Sullivan...divides his time between an empty think-tank office in Washington and Yale, where he lectures one day a week on law and foreign policy. Almost everything about his professional life is transitory, uncertain, unsettled.
He ran through a list of his early mentors who had helped him find purchase in Washington: There was Leslie H. Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, where Sullivan had spent time as a summer intern, assigned by happenstance to Gelb’s office.
There was Strobe Talbott, who runs the Brookings Institution. In 2000, when Sullivan was starting law school, Talbott had just been chosen to lead the newly formed Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. “Those were the heady days when the mainstream foreign policy consensus was that globalization was a force for good,” Sullivan recalled. He had sought out Talbott after learning that they had both been Rhodes scholars and edited the Yale Daily News.
The "empty think tank office" that the piece mentions likely refers to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where Sullivan is a Senior Fellow in the think tank's Geoeconomics and Strategy Program.
