The Dawn of New Cold Wars
BOOK REVIEW: “New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West”
By David Sanger / Crown
Reviewed by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret)
The Reviewer – Admiral Stavridis (Ret.) was the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and 12th Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he earned a PhD in international affairs. He is currently partner and Vice Chair, Global Affairs at The Carlyle Group and Chair of the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. A Cipher Brief expert, Admiral Stavridis is the author of thirteen books. His latest book, 2054: A Novel, was released on March 12.
REVIEW — David Sanger is the Chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times and is a fixture on the international security commentary circuit. He’s been at the Times for an astounding 38 years. I have long admired his Pulitzer Prize-winning work and his previous three books – notably his superb volume on cybersecurity, “The Perfect Weapon.”
In “New Cold Wars,” he brings quite literally a lifetime of experience to the most pressing geopolitical issue of the 21st century: the rise of near-peer military competition between the US, China and Russia. His central construct is simple: following America’s victory in the first Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we in the West enjoyed a long “vacation from history,” as my former boss Secretary of Defense Bob Gates called it. Clearly, history has come roaring back, and the subtitle of the book lays out the big themes distinctly: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion and America’s Struggle to Defend the West. Each of those form a significant portion of this outstanding work of contemporary history.
What makes the book exceptional is the access, sourcing, and anecdotal structure. Given his ability to reach out to almost anyone for an interview, Sanger has been able to sew together a series of fascinating vignettes surrounding his key themes. For example, he opens the book with a prologue set in the buzzy days just before the invasion of Ukraine. Only two years ago, it feels like a different universe: 150,000 Russian troops “on maneuvers” but repeated assurances from the slippery Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs that it was all routine exercises; Ukrainian leaders whistling past the graveyard and telling the West it was just a bluff; and an uncertain White House still reeling from the debacle of the Afghan withdrawal determined not to fail again. Sanger correctly highlights the conversations of Putin and Xi at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing and makes the crucial point that these are two nations engaging in a growing rapprochement. (Whether that “best friendship” survives the Russian stumbles in Ukraine remains to be seen.)
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Indeed, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, tacitly supported by Xi’s China, was the final death knell for two big ideas of the early 21st century that have definitively failed. The first was the notion that a post-Cold War Russia would gradually turn to the West, establish a functioning if flawed democratic political system, and find its footing economically by integrating with the European Union – thus gradually taking on our western, liberal bent. Similarly, the idea for managing the stupendous rise of China was that as China became wealthier and more engaged with the West, they would at least tailor their foreign policy and economic structure to co-exist peacefully and productively within the western norms.
But a funny thing happened in both Moscow and Beijing enroute the that glorious future: old ghosts in both nations reasserted themselves. In Russia, Vladimir Putin decided to become a combination of Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, and a bit of Stalin thrown in. He decried the “tragedy” of the collapse of the USSR and essentially vowed to make the West pay. Seizing Ukraine, a vast treasure trove of natural resources and (as we have learned) highly capable population was a key element of his “Russia resurges” plan. Meanwhile in China, President Xi blew up the carefully structured internal transition plan for turning over control of the country each decade and decided he would become a Mao-like leader for life. Alongside that enormous ambition, he put powerful energy into “One Belt, One Road,” the smart geo-economic plan China uses to create influence and economic control in dozens of countries along its trade routes, especially in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.
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In both cases, this leads to a direct confrontation with the United States. For Russia, the choice of invading Ukraine was the Rubicon for Putin. There is no going back for Russia while he remains in power, and the US has marshalled over 60% of the world’s GDP (US, EU, NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia) to (so far) provide aid to Ukraine. With 300,000 casualties and counting, Putin’s only hope (and sadly it’s not a small chance) is a failure of western will, led by the MAGA isolationists in the US. For China, the equivalent attempted seizure is the vast water space of the South China Sea, full of oil, gas, fisheries, and 40% of the world’s shipping. In both cases, assuming the US continues to lead the effort to thwart these land and sea grabs respectively, these two new Cold Wars will blossom.
The hard part for a journalist like Sanger, of course, is that the storylines are changing literally every day. The review copy I have, for example, contains concluding brief references to the emerging war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas. No one knows whether western aid to Ukraine will continue or gradually dwindle down, much to the thrill of Putin. Likewise, while Taiwan has held an election and chosen a candidate Beijing loathes, he has not yet been inaugurated and thus we can’t really gauge China’s response. And a re-election of Donald Trump would be a true wild card, the consequences of which no one can fully predict (although NATO and Ukraine are probably losers and Putin likely gets a boost.)
But ultimately the power of David Sanger’s “New Cold Wars” is in the way he illuminates the really big themes – Russia, China, US, cyber – with such detail and verve. This is a highly entertaining book to read, despite its immense cautionary themes. Sanger gets both the broad theory and the human details right and along the way provides a powerful book of geopolitics appearing at a hinge moment in global history.
New Cold Wars earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
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