Episode 51: Is America Headed into a New Cold War?
David Sanger thinks so. After four decades at The New York Times, he may be America’s most experienced national security reporter, and he thinks superpower conflict is back. He describes how the U.S. overestimated the democratizing power of globalization, underestimated the ambitions of Russia and China, and what, if anything, can be done to counter the “grand delusion” that kept so many smart observers from seeing this new era coming.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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David Sanger: If you want to hear the true President Biden, listen to him at fundraisers. He is much more revealing in fundraisers than he is in, say, sit-down interviews.
[DINNER PARTY SOUND EFFECTS: PIANO, CLINKING GLASSES AND SILVERWARE, WALLA OF VOICES]
David Sanger covers the White House for The New York Times. And he's telling a story about the moment when President Joe Biden went to a glitzy Democratic fundraiser in New York City and blurted out a terrifying piece of information.
David Sanger: So this was October of 2022. And James Murdoch, and his wife who are both big Democratic donors.
James Murdoch is the rebellious, left-leaning son of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch. He owns a townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where he hosted the fundraiser. At this point in 2022, the president had just received a series of highly classified briefings about Russia considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
David Sanger: So in the midst of this, Joe Biden, whose ability at control of his wording can sometimes be limited, begins to discuss in this crowd that is walking around with wine glasses amid Murdoch's very extensive art collection that for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon, if in fact things continue going down the path they've been going. So suddenly, everybody who's sitting there is realizing the President of the United States is talking about the possible use of a nuclear weapon, not sometime in the distant future, but in the next few weeks.
The president's remarks at this private event didn't stay private for long.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Words from President Biden behind closed doors, but they made immediate news.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: The president saying that Putin's recent threats to use nuclear weapons amount to the most serious prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
David Sanger: I'm calling over to his aides, one of who says, ‘Oh God, you know, that's what he was saying in the Oval this morning. It just sort of stuck in his head.’ You know? I talk to these characters every single week and nobody was telling me that we thought there was a possibility of nuclear use. But as soon as I read the words, I was saying to myself, okay, something's changed here.
Something has changed here. And the change runs deeper than a U.S. President sharing frightening intelligence to a group of well-heeled donors. David Sanger would say that Biden's “Armageddon moment” crystalizes a huge shift that's taking place in the world overall. And it’s this:
We’re witnessing the revival of Cold War-style conflict between great powers: Russia, the United States and China. It’s the kind of change that observers say marks a new historical era:
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: A new Cold War is brewing.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Are we heading into a new Cold War?
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: A new Cold War.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: The brink of a new Cold War.
David Sanger is in a really good position to talk about the revival of superpower conflict. I’m not just saying this because he wrote a career-topping book that's conveniently titled New Cold Wars. I’m saying it because — if you're 40 years old or younger — you've never known a time when David Sanger wasn't covering major events for The New York Times. He's covered five U.S. Presidents. And he specializes in the tangled intersection between foreign policy, technology, and international conflict. Join me for a clarifying conversation about the tangled-up events you’re seeing in the news right now.
David Sanger: We are headed back into something that has some passing resemblance to the old Cold War, but actually has more differences.
You’ll hear why so many observers missed the signs that this new era of superpower competition was at hand.
David Sanger: I think the biggest intelligence failure of the past 30 years was a failure to truly appreciate that Russia and China were not headed back toward integration with the West on Western rules.
I'm Peter Bergen, and this is "In The Room."
[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]
David Sanger: We had lived in a world of delusion for a good deal of the time since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
That’s David Sanger pouring considerable cold water on the post-Cold War optimism that the world was experiencing during the 1990s. This optimism came in a variety of different flavors. But the basic idea was that — with the Cold War over — free trade among nations would cause an outbreak of peace and liberal democracy around the world.
Thinkers and writers in the '90s were quick to celebrate. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that liberal democracy was the “end point of man's ideological evolution." And the writer Thomas Friedman went so far as to advance a novel theory of peace based on the worldwide spread of capitalism and McDonald's restaurants.
ARCHIVAL Thomas Friedman: I discovered basically that no two countries that both had McDonald's had ever fought a war against each other since they each got McDonald's. And I call this the golden arches theory of conflict prevention, which stipulated that once your country reached a level of economic development and integration where it could afford a network of McDonald's, it became a McDonald's country and people in McDonald's countries don't like to fight wars. They want to wait in line for burgers.
But these days, the idea that global commerce would necessarily give rise to a democratic and peaceful "Mc-World" is an idea that hasn’t aged particularly well. Russia and Ukraine were doing billions of dollars-worth of cross-border trade right up until Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the attack on Ukraine in 2022. That touched off the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. And in fact, last year, a McDonald’s franchise in Ukraine got hit by a Russian cruise missile. And on the Russian side, McDonald's packed up and left Russia after the war began.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: The company announcing it's now begun the process to sell its Russian business. This is forever. McDonald's effectively going to give up on Russia.
So much for the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention. And Russia isn't the only country whose recent behavior undermines the sort of naive idea that trading with rival nations necessarily makes them more peaceful and more democratic.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: As Russia increases its military presence around Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin was in China today, receiving support from President Xi.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Xi Jinping was confirmed as China's supreme leader. He's amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: China fired 11 ballistic missiles right over the island and encircled it with warships to prove it can strangle Taiwan whenever it wants.
Just as the United States is coming out of more than two-decade war against stateless terrorist groups like al-Qaeda the news today seems to be full of stories about rival nations where autocracy is on the rise about countries launching nationalist wars over territory about ongoing cyber attacks on the U.S. from nations who are supposed to be trading partners and economic competition devolving into something that's starting to resemble all-out conflict. It can all start to feel like a frightening and tangled mess.
But David Sanger has come up with a useful way for you to make sense of all this mess. Sanger's vantage point is pretty unique because he's spent decades getting into rooms with the people who run some of the world’s most powerful countries. And his new book lays out a framework for understanding how those leaders, and the world, have changed in recent years. Sanger's framework starts with abandoning the delusion that doing business with countries like China or Russia would make them more democratic.
David Sanger: The delusion was strongest, of course, in the 90s, during the Clinton administration when Russia seemed really on its back. And Clinton talked to them about moving toward democracy.
David Sanger: Recognizing that they were inherently suffering from corruption, power vacuums and so forth. And when Clinton really struggled about how to go deal with China, a country that he believed the internet would turn into, gradually, something resembling a democracy.
David Sanger: And this bet carried over to the next administration and the administration after that. With Russia again, he believed that their economic interests in selling oil would outstrip any of their interests in taking over territory.
David Sanger: And whenever the evidence came up that this was a bad bet We ignored it.
Peter Bergen: Did you see that at the time, or was it just so much part of the zeitgeist that it was hard to have an alternative view?
David Sanger: I didn't see it initially. When Bill Clinton went to Beijing University and said the internet will be the destruction of the Communist Party, he wasn't quite that clear, but he was pretty clear, and that you will see how true democracies live and it will free everybody to communicate,
ARCHIVAL Bill Clinton: I have seen freedom in many manifestations in China. I have seen the cell phones, the video players, the fax machines carrying ideas, information and images from all over the world.
David Sanger: I thought: ‘Yeah. That makes sense.’ Did it dawn on me at that time that the Communist Party would figure out how to use this new technology as an incredible tool for repression? No, my imaginings didn't go that far. But by the time Vladimir Putin declared in 2007, ‘There are parts of historic Russia that have been given away and they're going to have to come back.’
David Sanger: And by the time that Xi Jinping backtracked on every commitment that he made to Barack Obama about the South China Sea, about stopping the hacking that was intended not only to steal data from the United States, we're all accustomed to that, but to actually begin to put code in the infrastructure of the United States in case we ever came to conflict, code that could shut parts of America down, I thought: ‘Yeah, we've been living in a dream.’
Peter Bergen: There's a great scene in your book referring to Putin's speech in 2007. It's at the Munich security conference, which is where the great and the good and all the world's leaders get together. And Putin was kind of the skunk at the garden party with the speech that he delivered at this conference. What did he say?
David Sanger: So Putin shows up in the main hall of this conference, which has always been held in the same dowdy old hotel in the middle of Munich. And everybody is expecting him to give the integration with Europe speech, right? Because this is the moment at which they had been discussing bringing Russia into the European Union.
David Sanger: There was even discussion, earlier, of bringing them into NATO. I mean, that's mind-blowing thought.
[ARCHIVAL SOUND OF APPLAUSE, VLADIMIR PUTIN DELIVERING SPEECH AT 2007 MUNICH SECURITY CONFERENCE IN RUSSIAN]
David Sanger: So, Putin comes in. And he basically lays out how the expansion of NATO has come to threaten his country.
ARCHIVAL Brian Williams: While the danger of the Cold War has long passed, some see a new danger in the raw power of the Russian president.
ARCHIVAL Jim Meseda: With steely confidence, he stunned Western officials last month in Munich, attacking America with Cold War rhetoric he claimed the U.S. wants to defeat the world.
David Sanger: And people made the mistake at the beginning of thinking he's trying to restore the old Soviet Union. In fact, he thought the old Soviet leaders were idiots. That they had given too much power to the independent republics, whether it was Ukraine or any of the others, and had surrendered the central control that Moscow had exerted back to the era of Peter the Great.
David Sanger: And I guess, Peter, the moment that this really struck me came when Bush went over to sign a treaty in Moscow, and we were in the Kremlin with Bush and Putin. I was in the pool duty, the reporters who follow the president around. And there was one scene that took place in Putin's ceremonial office. And there were no pictures of Lenin. There were no pictures of Stalin. There was a big bust of Peter the Great. And that told you pretty much where Putin was headed.
David Sanger: I think the biggest intelligence failure of the past 30 years was a failure to truly appreciate that Russia and China were not headed back toward integration with the West on Western rules.
Peter Bergen: So you call this a failure of intelligence to misunderstand that Putin really wanted to be Peter the Great and restore not just the Soviet Empire, but the Russian Empire of the 18th century. And then that Xi, or China in general, wasn't just going to liberalize and turn into kind of a big version of Sweden because we started having trade with them.
Peter Bergen: That failure of intelligence — is it a classic case of mirror imaging, which the intelligence community tries to avoid, which is that everybody's just gonna basically come around to my view, sitting at my desk in Washington D.C., if only they knew what was good for them?
David Sanger: I think there were three factors involved. Number one, wishful thinking, right? We were in the middle of a war on terror that took a little longer, as you have chronicled better than anybody, than we had in mind. And during those 20 years, the mind share of the U.S. government was overwhelmingly on the problem of the War on Terror.
David Sanger: The second factor was there were moments when we cooperated with Russia and China and convinced ourselves that these glimmers of light showed that in fact on the biggest issues of the day we were going to come together.
David Sanger: The Russians and the Chinese sat on the U.S. and European side of the table during the Iran negotiations leading up to the 2015 agreement. I covered those negotiations for the Times. I can tell you the Russians and the Chinese were both pretty helpful. They didn't want an Iranian bomb any more than we did.
David Sanger: Obama reached a climate agreement with Xi Jinping. It wasn't much of a climate agreement, but they reached one. Obama negotiated an arms control agreement with Putin. So there were moments where we could say, We all have common interests here.
And then there was a third, and maybe most economically important factor. There was a ton of money to be made by American companies looking to manufacture goods with cheap Chinese labor.
David Sanger: The U.S. business community desperately wanted a much better relationship with China and basically pushed back when they thought the United States was being too aggressive.
In a few minutes, you’ll hear about some big downsides of the decision to move key U.S. manufacturing industries overseas. For Sanger, this decision was just one example of how really well-informed business and foreign policy leaders failed to see that the world had changed. The U.S. was slowly coming to the realization that globalized commerce did not equal globalized peace. And maybe the most telling example of this new reality comes in a scene Sanger describes right at the beginning of his new book.
David Sanger: So when I arrived in Munich in February of 2022, it seemed like war was imminent in Europe.
Sanger was again attending the Munich Security Conference, which attracts leaders from around the world. The Ukraine war hadn't kicked off yet, but it was about to. Putin was massing his troops on Ukraine's border, but European leaders were in denial. about something that seemed completely obvious to the American intelligence community.
David Sanger: I had been living in an American bubble, listening and looking at this intelligence that they were releasing. They were passing around satellite photographs and noting that the Russians, for example, were bringing blood for transfusions to the front, which you don't normally do if you're just conducting an exercise.
Peter Bergen: I thought that was such a telling detail.
David Sanger: Yeah. And basically saying to the Europeans, look, these guys are not bluffing. The Europeans were looking at the same intelligence and coming to a very different conclusion.
David Sanger: Their conclusion was that Putin was massing his troops in order to improve his negotiating position. But they didn't think a straight on war was coming. And this wasn't just a side view, I heard it from the Germans, I heard it from the French, I heard it from all these, Europeans — foreign ministers, defense ministers, some prime ministers saying, oh, Putin's bluffing.
David Sanger: So, the conference started on Wednesday night or Thursday. By Saturday morning, there's sort of a traditional breakfast with the Secretary of State and a group of reporters. Just as people were pouring coffee, we just started comparing notes. And uh, Secretary and I have known each other for a long time, long before he was secretary. And we were running through our list of people who had told us the war wasn't coming. And he said, “Look, I can't tell you if it's going to be tomorrow or a week from tomorrow, but this is happening.”
Peter Bergen: Why is it that these pretty smart people that you talked to just days before the invasion basically got it so wrong?
David Sanger: Because they had imbibed their own fumes over 30 years that Russia's future was with Europe, not in opposition to Europe.
Peter Bergen: Despite the fact that Putin had already invaded Georgia in 2008, despite the fact that he'd taken Crimea in 2014, and despite the fact that he'd taken good chunks of eastern Ukraine afterwards.
David Sanger: Peter, at the beginning of this conversation, I said that we were in a grand delusion for 30 years, and we tried to wish away where this was headed.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Peter Bergen: The Russian economy, because of the Keynesian effect of massive military spending, is actually doing quite well, and the sanctions are barely, I mean, if you're living in Moscow, you haven't been drafted, Putin seems to be doing quite well.
David Sanger: So, in the days after the war, the predictions you were hearing from economic analysis, the IMF, the World Bank was a shrinking Russian economy. Some estimates I saw suggested it would shrink up to 10%. They grew at 3.6% last year. It was slightly better than we did, right? Yes, you're right. Part of that, a good deal of that is the war mobilization.
David Sanger: But it's a long way from what Joe Biden promised, which was that the ruble would be reduced to rubble, which was one of his early speeches in the sanctions. We keep having to relearn the lesson. That sanctions are never quite as effective as you have in mind.
Peter Bergen: Sanctions are a sort of feel-good measure that rarely produce the policy outcomes. But it is a tool the United States keeps coming back to with little effect.
David Sanger: Our inability to learn this lesson time and again. And look, I understand why sanctions are, are, are appealing. You go to the President and you say, um, ‘Sir, you have three options here.’
Peter Bergen: Nuclear war!
David Sanger: One of them, one of them is nuclear war, okay? Okay. Let's take that off the table. One of them is sit around and do nothing and be accused by every one of your opponents as being a wimp who is allowing American power to eviscerate. And the third one is that we do sanctions so we don't have to put troops in there. But you can go up and give a speech saying that you are going to slowly destroy their economy. Everybody goes for it. I don't care whether you're Joe Biden or you're Barack Obama or you're Bill Clinton or you're Donald Trump. They all love that solution, even if it turns out that it is minimally effective.
Sanger seems to be saying that sanctions — if they work at all — are the sort of move to make when you think a country's behavior can be influenced in a more agreeable direction. You might say sanctions are premised on the hope there can be a future where two countries can kind of get back on the same page, where they've got similar enough interests that continued engagement leads to — maybe not marriage, exactly — but at least a cold peace.
But let's say you realize your potential partner can't be changed. Let's say engagement breaks off because there's no relationship left to salvage. And you’re actually in a cold war. In the world you live in, this partner has revealed themselves to be a rival. And you know they're a rival because the evidence keeps mounting that they're making moves to hurt you or hurt your friends. Like, say, friends who live on vulnerable islands where most of the world's best computer chips get built.
David Sanger: Peter, if Taiwan gets invaded, do not break your iPhone. Because the Apple chip that is driving the iPhone is made, not exclusively, but almost exclusively, at Taiwan Semiconductor.
David Sanger: And then the assembly of the phone is happening inside China. So, you're gonna be waiting a while for that replacement. Um, so don't throw out your old phone.
The island of Taiwan is home to the single biggest and most important maker of cutting-edge computer chips, known as semiconductors. The technology may have been born in the United States, but in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Taiwan leveraged its cheap labor and precision manufacturing to dominate the industry. Today, one company on the island, Taiwan Semiconductor, makes the overwhelming majority of the world’s most advanced computer chips.
David Sanger: Which was essentially a geopolitical bet that China was bluffing when it was saying it was going to reunify with Taiwan. Now we're at a point where 90 to 95% of the most advanced semiconductors are made in Taiwan Semiconductor.
The free market ended up locating the world's most important chip factory on an island right beside a nation openly contemplating the invasion of that island. If China did invade Taiwan — to reclaim the island it believes rightfully belongs inside China’s borders — and if chip production there stopped it would affect a lot more than your ability to get a new iPhone. Those chips go into everything from nuclear submarines to the cars you drive to the farm machines that harvest your food. Estimates vary, but choking off the chip supply from Taiwan could blow a trillion-dollar hole in the U.S. economy due to the domino effect of delays, lost sales, and factory shutdowns.
Sanger says the business and political leaders who allowed this risk to develop were guilty of a large strategic blunder.
David Sanger: A series of individual decisions ended up eviscerating our ability to produce something as critical as semiconductors.
David Sanger: They basically just dismissed the idea that there was risk in placing the most vital technology we have within a hundred miles of the Chinese coast.
And Sanger says this nail-biting situation in the Taiwan Strait is emblematic of the threat posed by the new Cold War. So, instead of "engagement” with China, Sanger thinks the new watchword should be "containment." It's a concept you heard a lot about during the last century's Cold War. The U.S. had partnered with Russia during World War II. But afterwards, it felt it had to contain Russia once that relationship soured.
“Containment” in the 20th century meant the U.S. tried to stop the spread of Communism to new countries, and it also imposed trade embargoes to keep Communist countries from getting ahold of equipment or machinery that could strengthen their militaries. Today, Sanger says containment means starving U.S. rivals of key technologies to maintain an edge in artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, in space and cyberspace.
David Sanger: Now there are a lot of my friends, colleagues, critics, who do not like the title of this, New Cold Wars. Because they don't want to think that's where we are headed. But frankly, we are engaged in a power containment contest now with both Russia and China simultaneously. And that was the essence of our strategy in the Cold War.
And President Biden’s recent moves on computer chips is one area where Sanger thinks America is getting containment right.
David Sanger: The part of the book that is most complimentary of the Biden administration, and there are plenty of parts that are highly critical — read the Afghanistan chapter — is that Biden has been the first president to say we need to cut off certain technologies that have given us a lead.
By “cut off,” Sanger means refusing to sell key technologies to China, and doing everything possible to stop or slow China’s ability to build those technologies itself.
David Sanger: Semiconductors being the obvious one, the semiconductor production equipment. We need to spend money building up at home to fill in, use that time for good purposes.
David Sanger: If you're just cutting them off and not building up a capacity at home, you haven't accomplished anything. And if that ends up looking like containment, well so be it.
Peter Bergen: There are many surprising things in the book, but something I learned, which I had never understood at all, is the vital role that Holland or the Netherlands plays in the production of high-end semiconductors. So how did that happen?
David Sanger: You're talking about a company that most Americans have never heard of and never really need to have heard of called ASML. It's in the Netherlands, and it produces these $100 million machines that sit at the core of every semiconductor fabrication plant and enable you to make the most advanced semiconductors down to dimensions of three nanometer-wide circuits, which is–
Peter Bergen: I’m going to presume that's a very small–
David Sanger: It is, it is, it is hundreds of times thinner than a human hair. Okay. And the precision of these, this equipment is remarkable. And it's another technology that the U.S. sort of began but the Netherlands managed to perfect.
In simple terms, silicon computer chips are where the zeros and ones of data actually get physically encoded. The more tiny circuits you can etch onto a wafer of silicon, the more powerful the chip. And this one company in the Netherlands, ASML, has a monopoly on the most advanced, nano-scale chip etching.
David Sanger: But for China to be able to compete with the United States and to compete with Taiwan, they were going to need this equipment from ASML. And so there were a series of pretty secret negotiations underway between Joe Biden and the then Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Rutte, who, by every account is about to become the next head of NATO and in part he's becoming the next head of NATO because he built a relationship with Biden that was rooted in his efforts to keep this equipment from going into Chinese hands and it is at the core of the technological competition.
So, if you accept Sanger's big-picture framework — this idea that there's a new historical era at hand, which we’re beginning to live through, and it looks something like a Cold War — this conflict over semiconductors gives us one example of what a containment strategy can look like. President Biden has made moves to cut off — or contain — China's access to high-quality chips and a key chip-etching technology. But he's also pushing a long-term strategy that recognizes that we don't live in a globalized “Mc-World” anymore. You can't always count on being able to build stuff anywhere on Earth and then safely ship it everywhere on Earth. Borders matter again. Sanger puts this really well:
David Sanger: This retreat of the world back to the hard lines that we thought globalization had washed away.
And so, in support of a containment strategy, President Biden is pushing an expensive and somewhat controversial industrial policy to start manufacturing some of those high-end computer chips in the United States. In April for instance, the Biden administration said it will fund a new, state-of-the-art chip factory in Arizona, at a price of more than $6 billion.
David Sanger: The United States provides some of the seed money and takes some of the risk for building those semiconductor plants in Arizona and New Mexico, rather than have another plant built in Taiwan.
Peter Bergen: And these plants are fantastically expensive, but certain Republicans don't like industrial policy, quote unquote, because it's like the government picking winners–
David Sanger: That's right. And the government can waste money doing this. Now, the government wastes money doing a lot of other things with weapon systems that we frequently don't worry about–
Peter Bergen: But there's also something called the Internet, which, a Pentagon investment that turned out pretty well for–
David Sanger: Right. And the space program led to a lot of our satellite technology.
Peter Bergen: Biden comes out of your book smarter than I think a lot of people presume.
David Sanger: I think that's right. I think he does. And, you know, I don't deal that much with the question of what his physical state is right now.
Peter Bergen: But why does he come out smarter?
David Sanger: I think that he is able to conduct, just from his years of experience, more directed consistent policy. Biden has taken this straight on. And by the way, that policy began during the Trump administration where they began attributing cyber attacks to the countries that did them. And most of that was China and Russia.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Peter Bergen: You call your book New Cold Wars, and it's not The New Cold War. It's, uh, wars. So tell us about the S.
David Sanger: So the S is critical here, because there's an easy temptation to say, ‘Oh, we're headed back into the old Cold War.’ And the argument of this book is, we are headed back into something that has some passing resemblance to the old Cold War, but actually has more differences.
David Sanger: You know, I was trained by the historian Ernie May, a wonderful historian who talks about the use and misuse of analogy in history. Ernie had this great, simple methodology, which is when something seemed overly familiar, you drew a line right down the middle of your piece of paper and you wrote similarities and differences.
David Sanger: So the similarities here are, you know, pretty clear, but the differences are really interesting. So first of all, in the Cold War, we had one major adversary, and it was primarily a military competition. Here, we have two major adversaries with a lot of side players who are super-empowered by technology, not only the internet, but also weapons technology, drones, and so forth.
David Sanger: So, that adds to the degree of complication, greatly, because suddenly you've got the three body problem, two of them are working with each other, against you, it's a very different environment.
The U.S. and Russia may have partnered to win World War II. But, afterward, they could afford to break things off pretty completely and have a good old fashioned Cold War. Sanger says things won't be nearly as simple for the U.S. and China. Even if this new era means the two countries are headed for something of a divorce, it's going to be one of those messy divorces that never really ends. And there's gonna be joint custody of the technology both economies love and can’t live without.
David Sanger: In the old Cold War, Peter, we were not dependent on the Soviet Union for anything other than caviar and vodka. Okay? Now, you and I, in particular, would be upset if we were cut off from our caviar and vodka, I am sure, but we could manage somehow to struggle through without it. In the case of China, it's not clear we can struggle through without much of what they produce. And by the way, it's not clear that they can struggle through without some technologies that we still hold on to.
Peter Bergen: The Cold War ended with a whimper and not a bang. So how's this going to end?
David Sanger: So the old Cold War had a dramatic beginning, a long middle, and a surprising ending. Right? We hadn't really predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union.
David Sanger: I think that anybody who is betting that we are in for a similar dual collapse of the adversary systems here in Russia and China, is a lot more optimistic about the next 30 or 40 years than I am.
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If you enjoyed this episode and want to know more about the topics we discussed, we recommend David Sanger’s new book, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. He’s also written a great book about the rise in the use of cyberweapons in geopolitics called The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age. Both are available on Audible.
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