The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with David E. Sanger: New Cold Wars

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

About thirty years ago, the world seemed to be entering what President George H.W. Bush called “a new world order” – a world where capitalism was victorious, global trade would discourage countries from going to war, and authoritarianism would slowly give way to liberal democracy.  It hasn’t worked out that way.  How did such a hopeful moment in history slip through our fingers? That’s the subject of the book New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West, by David E. Sanger, our guest on this Munk Dialogue. Sanger is the White House and National Security Correspondent for The New York Times, where he has worked as a reporter for more than four decades.  The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths. Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Executive Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Senior Producer: Daniel Kitts Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You don't help the poor by making everybody poorer. The media has a frame, and the frame is Israel is the oppressor, and the Palestinians are the oppressed. I shouldn't be forced to acknowledge my privilege unless I desire for that to be part of my interaction with somebody else. What I know to be true and what all of my fellow Gen Z know to be true is that this is the most talented generation yet. With respect to every indicia of disadvantage, there is still a racial hierarch. And though I am, of course, in Anglo, I'm certainly not a fucking Saxon. Hello, Monk listeners. Rudyard Griffith is here, your host and moderator.

Welcome to this, our continuing conversations called the Monk Dialogues. These are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. On each Monk dialogue, we go deep into the big issues and ideas that are driving the public conversation. About 30 years ago, the world seemed to be entering what President George H.W. Bush called a new world order. A world where capitalism was victorious, global trade would discourage countries from going to war, and authoritarianism would slowly give way to liberal democracy. Well, it hasn't quite worked out that way, has it? So how did such a hopeful moment in history slip through our fingers? That is the subject of the new book, New Cold Wars, China's rise, Russia's invasion, and America's

struggle to defend the West by David E. Sanger. You may know David as the White House and National Security correspondent for the New York Times, where he has worked as a reporter for more than four decades. He joins me now to talk about his new book and how the world ended up where it is today. David, welcome to the program. Great to be with you. We always enjoy rich geopolitical discussions and conversations here on the Monk Dialogues, the opportunity to go deep with you on the topic of the world as it is, the world seemingly entering into another Cold War, memories of the past, but different permutations and combinations that reflect this historical moment. David, let's begin there. How would you characterize the similarities between the current

Cold War that you're charting out in your new book versus maybe some fundamental differences? What would make this Cold War separate and unique and something for its own time? Well, first, thanks very much for having me on. It's great to have this discussion. The book is called New Cold Wars, and you should focus within that title on the first word new, because the differences from the old Cold War are greater than the similarity. And the S at the end of war is really important because we've now got two major nuclear adversaries that we are dealing with simultaneously and in combination, because Russia and China have come together in a way that they never really did or could in the old Cold War, of course, with a completely different power

dynamic since right now it's the Chinese on top of that system. And the Russians more as the dependent state. But you asked just the right question, which is, what's the difference between this and the Cold War we think we knew? It's exactly the question that the historian Ernest May, who I was lucky enough to be trained by decades ago, would have asked if he was still alive today. And Ernie always used to have people whenever they were playing with historical analogy, take a sheet of paper and put a line down the middle and put the similarities on one side and the differences on the other. So the similarities are obvious. We've got the United States up against familiar nuclear powers. We have a battle for influence that is

hardening into something of an iron curtain. Parts of it are physical around you, between Ukraine and Russia. Parts of it are digital as the US and the Chinese look to dominate certain areas of cyberspace communications and so forth. And some of this is really different. I mentioned one, the combination of these two powers, exactly what Nixon and Kissinger were seeking to avoid when they made the move to have the United States recognized China or get into that, move in that direction during Nixon's visit in the early 1970s. They feared these two powers coming together. And now, you know, more than a half century later, we are beginning to see exactly that take place. The second big difference

is that during the Cold War, we had one major adversary, who was mostly a military adversary, and within that mostly a nuclear adversary, which meant we could have a red phone on our side and they could have a red phone on their side, and you pretty much knew who was going to answer the phone and how many weapons they had and who had launch authority. There was sort of a clear delineation

that allowed for something of a predictability to the competition that does not exist in the much more unstable world that we have today. And I think that's an important difference as well. We don't have a red phone that would enable you to limit the use of artificial intelligence to do some significant amount of damage in a state-sponsored operation. We don't exactly know who the decision makers are when the Chinese are using their technology to help feed the Russians who, in terms.

turn or using it to help make weapons that avoid Western sanctions. So it's a very difficult, I would say, more volatile, and I argue in the book, much more dangerous world than the old Cold War ever was. One of the interesting parts about your ongoing analysis is that of unintended consequences that certainly the United States, the West, did not want to end up in this circumstance, pondering the consequences, the challenges of managing a new cold war or wars, as the title of your book indicates. What do you see as the error that was made in either categorization, in threat assessment, in presumptions about our own values and

the supposed supremacy of a kind of Western economic and global order. Where do you think we got this wrong? Look, I think we got it wrong for the best of intentions, right? And I think it was some mix of bad intelligence, wishful thinking, a desire to see a world that you wanted to come out a certain way, rather than consider the alternative possibilities. And the first 150 pages of the book, as you've seen, pretty much take you through those sets of assumptions

and the moments that were critical to them. I think the most vivid one is at the beginning of Chapter 1 as George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, and Vladimir Putin and his then-wife, are floating down the Never River in 2002. It's late May, early June, just that time of year when the sun barely sets around St. Petersburg, where they were. They had just been off to a performance of the Nutcracker

or a reinterpretation done by a former Soviet dissident who had come back to Russia, that itself was something of a symbol. And they're having dinner on this yacht floating down the river. And as my co-writer and researcher, Mary Brooks and I reconstructed the conversation from participants who were there, there was talk of Russia joining the European Union and the ultimate Europeanization of Russia. There was discussion that sometime down the world,

Russia might actually join NATO. And you may remember that prior to the annexation of Crimea, there was a NATO-Russia council. You could go in the gates of NATO and go into Russian offices, and it was a sort of coordination center. They weren't a member, but it was sort of what you would have on your way to, you know, junior membership, consider it the summer associate position for NATO members. Today, those offices, by the way, are occupied by the NATO-Ukraine Council, which tells you just about everything.

Dinner was served that night by this hulking guy in the background. I was on the press pool. I remembered seeing him. I had no idea at the time who he was. Of course, it was Putin's chef, Yvgeny Progosian, who by 2016 reappears to help try to fix the U.S. U.S. election by through the Internet Research Agency, which he created. And of course by 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine creates and activates the Wagner group. He had actually created it a few years earlier, a mercenary group that saved Russia's bacon and then ultimately marched on Moscow, which led to his demise, Progoshin's demise. So all the characteristics. characters are on the table out there. And we were proceeding with the thought that the value of shipping gas and oil to Europe

and integrating with the European Union was so great that while Putin might talk about lands that needed to be brought back into the wonders of his image of Russia's greatest moment, the days of Peter the Great, he wouldn't actually do much about it. For China, we had a parallel set of thoughts that as they emerged as a much wealthier country out of an agrarian society, they would also see the benefits of an economy that was completely integrated with the West. I remember going to China with Bill Clinton, who went to Beijing University and gave a great speech that said, the Internet will set you free and undercut the authority of the Communist Party.

And it turned out, of course, while that sounded perfectly reasonable when he gave this in the late 90s, that the Internet and the technologies it allowed later, facial recognition, cell phone geolocation, all became the tools that the Communist Party used to cement its hold on the society and repress opposition and dissent. So we got that one wrong as well. And we can talk about this later on, but the book delineates a lot of early warning signs that came up that should have made us think, gee, maybe our fundamental presumption here was wrong, but we did not want to go down that road. Great insights. A combination of kind of maybe technological miscalculation, a belief in the inevitability of our values and a kind of Western-led order. Do you think, David, that there were strategic and security miscalculations in addition?

I mean, you know this argument well. There's a belief that NATO expansion after the fall of the Soviet Union was too aggressive, too fast, and ignored successive kind of Russian warnings culminating in the invasion of Crimea. What's your take on that? So it may well have exacerbated it. I'm not entirely sure what we could have done about that. I mean, think about this. These are countries that were recently liberated from being a part of the Soviet Union.

They had populations that were yearning to join the West. And so the West created some criteria for what it would take to join the EU, what it would take to join NATO. And they met the criteria. So what were we supposed to say? You know, this might anger the Russians. And therefore, while we have tried for 50 years to free you from the yoke of authoritarian government, we're not really going to let you in.

I don't think that was really a viable option. There are many who disagree and who were warning at the time that it would be a problem. including George Cannon, right, the man who invented the theory of containment, who in the last years of his life wrote quite eloquently, including an op-ed in the New York Times, but not only there, that this was trouble and we should rethink it. I do think we sort of took it a little bit too far by letting in many smaller states that met the criteria

but didn't contribute that much to NATO's defense. thus setting ourselves up for the possibility that a future American president might have to explain that they were going to war and sending American men and women into battle to defend tiny countries that most Americans couldn't find on the map. And that may yet turn out to be a problem. But that's a domestic problem. That's a different problem than the one that you're discussing, which is had we not waive the red, flag of bringing former Soviet states into NATO, might this come out differently. It's interesting that the one country that Putin ultimately did invade was not a NATO member. He did so because he feared that they were headed in that direction.

But it is interesting that he was been very careful during this war not to let his missiles or his troops wander into NATO territory. To deploy your kind of new Cold War's lens on the conflict in Ukraine now, what is your analysis of the threat, which is often invoked by NATO Hawks, that Putin is bent on further conquest, that he does want to push into former Soviet republics, that are NATO members. David, in some ways, this would seem to go against the, you know, the kind of Cold War analog,

which is that those kinds of existential conflicts are put on ice in the face of, you know, the threats of escalation between superpower blocks. What's your take on this now regularly repeated line that Russia represents a, form of existential threat to the sovereignty of Europe. Physically, it's territory. It is a power bent on conquest.

So that may turn out to be true. It may turn out to be exaggeration. What it certainly is, is the reverse of what the Europeans were thinking, saying, and acting like up through the weekend before the invasion happened. And, you know, as you saw, the book opens with the Munich Security Conference the weekend before the invasion. And I was out there covering it for the times. And every European leader I ran into and President Zelensky, who flew in on an unmarked Pentagon plane because they were afraid the Russians might try to shoot him down, were saying they're not really going. going to invade. They're bluffing.

You know, Putin is doing this for negotiating advantage. It was so striking that on that Saturday in Munich, I went to a breakfast with Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken,

and there are a couple other reporters there, and the Secretary and I were comparing notes on European leaders who had said to us in some form or another, we agree that the evidence shows they look like they're preparing to invade,

but the Europeans didn't believe the American analysis that this was what it looked like, you know, a prelude to invasion, because they believed the opposite. And I remember Secretary Blinken saying to me, it's in the opening of the book, David, I can't tell you if they're going to invade. two days, four days, six days, two weeks, but they're going to invade. And it turned out it was four days.

So if the Europeans had it that wrong then, the question is, do they have it wrong again now that Putin, if he is successful in taking all or part of Ukraine, will keep on going, which is the Joe Biden argument. And I think he would have significant. hesitation to do that because I think he now believes NATO would would mass their forces against him but it would be foolish to make the same mistake twice and say he has no such plan or interest staying for a moment longer on Russia what of the I guess to again think take our minds back to the last Cold War was an understanding of the larger power dynamics between, you know,

superpower blocks and how these play out tactically on battlefields and in these kind of shadow conflicts that so defined, you know, the Cold War of the 1950s, 60s and into the 1970s before detente. Do you see Ukraine as as hewing to that model of powers using proxies and conflicts to sharpen their weapons, hone battle strategies, in a sense, engage in conflict without the open, open, presence of a state of hostilities between the powers?

So I don't think it started that way, but I think it has become that. For Putin, this wasn't a proxy war. For Putin, this was, that land is mine. It has never been an independent state. I'm going to bring it back into the Russia of Peter the Great's imaginings. And when I said before he had warned of this, there's a chapter in the book called The Seven-Year Itch, with apologies to Marilyn Monroe. In 2007, he was also at the Munich Security Conference, Putin was, and he said there are lands that have been wrested from Russia that must come back. And people were shaking their head and thinking, this guy wants the old Cold War back.

But they moved on with their lives and didn't fundamentally change their lives. assessment of Russia. Seven years later, he takes Crimea, annexes it, a peninsula that had been, of course, part of Russia for decades, I'm sorry for centuries, but that Khrushchev gave back to Ukraine in the late 50s. And it took a year for the United States. And it took a year for the United States and his allies to put in place any kind of serious sanctions and then only when that airplane was shot down or commercial airplane over Crimea, killing hundreds of civilian passengers. That was 2014. What happens in 2015? Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, signs the Nord Stream 2 Gas Pipeline Agreement with the Russians, with Putin. It routes around.

Ukraine so that the Ukrainians would be deprived of any of the revenue and Merkel declares he is a reliable supplier. The German strategy was wrap Russia in a embrace, make them economically dependent on Germany buying that fuel, and that that's the best protection. It was an interesting theory, it did not work, and of course seven years after that, he tries to take all of your credit. Hi, monk listeners. I wanted to tell you about our upcoming monk debate on anti-Zionism. On June 17th, author and journalist Douglas Murray and UK-based international law expert,

Natasha Halsdorf, will debate former MSNBC commentator and columnist, Medi Hassan, and Israeli journalist Gideon Levy on stage in Toronto in front of a live audience of 3,000 people. The debate will be streamed, so if you can't make it in person, you can watch it. from the comfort of your living room. Find out how to become a monk member and get your live stream access to the monk debate on anti-Zionism.

Visit our website right now, wwwmunkdebates.com. Let's move on to the other, or maybe the big interlocular in the new Cold War dynamic, and that's China. There are similar arguments that you lay out in the book

and that others have advanced, that there was a fundamental misunderstanding of China, possibly the Chinese Communist Party and its actual intentions. There was a belief, again, that further integration would lead to, you know, not just political normalization, but, you know, a China that could become a partner to the West on, you know, addressing the major kind of geopolitical, but also other important challenges like climate change that affect all of us. We now end up in a very different state in 2024, with China and the United States openly expressing the extent to which both sees the other as the primary foe and their single greatest.

strategic threat. How did we come so far, and you might say so fast, because this really began with the Trump administration, which is not that long ago, to a point where Chinese-American relations are where they are today? I'm more forgiving of where we were with China, because until Xi Jinping took office, which was a little more than 10 years ago. It seemed like a pretty reasonable bet that on a rocky path,

China was experimenting with a little bit of local democracy, was deeply invested in getting wealthier and more integrated with the Western economies. And while we were a little concerned about their military buildups and there were episodic crackdowns on dissent, you know, nobody thought this was going to be like a straight line path, but that it was a reasonable bet.

And of course, we were pushed along by a business community that was enthralled after the opening to China by the size of the market. And it took them about 20 years to discover that the Chinese strategy was first to steal intellectual property, then to subsidize their own industry, to build that up, then to bar the American products. and then to try to take over the market. Telecommunications is like the easy, you know, great example, where Huawei moved up from nothing to the dominant player or in many parts of the world. We woke up slowly to that,

but what we really got wrong was Xi Jinping. The intelligence reports, when he was taking office toward the end of the Obama administration, was this is a leader who will focus on the domestic economy, on job creation. He will not challenge the United States. He will not focus on the military. You may remember that when he was the sort of next leader designee, but essentially the vice president,

the U.S. set up as his main interlocutor, the then-vice president, Joe Biden. and they traveled around together in China. Xi came here. They went back to Iowa, where Xi had visited once as a young party. Parachique would come to the United States and stayed in an American family's home,

stayed overnight or a few nights in the room of their high school age or college age son, you know, mid-all of, like, basketball pictures. and he always waxes on about this. He seemed pretty Western, sent his daughter to Harvard, as many Chinese leaders were sending their kids for education in the United States. And it turned out we got him completely wrong. We now know from secret speeches that were later declassified

that he called for the buildup of the Chinese nuclear force to roughly a Russian and American level. in the first few months of his time in office. He then went on to do the crackdown in Hong Kong, which, as you mentioned, happened during the Trump administration. But Trump didn't object. Trump said to him, I won't make any noise about this if we can just get our big trade deal,

as if the trade deal was somehow going to go solve the fundamental changes that were going on. The hack of the Office of Personnel Management and many American healthcare, travel, other sites, enabled the Chinese to put together a picture of the American elite. OPM gave them their security clearance files, so they knew what 22 million Americans who had security clearances were working on, what their expertise was, where they'd been, what their vulnerabilities were, whether they had health problems, whether they had financial problems,

the names of all the foreigners they had met, remarkable trove of data. And we underreacted to each one of these. And you know, you make the good point. They did reach a climate agreement with Obama. They did ultimately reach a not terribly important trade agreement with Trump. They did, as did the Russians sit on the U.S. and European side of the table in the Iran negotiations to try to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions. If those negotiations started up again today, of which I think there would be about a zero chance, but if they did, do we believe they would be sitting on the U.S. European side of the table? I don't think so. They would be on the Iranian side of the table.

David, in our remaining moments, let's try to look forward a bit. The last Cold War was puncture by brief and geographically disparate hot wars. We've seen one hot war now in Ukraine. It's not a direct conflict between the protagonists of this new Cold War drama, but it carries risks, risks of escalation. So talk to us about what you see is the future trajectory of this war? Is it one that we should keep an eye on that like other conflicts that

have involved superpowers in the past could result in miscalculations that cause unexpected escalations? Or is this like other previous post-war conflicts in the Cold War period, simply a war that muddles on to no conclusion, possibly stretching into the years ahead? Those are not mutually exclusive options we have here. A model might be the best we could hope for here. At the end of the book, I say the closest model for resolving this war might be a Korea-like armistice in which no one really resolves who has legal control over southern and eastern Ukraine,

but that you set up a model for a future negotiation, and meanwhile just stop the shooting and keep the peace. You know, we've never resolved that since 1953 in Korea, but South Korea had emerged from being as devastated by the war as Ukraine is today into what the 11th through 12th largest economy, in the world, you know, a maker of some of the world's most sophisticated semiconductors, an economic superpower, a growth model, and a liberal democracy, right? Not bad as a trade for the territory that they still believe is theirs.

That would be a best-case outcome. The worst-case outcome is pictured in the chapter that describes the terrorists of October, October 2022, terrorists that I think most Americans were tuned out to at the time. But U.S. intelligence picked up evidence at a moment that the Russians were really on the verge of being driven back. Their worst moments in Ukraine in six months after they had done the invasion of Ukraine and had to retreat then from Kiev and Kharkiv and so many other parts and were in the retreat. When the U.S. picked up intelligence that Russian military commanders were contemplating, rolling out tactical nuclear weapons that they may use against Ukrainian military targets. And President Biden shows up at a fundraiser in New York at the home of James Murdoch, who's the Democratic black sheep of the Murdoch family, I guess.

And he's invited people over who are contributing to the campaign, and they're walking around with nice glasses of white wine, and looking at Murdoch's art collection, and in comes the president. And he declares, we are at the closest point to a nuclear confrontation with Russia that we have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And if this goes bad, I don't think that there's anything that stops this from rolling into Armageddon.

And, you know, they're all looking at each other, like, let's grab the kids and get out of town. right and back to the Hamptons and it was a truly remarkable moment and my biggest fear is it may not be the last one in this because one of the things that's happened in this war is the taboo that you would never even contemplate the use of a nuclear weapon by a nuclear armed state against a non-nuclear state Ukraine, that taboo may now have been broken forever. As we wrap up this conversation, just thinking through the future trajectory of two other hotspots in the kind of Cold War's thesis that you're advancing, Taiwan and second, the events

that we've seen unfolding in the Middle East since October 7. What risk do you see here of either escalation, unintentioned, um, consequences through miscalculation. Where do you think the world's most dangerous place is at this moment? Probably Iran and Taiwan. Let me start with Taiwan because it's dealt with more head-on in the book. We spent a lot of time in Taiwan in the reporting of this book. This is not a book of academics sitting around mulling what could happen. I did this as a reporter does it and got up and traveled around the world. Taiwan was fascinating because both the Chinese and the Taiwanese are watching every move in

Ukraine and saying, how does this apply to us? The Chinese are saying, do the Americans have the wherewithal to stick with it? And until the additional money got through Congress a few weeks ago, there was good reason to question that, right? The question I wanted to answer in Taiwan is, is there a silicon shield? In other words, is the existence of Taiwan Semiconductor, the world's most sophisticated maker of chips, makes 90 to 95 percent of the most advanced chips, the ones that are in the microprocessor that drives your iPhone, the Nvidia chips that are used for almost everything in advanced,

artificial intelligence development, the clusters of microprocessors that enable you to make large language models. Those are all Taiwan semiconductor products. And China needs them as much as we do. I think where I came out in the end is there is a silicon shield, but it degrades over time. And I don't think that we should overestimate how much time we have. And that's why we need to move pretty quickly in helping Taiwan build up the defense,

that would deter the Chinese in a way that Russia was not deterred involving Ukraine. Iran, I have to say that when the Israelis struck back from the Iranian missile attacks in May, I'm sorry, in April, the Iranians must have thought Isfahan is the situation, Vizfahan is more vulnerable than they thought, and it's where they keep a lot of their nuclear development projects. And it has to have created a movement among some in Iran to accelerate the nuclear program so that they have a real deterrent to Israel. We haven't seen evidence of that yet. I hope I'm wrong. But Iran is so. Iran is hesitated until now to turn the final turns of the screw that they would need to go nuclear.

And I wonder if that hesitance is now beginning to be chipped away. David, thank you so much for your time today. You've been so generous with it. And we've learned a lot. Your reporting over the years, I think has been a gold standard for explaining to audiences, complex international issues, bringing them to a place and presenting them in a way that all of us can engage with meaningfully. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you so much for coming on the program. We'll include links to the book in the show notes and urge our listeners to get a copy, get one now, and enjoy an important refreshing take on geopolitics. David, thanks so much for coming on the program.

Thank you. Great to be with you. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, David E. Sanger. He certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have any questions or feedback on what you've just heard on this or any of our podcast, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com. Thank you for lending your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of public conversation,

one dialogue at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.