonstrate in today’s episode.

From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Garry Kasparov.

My guest today is Jake Sullivan, the former National Security Adviser for President Joe Biden, and before that, a top adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state and when she ran for president.

My disagreements with him are too numerous to detail in full, but I will offer this summary. Sullivan and the presidential administrations he has worked for have too often failed to understand and predict the threats facing the world and misjudged what those threats mean for America and its democracy. They have been flat-footed time and again in Afghanistan, in Ukraine, in the Middle East. The list goes on.

In 2023, I called for congressional hearings into Sullivan’s leadership at the National Security Council, and I even wrote that Biden should fire him to be replaced with someone who understood the meaning of deterrence. But even with all those many disagreements, Jake and I still see eye to eye on the threat to American democracy, and that’s why I asked him to join me for this conversation.