E-mail a friendDavid Sanger
airdate January 22, 2009
David Sanger has been called one of the most trusted correspondents in Washington. In more than two decades at The New York Times, he's covered such issues as foreign policy, nuclear proliferation and the Bush presidency. He's also a two-time member of the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting teams. Now chief Washington correspondent, the Harvard grad previously served as Tokyo bureau chief. In his first book, The Inheritance, Sanger describes the costs of distraction and lost opportunities caused by the Iraq war.
New York Times Washington correspondent assesses President Obama inaugural address. (1:54)
Full interview. (11:05)
David Sanger
Tavis: David Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for "The New York Times." During his years at the "Times" he's been part of two teams that have won the Pulitzer Prize. His critically acclaimed new book is called "The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power." He joins us tonight from New York. David Sanger, nice to have you on the program.
David Sanger: Thanks for having me, Tavis.
Tavis: Let me start with the obvious question: For Mr. Obama, what is the inheritance, exactly?
Sanger: Well, the question, Tavis, is where do you start? Obviously he is walking into the biggest financial crisis of any president since Franklin Roosevelt did in 1993. You heard echoes of the Roosevelt '33 inaugural in the inaugural address that we heard this week from President Obama.
But then beyond that, beyond having to right the economy and rebuilt American power in part by rebuilding our economic power. He has this huge set of challenges and then also a set of programs, including some covert programs that President Bush has left. And just about any place you look around the globe you discover the price of distraction as the top leadership of the United States was focused so intently on Iraq, a war, you remember, they thought would only last six months, maybe a year.
And what happened in that time? Well, Iran made huge progress in developing a nuclear weapon, to the point that the day that President Obama took the oath they had roughly enough uranium to produce one weapon. The North Koreans built six or seven weapons and claimed they did a few days ago based on fuel that they harvested the very months that we were heading into Baghdad.
In Afghanistan the inheritance takes you through how we pull troops, intelligence assets, diplomats out and told many who came to Afghanistan that the Taliban were defeated. It sure doesn't sound that way when we listen on the evening news at night. And the list goes on - Pakistan's another great example.
So in each of these cases he not only has to deal with a deteriorating situation, he has to deal with lost opportunities, and in some cases, particularly Iran and Pakistan, covert programs he's got to decide whether to continue.
Tavis: I like that phrase "the price of distraction," and as I read the text, I think the argument is clear that for you, at least, the price of the distraction was too high a cost.
Sanger: Well, it was a very high cost, and people don't think about that frequently when they go in to begin a war. We think about the horrific human cost, and certainly here it's been 4,000 American lives and thousands more casualties, American and Iraqi. It's been $800 billion.
But the real cost was an opportunity cost, and not just with countries that are developing new weapons or posing new threats, but opportunity costs with rising powers like China. And I think President Bush did a pretty good job in managing the China relationship, but he never got to the hard issues, which would be managing China's use of energy, joining up with them on environmental efforts, because there's only so much bandwidth in the U.S. government, and so much of it was absorbed.
Tavis: Speaking of bandwidth, and I want to come back in a moment to the inauguration speech and some particulars in that, but speaking of bandwidth, does this president have the bandwidth, or for that matter, put another way, the luxury - not that he has a choice, I guess - of being able to do both at the same time?
I'm double-talking here because I'm talking myself out of my own question, but does he have the bandwidth to do both? Can he focus on the domestic crisis that we are in right now and all the stuff you lay out in this very dense text?
Sanger: Well, I hope it's not too dense, Tavis, but the answer to the question is he doesn't have a choice. We don't live in a world anymore where a domestic economy can be - problems can be solved at home. A lot of what he wants to do depends on getting the Chinese, the Europeans, the Japanese and others to work with us, particularly on the economic problems.
Think about this for a moment: China, of course, has been growing at great rates, mostly on exports that they're sending to us. You see it every time you walk into Wal-Mart or some other place. Those exports have fallen way off, and the Chinese are now hurting. They're laying people off in the factories in southern China.
We have financed our deficits in part by borrowing money from the Chinese that they're now intent on spending at home to solve their own unemployment problems. So what happens as we run up a trillion-dollar deficit for the year on an $11 trillion debt? What happens if we go to the Chinese and they say, "We're terribly sorry, we can't keep lending to you at the rate we used to be because we need this at home?"
So it's all interrelated, and so he's going to have to manage the international in order to manage the domestic.
Tavis: One of the things, David, that I believe, and perhaps you've felt the same way - I know that other Americans did - and that is that if Obama were, in fact, elected on the day that he was elected, to say nothing of the day he took office, the world would see the United States differently just because of the face that now represents the United States empire, as it were.
How do you think he managed that reality in the inauguration speech? Because I think he did - he obviously talked a great deal about how he wants to engage the world, and you have the world looking at this space and hearing this policy of how he wants to do things different while President Bush is sitting there. How do you think he managed the world's expectations?
Sanger: Well, it was a remarkable speech at several different levels. First, let's take the issue of race to begin with. During the campaign, he didn't talk about race very much. Some people wanted him to talk about it far more. He thought he didn't need to, that just his presence there, standing on the steps of this Capitol that had been built by the hands of slaves sort of said it all.
And so his only reference was that one marvelous reference to the fact that his own father wouldn't have been served at restaurants in Washington, D.C. a few blocks from that Capitol less than 60 years before his son took the oath. And he sort of left that there.
The next level of the speech that I found fascinating, though, was it was a direct attack on the era of George W. Bush in this references to how we have dismissed science, in his references to how we had gone to war. And to watch President Bush sitting there just having to take it was sort of interesting.
I covered President Bush for seven years as White House correspondent, Tavis, and there were not many moments where he had to sit there and hear a direct critique of his entire way of governing and he had no right of response. And I was wondering as I was watching that what was going on through his head.
Tavis: How sincerely do you think the world - and that's a bit catch-all phrase, but countries of the world will take Mr. Obama entreaties to work with us? That oft-quoted line now, and I'm paraphrasing, of course, that we'll extend our hand if you unclench your fist, how welcoming, how responsive are certain powers around the globe going to be to accepting the hand that he appeared to extend in the speech?
Sanger: Well to our allies, I think they will all accept it. They were very eager for him to start up, and in Europe the sentiment for President Obama was overwhelming. In Asia it was a little more cautious, because their primary concern is what his positions were going to be on trade, and he was a bit more on the protectionist side during the time that he was running and I think they're a little nervous about it.
In Africa, obviously, enormous enthusiasm, and you saw that. Those film clips from villages in Kenya where his father came from, but also throughout the continent. The hard question, Tavis, is what's going to happen with those states with whom we have been in confrontations? Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, which is an ally on some days and not an ally on many others.
And there you're going to see him be tested, and he knows it. Now, Joe Biden said this during the campaign: Someone - and I can't tell you which one it's going to be first - but someone's going to come at him to test his mettle, and he knows that in that first encounter he's got to stay pretty tough, the way Kennedy had to stay tough in his first encounter as also an untested senator.
Tavis: Before my time runs out, he made some major moves on his first day in the Oval Office yesterday. He started the process, which isn't going to be easy or quick, of closing down Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay. He called for leaders in the Middle East to engage immediately on the crisis there, which President Bush, of course, many people think didn't do enough of, or certainly was too late trying to reach out. Assess for me right quick those two issues.
Sanger: Well, on Guantanamo he made it clear he was going to call to shut it down, and it's astounding to me that President Bush didn't do this preemptively a year or two ago, because Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates, his secretary of Defense - secretary of State and secretary of Defense - came to him and asked him to do that.
But let's not kid ourselves - it's going to take a while to close down Guantanamo, because they have to figure out where they're going to move these 240 prisoners, and some of them are some pretty tough characters.
On the question of the Middle East, President Bush in his first days in office, the equivalent to these days eight years ago, said, "I'm not going to get into the weeds the way President Clinton did." I think that President Obama recognizes that was a huge mistake. But the fact of the matter is just getting into the weeds doesn't necessarily bring peace, and it's going to take a lot of effort.
And we now have Hillary Clinton confirmed as secretary of State, and I think that you'll find that she becomes a lead negotiator.
Tavis: David, when I said earlier the book was dense, it is not too dense. It's a fine read, not at all too dense. (Laughs) The name of the new book by David Sanger is "The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power." David, honored to have you on the program. Thanks for your insights.
Sanger: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: My pleasure.
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