David Sanger: New Cold Wars

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Hey, y'all. I got a little housekeeping for you and then a meditation on death and rebirth.
And then we'll get to a really interesting guest we have for today's podcast. Remember, on Wednesdays, I also am kind of in the panelist chair on the Next Level podcast.
If you want to hear my hot takes on Wednesday here, we try to get a little bit outside the news cycle. So make sure you're subscribed to the Next Level podcast.
also you know on days like yesterday we have guests like ross where we get to

you know get into a little bit more of a debate format. If there's hard news we didn't get to, I'm popping out some Tim takes on YouTube.
So make sure you're subscribed to our YouTube page. I went off on Tom Cotton yesterday, and I think you guys might enjoy that.
Next, I have a little bit of sad news I want to share. Mary Louise Swift, mother of Jim Swift, passed away over the weekend.
If you're a Bulwark Plus subscriber, you know Jim because anytime you've got a problem, you're emailing in, you're trying to figure out why the podcast is on chipmunk mode. Jim Swift is there.
If you have thoughts or feedback for us, Jim Swift's the one replying to you. He's the one that is fostering this community and putting in a lot of work doing that.
He's an OG bullworker. He also writes the overtime newsletter that rounds up the news for you all at the end of the day.
And so we appreciate Jim very much. It's really sad for him to lose his mother, but I'd say she was a great woman.
Jim was in the family business. Mary Louise was a journalist herself for the Lake County News Herald following a collegiate career writing for Ohio State's The Lantern.
She was also a musician. She played the church organ at Holy Angels and was known for her ability to play the piano by ear.
She was an active mother, always signing to gym up for stuff, always signing up for contests. And we've heard a lot of stories about her over the years.
If you happen to be in Cleveland, I'm a big funeral goer. I think there's a lot of value in being there and celebrating.
Her funeral mass will be celebrated on Friday at 11 a.m. at the Church of St.
Dominic in Shaker Heights. Mary Louise Swift will be missed.
There is a connection though between weddings and funerals, a cosmic connection, death and rebirth and all that. And I did not want to not miss an opportunity To maybe uplift a little bit we can obsess about the negative around here On saturday over the weekend.
I was able to marry my younger brother and his husband. I officiated their wedding in raleigh, north carolina Yeah, you got that right.
That's two out of three young gays for the Miller boys. The wedding was beautiful.

It was also both gay and interracial.

It happened in a state where those types of commitments were unlawful in the lifetime of those who attended.

There are plenty of black folks there who were not able to marry white people while

they were living in North Carolina.

Obviously, gay marriage was legal in North Carolina until the Supreme Court overturned

that not that long ago.

That's pretty astonishing, really, just when you think about that. It was a beautiful ceremony, not least because of that, because my brother is the first generation where a wedding, where an event like that could take place.
Very first generation where it could take place. So, we sometimes focus too much on the ways we've regressed and not on our astonishing progress.
I had a chance to celebrate my brother and his new husband's love and that progress last weekend. So I wanted to give you an opportunity to play a little part in celebrating them as well.
Lastly, my friends at Acid Tongue, they're the ones that do the theme music for the Next Level podcast. They got a new album out, Acid on the Dance Floor.
I'm going to play you out to them today. We appreciate the fact that they are providing some audio joy to Next Level listeners, and they put on a lot of work on it.
So if you're into kind of West Coast indie rock, garage rock, that kind of surf rock, and that kind of stuff, go ahead and check their album. I'd really appreciate it.
Up next, David Sanger. We're going to get real serious.
China, Russia, Iran. Stick around.
All right, we are back with David Sanger, White House and National Security Correspondent for the New York Times, author of the brand new book, which I got right here. New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West.
I've been jamming through it. Man, you've got some stories, David.
Yeah, well, it's been around a little while. You gather a few stories along the way, cover five presidents, and that was only after I was done with my stint as a foreign correspondent.

I want to get into some of the good stuff from the book.

But, you know, first, if you'll indulge, obviously, we've got a lot of news on the national security front.

I'm curious to hear your view.

You've also done a lot of writing recently, but also in the past on the threat from Iran.

I'm curious your view on the state of play there in the wake of their attack on Israel over the weekend, and also the view from the Biden White House. In Politico this week, Nahal Tusi argued that the Biden White House basically has no plan for Iran.
I'm wondering how you kind of assess the threat. What's the threat assessment now, and how the White House is thinking about it? We're in one of those upticks in the constant shadow war between Israel and Iran, a shadow war in which the United States has participated deeply at many points, and most deeply, of course, a decade ago in Operation Olympic Games, which I revealed in a previous book, But that was the one where the United States went after Iran's nuclear centrifuges using a very sophisticated cyber weapon.
And I think right now we're at a point where we've crossed one Rubicon in the past weekend that we'd never crossed before, which was a direct kinetic attack from Iran into Israel. Even though it was staged, even though it was choreographed, one young girl tragically was injured, but there were no deaths that we could attribute to this.
So that's why the president was trying to tell the prime minister, you know, just pocket the win here that you showed that your missile defense works really well. We can come back to how well it did or did not perform.
So now the Israelis are faced with a problem. They could take the advice and pocket the win.
But if they do, then it looks like Bibi Netanyahu is not striking back under the normal Israeli protocols to make sure that somebody pays for any direct attack on Israel or on Israelis. So the back and forth that's been going on has all been about, can you do a calibrated attack, something with cyber, something that's kinetic, but not directly on Iran, something that's limited just to military bases that is not going to ratchet this whole thing up.
And that's the mystery where the Israeli war cabinet, which has its own bizarre divisions, is going to come out on this issue. My guess is that they will do something somewhat modest,

but something noticeable. Cyber has a particularly salient possibilities here,

because it's not something you see on CNN the way you did last Saturday night,

when you saw the incoming missiles. And therefore, it might not force the Iranians to go respond.
Does Biden have a plan or no plan? Biden's plan so far has been to try to keep the Iranians somewhat at bay, but he has not engaged in direct negotiations with them, even on the nuclear issue, because they refuse to directly talk to the United States. So everything's been sort of passing messages through the Swiss or the Omanis or the European Union or whatever.
It's not a great way to talk to a country. There have been some out there who have argued that Iran essentially wanted the attack to fail, right? That it was intentionally weak and they knew that the missile defenses would stop it because they didn't want escalation.
I'm quite suspect of that argument for a variety of reasons, but you've got better sources than me. So what say you? It certainly does appear to have been orchestrated, which is to say they didn't want to have an accident happen here that would trigger an open exchange between Israel and Iran right away that the Iranians knew they would lose.
But they did want to demonstrate to their own people that they had done something. And by doing the direct attack, they got that.
I don't think they were counting on the fact that virtually none of their missiles or drones would get through. And so I think it ended up looking a little more embarrassing than they expected, which is exactly why Biden said, take the win.
Because, you know, there are two forms of deterrence, right? There is the form of deterrence in which, you know, you strike me and I strike you right back. There's the form of deterrence, deterrence by denial, in which you try to strike me and my defenses are so good that it's useless.
And so I sort of say to you, look, you could try. You can even try again, but you're not going to get through.
And that is by far the better form of deterrence here. The difficulty, as I alluded to before, is we had so much notice of this and such fidelity on when it would come that the U.S.
could have planes up, could have ships in the sea that were ready to take these down. That's not always going to be the case.
Yeah, and the numbers were pretty intense. 300, yeah.
Yeah, which is more than Russia shooting at Ukraine and most of their attacks, right? That's right. If you had come to me and said there would be 300 between drones and missiles that would happen, and what are the chances everything would be taken down or just about everything? I would have said very small.
Now, the thing about it is drones move really slowly. And so if you're willing to spend the money, that is to say, put a half million or a million dollar missile through a $20,000 drone, then yeah, you can take them down.
It's not terribly cost effective. One other thing on this engagement I've been dying to ask you about is on the Biden-Bibi relationship.
It's just tough for some of us to do Kremlinology on this. You know, when you have the leaks, it's like Biden got very mad at Bibi.
This is now moving more towards the offensive in Gaza. But as you said, they also, it seems like maybe had a disagreement on Iran.
So I'm more curious just about the relationship. Are those leaks performative? Are they real? How much tension is there in the relationship at this point? How would you assess it? These two have never liked each other.
And if you go back to early in Biden's time as vice president, there was a moment when he visited Israel. And he's in the car on the way to some meeting with Bibi.
And it was an effort to try to defuse an earlier phase of the Palestinian issues. As it happened, the Israelis announced a new group of settlements while Biden was on the ground.
And he was so angry that he nearly just drove back to the airport and flew home. And I think he recalls this in a memoir.
We wrote about it at the time. and Tony Blinken, now the Secretary of State, was in the car with him.
And this was one of the many things that poisoned the relationship between Bibi and Obama. And that is just carried through to this administration.
Trump, on the other hand, would give Bibi just about everything he wanted. and so there was very little tension there and i guess biden also really values the israel relationship though you know and so i guess is that what is happening behind the scenes there's this you know kind of push and pull between biden wanting to be supportive of israel and value in the relationship and having frustration with bb If you listened to the speech that was given by Chuck Schumer, where he said you could support Israel, but that's a different thing from supporting Bibi.
That is essentially Biden's position, but Biden didn't want to go out and say that much publicly, in part because it looks like you are undercutting an ally, you know, in office. Now, that never bothered Bibi when he came to the United States during the consideration in 2015 of the Iran nuclear accord.
And you may recall, he gets invited to give a speech in front of a joint session of Congress. Congress was dominated by the Republicans at the time.
He goes up,

he gives a speech, and he basically, that's when he took out his sort of cartoonish Iranian bomb

cartoon and said, you know, this is how close they are and so forth. He had no problem interfering

with US politics when it came to telling the United States how to go vote on this. But he

was outraged whenever a US senator would then say, we would be better off if there are new elections. to earn millions of bonus coins and win real money.
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Book now at thepodcastshowlondon.com. I want to get to the book.
We got New Cold Wars.

I have one big picture question for you here.

Has anyone gotten anything right in the Russia and China relationship in the last four administrations? Because I'm reading this book and it's like, it's hard to find some W's for America. Yeah, there haven't been a whole lot of W's.
So look, the core argument of New Cold Wars is that for the past 30 years, we were living in a delusion. It was a delusion we created for ourselves after the fall of the Berlin Wall and during that unipower moment for the United States when it looked like no one could touch us.
China was not a fraction of the military

or technologic power that it is today. Russia was flat on its back and experimenting with

democratization. And the view was this, oh, these guys will never really challenge us on Taiwan,

territory, Ukraine, whatever the issue is, because the economic incentive for China to keep its

Thank you. challenge us on Taiwan, territory, Ukraine, whatever the issue is, because the economic incentive for China to keep its products flowing to Walmart and for Russia to keep its oil and gas running, particularly since it didn't do a good job of diversifying its economy, would be so great that there is absolutely no way that they will threaten their economic future by going off in some tangent to exert greater control, regain old territory, and so forth.
And we persuaded ourselves of that across administrations. I was with Bill Clinton when he went to Beijing University toward the end of his presidency and gave this wonderful speech, which I believed at the time, that said the internet will set you free.
Once you see how the rest of the world is operating, it will undercut the authority of the Communist Party. Well, it turned out that was 100% wrong.
The Communist Party learned how to use digital technology for exquisite forms of repression, up to and including the facial recognition that they now use to pick out dissidents wherever they're walking around Beijing or Shanghai or some remote outpost. That's on the Chinese side.
On the Russian side, we didn't listen to what Putin clearly said. So in 2007, he went to the Munich Security Conference and said, there are parts of Russia that have been wrested away from the country after the collapse that rightly belong to Russia, or at least the Russia of Peter the Great.
And remember, when you walk into Putin's office, you don't see any portraits of old Soviet leaders who he views as idiots, who gave way too much power to the rest of the Soviet republics. You see a Peter the Great bust.
It's pretty clear who he thinks he is, right? So who participated in that myth? Clinton during the Yeltsin era. Yeltsin was usually so drunk that, you know, he would say anything you wanted a year, but he essentially had no power.
Putin came in. The glory days.
The glory days. There's a scene you probably saw in chapter one of the book called Floating Down the Never River.
It is a crazy story. It's a nutty scene in which Bush and Putin are on this party boat on the Neva, which flows across St.
Petersburg, you know, right out by the Hermitage and all that. It's one of those beautiful June nights where it's, you know,

late until 11 p.m. They're drinking and eating.
Well, Bush didn't drink. Putin's drinking and eating.
And talking about how Russia might enter the European Union, how one day it might even enter NATO, the alliance built to go contain. Who was cooking the food on that? Well, there's a hulking guy standing in the back to hand out the food.

Of course, it's yvgeny purgosian the man who comes back to run the internet research agency and try to fix the 2016 election in the u.s and then of course goes on to run the wagner group which was the private army that fought in Ukraine until it marched on Moscow itself. And you may recall, he was started as Putin's chef and ended up being blown out of an airplane.
Crazy. The other thing about that river story is they went to see the nutcracker.
That's right. This is the same story.
Yeah, they went to see the nutcracker, but it wasn't the normal Nutcracker. It was like a dark, macabre Nutcracker.
Very appropriate. Written by an old Soviet dissident, and Putin was trying to show, oh, we respect free speech.
She was invited back to produce this in Russia. I changed Russia.
And that wasn't the only thing. I mean, they would meet with students at a university in St.
Petersburg. Putin later went to Crawford, Texas.
They met high school students. And they would basically, you know, joke with each other, call each other by nicknames.
Bush and Putin met each other two dozen times over Bush's presidency. Do you know how many times Joe Biden has met Putin as president? Zero, right? One time.
It was at Geneva in that great meeting after the colonial pipeline hack to try to say this ransomware has got to stop. That will probably be the only time these two guys ever meet as presidents.
I want to get back to Russia. There's much to get on on this, but we spend a lot of time on Russia on this pod.
I want to spend a little more time on China first and looking back at the ways we maybe miscalculated that. And so I want to start with a bit of a trick question for you.
Do you think America should fear a strong China or a weak China? That's quite a trick question. It's the one I asked George Bush in an interview beginning in 2001.
It was 10 days before he was inaugurated as president. And Frank Bruni, now a Times columnist, and I went down to interview Bush at the ranch.
And we took a nice walk down to the, through his land and down to a waterfall and all that. And in the midst of all that, I asked him this question and he squints at me and says, is that a trick question? I think the answer is pretty easy.
I think we have to be more fearful of a weak China because that's the one that's more likely to lash out. A strong China is more likely to feel confident about its future.
And that's a little bit of what worries me right now. I know in Washington speak, China is 10 feet tall, but they don't feel 10 feet tall right now.
They feel like they're going through the first big economic crisis of their modern time as a superpower. And they're building up nuclear weapons.
We want to get them involved in nuclear talks. And their answer is, great.
We have 300 to 500 nuclear weapons. You have 1,550 deployed, as do the Russians.
When we get up to your level, we'll talk. Or if you prefer, you can eliminate two thirds of your nuclear weapons and we can talk now.
Not an unreasonable position, but one that we don't want to engage in. And, you know, same thing about AI.
I kind of want to fast forward a little bit. I do think the Clinton and Bush era view of China was a little bit defensible, just the integration argument.
You had to try. You could make an argument.
You had to try. Obama then starts to pivot to Asia when fits and starts, which obviously doesn't really work.
And China is getting stronger and stronger. Our countering them is weaker.
The TPP fails. That was one thing Obama was right on that.
Both parties, I think. The populist side of both parties undermined him.
And then we get to Trump. And I want to spend a little time on this because there's a lot of time spent on the Trump-Russia situation, which is pretty well understood that Trump is publicly very effusive to Russia.
And then a lot of Republicans argue that privately, like the policy, though, is pretty tough. The picture you paint of Trump on China is pretty much the inverse of that and of him being very unserious on policy and dealing with China and bellicose in rhetoric.
Do you agree with that kind of broad assessment of the Trump administration policy towards China? And maybe talk about that a little bit. When you covered the Trump presidency, what you discovered was there was an unserious nature of it at the top when the president got involved in the conversation.

And there was a very serious nature to it when his staff did. So his deputy national security advisor, the only one of the very few officials who stayed on from Inauguration Day at the White House through to January 6th, when he quit and discussed, was Matt Pottinger, former Wall Street Journal reporter, former Marine, who had great China expertise, language capability, and put together a quite sophisticated approach to China.
The difficulty was he and everybody else there was working for somebody who only could think about the next trade deal or the next moment. The Chinese are trying to think about this in 50 and 100 year segments, and Trump is thinking about what makes him look good today or tomorrow or the next day.
Thinking about like a real estate deal. Yes.
And in this case, he was thinking about it as a trade deal. So there's a moment when Trump is on the phone with Xi Jinping and he says, I'm not going to give you a hard time about Hong Kong, where Xi was imposing new national security laws, cracking down on dissidents, throwing everybody in jail.
He says, as long as we think that we're going to get a good trade deal out of you. He basically was trading away human rights explicitly for that.
He chewed out his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, for taking a too hard line on the Communist Party of China, which Pompeo regularly did, when Trump feared that it would mess up the trade deal. Then came COVID.
And of course, Trump needed somebody to blame because he was out there saying, oh, don't worry about it. There'll be no problem.
Then he said, you know, we'll never get to 60,000 cases in the US. We had more than a million deaths, right? COVID's a perfect example, right? He's out there calling it the China virus, doing bellicose, quasi-racist verbiage.
But then on the policy with Xi, he's like talking about how he trusts Xi. And, you know, it's like he was out there.
That's right. He's all over the map.
OK, so the fun example in the book is that during this time, his second national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, comes in and begins writing the administration's national security policy, something that every new president has to go do.
And he decides that the moment has come to shift the whole US government by declaring in this national security policy that the primary challenge facing the United States is the rise of a revisionist and revanchist China and Russia,

rather than counter-ism, which had dominated every national security policy from 9-11 forward, right? And that's a big shift because you got hired and promoted in the Pentagon and the State Department for spending time in the Middle East, not for thinking about long-term challenges from a country like China, the only nation that can challenge us economically, militarily, technologically, financially. They write this national security policy.
It's quite good. I remember going in and spending half a morning with McMaster, paging through it, talking about how they got to each of these things.
They then send Trump out to announce the national security policy, which, of course, he hadn't read. And he immediately starts talking about terrorism.
In fact, he lost the entire point of the whole thing, which was to steer the government toward these bigger challenges. So if you look at Biden's policies today, he has not lifted any of the Trump era tariffs on China.
The origins of his industrial policy to build up the semiconductor industry, you can find in things that Trump did. I think Biden has a much more sophisticated policy, but still.
The semiconductor thing was something I wanted to bring up, because I do think this gets missed a little bit. You were writing with this, that the threat, the concerns about the semiconductors become really clear by 2015, by the end of the Obama administration, right? And they are like looking into this.
That's right. And so, you know, the Trump guys do some things on the margins.
But I do think that that is kind of like in the discussion about Trump's China policy, this is kind of missed, right? That we had four years of quasi lost time on the semiconductor issue, you know, vis-a-vis Taiwan, just because the guy at the top was concerned more about the trade deal. I would argue that we actually had 12 years of lost time, that Obama should have leapt on this right away.
And this is one of the faults in the American system that I describe at some length in the book. And that is this.
You had a series of American companies that dominated the semiconductor world make a bunch of individual decisions. Oh, it will be cheaper to just design our chips and let Taiwan Semiconductor, the behemoth on Taiwan, produce them, or for lower tech chips, give them to Chinese manufacturers.
Every one of those decisions was defensible on some business rationale. But when you looked at them together, they completely eviscerated our ability to produce the most vital single component of our national defense systems, our cryptography systems, and of course, commercial systems.
So, you know, if there's a war over Taiwan and Taiwan's semiconductor gets destroyed, do not drop your iPhone. Because the chip that's in the middle of this thing is actually made at Taiwan Semiconductor.
And that's for just about every iPhone. The NVIDIA chips that end up powering AI applications are all made at Taiwan Semiconductor.

So as my wonderful book assistant, Mary Brooks, and I traveled around the world doing the reporting on this book, we spent a lot of time in Taiwan, and particularly with the leadership of Taiwan Semiconductor, trying to understand, is there a silicon shield? which is to say, would China hold back on destroying Taiwan because it needs Taiwan's

democracy? understand, is there a silicon shield? Which is to say, would China hold back on destroying Taiwan because it needs Taiwan Semiconductor as much as we do? They can't make the kind of chips that they can make a Taiwan Semiconductor. And the conclusion I came to at the end of this is, yeah, there's a shield, but it's not going to last that long, only until the Chinese learn how to do this themselves.
I'm also wondering what you think, particularly about Trump and the people around him. But I'm also curious on Biden.
So I'd like to hear both sides. I hear what they all say about Taiwan, like the actual rhetoric about coming to Taiwan's defense.
But man, I don't see a ton of evidence that these guys actually want to go to war over Taiwan. And Trump in particular, I just don't see how you can listen to his rhetoric on Ukraine, on any foreign policy issue, and think that he would really actually go to war over Taiwan.
And the Democrats, I think, I sometimes doubt their resolve on that too. You have closer sources, than I do in the national security world.
How do you assess that?

So, hard to know how they would react to a specific set of circumstances because of how it could unfold. But let me give you a couple of policies.
So first, start with Ukraine.

If Congress just packs it up and says, we've had enough of this Ukraine thing after two years, and guess we ought to just give the Russians territory they want, which seems to be the Trump strategy if he says he's going to end the war in 24 hours. The only way I know to end it in 24 hours is to say to Putin, okay, why don't you take this and go away? Okay? Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so you're Xi Jinping,

and you look at that, and you say, okay, so Ukraine was easy for the United States, because it's got NATO allies right up to the border. Right? Poland, right there.
Taiwan's hard. And I can't imagine that a President Trump would risk American lives to defend Taiwan when the push came to shove, particularly if the Chinese came around on the side and said, hey, look, if you just sort of ignore this, there's a really great trade deal in this for you.
We'll make this the bargain of the century. Okay? Yeah.
I do see Secretary of Defense Tom Cotton really strongly arguing for it and then backing down

as soon as Donald Trump tells him we're not going to go to war.

I can imagine that pretty easily.

I'm also having a hard time imagining that President Biden, who has said three or four

times that he would put Americans in harm's way to defend Taiwan, I think that would be a really, really hard decision for him to make. And that just has to do with the reach, right? That it's a lot of miles and a lot of water just to get your forces there.
It's not like you've got them on the border. And that's why he's trying to build up in Japan and the Philippines to deter China.
And it's a brilliant strategy by increasing our presence right off their shore. And that's the key to the AUKUS decision, which is basically giving Australia the capability to begin to build nuclear powered, not nuclear armed, but nuclearpowered submarines.
So they too could be in that strait and disrupt an invasion. The Chinese have a counter-strategy, and it's called Volt Typhoon.
And Volt Typhoon is the name the U.S. has given the Chinese effort to put code inside American power grids, American water supply systems, particularly near bases in Guam, California, where a response to Taiwan or Taiwan incident would be based from.
And the idea is so cut off, even briefly, our water, our electricity in those regions that we would be focus on an internal crisis and it would slow our response.

How successful do we think that? You'll never know till the balloon goes up. That's comforting, David.
Thank you. Starting that last summer, the US began declassifying some of this.
We were writing about it on the front page of the New York Times. But I don't think Americans have absorbed the breadth and the sophistication of the Chinese effort here.
And while the US has been doing a good job trying to root that code out of the utility company's systems, you never know what you've missed. L-E-T-E-N-D-Z.
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The biggest international festival for the business of podcasting is back. The Podcast Show 2025.
Now in our fourth year. We've hosted over 20,000 visitors from across we close with Russia.
I guess these are related. One of the stories from your book, I mentioned that on last week's podcast with Adam Kinzinger while I was reading it, and I want you to talk about it because I had just forgotten about it.
It's like the tsunami of shit that Steve Bannon talked about with Trump. Sometimes just stuff stuff gets lost The solar wind story, which is also related to cyber, a solar winds attack, cyber attack on our government that was happening in the aftermath of the 2020 election and in the middle of the stop the steal efforts with Trump, which is part of the reason why this got lost.
And Trump kind of bleats out that this could be China. We know it's Russia.
We've identified that it's Russia, and he bleats out that it could be China, just, you know, because of what we were discussing earlier about his lack of interest in pinning things on Russia. Share that story and kind of the background of that.
So SolarWinds was an incredibly sophisticated cyber attack on the United States. And rather than go and try to attack individual government agencies, the Department of Energy or the Department of Commerce or the Treasury Department or individual American companies, the Russians, particularly the SVR, which is their most sophisticated of the KGB successors, said, we have a better idea.
Let's get inside the software of a company that sells its product to all of these firms so that the code will go in through the software management product itself. And SolarWinds products are used by companies, governments alike, to manage the load for big surges in the internet and so forth.
Lots of news organizations use it for big news days when millions of people come to the site to make sure the site doesn't crash, that you distribute the load. They got into this software in an extremely sophisticated way.
And then when companies went to go update their software, boom, they had the Russian malware in them. How many times do you update your iPhone overnight? Before you turn on the iPhone, do you insist that you go through every line of code that Apple just put into your phone? Of course not.
And that's exactly what happened here. We just trust that the stuff going into our phones or into our computer systems is not only authenticated, but fed it.
This was not. And suddenly, President Trump, who's, of course, trying at that moment to go stay in office desperately, ignores it, tries to say this must be the Chinese.

Biden comes out as president-elect and says, I'm going to go deal with this as president

in a big way.

I'm not sure he has fully dealt with it.

I mean, he made a lot of threats about the Russians that I think they backed away from.

But, you know, at least he was calling it out.

And I have to say, this administration has gotten serious about cyber in a way that we have not seen either Obama or President Trump do. And a lot of that is due to the work of the National Security Council.
You read a lot in this book about Ann Neuberger, who was the first deputy national security advisor for cyber. Let's just kind of roll back the clock a little bit on Russia, because the other, I think the striking thing for me about the book was just of all of the mistakes, we discussed the top, a lot of mistakes in judgment of looking at the threat from Russia and China.
Maybe the top one and the most obvious was the continued use of Russian oil in the EU in particular, but that we really weren't arguing against for multiple administrations. How did that happen? How were they caught so off guard to have Russia have this leverage over all these NATO countries? You know, it didn't just happen.
The Europeans invited it.

Yeah, fair. The concept after the Cold War was, if we just embrace the Russians and increase their dependency on us, they would never go to war again, because it would just cost them too much money.
So a generation of Europeans, but particularly of Germans, grew up with this concept. And, you know, I just spent three months in Germany.
I was living there from the end of last year through to mid-March, working out of the Times Bureau there. And it struck me that among the german population there was still a very predominant view that you know this ukraine thing it'll pass and then we'll start buying oil and gas but particularly gas from the russians again and embrace them and life will go back oh my god okay and the, particularly the defense minister and the national security apparatus, are saying to themselves, they don't understand.
We're in this for 30 or 40 years of new Cold War, right? And they may not use that phrase in public because Chancellor Schultz does not like to use it in public. But that's what they mean when they're building up their military.
One of the reasons they don't want to say that is that if you take that view that you are in it for 30 or 40 years, then spending 2% of your GDP on defense, which is, you know, the big goal they've all been trying to meet now for a number of years, and the Germans have barely netted at this point, isn't anywhere near enough. You know, the Germans spend 72 billion euros a year on defense, which is about a tenth of what we spend.
And they're one of the good ones. And they're one of the good ones, right.
And if they're truly going to enact the changes that they say are necessary, then they're going to have to be spending three or four percent or more on defense. No politician who wants to hold on to their job is going to say that in public in Germany these days.
So they're kind of caught. They don't want to contradict the dream that we're going to get back to embracing the Russians, but they all know it's not going to happen.
Just fast forward now to Trump briefly. The talking points from the national security conservatives, right, is that, you know, Trump's rhetoric might have been so soft on Putin, but just look at the actions.
It's hard to see how that would continue in a second Trump term. And I think all signs point to a second Trump term would align his rhetoric with his actions more.
What sense do you get when you talk to folks in the kind of conservative national security sphere on that? It all depends on what kind of team he assembles around him. In the first term, he assembled a group of serious old line national security officials, all of whom he later on fired, right, for being insufficiently loyal to him.
But Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, who he loved to call one of my generals and mad dog, which drove Mattis crazy, right?

He seriously understood from his time what kind of threat Russia posed. He had a pretty good sense and was learning quickly about China.
If instead you replace him with people who are basically going to roll over and do whatever it is that he says he wants in the moment, then yeah, the rhetoric is going to pretty quickly dominate the actual policy. The policy got more worrisome as time went on.
The few serious players, McMaster, Mattis. I wasn't a huge fan of Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, who I thought made a number of, you know, major errors along the way and did it with a lot of bombast.
But he came out of a more traditional Republican approach. What was the top error, you would say, for Mike Pompeo? What was the main error? He started off by going around to US allies and saying, if you don't get rid of Huawei in your telecommunication systems, the big Chinese firm, we will cut you off from all American intelligence.
And they're looking at him like, you're coming in, you're threatening an ally to get rid of a system to which the U.S. didn't even have a competitive offering.
Okay, two more things real quick, then I'll let you go. You do a madcap story that the book, does the book start with the Bill Burns story? It opens and then we come back to Bill Burns being sent off to talk to Putin in the weeks before the invasion into Russia.
Just share the TLDR, the short version of that, because it's really so interesting about how Biden was responding, how the US was responding to the Ukraine invasion. So as it became clear that the invasion was going to happen, and this starts from a wave of intelligence, which in the book, I quote, somebody is calling the mother load in October of 2021.
It became evident to the administration that they needed to go to Putin and say, we see what you're doing. And if you do it, here's how the world's going to change.
And the man they chose for it was Bill Burns, the CIA director, who, as you've seen, has taken on a number of diplomatic as opposed to CIA-related tasks for the president. He's the one who knew Putin best.
He was ambassador to Russia. When I first met him, he was ambassador to Russia in the early Putin years.
He'd spent time with Putin, understood what made him tick. He was just the right person to send.
But Putin essentially blew him off. He arrives in Moscow and tries to go see Putin and discovers Putin's down in Sochi at his DACA.
So they put him on a phone with him. Well, they could have done that from CIA headquarters in Virginia, right? But they have this teleconference and essentially the warning is delivered, but not fully received along the way.

Then they go turn around and make a lot of the intelligence public to me and to other reporters

in an effort to try to embarrass Putin by making it clear what he's planning.

What's fascinating here is that while the US intelligence community had this one exactly

right, it was the opposite of Iraq and so forth, the Europeans did not believe them, right? And the book opens again, back at the Munich Security Conference in February of 2022, when I'm walking around talking to these European leaders who are saying, David, he's not really going to invade, he's just bluffing. And finally, on the Saturday morning, at the end of the conference, I sit down with Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, and we're comparing notes of people who told us this wasn't going to happen.
Of course, the invasion happened four days later. So, it's a wild story.
Okay, my big picture final question to, you know, maybe put a bow on the top. I want to give maybe a contrarian view to the thesis of the book.
And just ask, you know, in some ways is maybe the threat not as dire as it seems to the US, like to the US core interests? Like it was there's something to be said for the fact that the interconnectedness has offered some level of a shield and that the great power threat is real. The threat to Taiwan is very real.
I'd be very nervous if I was in a former Soviet state in Eastern Europe. But like the core threat to the US is maybe not quite as great as some of the more dire warnings make it seem.
How would you respond to that pushback? If you are thinking of the core threat in old Cold War terms, and remember this book is called New Cold Wars with an S. Like that we might get nuked.
That was the old Cold War threat. That was the old Cold War threat.
Then you might make that argument. But in the new Cold Wars, it's quite different.

In the old Cold War, it was a military to military threat with one big adversary, the Soviet Union. China was still an agrarian society.
Nixon and Kissinger stepped in in the 70s to try to make sure that the Soviets and the Chinese did not come together. That was the core of the opening to China, which I think was a brilliant move.

And the essence of integration with China was, as you said, to prevent this from happening. And I think we agree you had to try.
But today, we're in a different world. We are in one where Russia and China are at moments deep partners.
Remember the partnership without limits that they declared before the Beijing Olympics? Some days it's without limits. Some days it's with serious limits.
But that partnership is something we have to go watch because the combined Russia and China with Iran to create a sort of axis of resistance, as the Iranians call it, to the United States and to the West, runs the risk of creating new borders of two cutoff worlds from each other. After a 30-year wonderful experiment with globalization that may have been a bit of a holiday from history, right? We are back to a situation where you've got a restrictive internet, a restrictive economy, authoritarian governments gathering together, and the United States and its core democracies gathering together.
And then a group of very critical countries led by India saying, don't make us choose between the camps. but the fact of the matter is, in a world where you've got to think about whether you're going to get your semiconductors from China and a threatened Taiwan, or whether you're going to make them yourself, you've got to choose.
In a world in which you've got a Mideast that's being courted by the Chinese to build up their systems, or by the US, look at the Microsoft deal on artificial intelligence announced yesterday, you've got to choose. You really can't play both sides.
And the book, if anything, is a warning that we have to begin to develop a serious strategy that will last us 10 or 20 or 30 years to deal with that. And I know it's tempting to say, we're tired of all these interactions with the world.
You hear this from so many Americans and not just Republicans. I know it's a MAGA theme, but you hear it on the left as well.
And the answer to that is every time in American history, we have tried that. staying out of of World War I, staying out of World War II, the list goes on.
We may not be all that interested in the rest of the world, but it's interested in us. And so you need to design a strategy in which you're molding the world to your interests, because if you don't, you're creating a set of vacuums and someone's going to fill them.
Hard to argue with that. The book, again, New Cold Wars.
It's deeply reported, deeply researched, well-sourced. David Sanger, it's an honor.
Thank you for coming on the Bullock Podcast. Great to be with you.
All right. We'll be back tomorrow with another edition.
Do it all over again. We'll see y'all then.
Peace. Never questioned, certainly I feel old fashioned

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And end up in Hollywood

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Like our parents thought we should Like a daydream, half listening Sleeping with a former lover Tried a new voice, made a new choice, arguing with one another. We'll go right into the sunset, and end up in all the news.
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The Boar Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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