Podcast: America at risk: assessing Russia, China, and domestic threats

TRANSCRIPT: America at risk: assessing Russia, China, and domestic threats

David Sanger:

Our greatest national security threat right now is really an insider threat and it's backed up by a new acceptance that if you don't like the outcome of an election, violence is then in some way warranted.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and in this episode we're taking a deep dive into the key national security threats facing the United States. It was in mid-October that the Biden administration released its long awaited national security strategy, a 45 page document that evaluates a wide range of threats and challenges, both foreign and domestic. To break those threats down for you and to talk about what we may be missing, I'm joined by New York Times National Security correspondent David Sanger. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

David Sanger, welcome to GZERO World.

David Sanger:

Thanks so much, Ian. Great to be back with you.

Ian Bremmer:

So I want to start a pretty big picture. A mutual friend of ours, former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, just passed away a week ago, and I've been thinking about his quote a lot. I think it was exactly, I always tell people the day when nuclear weapons are in the newspaper, we are in real trouble. Well, I think it's pretty safe to say that nuclear weapons are in the newspapers right now, given all of the saber-rattling we've seen from the Kremlin and particularly from President Putin, how much are you worried about nuclear war right now?

David Sanger:

Well, in first a moment about our friend Ash. I had lunch with him on the Monday that he passed away, and we were up at Harvard and he was full of life and humor and wonderful questions. We were with a number of Harvard faculty and a member of the Biden administration who was up visiting in Cambridge. And we talked about this a little bit. We talked about it in two contexts, one, Putin's threats, and second, China's buildup. And to think about this right, I think you have to separate out two or three different issues.

The first is that at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, I think the fear of use of a nuclear weapon was pretty low, I would say well under 1%. Because at the time we thought that the Ukrainians would not be much of a match for the Russian military. We've now discovered we had that completely wrong and that the Ukrainians were quite a match. And at this point, Putin really only has the choice of using some of his extraordinary weapons if he is going to try to fulfill a larger victory, if you could call that a victory.

Ian Bremmer:

And again, it's not just Ukraine, of course, it turns out that Ukraine plus NATO support is very much a ma.

David Sanger:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

For the Russian military.

David Sanger:

Without the NATO support, I don't think the Ukrainians would've held on. With the NATO support, they're doing quite well. I don't think they've got the capacity to win right now, but I don't think the Russians do either in the current standoff, which creates, Ian, what in the Pentagon they call the Ukraine paradox. And the Ukraine paradox is that the more successful the Ukrainians are, the more likely it is that Putin will consider using cyber, chemical, biological, or nuclear. Now those are all very different and I don't think that chemical or biological is terribly useful in this conflict at all. And chemical doesn't spread out very far. He can do more damage with his conventional missiles. Biological is very hard to control, and he's right near the Russian border. Cyber he has used extensively in Ukraine-.

Ian Bremmer:

Against Ukraine.

David Sanger:

But has not used outside against the NATO forces. We haven't seen it in the banking system yet. We've seen the usual background level of Russian activity.

Ian Bremmer:

Now we've seen these airport hits across Europe that some have attributed to Russian sources over the last couple of months. You don't include that.

David Sanger:

Well, we've also seen here a fair bit of activity against the usual ransomware suspects, cities, school districts, so forth. Hard to tell how much of this is just the traditional criminal activity and how much of it is something related to the war. But I think it is fair to say that Putin has been pretty cautious not to go over the boundaries of Ukraine. He could have struck physically the incoming weapons flow from NATO out of Poland and Romania. He has not. He could have gone after Bank of America and Citigroup and others in retaliation for the devastating economic sanctions and export controls on Russia. He has not. And similarly in cyber, we have not seen a big uptick.

Now, one explanation for that could be that cyber attacks take a long time to make work. And solar winds the most successful and ingenious supply chain attack that the Russians ever did on the United States, which happened just at the end of the Trump administration, took 14 or 15 months to put together. So that takes us back to your question and to Ash's quote, which is when nuclear weapons are suddenly in the headlines, again, you have to be worried. And I do think we have to be worried because the people inside the US government who I speak to, while they still think the chances of use are remote, they think they are far greater than they were when the war began in late February.

Ian Bremmer:

The numbers that I hear are more like, they're horrifying numbers, they're more like 20% than they are like one which you mentioned before. Is that what you're hearing?

David Sanger:

I'm hearing in the 10% region, but I've also heard people with numbers higher than 20%. I'm not sure it's terribly useful to put percentages on this because it factors in two or three different things. First is how desperate Putin is. Second, what he thinks the price is that he would pay? But thirdly, what kind of nuclear event are we talking about? A week or two ago, you were hearing a lot about dirty bombs. Those are not nuclear weapons. Those are a stick of dynamite or essentially T&T wrapped in radiological waste. They could-

Ian Bremmer:

But we were hearing about that from the Kremlin, not from the White House, to be clear.

David Sanger:

That's right. We were hearing about the Kremlin saying that the Ukrainians were preparing a dirty bomb attack, and we heard the Ukrainians say that the Russians were building dirty bombs in the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex. We have not heard any evidence in the US. That's not a nuclear weapon. What the Pentagon has been looking at, what the intelligence agencies have been looking at are the use of small tactical weapons, which could still do a huge amount of damage. Tactical weapons range from sub kiloton to much larger than what the US used at Hiroshima. Just to scale this conversation, the Hiroshima bomb was a 15 kiloton bomb. And the issue is if the Russians want to use one, would they use it first in a demonstration over the Black Sea? If they did that, Ian, it's hard for me to understand exactly how NATO or the United States or the Ukrainians would respond because there are nuclear tests that the North Koreans do. We don't respond to those in a similar way.

They could hit a Ukrainian base, a military target, they could hit a civilian location, they could use a small weapon, they could use a larger one. The larger they use, the bigger the chance that the radiation cloud flows back given the prevailing wins on Russia itself. So there are a lot of considerations, and I think the big debate inside the administration right now is do you respond militarily? Do you respond just with economic sanctions? Do you try to use this to separate Russia from China and India, everyone else who's buying their oil right now?

Ian Bremmer:

So what I am hearing both from you as well as from the policy leaders, is that nuclear war, which has been for most of my life, unthinkable, is now something that policy leaders are actively thinking about?

David Sanger:

That's right. In the 60s, Herman Kahn, who was one of the first great nuclear theoretical types, wrote a book-

Ian Bremmer:

Was his book on thermonuclear war? Was that the name of the book?

David Sanger:

I think he wrote a book called Thinking About the Unthinkable, and we're suddenly thinking the unthinkable again. And part of the risk here is, and this has always been the risk about tactical nuclear weapons, unlike the big strategic weapons that could fly intercontinentally and which are under control of treaties, in this case, the New START Treaty between the US and Russia, the tactical weapons of which the Russians have about 2000 have no restrictions. We don't know very much about them. We don't inspect them. We don't know whether they are small, medium or large. We don't really know their effects. And the chances that we would see them being prepared are only 50/50. We might hear the chatter of military operations getting ready to move them, but it's not clear at all that we would actually see them being moved. So the warning would be pretty low.

Ian Bremmer:

The difference, as I see it, the principle difference between what we seem to be moving towards today and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 is that after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when both sides recognized the level of danger and decided to step away from the precipice, is that you were able to achieve the status quo anti relatively quickly. In other words, the impact on the Americans and the Soviets going forward was very similar to what they had before, where this time around, it's almost inconceivable to imagine that you could create something stable given the realities of the war that the West and Russia are presently in, given the corner that President Putin has managed to dig himself into with facilitated very much, of course, by NATO.

David Sanger:

I think that's right, Ian. First of all, it is worth thinking about the Cuban Missile Crisis because it was the closest that the world came during the Cold War to a massive calamity that would've killed millions if not hundreds of millions of people. But the dynamics of it, as you rightly point out, were completely different. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, mutually assured destruction, MAD, did apply. If we went up the escalation ladder, we knew that if New York was struck, they'd lose Moscow. They knew it too. And that was a constraining factor. Here, we don't quite have that. Ukraine is not a NATO member. An attack on Ukraine would not necessarily result in a response, and probably not a nuclear response. In fact, the debate I'm hearing in the administration is, do you do a conventional military response or not? The argument against it is that it would quickly escalate or could quickly escalate into a nuclear confrontation.

And, of course, one of the things you've heard from President Biden is that among his strategic objectives here are a strong independent democratic Ukraine and no confrontation directly between the United States and Russia, and certainly no World War III. So the dynamic here is different, and I think the instability that you refer to comes from the fear that if the Russians use a tactical nuclear weapon in a conventional war and essentially get away with it, in other words that they pay a price but not too big a price, then all of a sudden the taboo about using nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict is gone. We have not seen nuclear weapons used in anger since the United States dropped weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. And if that goes away and suddenly smaller nuclear weapons become a weapon of choice in a conventional conflict, we're in a whole different world.

Ian Bremmer:

One thing that I've heard some of the Washington policy types discussing as well is that Putin's perspective is not that just you break a taboo using a nuclear weapon, but also that when the Americans used nuclear weapons, it was to end the war definitively because of the escalatory ladder. And that Putin may well be thinking about his nuclear weapons in a similar way that the West is happy to provide enormous amounts of support to Ukraine because the Russians have been reluctant to truly use their source of power. And this time around might very well be different. Again, very hard to get into the head space of someone that we presently consider to be a war criminal, but given the stakes at play, I'm intrigued in asking you your view there.

David Sanger:

So as you say, understanding what it is that Putin is thinking at any given moment requires far greater insight than I have, and I think that most Americans have because the one great mystery is what's his turning point, his breaking point? But here's what we do know. We do know that at the beginning of the war, the United States was very hesitant to send certain kinds of weapons for fear that they would cross a red line for the Russians. You didn't see the HIMARS precision artillery sent at the beginning of the war. And in fact, I don't think Putin, I'm sorry, I don't believe that President Biden would've done that for fear of the reaction that Putin would have.

Over time what we've seen is a gradual escalation by NATO and by the United States as they have discovered that they can send greater precision weapons without getting a big reaction out of the Russians. And the question is, where is that new red line? Where's the breakpoint where Putin will say, this goes too far, I'm going to stop this flow of weapons by detonating a nuclear weapon, either a demonstration shot or a shot against Ukrainian military? And that's the big guessing game right now, and that is basically that nuclear paradox I referred to.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, let's hope we don't find out, David, but let me, I want to move on because you talk about global security issues and there are many of them. The other big one driving a lot of concerns both of mine, of yours and the headlines, of course, China. And I'm not going to ask you directly a Taiwan question, I want to ask you a semiconductor question because over the last few weeks we've seen the United States changing the status quo of the relationship in a pretty significant way, through comprehensive and strategic export controls that are meant to contain China's ability to develop a core component of its advanced technology. How surprised were you, are you that the Americans are engaging in that policy and what are the implications for the security balance between two countries?

David Sanger:

So I was not surprised that they did it, I was actually surprised it's taken the United States so long to do this. One of the curious features of the competition with China has been that while the Chinese have made huge advances in many different arenas, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, the biosciences and so forth, one area where they have been continually frustrated has been the ability to make the smallest diameter chips, the kinds that we get from Taiwan semiconductor and we'll get back to that, and the Chinese get from Taiwan semiconductor as well. We're talking about chips that have dimensions that are narrower than seven nanometers, and that has been a barrier that the Chinese have not been able to break. To get to those dimensions we are highly dependent on some semiconductor equipment that is made by a company that's in the Netherlands. And when you go into a big chip manufacturing company, you frequently see these hundred million dollar machines sitting right in the middle of a clean room.

And it's those machines that the US is going out of its way to make sure that the Chinese cannot get access to. And that's going to be a big task because there are older versions of them. They are out to steal the technology, to replicate the technology, to develop the technology themselves. The US effort right now is fingers in the dike. In other words, it is an effort to try to make sure that the Chinese have years more delay, but sooner or later, China is going to figure this out. And the question is along the way, do we make them convinced that the US is so out to contain Chinese technological power, that they begin to make moves in other areas including military arenas? And that's critically related to Taiwan because right now, in my view, Ian, the greatest defense we have against Taiwan being invaded is the existence of Taiwan semiconductor. China cannot afford to see it destroyed.

Ian Bremmer:

But that also raises a question of American vulnerability. If TSMC is not just critical to Chinese semiconductors, but also American semiconductors, not like the US is making these things at home, how do the Americans relate to the fact that one of its most important national security assets happens to be sitting 100 miles away from mainland China?

David Sanger:

If there was ever a reason for a commission on American vulnerabilities, one of the first things I would put on their agenda, Ian, would be a study of how we allow the manufacturing of key semiconductors, not the commodity semiconductors that go into your car or your microwave or whatever, but the real leading edge semiconductors, which the US invented, dominated the technology and then came to the conclusion in the era of globalization that the supply chain around the world was reliable enough that it didn't make any difference where we manufactured them. And this was a feature of the past two decades. The Europeans did it with oil and gas being dependent on the Russians. We did it in the semiconductor arena where we were dependent on Taiwan, but many other places. And the vulnerability of Taiwan was never really considered to be a high-end concern until the past few years. And that's remarkable to me.

Ian Bremmer:

I want to tease this point out more explicitly because there's been so much criticism in the United States of the proactive decisions of people like German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, that they were going to allow core aspects of their national security to be reliant, energy infrastructure reliant on Russia. And the United States essentially, in ways that are probably much more important ultimately to US national security, because at least gas and oil, you can buy those commodities anywhere. These semiconductors you can only buy in Taiwan. Who was asleep at the switch in the United States that allowed that kind of vulnerability in a territory that is frankly, completely contested between the Americans and the Chinese going forward?

David Sanger:

Well, who was asleep at the switch? The semiconductor industry in and of itself, a series of governments in the US that knew this was an important technology, but basically just allowed the capitalist flow of supply chain to work its own way. And so if you're looking for political leaders to blame for this, I'd start with George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Biden has actually paid attention to the alarm. Others raised it as an issue, but when you think back to say the Trump administration, they're worried about China installing 5G communications in the US and NATO nations, a perfectly legitimate concern, but didn't really do very much in the semiconductor area. They recognized it. They talked about it. They didn't do much.

Here's the challenge right now, you can buy yourself some time by trying to prevent the Chinese from buying these high-end manufacturing machines and the lithography all around it. But that only works if you then turn around and build enough capacity back in the United States. And that's why you've seen the president show up in Poughkeepsie, New York, the other day he was at a Micron Technology facility in upstate New York. You've seen him in Silicon Valley promoting all of this. But the fact of the matter is that while Taiwan semiconductor is building in the southwest and Samsung is building in the southwest, when those facilities are open, it will address under 5% of the problem.

Ian Bremmer:

So TSMC is a private sector company with shareholders and their own priorities and preferences. They are utterly critical to the Americans. They are utterly critical to the Chinese, mainland China. David, what do you think what are they going to do forward? How did they manage their equities in this environment, in your view?

David Sanger:

Well, I think the smart thing for them to do is to diversify off of Taiwan. You just don't want to have that many of your assets in one place any more than you would put that big a part of your portfolio in one stock or one region of the world, you'd want to be diversified. The difficulty is that they don't necessarily have the talent around the world to be able to keep being able to do what they do so well on the island in Taiwan. And that's going to take a long time to build up. It took a long time to create this problem, Ian, it's going to take a long time to solve this problem. And the difficulty is we don't have a long time on this. The timeframe that China has declared about, which at the moment at which they might be ready to take over in Taiwan or at least attempt to, is more like 2027. There's no way in the next five years we're going to diversify that much.

Ian Bremmer:

But when you say diversify, I want to get from TSMC's perspective. Are you talking about they need to diversify from their perspective, they need to diversify so they have major production facilities in the United States and in China in addition to other places, or you're not suggesting that?

David Sanger:

Well, they need them in the United States. They probably need them in Europe, which is where these ASML devices as they're called, these high-end manufacturing devices are produced. They may well want to have some capacity in China, but their concern about that is that China would use the moment to steal the technology. Frequently when companies go into China, the price for getting in is sharing the technology. So it's going to be a very tricky set of moves for Taiwan semiconductor and for the Taiwan government. They may well conclude that if they're doing a porcupine strategy keeping China at bay, that the biggest part of the porcupine is actually Taiwan semiconductor, that China cannot afford to bomb that building, but China also can't afford to do something that would make the talent that's inside that facility flee in the United States or elsewhere.

Ian Bremmer:

So before we close, let me turn back to the United States. You and I were talking before the shoot on the documentary that you've recently done, about domestic US national security challenges too. And I'm wondering, as we look forward to the midterm elections, as we see the violence, the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi that led to the hospitalization of her husband, Paul. So many things that feel unprecedented inside the United States. Talk about just for a couple of moments where you see the great vulnerabilities in domestic violence and instability in the context of US national security?

David Sanger:

So it's a fascinating question because our greatest national security threat right now is really an insider threat to a great degree. It's remarkable, Ian, if you and I were sitting around in late 2016 as we began to understand the scope of the Russian interference in the 2016 election, and we said, where do we think this will be in six years? I think what we would've said is greater Russian interference, more Chinese interference, and we are seeing China try to figure out a little bit about our election system and disinformation, maybe more from Iran or North Korea. But I don't think, Ian, that we would have thought that the number one threat to the stability of our election system was going to be Americans who were trying to put in place the vote counters so that they could assure a victory for their favorite candidate or attempt to assure that.

And that really is the number one problem. And it's backed up by a new acceptance that if you don't like the outcome of an election, violence is then in some way warranted. We haven't seen that in this country in a 125, 150 years except for at sporadic moments. And that's the big concern that comes out of the polling numbers that show that there's still a substantial minority of Americans who believe that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president. And that's pretty remarkable. You would've thought that over time that would've dissipated, and instead it's held quite steady.

Ian Bremmer:

So pro analysis, my friend, David Sanger, really appreciate you joining today.

David Sanger:

Thank you, Ian. Great to be with you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out at GZEROmedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

GZERO World would also like to share a message from Visa. The pandemic has dealt the world in almost generational setback in ending global inequality, but there are ways for technology to help get things back on track. Visa and GZERO Media have partnered to explore the ways in which digital tools can help close the global equality gap. Visit GZEROmedia.com/closingthegap to learn about the crucial role remittances, digital trade and the shift away from cash payments can play in empowering underserved groups to participate in the global economy.

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