The next era of global superpower competition: a conversation with the New York Times' David Sanger

TRANSCRIPT: The next era of global superpower competition: a conversation with the New York Times' David Sanger

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 today we are looking at the new era of global competition. More than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States is locked in a battle for military, economic and political influence with two major powers, China and Russia, but today's reality is a lot different than at the end of the Cold War. The world's economy is more interdependent. AI generated misinformation is deployed cheaply, and at scale intensified competition is reshaping US strategic interests and global alliances. What does this all mean for America's relationships with its two biggest adversaries? Will Xi and Putin deepen their so-called friendship without limits to rival US dominance? Can a politically dysfunctional America still be the global leader? My guest today, New York Times national security correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, David Sanger, whose latest book is New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. Let's get to it. David Sanger, the book is New Cold Wars. Congratulations and great to see you.

David Sanger:

Thank you. Great to be back with you.

Ian Bremmer:

You've been talking to these leaders, US high-level leaders and around the world for a long time now, and the premise of the book is that the United States had this belief after Soviet collapse that we weren't going to have to fight these cold wars anymore. It turns out that in many ways we were mistaken.

David Sanger:

We were mistaken in many different ways. The core message of the book is we are back in a period of superpower competition that will probably go on for decades, and that if we're lucky remains a cold war. It's a cold war that bears almost no resemblance to the one that you and I are old enough to remember because in that cold war we had a single competitor, and we weren't dependent on them, nor they on US for very much. Only thing we really got from the Soviet Union was caviar and vodka. While we certainly wouldn't want to give that up, we could have lived without it.

This is a three-way competition. It's Russia, China. Obviously from China, we have levels of interdependency we never saw in the Cold War. Yet we somehow believed, Ian, we somehow convinced ourselves that the profit motive was so great for China and the need to sell oil and gas was so great for Russia that basically their territorial ambitions, their sense of competition with us would all melt away. It was in some ways the greatest intelligence failure, or at least the greatest intelligence assessment failure of the past 30 years. Greater than whether or not Iraq was developing-

Ian Bremmer:

Nuclear weapons.

David Sanger:

... weapons of mass destruction and so forth.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, I want to get to where the relations are today, but so much of this is steeped in history. In the early days post-Soviet collapse when Yeltsin was president, there did seem to be both a moment and an intention to engage with, to join the West. That eroded pretty quickly when Putin became president. Where do you think the opportunities were lost? Where was the assessment wrong?

David Sanger:

Yeltsin, of course, we tried to promote a great democracy, but we also at the time expanded NATO.

Ian Bremmer:

NATO.

David Sanger:

That brought a huge amount of anger from those sitting in the background in Russia who were fulminating about the loss of-

Ian Bremmer:

Empire.

David Sanger:

... the old empire.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah.

David Sanger:

That included a man named Vladimir Putin, who made his way up from KGB officer in Dresden during the collapse through to City Hall in St. Petersburg, and then on to the presidency. Chosen in many ways by Yeltsin himself, which was pretty remarkable. For the first few years, it seemed like a pretty good bet that even Putin would go along with the old plan. There were moments... I was covering the White House for the time, so it was my first White House correspondence stent, and Yeltsin came to Crawford, Texas and met high school students with George Bush. They're joking with each other back and forth.

Bush went back and did the same thing in St. Petersburg with Russian students who just wanted to know how they could get to Europe and the United States on visas. There's a scene in the book where George Bush and Laura and Putin and his then wife are floating down the Neva River, which passes of course, right through St. Petersburg and in front of the Hermitage and all that. They're on a big party boat, and there's caviar, and there's all kinds of celebrations. On board, they're talking about whether or not Russia could join the EU, whether someday it might be a member of NATO, the organization that was-

Ian Bremmer:

It was NATO-Russia joint council at that point.

David Sanger:

That's right. That's right. You actually could go into the NATO headquarters and there was a Russia office. This is all hard to believe. Bush and Putin met more than two dozen times. Joe Biden has met him once as president and probably never will again, so this was a great era of hope. But even later in the Bush administration, as Russia began to turn inward, as it blamed the US for some of the terror activity that had taken place and so forth, this began to fall apart. Then in 2007, Putin showed up at the Munich Security Conference, and he gave a speech that basically said, "There are parts of Mother Russia that have been rested away from us that must come back." It was such a shock that Bob Gates, then the defense secretary, had to stand up and sort of respond to him.

But even then we maintained the hope through the Obama administration, certainly in the Trump administration, that somehow or another this was just Russia acting out, and in the end, they wouldn't undercut their interests. Seven years after the Munich speech, Putin takes over all of Crimea. Says, "This is truly part of Russia, and it had been until the late 1950s-"

Ian Bremmer:

To the Khrushchev era.

David Sanger:

That's right, Khrushchev gave it back, and he waited for sanctions. Nothing came for a year. A year later in 2015, Germany signed the Nord Stream 2 contract with Chancellor Merkel saying he's a reliable supplier. What was Vladimir Putin supposed to conclude from that? In the end, they'll make some noise if I take over all of Ukraine-

Ian Bremmer:

But I can get away with it.

David Sanger:

... I can get away with it.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. When the Americans were saying, "We can long term get you into NATO. We can long term get you into the EU," is the mistake overwhelmingly that no one ever should have believed that? Or is the mistake potentially much more should have been done early when you had a Russian leadership that was more credible and more willing to engage?

David Sanger:

They were more credible, they were more willing to engage, they were less capable. The question is, could they have reformed the economy and taken the steps they needed to take? Yeltsin had drinking issues, Yeltsin had credibility issues, but Yeltsin had support issues. There's another scene in the book in which I talked to Paul Kolbe who was the CIA station chief in Moscow during this period. One night at the end of the year, there's some kind of holiday party that invites the sort of declared CIA spies with the remnants of the KGB, now created into different intelligence agencies, and everyone's drinking a little bit. One of the Russians goes up to him and says, "Once we were enemies, but now we're friends." One of this guy's younger Russian colleagues look at him and says, "The problem with Russia today is people like you. We will never be friends. You have given away the Russian state." He was really speaking for Putin's core support.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, if we move on to China before we get to today, different kind of mistakes made with the Chinese. A belief that if you integrate the Chinese into the global economy, into Western institutions, they become rich, they're going to politically reform. Clearly that pretty big bet has not played out for the Americans. Talk a little bit about what's behind it?

David Sanger:

It seemed like a good bet at the time.

Ian Bremmer:

Clinton bet.

David Sanger:

It was a Clinton bet. I remember going to Beijing several times with Clinton, and on one of them he stopped off at Beijing University on the way back to the United States and gave a speech to students and basically said, "The internet will set you free. As soon as the internet takes over in China. This will be the crumbling of the Communist Party. You will all see how the rest of the world operates. How market economies operate. There are sprigs we are seeing coming up in China, local elections, so forth. The roots of democracy are here." I believed this stuff at the time I was hearing it, but it became pretty evident, pretty clearly that the Communist Party had learned how to take these same digital forces and use them for the most explicitly designed repression techniques we have ever seen. They took it in a different direction.

Now, there were many times that we had good reason to think we could work with the Chinese really up through Obama. Obama reached a climate agreement with Xi Jinping. Obama and Xi reached any number of other economic agreements and worked together with Russia to contain Iran's nuclear program. They worked together pretty well on North Korea. It's hard to imagine any of that happening today. Here the turn was President Xi himself. As Joe Biden was entertaining him as when they were both vice presidents, and Biden thought he knew him. What they missed was that he really was an autocrat at heart whose plan was to expand the nuclear program, crack down on the same freedoms that we thought were coming together. The intelligence reports during the Xi transition reflect none of this. They basically say, "He will not challenge the West. He will not challenge Taiwan. He will focus on the domestic economy." We got him completely wrong.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, this is twice that you are pointing out that the intelligence assessments, not the hard data-

David Sanger:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

... but what the smart people, and there are an awful lot of them. The US has the biggest, most well-educated, funded intelligence apparatus in the world, just fundamentally don't understand what's driving these non-Americans. Why do you think that is?

David Sanger:

Well, in the Putin case, I think the intelligence community caught on faster than the policymakers did. They started sending out their warnings by late in the Bush administration. In fact, Bush sent his national security advisor, Steve Hadley, over to take the measure of Putin and try to come up with plans that would save this by having the two countries and their cabinet secretaries all work together.

Ian Bremmer:

It that before the Georgia invasion or after?

David Sanger:

This was just before and then a little bit during, but I think the intelligence community came around on Putin faster than the policymakers did because they didn't want to create a situation that would push Putin further away. Even when the Russians were doing the massive cyber attacks on the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, the Obama administration wouldn't even name Russia as the aggressor even though they knew they were. There I would put as much blame on the policy side as I would on the intelligence and maybe more.

On the China side, I just think that the relentless focus on the era of terrorism took their eye off of the fundamentals in China. There's a reason that Bill Burns, the current CIA director, has built up a huge separate China house within CIA. We under-resourced that, and I think we fundamentally got Xi's intentions wrong. Now, you might say that it was unknowable. That Xi kept it to himself, and that we would not know... We had no way of knowing how he would develop. I recreate in the book the conversations that Biden and Xi had. Biden came out of those thinking he's going to be a tough customer, but we can work together. He too had it wrong.

Ian Bremmer:

It's very clear the US-Russia relationship is completely broken. At least under President Biden, I agree the likelihood that there's going to be a meeting between those two men, at least absent some level of multilateral diplomacy post-election if Biden wins on Ukraine. Hard to imagine. Right?

David Sanger:

It's really hard to imagine.

Ian Bremmer:

On China-

David Sanger:

Also hard to imagine US renewing the last nuclear treaty that we have with them, which expires in early 2026.

Ian Bremmer:

Indeed. There's no engagement in nuclear arms control oversight. Where I wonder if on the China front, Biden not only knew him well as vice president, has met with him as president. They are planning continued phone calls-

David Sanger:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

... direct engagement. The Biden administration considers that their Woodside summit back in November, San Francisco Bay Area, to be successful. They would say that this is a relationship that has a lot more high-level engagement now including at the military to military level, and that the Chinese are prepared to continue to work with the United States in areas of mutual interest, and in other areas the Americans are going to compete pretty hard. They would argue that they're doing it reasonably well. You, I feel, would argue that, no, the Chinese are just as implacable as the Russians are.

David Sanger:

The question for China right now is is this interlude we're in where I completely agree we are working better after Woodside and I was out covering that talk. Is this a fundamental shift or is it driven by the fact that the Chinese economy has-

Ian Bremmer:

[inaudible 00:16:15]-

David Sanger:

... slowed dramatically? That Xi Jinping needs investors and needs Americans back? What you have written about so much. It was pretty evident in the meetings in China a week or two ago that brought together so many business leaders. The Chinese realize that if they're going to get out of this hole, they're going to need Western investment and they have driven a lot of people away. Are they willing to do what that's going to take? I'm not sure.

Ian Bremmer:

You're skeptical?

David Sanger:

I'm quite skeptical, and I'm also skeptical that it would last very long if the Chinese economy takes off again. Xi has made it clear he plans to go solve the Taiwan problem while he is still in office. He's 70 years old. Let's say he's got another decade. That's not a lot of time for us to think about how the world would be changed if Taiwan, the producer of 90 to 95% of our most advanced semiconductors, is under threat, much less invaded. In a lot of the book I spend time in Taiwan with Mark Liu, the chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor, trying to ask the question, "Does the existence of Taiwan Semiconductor, this gem in the middle of the island, create a silicon shield or not? Are the Chinese willing to risk the loss of production there, which would affect them as much as us?"

Ian Bremmer:

That's an interesting question. You and I think a lot about this because Taiwan, TSMC, is now more like 80% of global production.

David Sanger:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

In part that's because the United States is trying very hard to get lots more production in the United States and with allies that are farther away from mainland China. At the same time, we've seen strict export controls against advanced semiconductors made by TSMC and other places so that China can't have them. Now, one can argue that the American policy is making Taiwan less of a silicon shield. It's making Taiwan less indispensable to mainland China, making it easier for them. They have to now invest and build the stuff themselves in mainland China.

David Sanger:

Sure.

Ian Bremmer:

If they really want to take it over, American policy is precipitating that. Do you buy that?

David Sanger:

Not entirely.

Ian Bremmer:

You buy little?

David Sanger:

I buy a little bit of it. First of all, I think what Biden has done here in the semiconductor field, trying to choke the Chinese of the most advanced chips but also the equipment to make those chips while trying to build up here is the right step. I think he had to go do it. A series of small and I think ill thought out business decisions made by companies, not by governments, moved that capability offshore from the United States over the course-

Ian Bremmer:

For 20 years.

David Sanger:

... of 20 years or more, and so we're down to 14% of global production. But most importantly, we don't produce the most high end. The chips that are in your iPhone, the chips that Nvidia is using for AI, those are all coming out of Taiwan Semiconductor. The question is what's the benefit and risk here? If all of the facilities that Biden has signed up are built in the United States, we will solve about 4% of our Taiwan problem. That's about it because we're just not building at the scale at which we would need. That's because Congress has allocated $52 billion, but thought it was a one and done. My own view is if you're going to have an industrial policy, if you've made the decision you're going to put the government behind this-

Ian Bremmer:

Go all in.

David Sanger:

... you've got to go all in. There's got to be money each and every year. Each fab, semiconductor fabrication facility, costs 15 to $20 billion to build. Now think about it, the last aircraft carrier that we built in the United States was the Gerald R. Ford. It was about 10 years ago. After all the cost overruns, it too was about $15 billion. If you went to Congress today and said, "Our Navy is so shrinking compared to what the Chinese are building up that we need 10 more aircraft carriers," I think you'd get the 150 billion, now probably $200 billion. If you went and said, "We need another $200 billion in semiconductor fabrication facilities," I think people would yell, "That's industrial policy. We can't do it."

Ian Bremmer:

They don't think it's military. Right?

David Sanger:

I would argue that for our long-term security, it is much more important to build those fabs than it is to build those aircraft carriers.

Ian Bremmer:

That's from the American perspective, and I get that. From the Chinese perspective, is it easier for the Chinese to be thinking about, well, we're not going to be working with Taiwan going forward because the Americans are shutting it down?

David Sanger:

At some point, the Chinese will build up enough of their own capability that it will be easier for them to make that decision. That's going to happen no matter what we do. They are investing heavily in this. They've had a lot of trouble, and Biden's going out of his way to worsen their trouble. Many in the administration think they're buying 10 years with these export controls. They may well be right. TSMC meanwhile is continuing to invest in Taiwan and in Japan, and they may build in Germany.

Ian Bremmer:

And in mainland China.

David Sanger:

And, of course, in mainland China. Over time, this is a declining bet, the silicon shield. But if you can buy time with it, it's like every other effort to avoid a conflict. We were just trying to buy time with Iran to keep them from building a bomb. We're trying to buy time with China to keep them from losing their dependency on Taiwan.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, one of the most interesting things about this trilateral dynamic as opposed to the Americans versus the Soviets when we were younger is that the relationship between China and Russia becomes extremely important to understand. Now, everyone remembered and was talking about the friendship without limits that was announced at the Beijing Olympics before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Certainly at a minimum we can say that this is a very asymmetrical relationship.

David Sanger:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

China holds a lot more cards than the Russians do.

David Sanger:

We were talking at the beginning about things that are different from the Cold War. When the Soviets showed up in China in the 1950s and the 1960s, they were top dog. They had the money. They had the investment. That's the relationship that Kissinger was trying to get in the way of. We are now, a few months after Kissinger's death at age 100, back in the same situation. Except this time, as you say, the roles are reversed.

Ian Bremmer:

Yes.

David Sanger:

It took a while for the Biden administration to come to the conclusion that this relationship is real. I realized this about a year and a half into the administration when one day I was at a briefing with Colin Kahl, who was the number three at the Pentagon. He told reporters on the record one day, "I know a lot of people dismiss this relationship without limits, friendship without limits, but there's something real going on here in the axis of resistance that puts China and Russia and Iran and now North Korea supplying for Ukraine together. We've got to watch this with care because it's one of the biggest changes." The next day, president Biden had a press conference. He hadn't obviously heard or read about what his own defense department was saying, and he called on me for the last question in the press conference. Never do the last question. I asked him this. I said, "Do you believe this is real or not?" He thought about it for a minute and he said, "No, no, no. These two just can't get along. They dislike each other," all that.

Ian Bremmer:

He's also said the US and China are not in a cold war. He's said that consistently.

David Sanger:

That's right. That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah.

David Sanger:

I don't think he would say there's nothing there today. They're not going out of their way to repeat the, "We're not in a cold war." Because I'm sorry, if you are cutting off the lead technology to the Chinese and trying to deprive them of artificial intelligence aid and watching over investment and so forth, you are back in a new era of containment. He may not call it a cold war. To the Chinese, I think it certainly feels like one.

Ian Bremmer:

When we talk about the China-Russia relationship, certainly the Chinese have not been providing the Russians with the direct military equipment that the Iranians have, that the North Koreans have. Also, the Russians can't be comfortable with the idea that the Chinese are becoming the dominant economic player with political influence in Russia's backyard. Countries like Kazakhstan, for example-

David Sanger:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

... very significant. How do you see that playing out going forward?

David Sanger:

At this point, Vladimir Putin has no choice. He needs that technology desperately, especially at a moment that the West is doing some sanctions. Although you and I could sit here and debate how effective-

Ian Bremmer:

How effective they are.

David Sanger:

... they are. Actually I think the technology sanctions have been more effective than the-

Ian Bremmer:

Economics.

David Sanger:

... economic sanctions.

Ian Bremmer:

I completely agree with that. Yeah.

David Sanger:

That's right. He needs that Chinese technology. In some ways, he needs it more than the arms. He can get the arms. He can get the drones from Iran. He can get artillery from the North Koreans, even if half of them are duds. Over time, that relationship will build up and they will become, I think, better suppliers to him unless the US can get in the way of that. But he does not have a choice except to deal with the Chinese on Chinese terms right now. Xi Jinping knows it. But it's useful to Xi because, look, Xi Jinping what was his biggest concern three years ago when Biden came in? That the US would finally get serious about moving everything to the Indo-Pacific and confronting him over the South China Sea and defending Taiwan and so forth.

Ian Bremmer:

Which from an architecture perspective, a lot of that is happening.

David Sanger:

A lot of that is happening. If you're Xi, the two best things that can happen to you is that the US is tied up in Ukraine or ripping itself apart about the aid and consumed again in the Middle East. That's what they needed.

Ian Bremmer:

If you're China. Why not? There's this massive Power of Siberia pipeline that the Russians really need so they can get their energy long term to Asian markets, to China, because Europe is cut off and is likely going to be cut off. The Chinese have just been slow rolling this. They've not been interested in putting the money out. This would give them a stranglehold, so much more influence over the Russians long term. It's as if they're thinking, well, we don't really care that much about these guys.

David Sanger:

Well, they may not. It's a little bit of a mystery to me because it strikes me that they could get that built on terms so-

Ian Bremmer:

Favorable for them.

David Sanger:

... beneficial to them.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah.

David Sanger:

That may well happen yet. I don't think it's dead at this point, but it does tell you that the relationship is not without friction. That's important for the United States because there are wedges where the US can step in and try to interrupt the Russia-China relationship. That's what Kissinger would be telling them to do right now.

Ian Bremmer:

When Putin invites Kim Jong Un to go to Vladivostok by train and the Chinese don't find out about it until he's going there. You'd think, again, if this is a great friendship, it doesn't take Putin much to get Xi Jinping on the horn and say, "Hey, just want to let you know I'm engaging with your buddy."

David Sanger:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Axis of Resistance doesn't feel like much. I don't see a lot of coordination going on for countries that supposedly need each other so much.

David Sanger:

I don't see a lot of coordination. I think it's going to be very uneasy. It's going to have high points and low points. On the other hand, they have been doing military exercises together. They've done that for a long time before. We're going to have to get our heads around the fact that over the next few years, we're going to have to decide do we consider the Russian nuclear force and the Chinese nuclear force as separate or something that could be used in coordination against us? Because that's how the United States is going to decide whether or not we're actually going to start building nuclear weapons again.

Ian Bremmer:

One other fundamental question that I think does make these countries differ, at least for now, and I'm wondering if you agree with this, is that a country like Russia, kind of like Iran, kind of like North Korea, benefits from a significant degree of chaos on the international stage. An international vacuum of power that allows them to take advantage and operate. In fact, they want things to break down. The Chinese need the international system to function for China's own stability. They need to be part of a functioning international marketplace. Russia doesn't. How important is that difference?

David Sanger:

It's a critical difference and a big theme of the book because in examining this Russia-China relationship, China wants to be the top dog by 2049, the 100 anniversary of the-

Ian Bremmer:

Chinese Communist Party.

David Sanger:

... the Chinese Revolution, and of Mao declaring the state. They want to be the top dog of something worth being the top dog of. The Russians have no hope for that, so their only source of power is as a disruptor. That's the friction between these two that may come into play. That said, there are moments when if they can control it, China loves having the Russians as a disruptor. Including, as I said before-

Ian Bremmer:

[inaudible 00:30:49]-

David Sanger:

... keeping us tied up in Ukraine, making us rethink our nuclear. Then there's one other area. In the last few weeks, Ian, it's been really interesting if you've just watch the homepage on the front page of the New York Times, you've seen stories about what the Russians are doing to fuel instability and disinformation campaigns in the United States. Not by injecting in the kinds of created news that the internet research agency did in the days of Prigozhin, but instead just amplifying the sounds of chaos in our own system. We've written the same stories about the Chinese.

They may have an interest, the Chinese, in a working international order, but they have a true interest in a United States that's eating itself apart and that can't focus on China policy, on industrial policy, on keeping them from getting their chip equipment. An America that would say, "Gee, if we're not going to send our real forces to Ukraine, why would we ever send them to Taiwan 100 miles off the Chinese coast?" They have every incentive, both of them, Russia and China, to be subtle actors in the background of this coming presidential election. That's one area where if they are not cooperating, it would pay them off considerably to coordinate.

Ian Bremmer:

David Sanger. Great to have.

David Sanger:

Great to be with you.