America’s New Cold Wars, With David Sanger

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is America's new Cold Wars.

With me to discuss how the post-Cold War era ended and the new era of geopolitical competition rivalry began is David Sanger. David is the White House and national security Correspondent for the New York Times. He has covered presidential administrations from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden. Over that time, he has been a part of three reporting teams that were awarded Pulitzer Prizes, with the most recent being for uncovering Russia's interference in the 2016 election. David has written four books, the most recent being, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West, which just came out. David, thank you for joining me on The President's Inbox.

SANGER:
Jim, great to be with you and working on this book and doing my work at the New York Times, I can't overstate how much I rely on what comes out of CFR and out of your Studies department, so I owe you a huge debt of gratitude.

LINDSAY:
Well, it's very kind of you to say, David. May I say, we owe you a great debt of gratitude for writing New Cold Wars. It's gotten a lot of praise, I have seen it described as cinematic, a must read, exceptional and provocative. Having read the book, I agree with all of the superlatives, and I imagine those are all descriptions that you as an author are glad to hear.

SANGER:
Indeed, and it's gotten a good reception and it was meant to provoke some debate about what it is we should be discussing and not discussing, as we head into this election year and beyond. So I hope it's fulfilled that mission.

LINDSAY:
So let's dive into that very debate, David, and let's begin with the title. I notice that there's an "S" there in the title, it sort of jumps out. Tell me about it.

SANGER:
Well, the old Cold War, Jim, one that you and I remember, which speaks more to our age than anything else, was a relatively simple affair. It was the United States versus the Soviet Union, it was largely a military contest, and within that largely, a nuclear contest. We each had red phones on desks on either side, and we knew pretty well who was going to answer those phones. We knew who had launch authority in the Soviet Union, and they knew who had launch authority in the United States. And after some incredibly scary times, including in the '50s and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, while it was still an era of nuclear terror, there was a predictability that descended over the entire era. And as I say in the book, the Cold War, the old Cold War, had a dramatic beginning, a long middle, and a real surprise ending. And anybody who's looking for that surprise ending in the New Cold Wars is probably in for a disappointment.

The "S" at the end of the title is meant to signal to the reader that we are in now in something far more complex. We are dealing with two major nuclear armed rivals. A Russia that has learned with great effectiveness, how to be an agent of disturbance or at least disruption, and a China whose rise, although it has recently run into considerable economic headwinds, has created a range of new problems for us. And then as those two countries have found each other and joined up with the Iranians and to some degree even the North Koreans, as part of what Iran refers to as the axis of resistance, we now have the beginning of the definitions of two new groups facing off against each other, a western U.S.-led NATO driven group that includes of course, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia with its new AUKUS deal to get nuclear-powered submarines. And then a China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and other authoritarian states that see a considerable opening to oppose the U.S., exploit the divisions that we've created here at home, our fault, not their fault, and who along the way are creating a much more complex atmosphere.

In the Cold War, we didn't rely on the Soviets for anything other than caviar and vodka. And while you and I would be very upset if we had to go give those up, the fact of the matter is we could live without it. In the new Cold Wars, we are still reliant on the Chinese for chips, other technology. They are reliant on us, and yet none of that has prevented us from descending into what I think is a new era of containment.

LINDSAY:
Let me pick up that theme, David, though I have to note, I'm a bourbon man, not a vodka guy.

SANGER:
Okay.

LINDSAY:
So as long as the distilleries are still working in Kentucky.

SANGER:
You're good.

LINDSAY:
I should be fine.

SANGER:
Okay.

LINDSAY:
But I mean, you started doing the beat at the New York Times covering the Clinton administration, that was the immediate beginning of the post-Cold War era. There was a lot of optimism about what America's overwhelming power was going to enable it to do. We were certainly promised a different future than the one we now have. What happened?

SANGER:
That's really the basic theme of the beginning of the book, well, first 150 pages or so of New Cold Wars. I got to Washington almost exactly thirty years ago after the New York Times drew a close to my happy years as a foreign correspondent. Happiness at most news organizations being measured by your distance from their headquarters. And I was in Japan, so you couldn't get a whole lot happier than that, right? But all good things come to an end. So I was told to come to Washington for three years, which is now stretched to thirty.

And at the time the Soviet Union had collapsed, a rocky democracy was trying to establish itself in Russia amid corruption and many other problems before the Yeltsin years, was one should not become too sentimental about that. He was drunk most of the time and ultimately turned power over to Putin, but at least we had reason to hope that good sense would prevail and that Russia would decide that its oil and gas revenues were more important than any territorial ambitions and so forth. And this was the era when people were discussing Russia joining the European Union, and maybe even one day joining NATO, the alliance created to counter it.

And I think the hypothesis of this moment, Jim, came in a scene that's really in the first chapter of the book. When George W. Bush goes to visit Putin, one of two dozen times the two of them met during the Bush presidency, in St. Petersburg. And after a night out seeing the Nutcracker, they and their wives joined on this yacht that was floating down the Neva River, it was one gorgeous late spring, early summer night. The sun doesn't set in St. Petersburg at that time of year until really late at night, the Hermitage was all lit up. And I was on the press boat in the back, but we briefly had some time on their main yacht and you could see that they were brimming over with good cheer and discussion of how they were going to collaborate on all kinds of issues.

And there was this guy in the background who was serving dinner, he was kind of hulking and menacing looking. It took me years, decades to figure out that this was indeed Yevgeny Prigozhin, who would show up later on trying to influence the 2016 election, swing the war for the Russians in Ukraine, and ultimately made a bad decision to march on Moscow.

LINDSAY:
He's now the late Mr. Prigozhin.

SANGER:
That's what happens when you mess with Vladimir Putin. So the assumption at the time was that we were on a pretty steady road to a much better relationship with the Russians and that proceeded until 2007, when Putin showed up at the Munich Security Conference and declared for the first time, there are parts of Russia that had been wrested from it that actually belong to Mother Russia and, "We're going to get them back." And Bob Gates, who was representing the U.S. at the conference, he was defense secretary, of course stayed on during the Obama administration for a few years in that role. Finally, stood up the next day and said, "I've been through one Cold War. It was miserable enough. I'm really not looking for a second." And we've had a progression of presidents since that time who have said we're not going back to another Cold War.

Well, this book is here to tell you we've pretty well gotten there with the Russians. Seven years after that speech, Putin took Crimea, it took us a year, a year to put together Western sanctions because the Europeans did not want to challenge the Russians or risk the cut-off of that oil. The following year after the sanctions, Chancellor Merkel, Angela Merkel of Germany, signed up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which routed around Ukraine, depriving Ukraine of the revenues and went directly to Europe. And she declared that Putin was a reliable supplier. This was just 2015, nine years ago.

LINDSAY:
The chancellor had a very benign view of the Russians, and I think more generally for many Europeans, found it hard to believe that war could come to their region.

SANGER:
That was true as the book opens to the weekend before the invasion of Ukraine. I was back at Munich and almost every European leader I ran into and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, who flew in on an unmarked Pentagon plane because they were afraid that Russians might try to shoot him down, should have told you something, were insisting that this was all a bluff and that the Russians were looking for a good negotiating position. And I remember the Saturday of that conference, just as the conference was ending, sitting down to breakfast one morning with a group of reporters and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. And secretary and I, known each other for a long time, compared a list of the people we had run into who told us the war wasn't going to break out. And I remember he said to me, "You know, David, I can't tell you if it's two days from now or four days from now or two weeks from now, it's going to happen." It happened four days later.

LINDSAY:
So let me ask you, David, was the return to geopolitical competition in rivalry, the new Cold Wars, inevitable? Was there something that in our relationship, either with Russia in Putin, with Xi in China, that changed the direction of history? Or is this the case that this is where Putin, this is where Xi were going to take us?

SANGER:
I don't think it was inevitable, Jim, but I think it was more likely than not, which is why this period of optimism that broke out not only over Russia but about China as it talked about peaceful rise and integration in Western economies, we needed to deal with more skepticism.
We talk a lot about intelligence failures, the decision to go into Iraq because they were allegedly working on weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear, turned out to be false. We've had many other intelligence failures of omission and commission in the years, but this was a failure of imagining a world in which these powers wanted to return to a past era of greatness and weren't going to sit still for a unipolar world, run out of Washington under Washington values. And I would say that in Russia's case it was more predictable because the signs were all there. Putin told us where we were going.

With China, it's more complicated. Xi Jinping hid his real motives during his rise to power. You may remember that when he was the equivalent of vice president of the country, there's no exact measure to our system, then Vice President Joe Biden was sent out to begin to build a relationship with him. They traveled in China, they traveled in the U.S., they went back to a house in Iowa that Xi had visited it as a young party apparatchik looking for agricultural knowledge back during his rise. And almost all the intelligence reports that came out at the end of the Obama era, just as Xi was beginning to take power, basically said, this guy is not going to challenge you as power. He's going to bide his time, he's going to make sure that he takes care of the domestic economy. He's got a huge challenge keeping young Chinese, particularly young Chinese males, fully employed so they're not wandering up and down the coast getting in trouble or challenging the Communist Party. We were still believing what Bill Clinton was said during his last visit to China as president, when he went to Beijing University and basically made the argument that the internet will set you free. That containing the debate on the internet would be like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.

LINDSAY:
I remember that comment well.

SANGER:
Yep, and what have we learned? That the Chinese turned out to be exquisite Jell-O nailers, that they have used the internet and the derivative technologies, including facial recognition and the ability to track people via their cell phones, to build one of the most techno-repressive states we've ever seen. It's so good that they export the technology to other authoritarians. We got that one totally wrong.

LINDSAY:
I suspect David, that a lot of writers, certainly a lot of PhD dissertation students are going to be writing about why it is we got it wrong and whether we should have picked up signals earlier than we did. But let's talk about the fact that the mood, the consensus in Washington clearly has changed. As you note in the book, Trump's 2017 national security strategy was the first attempt to refocus the nation on great power competition. Joe Biden's national security strategy put that front and center. How do you assess that strategy? And particularly, has the Biden administration put forward its definition of what success would be.

SANGER:
They haven't. They have put forth a definition of what it would take just to stem where we were headed. So the book gives credit, as you note, to the Trump administration and many in it: H.R. McMaster who helped draft that national security strategy, Matt Pottinger, who was the most China savvy member of the administration.

LINDSAY:
And an Edward R. Murrow, press fellow here at the Council.

SANGER:
That's right, that's right. All great strategists start as journalists, don't you think?

LINDSAY:
I'm getting that impression.

SANGER:
So they had a good approach. What they didn't have was follow through, because they had a president who hadn't read his own national security strategy. When he was sent out to describe it, talked about counterterrorism, not a key part of the strategy, and who was willing in the interest of getting a trade deal, to give away anything. In comes the Biden administration, there's more continuity to the Trump policies than they would like to admit. Not only did they not reverse the Trump-era tariffs on China, they've added to them, including in the past few days, right?

LINDSAY:
That they have.

SANGER:
That's number one. Number two is, they came up with more effective ways than the Trump folks had to actually work on this containment issue. And the one that I'm most complimentary of in the book is the decision to keep China from getting our most advanced semiconductors, those that are three nanometer circuitry and below, or the equipment to go make them, which involved huge diplomacy with the Netherlands because those machines are made by a company called ASML, and by working with the Japanese on that as well. And you will note that when President Biden and President Xi last met in person, which was at Riverside, California last Thanksgiving, this was the topic that Xi spent about an hour complaining about, which tells you we finally actually found a sanction that works, or at least is effective.

Now, will that trigger the Chinese to go focus on these technologies more intently than ever and make them convinced that we're trying to contain them? Yes, absolutely, but it's the only thing we've got to build a little time. And one of my concerns, as you read into the book and go off to TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, in Taiwan and you see its central role in the competition with China, is that I don't think the Biden administration has bought as much time in the technology race as it thinks it has bought. And it worries me because at the moment that the Chinese can do what Taiwan Semiconductor can do, we're still a few years away from that, then the disincentives for taking Taiwan get eroded away pretty quickly. I don't think they're going to take Taiwan at a moment that they need TSMC, I become less confident of that as time goes on.

LINDSAY:
Well, David, let me talk about the issue of the U.S. approach to China and also to Russia. Obviously when the Biden administration came to office, it placed China in the center of its foreign policy. I think the administration essentially hoped to create a stable and predictable relationship with Russia, while it focused on all the things it wanted to do in dealing with China. That hasn't worked quite to plan because events have intruded, complicating the administration's foreign policy inbox.

And I wonder in your judgment, David, to what extent some of the troubles the administration is facing today is because of how it handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan. As you know, when you talk about in the book, number of people viewed the withdrawal from Afghanistan and particularly the way it unfolded, as signaling weakness and a lack of commitment on the part of the United States, emboldening American adversaries. How do you assess the withdrawal from Afghanistan?

SANGER:
So I think the withdrawal itself, the decision that we could not sustain troops there was the right decision, and it's interesting, it's hard to remember this now, but it was one of the very few things that Donald Trump and Joe Biden agreed upon in the 2020 election. You could count those on one hand, right? Maybe even just a couple of fingers, so it's pretty notable. Former President Trump has a revised history here, but he wanted to pull out in December of 2019. All of a sudden, had to be talked out of it by Mike Pompeo, who was secretary of state at the time.

The problem was not the decision to get out, it was how they executed it. And I would've to say that the most searingly critical chapter in the book of the Biden administration is how they handled that withdrawal. That said, I think it was such a wake up call to a group of former Biden staffers, Secretary Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Secretary of Defense Austin, who had never worked for Biden before but obviously had been a military commander who had known him well, that it actually unified them, sort of the way that the Kennedy administration got unified by screwing up the Bay of Pigs, made them realize that they could make mistakes even if they had all worked with each other for years on end. And I think actually led to a much better response as the evidence bounded that Putin was planning to take Ukraine.

There was the one meeting between Biden and President Putin in Geneva in June of 2021. I was there covering it for the Times, and we play it out at some length in a documentary called Year One. It's an HBO documentary about Biden's first year, and that meeting was mostly about ransomware. This was right after the Colonial Pipeline Act, but Ukraine came up briefly and so did Afghanistan. And some members of the administration have said to me that they are concerned that Putin himself may have concluded from that meeting that Biden was so intent on getting out of Afghanistan that he wouldn't really risk another foreign engagement if Putin took Ukraine. Now, that was a huge misjudgment of Biden, what he was thinking, how he grew up in the Cold War and what he was accustomed to, his values, but it may well have been Putin's conclusion. And frankly, given the history that we discussed before, Jim, he probably thought they didn't react much when we went into Crimea. What are they going to do if we take all of Ukraine?

LINDSAY:
I have no doubt that those calculations went through Putin's mind, David. I'm glad you mentioned the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, because one of the things that pops up across the book, the New Cold Wars, is what is happening on the cyber front. And it plays into your argument that what distinguishes the two Cold Wars we're faced with today from the original Cold War is this degree of interconnectedness. How worried are you about America's cyber vulnerabilities? And I'll note, you write a lot about this topic for the Times, outside of the book.

SANGER:
I did, and the predecessor book to New Cold Wars was a book called The Perfect Weapon, War Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age, which was published in 2018 and was an effort to try to explain how cyber was fundamentally changing American foreign policy just as nuclear weapons and their onset changed American and world foreign policy in the 1950s, and you see that all through the book. In The Perfect Weapon, I argue that cyber was a very effective short of war weapon, a way for Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, others to come after us or us after them in a situation where you didn't want to trigger an all out war. What Ukraine gave us was the first laboratory during the cyber age to think about what cyber is good for and not good for when you actually are in a full scale war. And we've learned a lot. I'll give you two or three quick examples.

First, the opening act of the war was the Russians taking out the Viasat European satellite network, but they did this without ever going into outer space. They did a cyber attack on the modems on the ground and made that communications link completely useless to the Ukrainians in the week before the war. Second, they activated malware to go after the Ukrainian government in the hours before the war, detected by Microsoft and flagged up all the way to Jake Sullivan in the National Security Council. Third, during the war, they have combined physical attacks, which get all the headlines, and cyber attacks, which get none of the headlines because they're harder to see. So they've learned how to use it in a coordinated fashion, not unlike how we learned how to use air power in coordination with ground and land power during World War II. So cyber's played a big role.

The question that we're headed with now is, are the Russians now prepared to take that conflict beyond Ukraine's borders and use their cyber power against us and the NATO allies? And if you're looking for Sanger predictions, that would've been completely wrong two years ago. One of them was, I thought they would be much more active in their cyber actions against us. They haven't been.

LINDSAY:
Do you have a theory as to why?

SANGER:
I think that they came to the conclusion that they did not want to give NATO and the U.S. a reason to come into the war directly. And so for the same reason that they didn't drop missiles into Poland when we were massing arms there to give to the Ukrainians, they decided not to take out Citibank.

LINDSAY:
Fair enough.

SANGER:
We learned a couple other things. We learned that our giant $5 billion per satellite systems that we have going out there are sitting ducks for the Chinese and to some degree, to the Russians. And what we need is a system more like Elon Musk's Starlink, which kept Ukraine alive in the early days of the war. There was a fascinating moment, it's played out in the book, where Microsoft and Amazon come in the opening week of war to the Ukrainians and say, "You have a law in the books that requires you to keep all of your data in servers in Ukraine, all Ukrainians, pensions, government operations, whatever, if you keep that in place, the Russians are going to drop a missile into each one of those servers and your government will be gone, unable to activate." In a week, the law was changed and they moved Ukraine's government to the cloud and that kept Ukraine afloat. Wasn't in anybody's war plan, and Starlink made sure that the Ukrainians could still communicate with their own data.

LINDSAY:
Well, I think one of the major consequences, David, of the return to great power competition, it was partly spurred by what we experienced during COVID-19, is that we've abandoned efficiency in favor of building redundancy in gaining resilience.

SANGER:
That's absolutely right, and so that's what Biden's trying to do in building up the semiconductor plants here in the U.S. It's hard to find a week when he's not breaking ground on some semiconductor plant. But by the Biden administration's own projections, if all of their programs go flawlessly, and they won't because that never happens, right? We would be able to produce 20 percent of the semiconductors we need the most by 2030, meaning we're going to be reliant on those supply chains overseas for 80 percent. That doesn't sound to me like a strategy that's going to work or one that's being executed with the urgency that is needed.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about where we go from where we are today, David, obviously with the two biggest challenges being China and Russia, how do you assess the thinking inside the Biden administration on how it intends to proceed, whether it is optimistic on its ability to act on its strategies?

SANGER:
So oddly enough, I'm slightly more optimistic, at least in the short term on China than I am on Russia. At least we have conversations underway with them. That's really only in the past year and is driven less by the brilliance of our diplomacy, I think, than by the fact that the Chinese economy has been through a significant downturn that's going to be really hard for them to reverse.

When Xi came to the United States at that same meeting in November, after he met Biden, he held a big party in San Francisco to invite Silicon Valley entrepreneurs because for the first time in life, he needed them to invest. For the past thirty years, all you had to do to get American investment in China was stamp visas. People with money would show up, right? Now, all of a sudden a combination of their crackdown on foreigners, free speech, the general air of repression, the return of Cold War thinking about who's got advantage in quantum or AI or semiconductor production or electric batteries or autonomous vehicles, that has all so settled in that it has really made doing business in China a hard thing and many American companies were just looking elsewhere. So I think that's bought us some time and a little bit of opportunity to work with. I don't think it's going to last. I think the Chinese are entirely capable of coming back and then acting in their own interest.

LINDSAY:
So this is more a tactical pause than a strategic understanding coming out of last November's Summit?

SANGER:
I think it is a tactical pause that gives us an opportunity to try to reach some strategic understandings. In recent days, the U.S. and the Chinese have met for the first time on the question of safety around artificial intelligence, and that has given an opportunity to have real conversations about questions like, do you want to both commit to keeping AI a million miles away from your nuclear command and control systems? Good conversations to have and conversations it's impossible to imagine having with the Russians right now, even if the Russians had that degree of technological sophistication.

The second big concern I have about Russia is that the New START Treaty, our last treaty limiting nuclear weapons, runs out in February of 2026, that's not very far away. The progress toward negotiating a new treaty, you can't renew the old one under its own terms, are zero right now. And I don't know about you, Jim, but I'm not willing to bet next week's pay that we can get a negotiation going in time to have an agreement in 2026, which means that by the third week of February, 2026, the world's two largest nuclear superpowers will be operating with no limits on their arsenals at all, period, full stop. And that runs the risk of an expensive and wasteful arms race.

LINDSAY:
So David, let me ask you one final question, which is, it wise for U.S. policy to be pursuing Cold Wars with the two other great powers at the same time? Isn't there a risk of driving Russia and China together into an inextricable bond? Indeed, precisely opposite what it was that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sought to do with the opening to China some half century ago.

SANGER:
There is that big risk, and Russia and China are already developing that relationship. I wouldn't call it an alliance, I don't think it's going to be easy. Putin's got hated deep down because in the old days, the Soviets were the top dog in the relationship and right now clearly that he is the supplicant power and that it's all up to what the Chinese want to fund and tolerate. That said, we have to be designing American policy now to think about how to divide the Russians and the Chinese.

Let me give you a concrete example. We've been running stories in the past three or four months about a Russian program to place a nuclear weapon in space in violation of the 1967 space treaty. Do I think they would detonate it? No. Do I think they want to have the power of a disruptor to say, if you come after us, we could take out your entire set of space assets? Absolutely. The same way they want to threaten the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but it's an opportunity for us because there's no way to detonate a weapon in space that doesn't also take out China's satellites and thus, the Chinese economy. So if ever there was a moment to go to the Chinese and say, "Hey, we get it that you don't like us, but your buddy over here is so crazy that he's thinking about putting nuclear weapons in space. Can I introduce you to a couple of physicists who will explain to you what this will do to the billions of dollars of space assets you have put up?" That's the kind of thing we need to go focus on.

It's interesting that when Putin was threatening the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the Chinese did speak up. So we have some narrow areas where we and the Chinese can come together in a Russia containment policy. I don't have any illusions that that's going to be a broad effort, and I fear the two countries may grow closer, not further apart, but it is an opportunity for the U.S.

LINDSAY:
On that sobering point, I will close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been David Sanger, White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times. David, thank you for joining me.

SANGER:
Thank you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen and leave us a review, we love the feedback. You can email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay, thanks for listening.