China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West with David Sanger

China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West with David Sanger

welcome everyone to the Center for strategic and International Studies uh really grateful to have David Sanger uh to talk about his new book which we’ll jump into in a second new cold Wars um China’s rise Russia’s Invasion and America’s struggle to defend the West uh David is the White House and National Security correspondent for the New York Times uh reports on the president the administration uh he’s worked at the I’m I’m I’m going to not bring up your age by the way but he’s he’s worked at the times for more than four decades uh starting 2 months after he graduated from Harvard and that makes him for better or worse probably for better uh one of the longest serving correspondents at the times and that dates back I know to before there was even a virtual way to read the paper just the printed copy so uh you’ve been there for for a while yes uh back in the days when we actually thought you could merge Inc on paper and that was all you needed to do well uh I still subscribe to that version of the paper so thank goodness uh he’s worked on several Pulitzer Prize winning teams the Challenger disaster uh the uh Russian investigation I think there’s one more one on one on Chinese um uh US exports to China of military gear in the late 1990s late 1990s um uh Native of White Plains New York um one of the things that I found most interesting in doing a little bit of extra research on David since I’ve known him for some time is his three most vital items that he brings with him um probably not going to get this from the book but this is just extra fodder one noise cancelling headphones I don’t know if you still do this two a small shortwave radio and three a 7piece four-weight fly Rod that breaks down to fit into a tube under a foot long that’s right so that means wherever you are if there’s a chance to fish you’re going to get at it I’m going to slip out and try to go do it I don’t think the G7 in Italy is going to sort of lend itself to that next month but we can try all right well maybe there’s a way to get up to Lake Como or something like that U I’m not sure there any fish in there a lot of celebrities but much for any fish well thank you for for coming um David if we could just start off with the title which has been somewhat controversial um the the title is not the new Cold War the the the word war is plural here so the new cold Wars uh and congratulations you hit the New York Times bestseller list thank you uh right off the bat uh can you describe to us a little bit what the new cold Wars why plural and then we’ll go from there well this is a book about um how it is that the United States made some some fundamentally wrong assumptions along with our allies about where we’d be today uh when I came back to Washington after a happy life as a foreign correspondent in uh Japan uh the Assumption at the moment was that Berlin Wall had fallen the uh Soviet Union had collapsed we had won the Cold War and that Russia and China each in their own ways would basically sign on to Western institutions the whole Western experiment and while there would be frictions back and forth because we’re big countries with different interests that fundamentally we’d all be rowing in the same direction and so the first 150 pages of the book is Lort of a history that I put together with um uh my wonderful researcher and and co-writer on this Mary Brooks who some of you in the audience may know and so we went back and sort of interviewed all of the principles who were still around on the question of how do we get this so wrong I mean talk about either intelligence failures or wishful thinking or just faulty assumptions but you know the first chapter Seth um uh opens with George W bush and his wife Laura and uh Putin and uh his then wife floating down a yacht on the never River right around this time of year end of May early early June Sun barely sets you know maybe at around 11:00 or close to midnight and the conversation on that boat I was in the pool boat we were less wellfed and we had we had much less expensive it didn’t it didn’t sink though so it didn’t sink didn’t sink um and uh but we were brought on the The Yacht briefly to sort of see the leaders there’s this hulking guy in the background who was serving dinner it took me 20 years to confirm my suspicion about who that was but it was exactly who you would think it was froan who reappears as a character later on so all the characters in the book are on the scene and this is a narrative history this is not an academic work of study this is an out reported book uh with real life characters interacting with each other over these these 30 years and the the discussion on that boat at that time set was when not if when Russia would join the European Union and whether Russia which already had an office inside the gates of NATO the Russia NATO council could ultimately join NATO the alliance created to contain the old Soviet Union so fast forward to where we are today all the signals we missed from Putin from his speech in the Munich security conference in 2007 saying there are parts of Russia that have been ripped apart from away from us that must come back together to the invasion of Crimea which we didn’t really respond to in a serious way for a year to signing up uh to the nordstream 2 uh deal which Angela Merkel did a year after Crimea saying Putin was a reliable supplier how we underplayed every signal this was going wrong and overplayed every signal that they were cooperating on climate or containing Iran or containing the North Korean nuclear program and then for China a different story but comes out in the same place where the big misjudgment was Jinping and what he would do and the intelligence reports which you’ll read about in the book that basically said he would um buy his time focus on the domestic economy and so now we’re ending up with those new cold Wars wars with an S because Russia and China are working together they are not full allies but they’re doing exactly what Nixon and Kissinger tried to get in the way of and I was here I think it was either this now guess it was upstairs for that Kissinger H 100th birthday party you may remember this and Kissinger that night talked a little about what the objective was in keeping Russia and China apart and he’s gone now but in many ways so is the success of that effort so how would you describe the current situation what are the characteristics of the Cold War of the cold Wars the way you sort of describe it at various parts of the book is globalization now that’s out there’s an element self-reliance and nationalism that’s in right uh so how would you how would you describe what now Cold War those key characteristics of what we’re in right now are you know you said at the beginning Seth you’re absolutely right there’s been some controversy about the title and there a lot of my academic friends say um this is so different from the old cold you shouldn’t even be calling it a cold work some of them are saying this including in the administration out of a desire that it not become a cold war in fact Biden himself in his first address to the United Nations as president said in relation to China it was before the invasion of of Ukraine um we’re not headed to another cold war it’s interesting that since the book came out they have not pushed back on on the title because it seems so obvious that what we’re in Now does not look exactly like the old old Cold War why would it the internet not only hadn’t been invented or hadn’t become widespread when I joined the New York Times it also was hadn’t become widespread during the old Cold War so I me we’re in a very different moment but I was trained by Ernie may the great Harvard historian who wrote a wonderful book about the uses and misuses of analogy that I keep right by my computer lest I um reach for the wrong analogy in some Times News analysis or whatever it’s called if you ever want to cross particularly for the students in the audience uh an old copy of it on Amazon or something it’s called thinking in time and it’s just a great read about how you think about these things but Ernie had a great habit which was whenever you were about to go use an analogy like to the old Cold War here you took a piece of paper you put a line down the middle and you did similarities on one side and you did differences on the other and the differences here are a lot bigger and a longer list than the similarities the similarities are striking but the list is longer on the other side so during the old Cold War we had a single adversary now we obviously we have two vastly complicating it it was almost entirely a military conflict and within that a nuclear conflict but we knew who we were dealing with after the Cuban Missile Crisis we got into sort of a pattern of wouldn’t call stability but predictability there was a red phone at our end a red phone at their end you sort of knew who was going to answer it at the other end he sometimes practiced answering it at the other end this is so much different because with China we have an economic competitor a military competitor a cultural competitor if you don’t believe that then you don’t have Tik tock on your phone and those have nothing I don’t actually you don’t but may or may not have kids that do when it gets when it gets banned then you’re it’s going to be very fast process you’re not going to right um and obviously along the way it’s a technology conflict and the book argues it’s primarily a technology conflict we can get into that later on um that wasn’t the case uh with um Russia we were dependent on them for absolutely nothing except caviar and vodka and um we would not want to live without those things but if we had to we’d stumble through but it was cold in the sense that that there was no direct conflict between the US and the Soviet Union we fought along the margins we fought indirectly in in El Salvador and Guatemala Vietnam and at least so far uh there has not been direct conflict as well so the competition right now is cold and cold I I I don’t think you mean cold doesn’t mean without War because obviously we have that in Ukraine but cold for the moment um does mean that we have not seen direct conflict and I think that has been one of uh President Biden’s objectives in Ukraine in Ukraine President Biden has laid out two objectives one is don’t let the Russians win he hasn’t quite said the ukrainians should win but by don’t let the Russians win he means don’t let them take over the country you know and its territories he has defined it much and don’t stumble into World War I which is why he has not allowed us to put troops on the ground in Ukraine uh where they could you know die in a missile attack you’ve just been there you you you know what it’s like when you’re scrambling down into the basements into the bunkers um from our conversation before I think you may have had an evening of that uh and um the the second part is don’t allow us arms to be fired into Russia on the theory that that would get you on an escalation ladder and that’s the argument that is coming under under a lot of stress now you may have seen a story I wrote last week saying that secretary blinkin when he came back from his most recent trip to Ukraine which I think was just a week or two after you were there uh basically said to the president we’ve got to lift that given the change circumstances of the war moving up near K what is your sense about the pros and cons of that um a number of NATO countries including the British have had very different views they are at a place right now where it’s okay for the British provide to provide weapons to the Ukraine and for the ukrainians to use them on Russian soil against military or other logistical targets uh oil reserves weapons depots milit bases I think I think some of these some of these countries including the British at least my conversations with senior British leaders would be a little different if they were targeting civilian populations in Russia but what is your sense about the debate now uh even since you wrote that story about where where the debate is in the US and do you have thoughts on whether whether concerns are are are uh a bit of self-d deterrence potentially exaggerated on our part so the whole history of our involvement with Ukraine as described in the book and the book takes you through the internal White House debate over revealing the intelligence something I think AAL Hayes may have discussed some when she was when she was uh here um and then takes you into the the decisions that Biden made he was very concerned from the beginning about nuclear escalation and this is partly a product of who he is I mean he grew up in the old Cold War chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee when the overwhelming goal was let’s bring down the size of our nuclear arsenals let’s lessen the possibilities that we’re going to use nuclear weapons was in the Obama Administration whose Mantra was let’s take nuclear weapons out of the cent center parts of of defense policy and I think what he saw was the possibility that this could go nuclear very quickly and I think the most striking chapter in the book is the one where he shows up uh in New York City in the second week or third week of October of 2022 at a fundraiser at um the home of James Murdoch who was the black sheep Democrat of the Murdoch family and uh people are walking around nice glasses of wine in their hands looking at the Murdoch art collection which is quite impressive and in walks Biden and he’s clearly preoccupied with something and he says to this whole group well we well actually I I’ll read you the line that’s on the back cover of the book he said on this night for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis we have a direct threat of the use of of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going and initially people were looking at them like is he thinking like in the future and they realize as he keeps talking he’s talking about like in the next week or two so he keeps talking they keep thinking about how quickly they can get out to The Hamptons and start digging tunnels um and this was based on a series of very highly classified intercepts that the US had which which you get into in the book by the way so another good reason to read yeah in some considerable detail probably a little more detail than I think the US government cared for me to get into them but by this point the Russians had understood what we had because we made it pretty clear to them um in which Russian military commanders were overheard talking to each other about rolling out tactical nuclear weapons these are Battlefield nuclear weapons but some of them in the Russian Arsenal more powerful than what we dropped on Hiroshima presumably for use against Ukrainian targets and if they had done this and if this conversation wasn’t just for show it would have been the first use of a nuclear weapon by a nuclear armed State against a non-nuclear armed State since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Biden was concerned this would change the world because we would have to go respond not in a nuclear way but probably with a conventional strike on whatever bases the Russians used to launch this nobody knew how the Russians would respond and at one point in that conversation that night the President says once you start down that path you’re in Armageddon this was not what these nice wealthy Eastsiders had come to hear that evening right they were thinking initially about where their their Afterparty dinner reservations were and he was telling you we might be in a nuclear Exchange in the next few weeks in fact his AIDS thought at that point that under some circumstances there was a 5050 chance of a nuclear detonation in October of 2022 and most Americans were wandering around completely oblivious to this in fact the night he said this I start looking at the transcript that’s coming in and I call up somebody at the White House I said what is the president saying here and he said oh God he just gave us that talk in the oval the other day so if you want to hear what Biden’s really thinking go to go to fundraisers all right but that means you’ve got to donate a fair amount before you go yeah well go as a reporter and that way you know have to contribute but so what have you seen the um Russians do in the past week last week amid all of this discussion from the French about putting troops on the ground and zalinski urging the administration to allow him to fire into into Russian territory they begin to run a very public tactical nuclear weapon exercise so Putin is using his nuclear weapons every single day in this conflict as the thing he can wave around to say don’t you push this too far and the US debate a fascinating us debate which the president has never really come back to talking about in public is how much do you let that deter you or do you come to the conclusion I I can’t let him do that and I’m willing to take some more risk and I think that’s the argument the president’s in right now if you listen to his um commencement speech at West Point on Saturday you wouldn’t have gotten a single clue of this he just went on and and made the same old arguments about helping Ukraine stay free so do you think the Administration has essentially self-d deterred out of concern that whether it’s striking Targets in Ukraine or providing types of weapon systems that it risks escalation including to nuclear war do you do do you do you give validity to the argument I think they recovered from it in a chapter called boiling the Frog as the temperature Rose they made decisions the president made decisions to give the ukrainians weapons that in February of 20122 he was not willing to go give them you know initially they said no way are we giving you attack thems we first gave them the short range now we’ve given them the long range he said there’s no way we’re going to let you have f-16s at the last Hiroshima uh G7 Summit they agreed to allow the f-16s and they’re supposed to be there fall is that well summer uh but there’s been some delays yeah so uh it’s a pilot training thing and it’s complex um the US said we will not give you Abrams tanks and they’re not suited for the region but in an effort to free up the European much more flexible tanks we gave them abam tanks the Russians have captured one and put it on display in Moscow so one I want to back to to two other components of the the new cold Wars because I think they’re interesting um I mean every period is different this is a different period from uh the last Cold War and it’s been different from other other periods but you do say in the book that there are some features of today’s geopolitical era that are at least in part 1914 part 1941 part 2022 and it’s partly the way the war is evolved in Ukraine so how do you look at not just during the Cold War but other historical contexts and what do you pull lessons from about where we are right now so this has been what’s been remarkable about Ukraine as a war first of all it’s been a huge training ground for the United States I mean if somebody had come to you as a simulation here at csis and said for 6% or 7% of the defense budget you can actually take on the Russian army and see what works and what doesn’t you’d probably say that’s a pretty good bargain because we’ve learned a lot along the way systems that work and systems that don’t I’ll get back to it in a minute that discussion of 1914 1941 2022 came out of a long dinner that uh Mary Brooks and I had with the uh then chairman of uh The Joint Chiefs and um he was um making the point that the Assumption at the opening of the war was that this could be a nice clean cyber War because of course the Russians had uh gone after Ukraine to turn off the power in on several uh occasions in 2016 and 2017 then he said it looked like a World War II tank war as the ground action took off and then and I’ll clean up a language for a nice csis Forum here yes he said it ended up looking like a blanking uh trench warfare from World War from World War I and uh you know this is really what we’re seeing we’re seeing all three wrapped up I mean at the opening days of the war what saved Ukraine in addition to the US rushing in Aid was that Microsoft and Amazon World Systems moved the entire government of Ukraine into the cloud it required a change of law in Ukraine and they did it in a week and then because nobody in the US government had planned for the question of how do you communicate with your government in the cloud Elon Musk whatever you might think of his other Ventures in the world and other statements came in and saved them with starlink and showed us along the way how vulnerable our own multi-billion dollar satellite systems are being and that’s why star Shield the sort of classified version of starlink ultimately I suspect will end up replacing almost all that we have up in space today um we learned some other lessons the ukrainians are making drones as a chapter in the book end toward the end of the book describes in here for $350 a piece welded together or soldered together I should say by high school kids in like old abandoned factories I met some of them when I was there it’s pretty remarkable they’re like they’re Frankenstein um drones in in a sense they’re soldered together uh but they’re in some cases quite effective they can be and they’ve been less effective lately because the Russians have finally figured out the electronic warfare techniques that they could have used from the beginning but didn’t right which is in of itself pretty interesting we roll in with our tens of thousands of dollars made in America skyio drones to help them out and every single one of them gets taken down by the Russians in the first 48 hours or so okay back to the drawing boards with that at least we found out now in Ukraine rather than find out in a you know conflict over a NATO country so when I say this is really an area of experimentation I mean it um so the war is the strangest combination of old brutality of being stuck in the in the trenches um and a bit along the way of learning how cyber integrates with ground Warfare you know when I wrote the perfect weapon in 2018 18 there were still people who thought there was going to be cyber war and then traditional War and the argument I made in that book was this is more like aircraft in World War I where we thought there would be air wars and regular Wars and eventually the aircraft got fighter jets bombers all got um merged in with ordinary Warfare and that’s what we’ve seen happen in this conflict in Ukraine with cyber so one one of the things you do discuss it in the book um is can you draw out some of the differences in the role of companies and how this has changed because one of the interesting things about Ukraine you mentioned Microsoft getting directly involved and Amazon web services directly involved in the conflict at least on the Cyber defense side you mentioned SpaceX but it’s the list of companies that have um uh have gone to Ukraine and have provided Services directly to the Ukrainian government paler um andril uh the satellite companies commercial satellite companies uh Hawkeye 360 maxar Planet uh I mean I I can’t think of a of another case of Another War where we’ve had such private sector involvement we certainly have had in previous Wars with dinec cor contractors or others but is this a a new Prelude to how the future of the these cold Wars are and what the struggle is going to look like it may well be but we’ve learned along the way there are some risks in doing it this way so at the beginning of the war this seemed like such a clear moral cause that it wasn’t hard for companies to sign up right away I mean Microsoft made no bones about the fact that they were going to help the ukrainians and pull their operations out of Russia and AWS though not as public did the same thing and you named many of the others it would be a lot harder case if it wasn’t such a blatant Act of aggression where the companies weren’t quite certain where they were going to be or if it involved China where the cost of giving up the Chinese market for some companies not for others because a lot of tech companies have been excluded from the Chinese market would be so much higher than giving up Russia I mean for some of these companies Russia was one or two or 3% of Revenue I mean they’d hate to lose it but lots of things can go wrong that where you lose a lot more Revenue wasn’t really a hard decision um the second risk that you run is that the companies end up playing National Security advisor and that’s what happened when Elon Musk gets that phone call that Walter Isaacson first described in his musk biography where the ukrainians asked him to turn starlink on for Crimea where it was not covering at that time so that they could strike a bunch of Russian ships that were sitting in the harbor and he refused because someone had told him that if we do that sort of the Biden argument we were discussing before it would start a nuclear war so you know he made his decision it’s his company it’s a private company do you want a somewhat how do I politely refer to this eccentric billionaire is that is that polite enough yeah um making the decision about whether or not you give the ukrainians a critical weapon that they want do you would you like that to be debated in The Situation Room even if you didn’t like the outcome or would you rather that be made in a boardroom or by one founder and that’s the difficulty that we’re heading into here that if these are not in some way deeply coordinated with the US government every company is not only going to be running their own foreign policy they’re going to be running their own defense policy that is a it’s interesting the Chinese have already signaled to Elon Musk and starlink and SpaceX uh that a decision to provide that type of assistance to Taiwan in case of a contingency would not be received well and the Chinese have things they could do to the starlink network that no other country could go do maybe Putin could do if he ends up placing a nuclear weapon in space but that whole argument which is came out in February that he was planning to go do it and he has not yet done it as far as we can we can tell um is a fascinating one because if he detonated this it would not only take out American satellites it would take out Chinese satellites so it’s one of those opportunities the US has to drive a wedge between that Russian Chinese partnership so I want to come back to a few different aspects of both China and Russia but also ask you about the Iranians and the North Koreans but before I do that I want to ask about your sense of strategy um on this is Page 435 uh the beginning of the epilogue you write Biden’s conclusion in 20 22 that the post Cold War era is definitely over was an effort to thrust the country into the new reality yet he stopped short of offering a vision of what this new era might look like are you seeing a vision of how to deal with this new as you call it cold Wars uh as you as you sort of talk historically about various strategies to deal with the Chinese and Russians in the book you highlight various issues like engagement that’s certainly the case with China or containment but how do you see the debate right now over what strategy or strategies the US and others should circle around as as uh to deal with the current situation so let’s start with China and its allies because on the one hand the US has been successful I think in keeping the Chinese from direct entry into the Ukraine war but they have as you and I have discussed before uh been providing dual use technology that is of critical use to the Russians and they’ve been buying oil so they have not participated in the US effort to isolate the Russians along the way and I think what you have seen happen and I wouldn’t call this strategy as much as just the way the world has unfolded is you’ve begun to see a new Iron Curtain of some kind the physical manifestation of which is somewhere in the Netherlands of Southern and uh eastern Ukraine where there will be a line one day it may be a a Korea like Armistice line as I describe at the end here I can’t imagine a negotiated settlement over a firm online um and then you’re seeing it in cyers space as well with the Russians and Chinese the Iranians the North Koreans some other countries particularly authoritarian regimes looking to design a world that is an alternative to the US and Western Le World in which there’s great clarity about who’s on the internet at any given time so you can hunt down disant uh in which the government has extraordinary control over speech and has an ability to contain protest and you see it that part of of the Iron Curtain is much more virtual one and wrapped up in Russian and Chinese Concepts which differ in some important respects in how you control information and thus the people behind them but in China’s case and we haven’t spoken as much about China here we have seen the emergence of a real strategy from the Biden Administration I would say actually more so in China’s case than in Russia’s case and in the Chinese case what has the strategy been first cutting off their access to the most advanced Western chips that is to say those that run on circuitry with diameters of 3 nanometers or smaller it’s the most advanced chips that are produced largely by Taiwan semiconductor uh even if they are designed by Nvidia or apple or whatever and that gets to our Taiwan vulnerability because even though President Biden has been getting those companies Intel Taiwan semiconductor many others to build facilities in the US if you look at the administration’s most um optimistic prognosis of where we will be in 2030 their estimate is that we will be producing fully 20% of the most advanced chips now I don’t think we’re going to get there by 2030 but let’s take their number could we survive in a China Taiwan conflict losing 80% of the most advanced chips that we now regularly use in our military systems and our communication systems to keep C to keep csis and the New York Times running I don’t think so so while I think they’ve been doing the right thing in depriving the Chinese of these Advanced chips and most importantly the equipment to make them I don’t think we’re running fast enough here in the United States to make up the difference the other part of the strategy uh along the way with the Chinese has been to um press them uh on a range of other Global issues in an effort to find those areas of common interest that we can work together on and we’ve had them historically Obama struck a climate deal with them um as I’ve mentioned to you uh earlier when the Iran nuclear negotiations happened Russia and China were sitting on our side of the table trying to contain that would not be the case if we were to sit down with them again8 years later and I don’t think we are going to sit down again but let’s assume we did you would be looking at them across the table and so I think Biden has set us on the right direction of more self-reliance covid helped I think make people understand the supply chain problem but I just don’t see the urgency to move as quickly as I think we might need to Russia it’s a much harder case because in China you’re dealing with a rising power and you do have common interests and you do have regular consultations with Russia there has been one meeting one meeting between Biden and Putin it was in June of 2021 that was three years ago it was in Geneva it was largely over the ransomware attacks on Colonial pipeline Ukraine came up briefly but at the time the US did not have the evidence that Russia Was preparing to go in and I think it’s fair to say that whether Joe Biden gets reelected or not one meeting will be all those two men ever have and and actually interestingly and you talk about this in the book even when Biden sent over his CIA director he didn’t get a direct meeting with Putin either once he got to Russia he had a phone conversation this was before the war with Putin who refused to meet him in person well Putin was down at his um Sochi uh DACA and yes that that conversation was over the phone that was the one to warn Putin that uh the US had seen the evidence of uh plans to invade Ukraine and to describe to him very clearly what the cost of that would be and to deliver a letter from Biden on that subject and I I hope it’s struck you as you were reading the book I I think you read more on the record description of those meetings from Bill Burns from AAL Haynes and other intelligence folks than you’ve probably seen before and um it took some pressing but they were willing in the end to go on the record mean what one of the things that that does strike one in reading the book is the access David had in interviewing a range of individuals mostly on the record not all on the record uh and not just current officials too but also previous ones but Millie uh the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs um blinkin Secretary of State and a wide range of others that help provide color and context in a range of these mle’s long on color Milly is long on he is um one one interesting question before before coming back to um some of the implications of the the the the the new cold Wars as you call it is uh for for budding writers both in the physical audience but also those watching how did you come up with the idea to write uh I’m sure you probably had several options in looking at the next book um after your last one which focused mostly on Cyber related issues this was a slightly different bigger in breadth right um so how you come up with that and also what what what’s your writing process like uh I mean you’re also involved in uh just day-to-day times activity I know you had some time off for it but but but how do you actually take on writing a book like this um well let me do that in two parts the concept and then the execution in the concept this book is a little more like The Inheritance and uh a second book uh that that I had written uh right after after Obama’s or during Obama’s first term called confront and conceal in that it is a history of some administrations but I also wanted to do something deeper I wanted to go back and ask the question how did we all get this wrong not just the intelligence agencies but the American public about what the relationships with the superpowers was going to be like and what do we learn from that as we’re thinking going forward so the book’s really in two parts it’s this history that runs from basically the Bush Administration some some of the Clinton Administration up to the end of trump and then a deep dive in the second part into the inard of the Biden Administration um and so part of the execution then is how do you Pace A Book Like That that because we don’t you can’t get bogged in the history the history section is about 150 pages but you’ve got to move through pretty quickly before you then slow down to the current story um I had a remarkable editor Uh Kevin dton at Crown who had edited uh the perfect weapon uh cyber book and both of these books are very narrative Tales I said at the beginning you meet characters at the start you carry them through your editor makes sure that you’ve developed them and you come back and that way it is more novelistic or more like the documentaries that I’ve made with with HBO um the second is you get out and you show your reporting so you know I had my notes from that trip down the never River but uh Mary Brooks and I took off around the world we went and had uh a long coffee with the president of Finland in his um residents to talk about how he moved the fins from this concept that we would never be part of NATO to we must be part of NATO and he was fascinating because he was coming to the end of his term and he really wanted to go tell a story we went to India and talked to the foreign minister uh who is sort of at the heart of the don’t make us choose movement between the United States and China that we’re going to go find our own independent way we spent a lot of time in Taiwan at Taiwan semiconductor with their uh chairman who’s retiring I think uh next month um and he talked about Taiwan semiconductor as the Silicon shield and whether he believed that in the end this would protect them against China the conclusion I come to is it may now but but won’t for long so it’s very much a book of reporting and when you do that you’re out there to describe the characters and tell you how the chairman of Taiwan semiconductor got trained in the United States at Berkeley got swept back to come home and thus how he became part of the identity of his country these are in the end human stories um Mary drafted some parts and I rewrote them I drafted much and she rewrote them our editor then went at it it is a the writing part is a really intense part of it and what I sometimes worry about in academic works is we spend a lot of time thinking about it and I say this as somebody who also teaches a course on National Security and not enough time thinking about how to tell the story in a way that people who are not normally engaged in these subjects if this is the one book in 10 years they may read about international relations will get sucked in it fit it doesn’t read novelistic They’re not likely to read it one one interesting um component of the book uh actually two uh on the Russians and they they you’ve you’ve touched on you’ve touched on on them a little bit but this requires us to to think over several administrations about how we got some of these countries particularly the Chinese and the Russians wrong so I want to I want to talk a little bit about the Russians in really two questions first is how did we collectively in the US and other Western Miss signs after Georgia after uh the Russians take Crimea then after they move to the dabas then they go to Syria uh how did we miss the signs that’s one and two is um is there was also a failure from our intelligence community and and actually not just the us but others as well about the outcome of the war once the Russians invaded I think the general View and the chairman Millie said this publicly was that this would this would be a relatively quick War the Russians had uh the balance of power in their favor uh but collectively I think people underestimated the ukrainians overestimated the Russians at least in the initial part of the war so those are two big mistakes how did we get the first and the second On’s wrong and and what do they mean as we move forward let me take the second one first because it’s a little narrower and a little easier and by the way it came after another intelligence failure we had just come off of Afghanistan which is a chapter in the book where we overestimated the capabilities of the Afghan forces that we had spent 20 years training and we underestimated how quickly the Taliban could take City so um when you go into Bill Burns’s office uh or at least in the earlier days of the war when you you’re reading about this he put a map that uh came out of those early discussions um right over the little couch where his visitors sit and it is the map showing the Russian plan for the three-day run into ke and partly he’s keeping it there as a interesting artifact never asked him whether you get to take these home you’re done with the job but I bet you can’t um and um the second is to remind everybody of a bit of humility about what assumptions we made about their capability and the Russian story has been a remarkable one I mean in history the Russians tend to start off badly and get their get their feet and momentum together and that’s kind of what’s happened here in in this particular case uh but but we did overestimate their capability we underestimated the degree to which corruption had undercut their systems and you know they had tires on vehicles that were rotted out because somebody had cleared out with the money for you know replacement parts they had not taught their troops to be terribly imaginative thus the 40 mile long traffic jam with um tanks and then fuel trucks periodically the satellite imagery for this including ones that the time showed were stunning along these lines they were and and so all the ukrainians had to do with a little bit of guidance from us was go find those fuel trucks and set off huge Fireballs at various points in the 40 miles um so we overestimated the Russians as we may be today overestimating the Chinese in some ways I’m sure xiin ping has sort of asked himself that question but then you asked a broader question which is not really about tactical intelligence but really about the biggest open source question which is where is a country going which is a combination of their will their intentions whether or not we are projecting our values on them every American president from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump at various moments made the argument Trump in particular that these countries would be driven first and foremost by their economic interests and how often do we teach that in classes so it wasn’t in Vladimir Putin’s economic interest to end up threatening his ability to sell oil and gas to Europe but he did it anyway because he had a higher value that we didn’t get and you know how many times did you hear Trump say well I’ll make him the deal of the century and that deal whether he was talking about the Russians or the Iranians was always they will value getting money and trade with the United States more than they will value some other thing and that is the pure American projection of our priorities on their hierarchy of of priorities um you could ask the same question about China absolutely right there’s no way that it makes economic sense for the Chinese either to invade or choke off Taiwan that is the Silicon Shield right they need Taiwan semiconductor as much as we do and yet if you are 70 years old and leading China and you figure you’ve got maybe 10 years left and you have promised that you are going to solve this problem that is left over from 1948 49 and you have a DE PP Victory yet again yeah then you may think to yourself there are things more important than keeping my exports going so where where do you last two questions and then um the the the real upside for those here is that uh uh normally we do a Q&A session with the audience this time uh Dave’s actually going to stick around and sign books so you’ll have the opportunity to talk to them and sign um books but briefly where do Iran and North Korea fit into the new cold Wars then I’ve got a final question about the future so this conflict has saved the North Koreans I mean all of a sudden they have a steady flow of oil coming in from the Russians right the one thing that they were worried about being turned on and off was the Chinese basically had their hand on the valve right and would punish them when they went off and did missile tests or nuclear tests well first of all they’ve not not long no longer interested in punishing them and secondly there are now additional sources the North Koreans are selling their um artillery rounds including the 40 or 50y old ones that don’t work to the Russians so they’ve had a new lease on life out of this the Iranians have had a big technological upgrade and they’ve been selling the drones and um May soon be in a position to be selling considerable numbers of missiles to the Russians but more importantly this has given Russia China Iran North Korea and some other players an opportunity to to think and talk and try to feel out where their interests really do converge they don’t as I said have an a um Alliance here but they do have a partnership and when Putin and she first got together there was a big debate in the US government about how real this was and one day I was on an on the record uh briefing that colen K who’s frequently here uh and running former under secretary of defense for policy right now running the Stanford program in Washington um he he said to us you know I think this is real I not telling you it’s going to be a full-scale Alliance but I’m telling you this is going to be trouble for the next large number of years and I thought that’s interesting that’s the first time I’ve ever heard this is about probably early 23 first time I’ve ever heard a Us official say this in public I’d had plenty say it to me you know off the Record and the next day the president decided to have a press conf conference and I was sitting in the time seat and um he sometimes calls on me because he’s known me since uh his Senate days and the the other reporters seem to be a generation younger to my distress um and um so he called on me for the last question and so I just asked him do you believe this is for real and he gave me a long answer that basically came down to no these guys can’t learn how to get along I don’t believe Joe Biden believes that today I think he believes now this is one of our Central challenges and uh last week I was doing a talk like this uh up at the 92nd Street Y and um the uh CEO of CNN Mark Thompson who used to be the CEO of the New York Times company was sitting in your equivalent chair and he said to me if there was one question you could ask at the presidential debates What would be since he’s sponsoring the first presidential debate and I said to my mind it would be tell me your plan for getting in the way of the Russia China partnership we need a new name for it by the way if anybody uh can put on their thinking yeah cap we we we called it the Bush Administration called some of these countries the axis of Evil I don’t think that one’s going to work now that one that that one’s been used but there’s there’s opportunity for some creative new thinking last question for you um this is the last uh page of the book the epilogue uh you say for all the present risks it is worth remembering that one of the most remarkable and little discussed accomplishments of the old Cold War conflict was the great Powers never escalated their differences into a direct conflict that is an eight decade long streak we cannot afford to break what what would it what would it mean if we were to see direct conflict and what do you think the odds are as we look I think the odds are a lot higher than they were in the Cold War because you have so many more players when I said at the beginning that sort of we knew who the Russian decision makers were we knew who had launch Authority they knew all that um we got into some something of a predictable set of interchanges that actually resulted in the arms control talks that brought down the number of nuclear weapons from well over 10 or 20,000 in some cases to what we have today and the last of those agreements runs out in February of 2026 not very far away today we have much more unpredictability in the system when you’ve got two major players on the other side with different interests China and Russia that adds considerably to the complexity when you’ve got Iran and North Korea playing around the sides having changed the dynamic that adds to it when you’ve got commitments to Nato that it’s somewhat remarkable we have not yet seen you know get into it directly with the Russians that’s adds a lot to it so I just think there are a lot more things that can go wrong and this is you know there are a lot of people who say this is more like 1914 or 1915 I’m not sure it’s quite that bad yet but but with nuclear weapons which we did not have which we did not have to worry about so that’s number one worry the the second worry I have is here at home because during the old Cold War for all the differences between Democrats and Republicans we had a fundamental consensus about what the American role in the world was and this was a a role that was not completely narrowly def defined by our national interests that we thought we had a responsibility that went broader and that’s been fundamentally questioned it was qu it was the reason that the Ukraine uh Israel Palestine Taiwan bill was held up but it also plays throughout the campaign and it’s basically at the core of the America First argument and we’ve gone through periods of in our our history like this before but it does raise the question that at the very moment that the world is getting a lot more complex the American instinct to pull back to our borders and say oh it’s all so messy out there we just don’t want to go deal with it is about as strong as it’s been in my lifetime and history suggests that that instinct while fully understandable almost never works out the way you want it to well on that sobering note yeah uh let’s hope that cooler heads prevail and that we don’t retrench back into the US Homeland uh David thanks for taking uh time to talk with us today on New cold Wars if everyone could join me in thanking uh David [Applause] sangler and and for for those in this packed audience uh we will now uh sign David will now sign copies of his book thanks and thanks for having me back here to csis it’s such a great institution and you guys do such incredible work that we all rely on great thanks David [Music]

Please join the CSIS International Security Program on Tuesday, May 28 at 4:00 p.m. EDT for a conversation with David Sanger, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, and Dr. Seth G. Jones, CSIS senior vice president, Harold Brown Chair, and ISP director, about Sanger’s newest book, New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West. The discussion will be followed by a book signing and reception.

New Cold Wars is a fast-paced account of America’s plunge into simultaneous confrontations with two very different adversaries. For years, the United States was confident that the newly democratic Russia and increasingly wealthy China could be lured into a Western-led order that promised prosperity and relative peace—so long as they agreed to Washington’s terms. By the time America emerged from the age of terrorism, it was clear that this had been a fantasy. Based on a remarkable array of interviews with top officials from five presidential administrations, U.S. intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and tech companies, Sanger unfolds a riveting narrative spun around the era’s critical questions: Will the mistakes Putin made in his invasion of Ukraine prove his undoing and will he reach for his nuclear arsenal—or will the West’s famously short attention span signal Kyiv’s doom? Will Xi invade Taiwan? Will both men deepen their partnership to undercut America’s dominance? And can a politically dysfunctional America still lead the world?

This event is made possible through general support to CSIS.
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