David E. Sanger Unpacks America's Delusion About Russia and China

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Tonight?

A White House a national security correspondent for The New York Times. His latest book is called New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's struggle to defend the West. Please welcome back to the program, David Tanger, Sir, you wrote another bat New co Wars. David, First of all, thank you. It's nice to see you again.

Good to be here.

Is the premise that the United States did a poor job of managing risk after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Well, we certainly made a lot of false assumptions, bad assumptions. That doesn't sound along the way, Yeah, I wouldn't be as, wouldn't be as. And the fundamental argument of the book is that we believed, somehow we deluded ourselves into believing that China and Russia, each for their own different reasons, would like just sign up to the Western world. That we were going to go say, look, we got this whole thing figured out. All you guys do is come in here and sign on the dotted line.

We're going to do a rules based democratic foundation order and everybody will be cool with it.

And that was supposed to be the end of history, because right we were.

Said, it's the end of history.

Western liberalism is triumphant, and we can all just skate on the glorious booty that we get from it.

Right now, you can't blame just him, because there were a lot of other people, believe, okay, And I signed on to a little bit of this myself, so I confess. But I got to tell you this basically went on for thirty years, good twenty five anyway, because we were busy doing the wars on Terry. We're just talking about those.

Little when you talk about in the book, there's a lot of stories of how George Bush thought that there would be a great Reproachmont with Putin over there, shared dislike of terrorism and the two of them. I mean, there's stories in there that come out of James Bond. You're on a yacht with George Bush and Putin and they've just seen a.

Very dark version of the Nutcracker.

You're like, it's not even the regular Nutcracker, it's the dark Nutcracker.

And you're like, I bet Bush really enjoyed that.

I'm sure you love anything high.

So this was two thousand and two. We were in Saint Petersburg. We were floating down the Never River. They're in a great party boat.

There's this guy s wait, you were floating down the river with them.

I was floating down a boat behind it.

We weren't eat like tubing.

That's what white House reporters do, isn't it. We were in the pools, just this sign. The pool was a river, all right, Okay, So we're following him down and there's this guy serving dinner.

He's kind of big and hulking.

It turns out it's Pregosion.

Okay.

If Jenny Progosion the head of the Terrible Army.

Well, at the time, he was putin chef.

Okay, his only job was make sure the meals were good and a really glowering wait.

So he's like Bobby Flay and then he turns into the head of a mercenary army.

Well before he did that, he ran the Internet Research Agency and tried to fix the twenty sixteen election with this information.

They really are renaissance, man, it really is. I mean, that's talent, that's talents.

So now this appears to be going along until George Bush wants them to go after Islamic terrorism. And then at that point Putin wants them to go after chech Nan, right, or at.

Least Putin wants to use the excuse to go after Cheschney. And that was the beginning of Bush beginning to think, you know, maybe this guy isn't the one we thought he was.

He looked into his soul.

Yeah, well, you know, he may have looked at the wrong soul. So in two thousand and seven, Putin shows up at this thing called the Munich Security Conference and he says, you know, there are parts of Russia that have been separated from us that really belong to us, That to the Russia that Peter.

The Great created.

And remember Putin isn't trying to recreate the Soviet Union. He thinks the guys who are in the Soviet Union were idiots. You go into his office, he's got a big bust of Peter the Great there. So who do you think he thinks? He is.

Progosian. No no, no, no, how do we miss all of this?

And even if we had been onto it, what would we have done differently?

So first it was a combination of sort of bad intelligence, wishful thinking. Oh, sure, he's going to be troublesome, but at the end of the day, he cares about his oil exports, his gas exports, more than he really cares about this. And look up until the weekend before the invasion happened. There's a story the invasion of Ukraine in twenty twenty two.

So this all past twenty fourteen.

Yeah, twenty fourteen comes, he takes crimea. Obama says, I'm not going to war for something that used to belong to Russia. Nobody does sanctions for a year, right, And the next year the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel signs the nord Stream Too agreement, creates this pipeline that runs from Russia around Ukraine's what doesn't get any revenue from it,

Really gonna invade. He's just bluffing.

He wouldn't risk his oil revenues. Four days later he invades. The intelligence chief for Germany was in Kiev the morning of the invasion. They had to evacuate him because he didn't believe they would invade.

So what did he think that noise was? He got out of town kind of fast.

So this is all hindsight, though in truth, what could we other when someone is imperialistic in that way? What can other powers do short of an actual shooting war to prevent these kinds of things. There's no guarantee that tougher sanctions after CRIMEA would have deterred him. It sounds like this is kind of his destiny and he's fulfilling that destiny, come hell or high water.

So that's the other piece of this, which is we impose our values on Russia China and we think, well, we're not going to do something that would get in the way of our economic interests.

Neither would they.

So China's a really interesting example. Jijinping comes in more than ten years ago. Joe Biden spent a lot of time with him, traveled around with him. But the intelligence reports of as are this guy's not going to challenge the West. He's going to tend to his economy, make sure all is good. Right, We now discover, and you read about in the book, they're these secret speeches that he gave almost as soon as he came into office, saying we're going to build up our nuclear forces to

Kind of looks like, no, that's just convenience.

It's not are we lying to them or are we lying to ourselves?

I think more to ourselves.

So, you know, we did not want to conceive of a world in which we were back in superpower conflict. We wanted to live in the world in which the US was the predominant power. We finally calmed down the Middle East, doing real well with that, and and that we could focus on competing with China, some containment of Russia. And you know, Biden happened to be the one sitting in the office, sitting in office when this all fell apart. And most of the book is a story of what

Yeah, right.

And there's an amazing story right from New York City two years ago, October of twenty twenty two, when President Biden shows up at a fundraiser at James Murdoch's house.

They're nice, not familiar with the last name, but go ahead.

Yeah, he's actually sort of the black sheep of the family, a Democrat who raises money for Biden, among others. So they're, you know, nice New Yorkers walking around with their wine looking at his our collection. The President comes in and says, by the way, we're going through something that is the closest to nuclear war we've had since the Cuban missile crisis. They're all looking at each.

Other, like he drops that at a cocktail party.

I'm sure they all thought that it was really the moment to get out to the Hamptons.

Don't you think he drops that? And then it's like, do you guys have breathe like he does.

Actually, people in the White House were amazing the now call it his Armageddon speech, because he had just said the same thing in the Oval office.

Right, and then then he turned to everybody and go and my word is don't.

That's a big thing. Now he tells dictators don't don't And they're like.

Oh, okay, haven't we sowed the seeds of this with our own arrogance and cavalier approach to a lot of these foreign policy conflicts. A we always frame thing says, this is a battle between democracy and the free world, and liberation and authoritarianism. But the truth is we're fighting for trade channels and resources like this is all a function of competing capitalist powers.

And aren't we the ones?

I mean, we've invaded more countries than Russia and China combined. So how do we give ourselves somehow the passes the white hat guys when a lot of our policy has created a lot of the chaos that they're taking.

Advantage of, it is I'm done, I'm out here.

So there's been a lot of that going on in American history for a long time. Teddy Roosevelt, you know, took over his fair share of territory. But I think in the Biden administration we've had to sort of face these contradictions because at the beginning of the the president was saying, just what you said, this is a battle between democracy and autocracy, and everyone says, Okay, that's pretty clean.

Then he goes to just not true.

Yeah, then he goes then he goes to Saudi Arabia, does the fist bump with NBS, right, And I was on that trip.

They weren't quite sure. How that are you ever home?

When you cover the White House, you got to go where the president goes as part of the job. And then you know, we move on to what's been happening in Israel and the Israel Hamas war. And as you said earlier, we are in the very odd position of both providing aid and providing the arms that are being

With Would it simplify our position if we stopped part tending our morals were beyond the reproach of all these other countries. Would it help us to not have to scold everybody for failing to live up to principles that we very clearly do not uphold.

Well, at least we have some principles. Okay, that's the one thing.

We say that.

But you know, you can't invade a country. What happened in Iraq, that's you can't call for regime change. What did we do in Libya. Every time we say these things, we undercut our own position with I mean, for God's sakes, Iran is an enemy today because we overthrew their democratically elected government nineteen fifty three. Right, So at what point do we just admit that this is how we're behaving.

The odd thing is at the moment that presidents do admit that, they get chewed up for admitting to American error. Obama went and apologized to the Iranians.

Saying apologize. I'm just saying, take off the mask and go, you know.

What this is?

It strikes me as it's colonialism and imperialism in a more modern form. China is in Africa trying to extract, and we're trying to extract. We're militarizing economic rivalries and creating all kinds of chaos and death over what is ostensibly trying to get better deals.

Well, some of it's better deals, some of it is protecting technology. And I argue in here that with China as opposed to Russia, this is, first of all, this is an incredible competitor, and it's a competitor in a military sphere, in the technology sphere, in finance, in economics.

And we're their best customer and then they are ours.

And that's really what makes this different from the old Cold War. So reason there's new in new Cold Wars, and there's a reason there's an ass at the end. First of all, we're fighting too simultaneously. Okay, the old Cold War, that wasn't the.

Case, fighting the wrong terminology, because isn't that Look, the only people that never lose a war or the military industrial complex are the people that.

Sell the weapons. And if we continue to.

If we continue to push that weaponization of these economic rivalries, aren't we just playing into that cycle?

We are playing into the cycle. But if you're in a world in which vacuums happen, if we say, okay, we're done with this, you're going to go back and build our big walls and sort of recede from it, someone fills that space. And that space is going to get filled largely by China, some by Russia, some by

It seems like what we should do is be honest about what our aims are in the way that China went into Africa and did Belton Road, knowing that really it's about cobalt and lithium, and rather than us going into Africa and just building up all these small military juntas that end up creating all those dictatorships that create so much cash and pain for those countries, Well.

I'd argue that now we're not doing it with cobalt, We're doing it with semiconductors, right, So yes, the big story that we tell in here went to Taiwan. Spent a lot of time at Taiwan Semiconductor, which is the biggest producer of the most advanced semiconductors in the world.

And you looked at the.

Question does that create a silicon shield for the United States and for Taiwan? In other words, that the Chinese would not dare take over Taiwan because they would lose access to Taiwan Semiconductor.

And are we going to learn any sentence that begins with would they dare?

Yes? They would dare, and so would we, and so and so.

My argument here is it's a silicon shield for a little while, John, but eventually the Chinese are going to learn how to make everything Taiwan Semiconductor is making, and at that moment we've got a real Taiwan crisis. And so the book is sort of a warning head to what these next twenty or thirty years are going to look like, because this is not a world in which these new Cold Wars are going to end sometime soon.

I don't believe that last part. The Trump's never leaving.

I think the two of them, honestly, it'll be like twenty eighty four and they'll be.

Like, it's another Biden Trump rematch. I can't two heads in a jar, he call wars.

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