Tri-Polar World

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. If the world situation seems complicated right now, David Sanger, The New York Times, White House and national security correspondent, has a way to explain it. His new book is called New Cold Wars, and it's his take on how he got from the end of the old Cold War around 1990 to where we are today. In 1990, most Western leaders thought the future would be global democracy and global economic growth. They thought Russia was done with empire-building when the Soviet Union collapsed.

That China mostly wanted to integrate with the West through free trade that would lift all votes, that the emerging new thing called the internet would democratize information and therefore make authoritarianism harder to maintain. That even the Israelis and Palestinians would realize that their forever war was benefiting neither of them and figure out a way to coexist but where are we today? Information and disinformation chaos online. The resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism on every continent. Global trade seen as a failure for the middle class, certainly in this country, and a growing alliance between Putin, Xi Jinping of China, and the leaders of Iran.

The old Cold War is over, but the new world order that the West thought would emerge is instead giving way to what David Sanger calls New Cold Wars and the 21st century version of the question, how much will leaders everywhere have the wisdom and restraint to keep them from getting nuclear hacked? The full title of the book is New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. David, always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

David Sanger: Brian, it's always great to be back with you. I think that was maybe the best summary of the book and its purposes that I've heard yet in a week of book tour.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Why the plural in the title, New Cold Wars? There used to be just one.

David Sanger: Because in the old Cold War, it was basically a military contest, Brian, between the United States and the Soviet Union and within that, mostly a nuclear contest. There was a certain simplicity to it, a predictability that came from the fact that we knew how many weapons they had and where they were, they knew how many weapons we had, and where we were, we had mutually assured destruction. We knew the leaders with launch authority. There was, in short, contained nature to it, fearsome and awful as moments like the Cuban Missile Crisis were.

All that is gone in the new Cold War because now we have two major competitors, Russia and China, that in recent years have developed a partnership without limits that has confused Washington a fair bit, and it's pretty clear there are a fair number of limits to it. It's because the introduction of new players, including Iran, to that grouping has made the dynamic much more unpredictable. Just look at last Saturday when Israel misjudged how Iran would react to the killing of those seven IRGC commanders, and because in the new Cold Wars, we have a dependency on one of the players, China, and they have a dependency on us that we have long assumed would act to prevent conflict from breaking out.

It was that same assumption, Brian, that we had, and I tell the stories in the book about this, we can get to that in a bit, about Russia where we assume that the import of their oil and gas revenue would be so great. That would overcome any desire on their part to risk it all with an invasion of Ukraine or with other territorial ambitions or even a new set of nuclear threats aimed to be less and its allies. Every one of those assumptions, we got wrong.

Brian Lehrer: What about Putin? What does he really want internationally, as far as you could tell? To recreate the Russian Empire or the Soviet Empire land dominance for its own sake and a very retro notion of empire building or something more complicated than that?

David Sanger: Well, certainly at one level, we have to recognize that China and Russia are working off of very different dynamics and that Putin's greatest power is as disruptor, and China's greatest power is as a builder. Their hope is that by 2049, they are the world's largest military, economic, technological power. Russia's got no hope of that, but I argue in the book that we overlooked very clear signals from Putin. That's a big change from, say, 2002, right after the 9/11 attacks, when George Bush thought he had created a new relationship with Russia really based on a mutual commitment to counter-terrorism, although Bush quickly found out that Russia's definition of that is quite different than ours.

Chapter one opens with a float down the Neva River while Bush and his wife, Laura, and Putin and his then-wife are on these party boats. It's late June, the sun is up until eleven o'clock, there's great food being served. As they're floating down the river past the Hermitage and all that, they are discussing how Russia might one day join the European Union, how maybe one day it could become a member of NATO, something that was actually actively discussed 22 years ago, farcical as that seems today. What did we miss?

In 2007, Putin went to a Munich security conference and he gave this public speech in which he said, "There are parts of Russia, Mother Russia, Peter the Great's Russia, that have been arrested away from us and these must return." Bob Gates, then the Defense Secretary, also a former CIA director, stood up and said, "We've had enough of one cold war, we don't need a second." The fact of the matter is that's where they were headed. Seven years later, Putin took Crimea, part of Ukraine, of course, and the US and its allies took a year putting together some pretty ineffective sanctions.

In fact, the next year, Angela Merkel signed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline agreement with Russia and called Putin a reliable supplier. What was Putin to conclude, Brian, other than that if he took all of Ukraine, we would yell and scream a lot and do some ineffectual sanctions and we'd all forget about it in a year or two?

Brian Lehrer: What about China? You write, the US has never faced a competitor like China before and it shows. What are we competing over fundamentally with China?

David Sanger: The Russia one is fairly simple, as I suggested. Because of China's ambitions for 2049, which will be the 100th anniversary of Mao's revolution and the creation of the People's Republic, we are competing there not only for our military predominance in the Indo-Pacific, and that's why you've seen President Biden try to focus so much energy on getting out of the Middle East, something he hasn't been terribly successful at in the past six months, and getting us focused on not only putting together allies in the Pacific, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, creating new arrangements in the Pacific that will help us push back militarily.

That's what AUKUS is all about, the Australian, UK, United States agreement that will give Australia for the first time nuclear power, not nuclear-armed submarines. This is all about having the mass to push back on China's regional ambitions from the South China Sea to the area off of the Philippines and down through the Pacific Islands, the Solomons, and so forth. The book takes you to all of those places. It's also-

Brian Lehrer: Can I jump in on that? One of the, I think, big ideas in the book is that if we thought we were living in a postmodern world in the post-Cold War world where territorial acquisition didn't matter so much, we have to look back to what happened in the run-up to World War II, we have to look back to what happened in the run-up to World War I to explain what's starting to go on in the world today. Territorial acquisition for territorial acquisition's sake in the case of both Russia and China?

David Sanger: It turns out that geography still matters and that one thing the internet couldn't do while it brought us all together virtually, is it couldn't get rid of the nationalistic urgency to either take over nearby lands or reclaim territory that different countries thought was historically theirs. That's Putin and Ukraine. That's China and Taiwan. The difficulty now is that the technological interdependencies we have created have intersected with these geopolitical forces. I spent a lot of time with my great co-writer, Mary Brooks, as we went to Taiwan and other places, and tried to get a handle on the question of, would the technology create a shield for places like Taiwan that would make it harder for China to think about actually seizing the island.

We went to Taiwan Semiconductor, which produces 95% of the most advanced semiconductors in the world, including the microprocessor that is the key to powering your iPhone and the Nvidia chips that are critical to almost every cluster of computer chips that work away on artificial intelligence applications. The question was, since China needs some Taiwan Semiconductor as much as we do, certainly, that would shield Taiwan from being invaded.

I guess the conclusion I came to at the end of this, Brian, was that for a while, it will help, but it's a diminishing asset as the Chinese grow better and better at producing the smallest diameter circuits on the smallest chips. That we have to be prepared for a day, maybe 5 years from now, maybe 10, when the Chinese loss of Taiwan Semiconductor wouldn't be all that great.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some phone calls. Who has a question for David Sanger, New York Times, White House, and national security correspondent on any of the ideas in his new book, New Cold Wars, subtitle, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Your question can be about Russia. Your question could be about China. Your question can be about Iran. Your question can be about the United States. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

You almost suggest in the book, David, and tell me if I'm overreading this, that Trump got it more right than the Democrats regarding economics and China. That the tariffs he placed on Chinese imports weren't just identifying an enemy for political advantage China, China, China because he could whip up another set of grievances, but a real response to economic harm, as evidenced by the fact that Biden has kept the China tariffs in place. How far would you go with that argument?

David Sanger: I certainly think the Trump administration, which I would separate out from Donald Trump, and I'll explain why in a moment, did a good job of identifying the fifth driver of American foreign policy issues for the next few decades as the revival of superpower conflict. If you just go back and look at the national security strategies of the different administrations over the past 25 years, not surprisingly, after 9/11, it was terrorism that was always identified as the number one threat to the US from the 2002 Bush-era national security strategy through the Obama administration.

It was H. R. McMaster who was President Trump's National Security Adviser, former general for just one year until Trump grew tired of him and fired him. He went through-- I think he had four national security advisors by the time he was done. By the time he got into the national security strategy, McMaster wrote about how a revanchist and revisionist China and Russia would be the main challengers. That national security strategy holds up pretty well.

Unfortunately, when they set President Trump out to describe it in the Rose Garden one day, he hadn't read it naturally. He started talking about counterterrorism, completely stepping on his own message. The effort was to try to get the US government to move from an age of terrorism, where you got promoted in the military or even the State Department for your time spent in Afghanistan and Iraq and thinking about these issues, to one focused on Russia and China. The terrorists were part of, I think, somewhat misguided and scattershot effort by President Trump to create some leverage as he was in his trade negotiations, which ultimately failed with China.

The instincts of the administration were in the right direction, their execution was pretty miserable because the President himself couldn't think beyond what transaction he was going to be doing that week. Biden has never backed away from any of those sanctions, as you suggest. He has, however, wrapped the strategy in a much more sophisticated multi-layered approach that is included export bans on the most sophisticated chips and the chipmaking equipment to China, which the Chinese view as a modern form of containment.

Brian Lehrer: Did Trump get Russia right in a certain respect by criticizing Europe for becoming so dependent on Russian energy exports?

David Sanger: He was right to complain, as Obama had before him, about NATO's failure to build up to respond to the threat. You see that in NATO's reality today, where they basically shut down all of their production of, say, artillery shells. We had done just almost the same, and wrapping that up has been very slow. He was right to complain that NATO was not spending enough money, that they would have to think strategically about pushing back on Russia, but he undercut all of this, Trump did, of course, by his relationship and his open admiration of Putin's techniques, his fascination with authoritarian strong men, which I think sends all the wrong messages to the Russians and to the Kremlin.

It is no surprise as we enter into the 2024 election, that both Russia and China, I think, have significant interest in seeing Trump elected. Russia because obviously, Trump is a lot friendlier to Putin and has talked openly about ending the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, which you could only do by just giving the Russians what they want. Right?

Brian Lehrer: Right, the whole country.

David Sanger: The Chinese are a more complicated issue with Trump.

Brian Lehrer: I think the conventional wisdom is that Russia would rather see Trump elected, but China would rather see Biden reelected because Trump is just intrinsically tougher on China. It sounds like you disagree with that.

David Sanger: I think that the Chinese at the end of the day, enjoy the chaos that Donald Trump brings with him and the absence of strategic approaches to dealing with them. While they have a lot of issues with Biden, particularly those export controls I mentioned, I think they think that Trump is probably easier for them to navigate around, and will be so distracted by his isolationist tendencies, that it will give China greater and freer rein. I think at the end of the day, while I'm sure the Chinese don't like either option, for different reasons, they probably would prefer a world in which Donald Trump sits there in a Rhodes-American alliances than a world in which President Biden tries to build them up, particularly in the Pacific.

Brian Lehrer: David Sanger, New York Times, White House National Security correspondent with his new book, New Cold Wars. I think Justin in Clinton Hill is going to suggest that maybe you're missing the US as an aggressor in these new Cold Wars. Justin, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling.

Justin: Brian, thank you for taking my call. Yes, I feel your analysis is missing the fact that so much of the destabilization that's happening in the world is a result of the US demanding it be the sole economic and military hegemony. You look at China and Iran, they haven't had a war in decades, we've had countless wars, Vietnam, Iraq 1, Iraq 2, Afghanistan. We've interfered in Libya, Venezuela, we've destabilized the entire Latin American quarter. What this comes down to again and again is, if you play ball with our economic system, we will buddy up to the most despotic dictators like Saudi Arabia, but if you don't play ball, even if you have a democracy, we will use either the CIA or indirect means or direct means to come and destabilize you. We really want to invade Iraq. There was no argument that Iraq was actually a threat to the US. There was made-up things that The New York Times helped propagate. Now, we're saying that Russia is the bigger aggressor.

I'm no fan of Vladimir Putin, but if you look at the way that we kept encroaching on their borders. He said again, and again, "I want to buffer between Russia and NATO." We kept pushing. We kept pushing despite many, many demands. Yes, it might be a Putin talking point, but it happens to be true. I much really appreciate your show, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Justin, thank you very much. David, a lot there.

David Sanger: It sure is. Justin raises some really good points because the United States is certainly not without saying in this territory. First, let's take on the Iraq War, which you mentioned. I agree, and I argue in the book, this was one of the great strategic errors of the past quarter century. It was an error not only because it tied us up in Iraq against a threat that didn't exist, but because it distracted us from focusing on the true issues with Russia and China.

All of the arguments about the different presidents who said they were going to pivot to Asia, and we're a Pacific nation and all that, our mindshare was wrapped up in the fact that we were losing people in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think Afghanistan was more justifiable in the initial invasion because it was intended to go after Al-Qaeda, but it lost its way very quickly and became a mission that was about forcing democracy on a country that clearly over the centuries had shown that it didn't operate by the rules that we would like.

On the second part of Justin's point, which is that the United States itself had created conditions that would allow Putin to go this route, I'm less persuaded. The countries that freed themselves from the Soviet Union had the right to make a choice. Many of them, not all of them, chose to join NATO. While the United States allowed that in, what were they supposed to say, sorry, you can't join our alliance because we don't know how the Russians would react to it? That's what we did with Ukraine. I would argue that had Ukraine bailed out into NATO earlier, though, you could make the case they weren't ready because of their own issues of democracy-

Brian Lehrer: Corruption.

David Sanger: -and corruption, I think Putin probably would have thought twice about invading.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting.

David Sanger: The other element of this is that I'm not certain that anything we did at the end of the day would have changed Putin's view that he had to bring Ukraine back into Mother Russia, whether we had a buffer zone or we didn't have a buffer zone.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. It is Stephen in Manhattan, who says he's a senior advisor for the Atlantic Council. I guess that's the international think tank. Stephen, you're on WNYC with David Sanger. Hello.

Stephen: Thank you, Brian. What a treat. David, how are you? It's a pleasure to hear you speak at any point at any time. David, this week, I was at the Norwegian embassies at Arctic security conference. There was a good deal of discussion there about what China expects to get back in payback from Russia for the support that it is providing. In that context, they were discussing payback in the Arctic, concessions for mineral rights, possibly even basing, and things that would bother us greatly, obviously. I wonder if you have any insight into-- I'm sure you do. I wonder if you could discuss the Russia-China relationship and what you think is in it for China and what they expect to get back?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Stephen.

David Sanger: This is a really fascinating question, Stephen. I'm glad you mentioned it. I mentioned it in the case of the Arctic, which is where climate change and geopolitics have come together. The fact of the matter is that since the Russians can get their icebreakers through parts of the Arctic now that they could never before, because of melting glaciers and the like, there's the possibility of creating new trade routes that would be dominated by Russia, and China, or could be. The Arctic becomes another place in which this superpower confrontation plays out in a way that wouldn't have happened I think without climate change. Space and cyberspace are obviously two other realms in which this is playing out.

The Russia-China dynamic, which is a central feature of the New Cold Wars book, is, I think, in many ways, the defining partnership, not yet an alliance of our time. We don't know how well it will work because the Russians and the Chinese over the years have not trusted each other, but we do know that this is exactly the combination that Kissinger and Nixon were trying to avoid with the opening to China in the 1970s. I was the author of The New York Times obituary for Kissinger, which we had spent years preparing, and spent a lot of time talking to him in his last years about this motivation.

Today, I think one of the big strategic questions for the US is, what do you do about the Russia-China combination? Do you rethink your nuclear policy because of the possibility that they might coordinate their use of nuclear intimidation, or do you treat them as individual countries? Do you try to entice China into arms control agreements as many have now argued we need to do? What do you do when the Chinese say, "We're not going into such arms control agreements, until either you cut your weapons to our levels, or we build up our weapons to your levels, which is where Xi Jinping is headed."?

How do you handle the control of artificial intelligence in which China and the United States will be the leaders, Russia will clearly play some role, and which could become the most dangerous element of all of this? That is all of where we try to go push the debate.

Brian Lehrer: We have a minute left. I want to pick up on that reference to artificial intelligence because you write in the book frighteningly about artificial intelligence, at least hypothetically. Scenarios like AI algorithms could decide to start a shooting war, even a nuclear war before humans have the chance to intervene and exercise restraint. In our last minute, could that really happen?

David Sanger: Sure. Think about it this way. We have all kinds of rules in the Pentagon that says there has to be a human in the loop on making a decision that would result possibly in the death of a human being or many human beings. That wording has changed in recent times, Brian, to a human ormolu. It doesn't sound like that big a difference. What it does, in fact, is recognize that if an adversary, China or Russia or another, was making automated decisions in battle, anytime you put a human in the loop, you're probably going to respond too slowly, to ever have a chance to prevail in that battle. We're beginning to discuss, well, if a human being watches what's happening, but the algorithm actually runs the battle, isn't that enough? The answer is probably not.

Brian Lehrer: With that vision of a dystopian future, we leave it with New York Times White House and national security correspondent David Sanger. His new book with his longtime researcher, Mary Brooks, is called New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. Thank you, David, very much.

David Sanger: Thank you, Brian. Great to be with you.

 

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