New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion and America’s Struggle to Defend the West

Penguin Random House/April 2024

Reviewed by Colin Robertson

August 14, 2024

In New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, veteran New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger sets the stage for the geopolitical challenges that will face the next American administration. Those challenges include problems unique to the 21st century, but also some that seem pulled from the last great-power clash, such asdeterring at least two nations armed with nuclear weapons.

Having covered five presidents as White House national security correspondent — from Clinton to Biden — Sanger has earned three Pulitzer Prizes, most recently as part of the team uncovering Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.  Among the paper’s longest-serving journalists at four decades, Sanger is the sort of national security and foreign policy writer whom politicians, diplomats, intelligence and defence officials read not just to check their own quotes, but to find out what’s really happening.

In this book, he takes us through the post-Cold War: the nearly 35-year period between the fall of the Berlin Wall up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, at which point Sanger says the new cold wars with Russia and China begin in earnest. Sanger’s message: if there were any illusion of a holiday from history or any question as to the need for defence and deterrence, those have been dispelled and dispensed with.

New Cold Wars is Sanger’s fourth book, and it draws from his earlier work. The Inheritance (2009) laid out the global challenges George W. Bush left for Barack Obama. Confront and Conceal (2012) described how Obama took on America’s enemies using intelligence and technology. The Perfect Weapon (2018) described how cyberweapons are transforming geopolitics.

Despite months of troop movements and sabre rattling by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Sanger writes, the global shock occasioned by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, “took Washington by surprise, reviving the era of superpower conflict but with a profound difference. Instead of one cold war there are now several with different dimensions – the technological and military competition with critical trade partner China; the hot, cold and cyber conflicts with Russia; the confrontations with Iran, North Korea and others.”

Why did so many miss what was happening? Sanger offers a couple of answers.

First, there was the school of thought that embraced Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis that a combination of technology, the internet and economic globalization would liberalize regimes and at the same time create high-skilled jobs. “Economics”, says Sanger, “would ultimately trump nationalism and territorial ambition.” While Putin may want to reconstitute the empires of the great czars Catherine and Peter, “in the end he would value his oil and gas revenues”.

The same logic would apply to Xi Jinping who, like his predecessors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao would have to focus on keeping “China’s astounding growth from falling back to earth.” Besides, both Xi and Putin were putative allies in the ‘war on terror’ and putative partners in containing the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran.

Second, the US got distracted by Afghanistan and Iraq, “two misbegotten wars in the Middle East that cost thousands of American lives and blurred our focus on bigger strategic threats.” Then came the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s volatile presidency, the COVID pandemic, the contested 2020 election and its violent aftermath on January 6, 2021, all of which led allies and adversaries alike to surmise that America was a “democracy that had lost its bearings.”

Sanger says the United States was not without its Cassandras as the factors contributing to this new reality were mustering. Defence Secretary and former CIA Director Robert Gates and many in the intelligence community warned of Putin and the lessons of history. Abroad, there were similar warnings from eastern European leaders, including Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa, who wrote an open letter to the  Obama administration declaring “Russia is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th century agenda with 21st century tactics and methods”.

But, writes Sanger, for too many on both sides of the political aisle there was a “cognitive dissonance… between the future we expected and the reality we confronted.” Both Democrats and Republicans viewed the warnings and misgivings of the skeptics as “noise and nonsense.” After all, who wouldn’t want the pleasures of democracy and the market economy? As Condi Rice told Sanger in 2022, “Fighting for territory, thinking in ethnic terms, using resources to wage war. I thought we had moved beyond that…we thought the linearity of human progress should have left all that behind.”

New Cold Wars is an important read, and not just for our diplomats, military and intelligence advisors.

Or, as a Biden official also told Sanger, “It’s fair to say that just about every assumption across different administrations was wrong.” The interdependence of globalization was no guarantee that nations, “would restrain their instincts to take power or land or disrespect human rights.”

For Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and future American leaders this is now a “battle between autocracies and democracies” and, as Biden declares, “we’ve got to prove democracy works…cooperating where we can, contesting where we must.”

This means shoring up existing alliances and building new ones, reshoring to protect strategic supply chains, and returning to industrial policy with directed investments in technology. It is vital, writes Sanger, to keep the US edge in semiconductors, if the US is to stay ahead in AI, nuclear weapons, space, cyberspace and the digital economy. This will also help ensure domestic stability, especially fairness and a more equitable sharing in prosperity. But all of this requires intervention through government action, a premise disputed by many Americans and much of the Republican party, whose last president and current presidential nominee has made no secret of either his support for autocrats or his own dictatorial aspirations.

Of Xi and Putin, Sanger writes: “For all their differences – and there were many – they had one common purpose: to stand up to the United States, frustrate its ambitions, and speed along what they viewed as its inevitable decline.” Sanger warns that China and Russia are now managing to do what Nixon and Kissinger prevented them from doing in the 70s.

To deter their ambitions, says Sanger, the West must use diplomacy, intelligence and a deterrent defence capacity. We should be under no illusion that we will change the autocrats’ ambitions, but we can aspire to a peaceful co-existence that avoids getting into an action-reaction, tit-for-tat cycle that makes conflict a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This means reinstituting the guardrails of the Cold War, including hot lines, military-to-military communication and, when the time is right, resurrecting arms control discussions.

Sanger describes how technology is changing how we wage war. Dealing with the new threat environment, especially cyber-intrusions, will require closer cooperation with industry and business. The assumption that governments have access to perfect information was always flawed and today it is dangerous. As Ukraine — a war that is “part 1914, part 1941 and part 2022” per the author — has demonstrated, tech companies have the ability to defend national networks from thousands of miles away in ways the US government could not.

Sanger also devotes his attention to the Iranian challenge. He thinks Trump’s rejection of the Iran nuclear deal a “colossal error”, saying whatever time we were buying with this for new Iranian leadership to emerge, “we threw it away”.

Looking forward, Sanger says allies must recognize “it is no longer a safe assumption that the United States views its role as being the indispensable nation.” He points out that a “major swathe” of the Republican party “has abandoned that view”.

It means the allies, including Canada, will need to invest more in national defence and take their collective security obligations seriously. Two percent for defence will likely double, as is already the case for our eastern European allies.

For Canada it means a serious costing of what is involved in the defence of our North. It will also mean assessing what we need to contribute to ensure freedom of the seas. Our trade diversification will depend on it, especially if a future administration imposes blanket tariffs. To presume that there will be an exception for Canada is wishful thinking.

New Cold Wars is an important read, and not just for our diplomats, military and intelligence advisors. It has many useful observations. Perhaps the most important is to guard against naiveté. We have already experienced the perils of assuming democracy represents the end of history. We want our political leaders to give us hope and inspire us with the world as it could be. But their first obligation to us is to see the world as it is and to prepare accordingly. Reading New Cold Wars is a good place to begin.

Policy Contributing Writer Colin Robertson, a former career diplomat, is a fellow and host of the Global Exchange podcast with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa.