c-span.org. ♪ spen is your unfiltered view of government funded by these television companies and more, including midco. a♪ announcer: midco suppos c-span as a public service, guest: along with these other television providers giving you a front row to democracy. announcer: now on book tv's author interview program "after words," "new york times" national security correspondent david sanger talks about china's rise, russia's invasion of ukraine, and america's role in the 21st century. he is interviewed by former

george w. bush administration state department official paula dobransky. "after words is a weekly interview program with relevant guest posts interviewing top nonfiction authors about the latest work. paula: david, congratulations on ur book "newolwars: , china's rise, russia's invasion, and america's struggle to defend the west." i read this book and it is outstanding. truly a masterpiece. truly amazing. i felt, as being a former government official, someone who was inside the set room, inside or on the phone with all the different policymakers. just every detail here jumps out at you, but i love, and he puts it best, michael bass last put it this way, this is truly a brilliant book, a masterpiece of reporting, revelations and analysis. congratulations to you and also congratulations for the fact

that it is on the new york times bestseller list. well done, well done. david: thank you, paula. great to be back here with you. we have had a lot of years over the years as a government official and of course much of the work we have done together since, so it is great to be having this conversation with you. it was a fun book to write. paula: clearly, clearly, because the inside story on so many issues, and we will delve into that, let me start with the main broad question, the question of, how did this new cold wars actually come about here? and by the way, maybe i should also, before you answer that, actually just say, it really describes it well in the cover, your book focuses on the three decades after the end of the cold war. the united states finds itself in a volatile rivalry with the other two great nuclear powers -- xi jinping's china, and

vladimir putin's russia, in the world far more complex and dangerous than it was a half-century ago. so the question is, how did these cold war's start? david: paula, that wasn't the plan. the plan was pretty simple. the plan was that after the collapse of the soviet union, the fall of the berlin wall, people were proclaiming the end of history, you remember the famous francis fukuyama article, but he was not the only one making that case. that liberal democracy was going to reigned supreme -- reign supreme, and china and russia because they are different societies, was going to find it in their own national interest to rejoin or join for the first time, western institutions. whether it was the wto, whether it was joining up with the european union in the case of

russia, there was even discussion for a while that russia might become a member of nato, the alliance of that was designed and built to contain the old soviet union, the predecessor state for russia. so the idea was that we were all going to live in this sort of peaceful harmony and for the first 10 years, it looked like that might happened. because china was in a very slow road to democratization but certainly was investing in its people and china's growth turned into the world's greatest antipoverty program. russia was in halting democratization, filled with corruption, with all kinds of problems, but there was hope. so whathbook tries to do is acthe five presidents i have

covered back through president clinton, and their common belief across party lines and that the u.s., china, and russia would find areas of common interest where they could work together, whether it was climate or nonproliferation, containing iran's nuclear program, trying to get north korea to give up its nuclear program. all projects on which the powers worked together. and we over interpreted that activity as if it was a sign that they were all going to fit within this western-based rule system, which over time they had no interest in doing. and after 150 pages of taking you through how we deceived ourselves that that was where this was going, what happened when the reality crashed into the biden administration with

russia going to war in ukraine and with china emerging as a far more aggressive representation of its old self, one that wants to be the dominant political military, technological power by the middle of the century. paula: you know it is amazing about the book, and you mentioned your recount to all of this evolution of policy over five presidential administrations. you had five presidential administrations. if engagement with the white house, interviews in covering the white house. but also intelligence agencies and also technology companies as part of this. so, the reservoir of information you have amassed here truly is a masterpiece. and seriously when i was reading it, i really felt, my gosh, i am

back in the situation room, or i am back on the phone during a crisis. [laughs] let me go to the question, what did we do wrong here? let's go over some of this. because you have said that over 30 years, we were deluding ourselves about russia, about china. what were we deluding ourselves about, and what big signals did we miss? david: we were deluding ourselves with the general proposition that they would let their economic interests overrun their territorial interests, their efforts at consolidating power. they would decide in the end that an open society was going to be more productive than a closed one. this delusion was really at its most extreme with russia. so you asked what signals did we miss? the book tries to walk you through some of them.

so, starting with russia, president bush, in whose administration you served -- paula: george w. bush. david: george w. bush, wanted very much to bring russia and china into the counterterrorism program as soon as 9/11 ended. there is a scene early in the book, in chapter one, where we are in st. petersburg in 2002. it is early summer, so it is when the sun doesn't set until 10:30 or 11:00 and then barely sets and pops right back up. bush and his wife laura, putin and his then wife, were floating down the river on this big party boat, essentially a big yacht. dinner was being served by this hulking man standing at the back. i remembered his presence but i didn't know at the time who he was.

of course we later suspected that it was yevgeniy prigozhin. and my wonderful call writer and researcher mary brooks went back and found the photos and sure enough, there is prigozhin, back when he was still a shaft from it before he ran the internet research agency to try to fix the 2020 election. before he ran the wagner group, invalid share group that saved russia in the early days of the russia-ukraine war, and, of course, before he marched on moscow. during the course of the cruise down the river, they talked about russia joining the european union. bush and putin on that trip and other trips met russian and american students. they were joking back-and-forth. you know how many meetings there were between bush and putin? we went back and counted, more than two dozen.

you know how many there have been between joe biden and putin? one. and there will probably never be another. it was in june of 2021 before the invasion. paula: put the stick and that, we will be talking about russia and china, the number of meetings between putin and she. i believe the count is something like over 50. david: and there were 40 before covid. paula: but we will come to that. david: we will come to that. so that was the early set up. do i think putin at the time had decided to go up on his own direction? i am not sure he had yet, but by 2007, 5 years after that trip down the river, he joined at the munich security conference in february of 2007 and gave this hardline speech in which he said, "there are parts of mother russia, of the russia of peter the great that have been wrested

from us and must now come together." bob gates was there. he had served as a sort of cia chief. by this time psaki was defense secretary. he would stay on as obama's defense secretary for a year or two. he stood up and said at the end of this, you know, this speech sounded like it was right out of the old cold war. he said, "i lived through the whole cold war and frankly, i am not eager to go do it again." and a succession of presidents from bush on forward have said, "we are not going back to the cold war." and in fact, they are at. we areot. we are going back to something that is a whole lot comple thus the title "new cold wars." '07 was followed seven years later by the russian decision to

take over crimea. it took a year, paula, for the united states and its allies to put together sanctions for that and only after the russians shut down that airplane over crimea. and then seven years after that, he does the build up to take the rest of ukraine. so we had plenty of signals along the way. we chose not to interpret them in the worst possible way because the idea was you can steer putin back. so when putin did the cyberattacks on the pentagon, the white house, and the state department, the obama administration didn't want to admit it was russia. i would sit in these interviews. i was looking at the code. they were looking at the code. it was clearly from russian intelligence. they wouldn't say so. the trump administration, to its

credit, began to attribute these attacks to either russia or china or iran, whoever they could attribute it to. paula: in fact, let me inject, the trump administration, when it came in that december, the very first year it was in, actually issued in national security strategy document. in it it said, "we are in an era of great power competition." and it focused on russia and china and the points that you are making. interestingly enough, biden in their national security strategy document that they have issued, they put in that "we are in an era of confrontation," but they focused on cooperation. give your view on those, how do those documents fit in? david: so the national security strategy, which is mostly read by, you know, a community of people in washington and academics, but it is important because it is a signal to the

government about where it once priorities are. when mcmaster came in as the second national security advisor to trump -- he went through 4 -- he was determined to go and write a strategy that would reorient the u.s. government away from years of counterterrorism and towards great power competition. what he called "revisionist and revanchist regimes." my only complaint about that strategy is it dealt with russia and china as too similar than different. but that is a small point. he was absolutely right to steer this in a new direction. now, that didn't help much when the president went out to announce the strategy because it is donald trump, he hadn't sat to read it, because he is donald trump. he went out and gave a speech in the rose garden that bore no

resemblance to the strategy that he was putting out. it was the usual problem, which was that the staff work on the russia and china, some of it was excellent. and the execution, because the president can carry through, it included before. move forward to the biden administration, they adopted a lot of that strategy would they talk about areas of cooperation. the strategy came out before the invasion of ukraine. they dropped the cooperative kind of thought about russia -- not with china. but i think the overall message of those strategies, and certainly the message of "new cold wars," is that we are in an era now of what will probably be decades of super power competition. but if we are lucky, then "new cold wars"

will stay cold. there is no guarantee. the old cold war had a liberally explosive beginning, the united states and soviet union became nuclear powers, china in the early 1960's. and then it had the surprise ending, in which our greatest adversary, the soviet union, collapsed of its own accord. anybody who is looking for an equally happy, sort of easy and inventor this new set of confrontations, i think they are in for disappointment. because one of the differences now is that while the old cold war was primarily a military and largely a nuclear confrontation with one adversary, we now have china and russia coming together in a partnership that they described as one with no limits. the book describes it as one with serious limits. but it is a partnership

nonetheless. and we have never confronted a situation in which our two major nuclear adversaries are truly working together. in fact, the essence of what kissinger and nixon did in the early 1970's in the recognition of china was to keep these two apart. paula: on your comparison on the national security strategy during trump in terms of the one released by biden, one challenge i would make to you is, i think some might say to you that in terms of the first one, it was executed in terms of defense. the line reagan had, you know, peace through strength, our defenses will both start. and also the kind of signals that were sent in terms of policies like the establishment of actually a kind of fort, if

you will, or forward deployment in europe because of the concern of russian aggression. that actually, there were concrete, tangible actions that provided a deterrent. they will challenge that it may not have been well-executed. some would say it was executed in terms of actions, not words. david: there were some very helpful actions, including, as you suggest, building up nato, giving some defensive weapons to ukraine -- -- that the obama administration had refused to give. paula: the javelins. david: which today seems pretty modest compared to what we have had to go give the ukrainians now. the problem that they ran into, paula, was that for every step forward, having that rotating group of nato troops that would go into eastern europe -- paula: poland.

david: and have a good presence there, you would have the president stepped out and undercut the american commitment to defend europe. he would not fight or a reference to article five of the nato treaty which requires all countries to come to the aid of any under attack. this was part of his obsession about whether europe was spending enough money. he was right on the point, europe needed to and i would argue it needs to spend wildly more now than it did then. but the result was that wild, at the lower levels they were doing the right steps, he was undercutting the unity of the nato alliance by talking about how nato was irrelevant, nato was outdated. questioning whether the u.s. would try to pull out of nato. if you read john bolton's memoir, they had to talk him out

of the u.s. pulling out of nato on more than one occasion. paula: i think the part was because of the moneys and the fact that the united states was doing a large -- and as we know, every administration, republican and democrat up to that point, had tried to push europe, and he got them to the brink to move. let's move along. angela merkel. nordstream, you have to mention it nordstream too. you mentioned the munich speech, the putin speech. david: crimea. so, crimea is 2014 ok. we don't do sanctions and finally they come up with modest sanctions that i don't think made a lot of difference. 2015. the year after he annexes crimea, angela merkel negotiates the nord stream 2 pipeline, it routes around ukraine, thus depriving the ukrainians of the revenue they were getting from

the original nordstream pipeline. and she declares that russia is a reliable supplier. it is a remarkable statement out there now, which is essentially saying is, "yeah, he has done all of this bad stuff, but he is not going to cut us off because it is in his economic interest." and that modified -- moderated everything that the germans were willing to do to push back on russia. i was living in germany for a couple of months at the end of last year and the beginning of this year just as i was getting the book finished. i was on assignment there for the times, and one of the remarkable things is, i think a good number of germans think that we are going back at some point. we are going to resolve ukraine one way or another, a negotiated

settlement, whatever it is going to be, and that they will return to this partial embrace of russia. get the oil and gas flowing again and that basically make europe secure by embracing russia. i don't think that is happening again. and neither does the german sort of elite and government officials, but they can't bring themselves to publicly talk about the kind of money they are going to need to spend on defense. we have all been discussing 2% of gdp, which was the standard that nato set for itself and the one that president trump used to refer to as their dues. it's not quite dues, but anyway, setting that aside, my guess is that if they are going to match their own rhetoric of what they are going to build up in the way of a serious military

determined, they are probably talking about spending 4% or 5% of gdp. something you cannot utter in european politics today. paula: i want to go to your chapter, "the meltdown," and the focus on afghanistan. also in terms of chronology and leading up to what happened in ukraine. talk about this. what was, in your terms, "the meltdown," and what happened? david: so the president had made no secret as vice president that he thought the united states needed to reduce if not for a lot of ukraine. paula: president biden -- then-president biden? david: then-president biden. in the 2016 election, you could count on two fingers the number of things that joe biden and donald trump agreed upon. but afghanistan and getting out was one of them. right? so it was pretty clear the united states was going to get out.

we had at that .20 500 troops. the pentagon was arguing for keeping them there as a sort of early warning system, a trip prior, and to maintain the intelligence gathering about where the taliban war, how quickly they were moving back in, and to keep a counter isis program going, because isis was the common enemy of the united states, russia. think of the isis attack in russia a few months ago. and, of course, even of iran. right? the president made a decision in april to pull out all the troops based on the accord that the trump administration had reached with the taliban. then-president trump, you may recall at christmas time in his last months in office, declared one day in a tweet, "all the troops are coming out in the next few weeks."

got to talk back from that by his own staff. my critique in the book of the biden administration is that has been in april to do that, they did not read about a plan to get out those afghans who had helped the united states. who had helped news organizations, who had helped the military. they should have been airlifting them out of bagram or gathering them in a place that the taliban could not get them. and when it turned out the american intelligence turned out to be wrong, the afghan military collapsed. it was clear that they had operated way too late. it was a disaster. obviously, 13 americans died. they had already closed bagram airbase early so they had no way to sort of gather everybody in a big protective base and get them out. as searing as i am in the book,

the after-action reports that have been written by the inspector general, including the afghan inspector general, is even more searing. the one good thing that came out of it is i think this was their equivalent of what happened to kennedy during the bay of pigs. ms up so important and so big early in the administration that it brought together the whole book. and i think it helps explain why they did so much better a few months later in the early warnings, public warnings about the run-up to the ukraine war. paula: so do you think that we pushed putin to invade ukraine? segueing because, some connect what happened in afghanistan as a signal to putin, one of the signals. the signal of not giving the javelins and the aid earlier on in 2014, and then afghanistan.

and then also just when the tanks were lined up on the ukrainian border. david: in april of 2001, right after biden came in -- april of 20. paula: correct. by and putin met in geneva in 2021. and that meeting was not about ukraine. that meeting was about the cyberattacks, the ransomware attacks that were proving so devastating. remember, they had taken out a hyperlink that said gasoline and jet fuel all the way up and down the east coast. there was gas lines at a time of plenty. ukraine did not come up until later in the meeting. i had some administration officials told me that the fear was that putin came out of that meeting against president biden

is so preoccupied with problems at home -- january 6, the ransomware attacks, getting out of afghanistan. the economic recovery, which at the time was still pretty tenuous. it blossomed pretty nicely from biden, but he had no way of knowing that then. that he would have no stomach for getting the united states and nato together to oppose the ukraine invasion. now "got that wrong. president biden rallied nato to come together and found a way to do it without committing u.s. or nato troops and poured a lot more resources and intelligence help into ukraine than putin thought possible. but i do think afghanistan contributed to put in close thought that the u.s. would not get in the way. paula: you mentioned what happened with colonial pipeline. let me quote this. you stated, quote, "hours before the war began demonstrated how

radically different this new era was from wars past and from the cold war. you referred to the digital war could spread much me quickly and change the dynamic, turning a war against ukraine into a war against nato." explain that. david: sure. a lot of people think that this war has been completely the physical one that you are seeing on the screen, but it has also been a digital one. there is a place early in the book where i quote the former chairman of the joint chiefs mark milley -- and i will clean up the language here because we are on a nice c-span broadcast. [laughter] paula: some great quotes in the bookpaula: , i have to say. outstanding research really. [laughter] david: so general milley said to me one day over lunch, he said, david, we thought this was going to be a cyber war. because russia had gone off to ukraine with cyberattacks and

turned off the power many times. he said, then we thought it was a world war ii-style tank war. than we thought it was a blanking world war i trench war. and there really is it's been all three. so in the days before the attack started, the russians took out viasat which is that european satellite networks that the ukrainians dependent on and i took it out without ever attacking the satellites in space they did a brilliant cyber attack on the ground that it fried enough of those that the communications with the satellites went out. then in the 24 hours before the war, microsoft -- and the book takes you to the microsoft center just outside of dulles airport here in washington, detected that the russians had

activated malware that was being used to basically take off-line all the ukrainian government agencies. there was a remarkable rush by microsoft and by amazon systems, to take the ukrainian government and put it in the cloud. required a legal change that happened overnight in ukraine. because they realized that all of the ukrainian data, everything from pension payments to health care plans to have the military communicates, to the leadership's communications were sitting in servers around kyiv that were sitting ducks for missile attacks. moving it to the cloud ensured that when those centers got destroyed, and they were destroyed within weeks, ukraine could keep running.

paula: that is absolutely correct. also the fact that you document this in the book is so crucial, because it's not a factor that is focused on. and really focused on. it's not only about the tanks and, if you will, the ground warfare. that is why i read this quote of yours because "the digital war," what is different in the "new cold war's?" david: one of the things that saved them is elon musk. we all have issues with elon musk, ok? [laughter] [laughter] i am not a sign of what he did with twitter. but if he had brought starlink units into ukraine, would've had no way to work with the cloud or, ultimately, to target their own military hardware, right, they are not hitting these russian ships off crimea because they have got remarkable vision across the sea? they are doing it because they

have starlink communications. it has been an amazing laboratory for the u.s. military, which has the suddenly discovered that these satellites we put up our sitting ducks and they need something much more like starlink which puts up thousands of small satellites in these constellations that can repair themselves. paula: absolutely. you do have some wonderful quotes in this book, and this enables me to segue to the china-russia relationship. first, the bill burns quote from the "who lost russia? it's an old argument that it misses the point russia was never hours to lose,", starting with that, that backdrop, just on point. then in the chapter where you do focus on the relationship and what is it? you know, it's interesting. kurt campbell who is now deputy secretary of state, he said it's not a marriage of convenience, that term has been used.

he calls it a coalition of the aggrieved. [laughs] that term, i found quite interesting. there have been those who have used "alignment,", in fact, i wrote a piece with stephen hadley and we used the word "a new alignment." there are those who use the word "alliance." how do you see it? describe how this relationship has involved? david: first of all, i don't think there is unanimity inside the biden administration about how to describe, much less respond to the russia-china relationship. certainly they have come together in all kinds of ways. the chinese are moving huge amounts of technology. not weapons, but dual use

technology to russia. they are continuing to buy russian oil. they are not the only ones. the indians are valuing russian oil, which is helping finance the war -- buying russian oil, which is helping to finance the war. they are leading on strategic issues, doing military exercises together. and both of them have developed a relationship with iran. iran is supplying russia with the shahid drones which are being used so effectively against ukraine. there is concern that iran will provide missiles. we are already seeing the north koreans provide both artillery and some missiles to the russians for this. half of them don't work because they are north korea, but half of them do, ok. [laughter] so i think kurt campbell statement there about the coalition of the aggrieved is, a

really good description of what they are, because the one thing that unifies them is their grievance about the united states and its allies. because what is our single greatest strength as we enter this new era of cold wars? it is our alliance network which the russians, the chinese and the iranians don't have. that is the single most precious power projection capabilities that we have got. it used to be at the core of republican as well as democratic orthodoxy. now we have seen the republican party split on the question of the value of these alliances. paula: you use the term "partnership without limits." a core question really is, can we expect that both are going to deepen their partnership to undercut u.s. power and u.s. dominance? will that continue? are we going to see that

deepening? david: i suspect that we will. it's not going to be without tension. in the old cold war, whenever the russians showed up in china, the soviet union was the top dog there, and the chinese were still an agrarian society. that dynamic has been flipped. when vladimir putin shows up to see xi jinping, or when xi goes to moscow, it is clear that the dominant player right now is china. it's got the cash. it has the strategic reach. it has the depth. putin include neither the chinese more than the chinese need putin, but putin serves an enormously useful role of the chinese which is, the more he keeps the united states tied up in ukraine, the more that that middle east blows up, some of it with russian help, particularly in syria. the more that the united states

is incapable of exercising the pivot to asia that every president since bill clinton has talked about and that has never really been fully executed on. paula: so, really fascinating chapter. let's go to the specifics. you have actual, detailed conversations with a general referenced in there. this is on the issue of the chinese hypersonic missile test. breathe life into that chapter. because that just jumped off the pages. david: so the general was the former head of the units within the u.s. military at the time -- paula: the supreme space command. david: yes, it was not yet the u.s. space force. paula: u.s. strategic command.

david: that's right. it runs nuclear weapons, but it also has a lot of interest in the space assets. then he became the vice chairman. one day he is sitting in his office. he gets a phone call from the defense department's main operations center which runs 24-7 deep underneath the pentagon. and they said, sir, we have seen a really unusual chinese lunch. and it turned out it was a missile launch. he said, they have missile launches all the time. but they said, this one is going in the wrong direction. normally missiles are launched in one direction mostly towards the east. this one was going in the reverse. and it was because it was the first detailed demonstration of a chinese hypersonic capability we didn't know existed. they looped all the way around

the earth, went over the united states, and then basically the hypersonic vehicle managed to go station itself in a place where it could then move in an erratic pathway. not the easy parabola of intercontinental ballistic missile, and it landed back inside china. and the pentagon was stunned. this leaked out later on to the financial times. they wrote the first stories about it. at that moment, general milley said, "this should be a sputnik moment for the united states," in other words referring to the satellite launch that the soviets had done back in the 1950's. he was saying it should basically bring about a reaction of some kind. i am not sure it turned out to be that way. there is still a lot of

debate inside the pentagon about how much effort they need to put into hypersonics. but what did it makes clear? that the decades we had put into missile defenses are basically wasted because they all are based on a nice easy parabola coming from the soviet union of the united states or from north korea into the united states. our missile defenses have never been able to handle more than a few missiles. but the moment you go hypersonic and you can have a missile that can move on an unusual path and come down close to the ground and below radar areas and all that, it's game over for our existing missile defenses. paula: as you called it, "a sputnik moment." well called it. let me ask you the question of, going 30 years back, let's say decision-makers had embraced your analysis and they are on the exact same page that you are

on now, so at that moment, first of all, what would the policy have been done? and then, b, would it have been both politically and theoretically possible? david: the hard part here was that everyone of these presidents, democratic and republican, clinton and bush and obama and trump, they all had to live in the hope that you could avoid using diplomatic and trade means, having a collision with russia and china and certainly having one that was simultaneous. so you can fault them for attempting to build up as good of a relationship as possible. but you can fault them for two things. and this is a bipartisan complaint i have. i would be interested in your reaction to it because you were in the state department of time

this was going on. first, we paid a very serious price for focusing solely on counterterrorism and the middle east for 20 years. you remember these days in the state department -- if you are going to get promoted as a diplomat, you had to spend your time in iraq and afghanistan. i mean, it was the unspoken rule. in the military you certainly did because it was the only way you are going to get battle experience and thus the commendations, the awards and so forth that would put you on a rise. so we ended up getting a generation of diplomats and particularly of military leaders whose whole experience had been in managing the counterterrorism wars which require a completely different set of talents than dealing with the economic rise of china or a revanchist, in a

that was once again becoming aggressive and willing to risk a full-scale war in europe. so the book argues that one of thprices we paid for the counterterrorism wars was a lack of attention on the area that would become the central challenge to the united states for the next half-century. paula: and the signals that you lay out from it so my answer would be we ignored the signals. we should have been paying attention to the signals. we should have been able to do both, quite frankly, we overreached. david: if you are going to be a superpower, you have got to be able to go maintain a regional presence and still keep your focus on your big competitors. and we failed at doing both simultaneously. paula: do you think it was inevitable, this chinese-russian

alignment -- i will use that term, the chinese-russian alignment. was it inevitable that it happened, because historically they, as we know, have had tensions. david: they have, a lot of them. and inevitable -- no. likely enough that we had to begin to think about how we would plan against it? yes. because now it is probably too late to interrupt it in any serious way. i mentioned before that nixon and kissinger had focused on preventing this by doing the recognition of china. and for nearly half a century, that worked out pretty well. i discussed this sum with kissinger in the last months of his life, i worked on the new york times obituary for kissinger, that wasn't as long as this book but felt like it was -- he was concerned that the

coming together of two and she knew it was undoing much of his lifetime work. interesting question of whether or not the united states could have gotten in the way. i think president trump would have told you that his trade deal that he pursued so heavily with china would have been a way to word that permits i actually don't think it would have been i think the chinese thought they could have their trade deals with the united states, and their alignment with russia. interesting question now is, are there things we can do to exploit those natural fissures in their interest that you mentioned? what i worry is we are not debating that in this current presidential campaign. we are so wrapped up in the internal divisions of the united

states, in arguments over social issues, whether it is black lives matter or abortion or if you pick your hot button issue. but if you go back and listen to a fun experiment, to the nixon-kennedy debates in 1960 -- turn off the video so you aren't focused on who looks young and who looks sweaty and all that and just listen to the conversation. it's an incredibly high level sophisticated conversation about the containment of the soviet union and how you go about doing it. they had two very different approaches and for another episode we could argue about whose approach would've been better or worse. can you imagine having that conversation in the current political environment in the united states? you can't. in part, because of our own divisions. in part, because we took a

30-your holiday from strategic discussions because we didn't think it was necessary at a time when america was the sole power out there. now we need to do it and we have kind of lost the skills, we need to get back on the bicycle and learn how to ride it again. paula: but 30 years ago you would say it was politically and even bureaucratically visible. david: david: it would have been politically difficult. the political difficulty is we were showing some early progress. we negotiated through the money, the billions of dollars that went to dismantling part of the old soviet nuclear infrastructure, so that fuel was blended down and burned off in a nuclear power plants in the middle of the country. so people were reading their kids bedtime stories at night under lights that were basically being fueled by old soviet nuclear weapons. that's pretty great. but we then convinced ourselves that that was going to be the

uninterrupted path of our future. paula: so the question is, will xi invade taiwan? that is one of the questions you actually pose for yourself in the book. will he, or would he? david: marry brooks and i spent a lot of time in taiwan for the research on this book and most of it enough with the government, but at taiwan semiconductor. this incredible gem that dominates the island now, and certainly dominates its economy. taiwan semiconductor is the producer of 90-95% of all the most advanced semiconductors produced in the world. they are what power the microprocessor at the core of your iphone. so if china invades taiwan, don't break your iphone, ok, it will be a really long time before you can replace them. [laughter]

paula: i had the advantage of going to taiwan and actually seeing those buildings where these chips are made. david: yes, it's really great. the fabs are amazing. the problem is we have consolidated so much of the world's chipmaking operations in these highly vulnerable buildings. so the question that we went to taiwan to answer was, is there a silica shield? in other words, since china needs those chips as much as we do, would they not invade taiwan because they couldn't afford to lose taiwan semiconductor? and to cut to the chase, the conclusion i came to us, for now, there is a silicon shield. but china is working really hard to build up its capability to make those most sophisticated chips. the biden administration is executed quite well i think, a program to deprive the chinese of equipment needed to make the most sophisticated chips and to

deprive them of the chips themselves that come out of taiwan semiconductors. that is what xi jinping spends most of his time complaining about to president biden which tells you they have gotten under his skin with this. i think we have bought some time. what i worry about is we are not using it well enough. president biden is running around the country every time there is a new semiconductor plant go dedicate -- he was just about one in upstate new york. he has been to arizona where taiwan semiconductor and intel and others are building in the southwest. my concern is, we are not building our capacity up fast enough that we will not need to be reliant on taiwan or china. paula: another question that you pose, i will cite it, "move the mistakes that putin made in his invasion of ukraine proved to be his undoing, leading him to reach into h nlear arsenal?

or will the west for such a span signal kyiv's doom." david: general milley had this great phrase, which was that we are faced with and nuclear paradox that the worst the russians do in ukraine, the more likely their nuclear use. the better they do, the least likely their nuclear use. and that the high point of the concern that they were going to use their nuclear weapons came in october of 2022 when the u.s. picked up intercepts from russian generals who were responsible for moving nuclear weapons around the battlefield, tactical nuclear weapons. it was clear they were discussing moving some of these into ukraine for possible use a guest ukrainian military targets. it would have been the first use of nuclear weapons since the day

the united states dropped a bomb on nagasaki. and the senate panic stewards -- that sent a panic towards the biden administration. it was the evening went president biden shows up at the new york townhouse of james murdoch for a fundraiser. probably the only democratic fundraiser within the murdaugh family. and everybody was milling around looking at murdoch's's spectacular art collection, is thinking to themselves, this will be in a nice evening. i can say i had cocktails with the president. and he comes in and he says, "we are facing the closest we have ever been to a nuclear exchange since the cuban missile crisis in 1962," which was 60 years to the week before when biden was speaking. and he went on to describe -- not the intelligence, but the problem we faced. i think most americans were clueless that we were in the middle of a nuclear crisis.

they did get china and india to quietly signal to the russians and to putin that there was no room for nuclear use in this conflict. and after a number of weeks, the crisis abated. but many who i interviewed, think that a sort of 50-50 point of nuclear use at that moment. that is pretty chilling, because here was a nuclear armed country thinking about using a nuclear weapon against a nonnuclear country. paula: we have a few minutes to go and i just want to ask a few precise questions. so what is your core message in this book -- something it up in one minute. david: the court message of this book is that we are in a new age that has some similarities to the old cold war, but is much more volatile. much more dangerous. because of this combination of

russia and china, and some of the outsiders who are there, that we have not absorbed this as a body politic and begun to think or debate the strategies needed to go counter it. because we are so wrapped up in our own problems. there is a huge narcissism to american politics as there are, too many countries' politics. but we have to regain our strategic edge here and that means thinking about his future in which this set of confrontations is the one we will have to manage for decades to come. paula: david, a hearty congratulations on this fantastic, i mean, truly, as i used before the term "masterpiece," a masterpiece of reporting. revelations and analysis. it really is an amazing read. david sanger's "new cold wars:

china's rise, russia's invasion, and america's struggle to defend the west." it is a terrific, terrific read. thank you for coming to this interview, david. david: thank you, paula, great to be with you. paula: thank you. 'i think what is happening on our campuses is abhorrent. kate has no -- hate has no presence in our campus. i have spoken to jewish students who have feared going to class as a result of some of the harassment they are facing. it is unacceptable and we are committed as the department of education to adhering to title vi enforcement from it we have 137 open cases. we take this very seriously. we have increased the number of communications to campuses to make sure they have what they need in terms of the law and best practices on how to make

sure. they are protecting students a a lifelong educator, protecting students is our number one responsibility. we take that seriously. antisemitism that we have seen on campus is unacceptable. announcer: on capitol hill this week, educational ceric territory miguel cardona addressed ongoing protests at college campuses and acts of anti-semitism during testimony on the president's for budget request and other issues, including delays with the fafsa application process. you can see the full senate appropriations subcommittee hearing saturday at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. it's also available on c-span >> c-span is your unfiltered view of government funded by these television companies and more, including cox. >> this syndrome is extremely rare. the friends don't have to be. when you're connected, you're not alone. >>