David Sanger on “New Cold Wars” and the Return of Superpower Conflict

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: But first, threats to the international world order. David Sanger is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. And in his latest book, “New Cold Wars,” he explains America’s volatile rivalry with two great powers, China and Russia, and tells Walter Isaacson how this happened and what America got wrong after winning the old Cold War.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. David Sanger, welcome to the show.

DAVID SANGER, WHITE HOUSE AND NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT, “THE NEW YORK TIMES”: Great to be with you, Walter.

ISAACSON: Over the past weekend, Iran sent a whole fleet of drones and missiles to Israel in retaliation for Israel’s attack on its commanders. What is Biden doing now to stop escalation?

SANGER: Well, first, let’s start with the attack the Iranians ran itself. It was notable for two things. One was, it was the first time since the Iranian revolution we have seen a direct attack on Israel from Iranian territory. That lifts one of the big taboos that has existed for a long time, which is no exchange directly. And I think the biggest worry to come out of it, you know, fortunately casualties were low. There was tragically one young girl who was injured by shrapnel, badly injured, but there were no deaths from this. But there was the death of a restraint. And the restraint was the attack from one territory to another. The second big lesson that came out of it was the Iranians are learning from the Ukraine war just as we’re. They started with a swarm of drones. They then had cruise missiles and ballistic missiles following up that could move much faster. I think the Iranians have emerged from last weekend with a few important lessons that they need to move their weapons closer to Israel if they’re going to be effective, and they need to go invest heavily in hypersonic and faster weapons. And my fear, Walter, is that they may think from this, that if they can’t get through the shield that the Israelis put up, they may have to invest more in nuclear weapons and rev up the nuclear project. We have not seen evidence of that yet, but it would be too early.

ISAACSON: Well, you know, China and others helped us on that nuclear deal. What are they doing now? And can we try to stop somehow Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?

SANGER: So, it’s a critical point because during the 2015 nuclear negotiations that were run during the Obama administration, Russia and China sat on the same side of the negotiating table as the United States and the European Union. If those negotiations started up now, and I think there’s almost no chance that they would, you wouldn’t see them sitting on that side. The Russians are now getting their drones from Iran. China, Russia, Iran together are forming a key part of what the Iranians call the axis of resistance. That’s a big change in just nine years And it’s part of the dynamic of these new Cold Wars that I described.

ISAACSON: Wait, wait, wait. Let’s talk about this big change because it’s huge. And the fact that that all three of our major adversaries in the past 10 years have joined forces, meaning Iran, Russia, and China. Any realist would have said, let’s not let that happen. Let’s keep them from joining forces. Were we making a big mistake, especially pushing China into the arms of this axis of resistance to us?

SANGER: Well, I argue in the book, Walter, that we made a fundamental mistake that goes back 30 years. We were making a good faith effort to try to integrate China and Russia into the western economy. And I argue that we spent 30 years diluting ourselves. Some with bad intelligence, some with just wishful thinking into believing that in the end of the day, China would not risk its economic future and its export market of the United States, that Russia would not risk the revenues needed from oil and gas in order to pursue territorial gains or in order to crack down in ways that they knew would separate them from the West. We fundamentally got that wrong, for very different reasons in both countries, but we weren’t listening to Putin when he said in Munich in 2007 that there were parts of the old Russian empire, meaning Peter the Great’s empire that needed to be restored. We didn’t react fast enough when he annexed Crimea, a part of Ukraine, and then the German’s chancellor, Merkel, signed the Nord Stream 2 deal the next year, 2015, right after Crimea, which gave a new form of revenue to the Russians for gas exports. So, what was Vladimir Putin supposed to conclude other than we would scream a lot about Ukraine if you want to take the entire country, but we wouldn’t do much. And in China, we made parallel mistakes. Did we push them together? I’m not sure we did, but it is clear that they are today doing what Nixon and Kissinger were trying to prevent in the mid ’70s.

ISAACSON: So, in the House of Representatives this week, you got Ukraine aid Israel, Taiwan, everything all bundled up in a mess. How is Biden trying to get this resolved with the House of Representatives? And what do you think could and should happen?

SANGER: So, the initial theory about how they were going to get aid for Israel and for Ukraine and for Taiwan and get some money for the border was put it all in one bill, on the theory that there would be parts of it that everybody would hate, but that they’d all vote for it to get the part they wanted. And now, what you’re seeing the speaker do is try to cut those apart and try to put together coalitions on each and every one of these, which is interesting, may work, but it requires him to get everything right each time, or you’re going to get Israel aid and no Ukraine aid, or Ukraine aid and no Taiwan, or, you know, whatever it’s going to be. Actually, Taiwan’s probably the easiest one of these three. On the left, the president’s got to worry about progressives who want restrictions on aid Israel, although I think you can make a very reasonable case. So, we put restrictions on all kinds of aid, including telling the Ukrainians that they cannot fire U.S. arms into Russia, for example. So, it wouldn’t be that big a stretch to say, you cannot use American 2,000-pound bombs in a dense urban area like Gaza. In — the hardest piece of this, it may well be Ukraine, where you’ve got a rump group of Republicans who basically want to send no aid at all, they’re finished with this. And there, you just are in a philosophical difference about what it would — what message it would send to the world if the U.S., after declaring to the Ukrainians, we are with you for as long as it takes, suddenly changes the message to, we were with you for two years, but now, we’ve run out of money.

ISAACSON: We’re reading this week a lot about the Russian disinformation campaigns and how long they’ve been authorized. It’s something you’ve been reporting on for a long time. And I’m going to read something you read you wrote about their online disinformation campaigns just recently. Russian operatives are laying the groundwork for what could be a strong push to support candidates who oppose aiding Ukraine or who call for pulling the United States back from NATO. Has this effort by Russia impacted our politics and impacted the politics in the Congress this week?

SANGER: It’s really hard to tell, Walter, because the Russians are so much more sophisticated about this than they were in 2016. So, what are they doing now? They are simply grabbing things that Americans themselves turn out, Americans have First Amendment rights, and amplifying those and creating that echo team, in the hope that by being more subtle about it, all they are doing is amplifying the words of people who have First Amendment rights to have their views, whether you agree with them or do not agree with them. It’s a much more sophisticated and harder to catch kind of technique. And what I found really interesting as I was working on the book and having done a previous book on cyber, is that the Chinese who had basically done a lot of hacking but had never really been in serious information operations in the United States were beginning to replicate what they were learning from the Russians. And it will be interesting to see what the combined effect of Russian and Chinese disinformation, misinformation, or just amplification could be.

ISAACSON: Your previous book on cyber and cyber warfare made it feel like in the 21st century. That’s the way we’re going to fight wars. What’s stunning to me is the Ukraine war is fought the way it was 100 years ago. It’s a World War 1 trench warfare. Why have there not been more cyber-attacks in this case?

SANGER: Well, they have been, but they have been of a nature that’s a little harder to see. You know, when you’re watching the war in Ukraine what you see is the missile that goes through the power plant. And the previous book, “The Perfect Weapon,” made the argument that cyber was a terrific short of war weapon, because it’s hard to attribute, it’s hard to see, and it’s a way of taking something out of a country without going to full-scale war. This has been the first time that we have. I’ve seen a full-scale war between two very cyber savvy countries, Russia and Ukraine, where there was a significant cyber capability both on offense and defense. And of course, the Russians, as I’ve described in “The Perfect Weapon,” which is now from five years ago, used Ukraine as their testing ground for cyber. They did again. And in the opening of the book, you see not only what the White House is seeing in the opening days of the war, but what Microsoft is seeing, and they send up a flair saying, cyber-attacks have begun on Ukrainian government agencies. And that makes its way up to Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, as a warning that the kinetic war was about to begin. General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said at one point in this colorful way, I’ll clean this up, because he speaks army, but he said, you know, we thought at first this was going to be a pure cyber war. Then we thought it was a World War II tank war, and then we discovered it was a blanking World War I French warfare. And the answer is, it’s all three, Walter. It’s 1914, it is 1941, and it’s 2022 to ’24.

ISAACSON: Now, the big news this week is that President Biden is looking to put huge tariffs on Chinese steel. How does that fit in? That seems to push China even further towards the Russian-Iran access. Why are we in this confrontation with China right now?

SANGER: I’m not sure that the steel part of this fits his own China strategy. What he keeps saying is, I don’t want a Cold War with China. He said it at his U.N. speech, his first year in office. But he has never lifted a single tariff that Trump put on, and he has imposed some export controls on China. That are preventing China from getting the most sophisticated chips, particularly chips that would help them with artificial intelligence. That makes sense to create a bit of a of time and gap for the U.S. to catch up. The steel tariffs, which he is describing, seem to be — to me, to be more classic protectionism and an election year gambit. And, you know, you’re seeing that even with non-adversaries. The president has made it clear he doesn’t want a Japanese firm to invest in U.S. steel. Well, there’s no closer ally we have in the world than Japan. Their prime minister was just getting a state dinner the other day. And so, that’s what happens when politics interferes, I think, with the good judgment of what makes sense and what does not.

ISAACSON: With this announcement of potential new tariffs, it follows a theme in your book, which is that somehow or another the Biden administration is continuing a lot of the Trump administration’s policies when it comes to China, especially on protectionism. Is that right?

SANGER: They have certainly continued a number of the steps that President Trump took. And as I said, the sanctions are the most obvious among them. I think they have wrapped it into a much more sophisticated and well- developed Indo-Pacific strategy in which they have brought Australia into the fold by — with a deal that will essentially allow the Australians to produce American and British designed nuclear submarines, not nuclear armed, but nuclear powered, and one in which they are bringing allies together who have not worked together before, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines. In Washington last week, we saw the first meeting between the Philippine leader and the Japanese prime minister with the Americans sort of guiding it along the way. And this is an effort to try to create closer to China’s shores a grouping that is not quite a NATO but is a made for purpose alliance to show a common front against Chinese expansionism. I think that makes sense in a way that the Trump policy never did. You’ll remember Trump would cut any deal with China. He once told Xi Jinping, I’m not going to complain to you about what you do in Hong Kong, cracking down on free expression, jailing dissidents, if it looks like we can get a trade deal. You’re not hearing that from Joe Biden. But a lot of the techniques that Trump used, including tariffs, you’re not seeing reversed.

ISAACSON: This book shows the real complexities and the dangers we now face, especially with three major adversaries aligned against us, U.S. being against Russia, China, and Iran. How does this end? How would you break out of this impasse we’re now in?

SANGER: Well, the first lesson of the book and its complexity is, we’re not in your old Cold War. The old Cold War was a one-on-one contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, and it was primarily a military and nuclear contest. This involves two major adversaries, some minor ones or less capable ones, Iran included, but also North Korea, and a number of countries that are sitting on the sidelines trying to make bets difficult to do. You know, the other day, there was a fascinating investment that Microsoft made in a company called G42 in the United Arab Emirates. And while this looked like an effort by the United States to invest in A.I. in the Middle East, what it really was, was an effort to try to box the Chinese out of the Middle East. That’s the new territory, and it is now rather than it’s — you know, whether there would be a domino theory of ideology spreading, the question is, who’s going to control the key technologies of the coming decades? The only way I know to do that, Walter, is to be both aggressive and thoughtful about how the U.S. government helps marshal private enterprise to do this. This Microsoft deal was basically conceived of by the administration, although the U.S. is not formally a party to it. And you’re going to need to see a lot more of that. I know there’s an aversion to industrial policy, but the fact of the matter is that the world is right now is a series of vacuums that one great power or another is going to fill. And if you decide That we don’t want the U.S. involved in this, we just want to go build big walls and pull back, then what you’re essentially saying is, I don’t care who fills those vacuums. And my guess is that’s probably not a policy that over time is going to work out with.

ISAACSON: David Sanger, as always, thank you for joining us.

SANGER: Thank you, Walter.