david, congratulations on your

book, new cold china's rise as russia's invasion and america's struggle to defend the west. i read this book and it's outstanding truly a masterpiece truly amazing. i felt as being a former government official someone who was inside the room, inside or on the phone with all the different policymakers. i mean, just every detail here jumps out at you. but i love and puts it best. michael beschloss, put it this way, that is truly a brilliant book, is a masterpiece of

reporting, revelations and analysis. congratulations to you. and also congratulations that the fact that it is on the new york times best seller list. well done. well done. well, thank you, paula. and great to be back here with you. it's been we've had a lot of years over the years when your government official and of course, much of the work we've done together since the it's great great to be having this conversation with you was a fun book to write. well clearly clearly because the inside story on so many issues. and we're going to delve into that. let me start with maybe the main broad question, and that's the question of how did this new cold war has actually come about here? and by the way, maybe i should also, before you answer that, actually just say here it really describes it well in. the in the cover your book focuses on 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 a world far more complex and dangerous than it was a half century ago. so the question is how did these cold war's start? well, 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 you remember the the famous francis fukuyama article. but fukuyama was not the only one making that case, that liberal democracy was going to reign supreme, that china and russia each for very different reasons because they are such very 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 world trade organization or

whether it was joining up with the european union. in the case of russia, there was even discussion for a while that russia become a member of nato, the alliance that was 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 ten years, it looked like that might happen because china was on a very slow road to but certainly was invest in its people and it turned china's growth turned into the world's greatest anti-poverty program. russia was in halting democratization and filled with corruption, filled with all kinds of problems. but there was hope and so what the book tries to do is trace

the five presidents i've covered backo president clinton and their common belief across party lines that the us, 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 to get north korea to give up its nuclear program. all projects on which the powers work together and we overinterpreted that activity as if it was a sign that they were all going to fit within this western based wall system, which over 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 this century. you know what's amazing about the book and you mentioned your recounting all of this evolution of policy over five presidential administration issues and you had five presidents, all administrations. your engagement with the white house in interviews and covering the white house. but not only that, the intelligence agencies and also technology companies as part of this. so the reservoir of information that you have amassed here truly is a master piece.

and seriously, when i was reading it, i really felt, my gosh, i'm back in the sit room or i'm on the phone during a crisis. so let me go to the question. what did we what did we do wrong? let's go over some of this, because you've said that, you know, over 30 years we were diluting ourselves about russia, about china. what were we diluting ourselves about and what big signals did we miss? well, we were diluting ourselves with the general proposition that they would let their economic interests overrun their territory, real interest, 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. and this delusion was really at its most extreme with russia. so you asked signals, did we

miss? and the book tries to walk you through some of them. so starting with president bush in whose your administration served, i think very jeb bush, george w bush want had very much to bring russia and china into the counterterrorism program. as soon as 911 ended. and there's a scene early in the book. it's in chapter one where we're in st petersburg in 2002. it's early summer. so it's when the sun is, you know, doesn't set till 1030 or 11 and then barely sets and pops right back up. bush and his wife, laura, putin and his then wife were floating the never river on this big party boat, essentially big yacht dinner was being served by this hulking man standing in the

back. we were trying to figure out i remembered his presence, but didn't know at the time who he was. of course, we suspected that it was give kenny prigozhin and my wonderful co-writer and researcher mary brookes went back and found the photos. and sure enough, there is prigozhin. back in the days when he's still the chef before he ran the internet research agency to try to fix the 2016 election, before he founded the wagner group to a mercenary military group that saved russia in the early days of the ukraine war. and of course, before he marched on moscow, during the course of that 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. and they were joking back and forth, you know, how many meetings that 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 of 2021, before the invasion in geneva, to stick in that, we will be talking about russia and china. the number of meetings between putin and she actually i believe now the count is something like over 5050. so and there were 40 before covid. when was we were. but we'll come to that. we will we will come to that. so that was the early set up. and do i think that putin at the time had decided to go off in his own direction? i'm not sure he had yet, but by 2007, just five years after that fluke down the river, he showed up at the munich security conference, february of 2007 and gave hardline speech in which he

said there are parts of russia, of mother russia, of the russia of peter the great that had been wrested from us and must now come back together. and bob gates was there, who, of course, had served in as served as cia chief. by this time, he was defense secretary kerry. he would stay on as obama's defense secretary for a year or two. and 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. and he said, i lived through the whole cold war. and frankly, i'm not eager to go do it again. and a succession of presidents from bush on forward have said, we're not going back to the cold war. and in fact, they're right. we're not we're going into something that is a whole lot more complex. thus the title new cold wars. oh seven was followed seven

years later t russian decisi ttake over crimea. it took a year, paula for the united states and its allies to put together sanctions for that, and that only the russians shot 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 which chose not to interpret them in the worst possible way, because the idea was you can steer putin back. so when putin did the cyber attacks on the pentagon, the white 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. right. the trump administration, to its credit, began to these attacks to either russia or china or iran, whoever they could they could attribute it to. in fact, let me inject the trump administration when it came in that december, the very first year it was in actually issue a a national security strategy document. and in it, it said, we're in an era of coal, a great power competition. and it focused on russia. it focused on china and the points that you are making. now, interestingly enough, are it biden in their national security strategy document that they've issued? they put in that we are in an era of confrontation, but they focus on cooperation. so give your view on on those. how do how do those document fit in? so the the national security strategy, which is, you know, mostly read by, you know a

community of people in washington and academics, but it's important because it's a signal to the government about where one's priorities. when h.r. mcmaster came in as the second national security advisor to trump, he went through four. he was determined to go right. a national security strategy that would reorient the us government away from years of counterterrorism and toward the great power competition. what he called revisionist and revanche ist regimes. now my only complaint about that national security strategy is, i think it dealt with russia and china as two similar then, then, then different. but that's a small point. he was absolutely right to go steer this in a new direction. now. that didn't help much when the president went out to announce the strategy because it's donald trump. he hadn't sat to read it because

he's donald trump and he went out and he gave a speech in the rose garden that bore no resemblance to the strategy that he was putting out, which the usual problem, which was that the staff work on russia and china. some of it was excellent and the execution because the president couldn't carry through, was incredibly poor, move forward to the biden administration. they adopted a lot of that strategy. they do talk about areas of cooperation. the strategy came out before the invasion of of ukrain' dropped e kind of thought about russia. not they have 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 superpower confrontation, that, if we are

lucky the new cold wars will stay cold. there is no guarantee the old cold war, you know, had a literally explosive beginning. the united states and soviet union became nuclear powers. china, in the early sixties. and then it how long middle and it had this surprise ending in which our great its greatest adversary the soviet union collapsed of its own accord. anybody who's looking for an equally happy sort of easy end to this new set of confrontations, i think they're for a 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 describe 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. and we tried to major nuclear adversary. we are truly working together. in fact, the essence of what kissinger and nixon did in the early 70 is in the recognition of china was to keep these two apart. let me on your compare listen on the national security strategy. you know during trump and then in terms of the one released by biden, one challenge i'd make to you is i think some might say to you that in terms of the first one, that it was execute did in terms of defense the line that reagan had, you know, peace through strength, that our defense defenses were bolstered and also the fact of the kind of signals that were sent in terms of policies like the establishment of actually a kind

of fought you will or forward deployment in europe because of concern of russian aggression that actually there were concrete, tangible actions that provided a deterrent. so they would challenge that. well, it may not have been well executed. some would say that it was executed in terms of actions, not not words. there were some was said, but actions. so 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 the javelins. the javelins, which i mean, today seems pretty modest compared to what we've had to go give the ukraine. and now the problem that they ran into, paul, was that for every step forward, you know, having those that rotating group of nato troops that would go

into eastern europe and poland have have a a good presence there. you would have the president step out and undercut the american commitment to defend europe. and and you know, he would not utter a reference to article five of the nato treaty, which requires, you know, all countries to come to the aid of any under attack. and this was part of his obsess about whether europe was spending enough money. he was right on the point. europe needed to spend more. and i would argue needs to spend wildly more. now than it did then. but the result was that while at the at the lower levels, they were doing the right steps. he was undercutting the unity of the nato allies. and by talking about how nato was irrelevant, nato was outdated, you know, whether the us would would try to pull out of nato.

if you read john bolton's memoir. they had to talk him out of the us, pulling out of nato on more than one occasion. well, i think the part was because of the money he's and the fact that the united states was doing such and shows. and as we know, every administration, republican or democrat to that point, actually tried push europe. and he it to the brink to really get them to move. but let's go, angela merkel. mm hmm. nord stream. you have to mention nord stream two, because you mentioned the munich speech, putin's speech you even made about. yes, crimea. so so crimea is 2014. okay. we don't do sanctions. then finally they come up with some modest sanctions that i don't think made a whole lot of difference. 2015 is the year after he annexes crimea. angela merkel negotiates the nord stream two pipeline. it routes around ukraine does

deprive the ukrainians of the they were getting from the original stream pipeline and she declares that russia is reliable supplier and it's a remarkable statement out there now. so what she's saying is yeah he's all this bad stuff but he's not going to cut us because it's in his economic interest and that modified, moderated everything that the germans were willing to go do to push back on russia. and, you know, i was living in germany for a couple of months at the end last year. and the beginning of this just 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're going to

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

deterrent, they're probably talking about spending four or 5% of gdp, something you cannot utter in european politics today. we still have a lot to. i want to go to your chapter the meltdown and, the focus on afghanistan, because also in terms of chronology and leading up to ukraine and what happened in ukraine. talk about this. what was in your terms the meltdown and what happened? so the president had made no secret when he was vice president that he thought the united states needed to reduce, if not pull out of ukraine. president, president biden and then vice president. right. then vice president. in the 2016 election, you could on like two fingers a number of things. 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 only had at that point 2500 troops that were left. the pentagon was arguing for keeping them there as a sort of early warning system, a trip wire, and to maintain the intelligence gathering about where the taliban were, how quickly they were moving back in and to keep a counter. ice's program going because isis was the common enemy of the united states, russia. just think about 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. and president trump, you 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. he had no plan to do it, but he

just announced got talked back from that by his own staff. my critique in the book of the biden administration is that having decided in april to do that, they did not rev up a plan to get out those afghans who helped the united states, who had helped news organizations and help 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 of course, when it turned out the american intelligence turned out to be wrong the afghan military collapse passed. it was clear that they had operated way too late. it was a disaster. obviously, 13 americans died. they are already closed. bagram air base early. so they had no way to sort of gather everybody.

and a big protected base and get them out as searing as i am in the book, the after reports that have been written by some of the the inspectors general, including the special afghans, the general is even more searing. the one good thing that came out of it was, i think that this was there equivalent of what happened to kennedy during the bay of pigs, a mess up so important and big early in the administration that it actually brought together the group. and i think it helps explain why they did so much better a few months later in the early warnings and the public warnings about the run up to the ukraine war. 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 even when the tanks were up on the ukrainian border, that in april of 2021, right after biden came in. correct. so biden and putin met as said one time it was in geneva in 2021. and that meeting was not largely about ukraine. that meeting was about colonial pipeline and the cyber attacks, the ransomware attacks that were proving so devastating. remember, they had taken out a pipeline company that fed of gasoline, jet fuel, all the way up and down the east coast. there were gas lines at a time of of plenty. ukraine did come up in the meeting later on. i had some members of the administration tell me that their fear is that putin came out of their geneva meeting

thinking biden is so preoccupied with problems at home. january sixth the ransomware stuff getting out of afghanistan, the economic recovery which at that time was still pretty tenuous since you know blossomed pretty nicely for biden. but he had way of knowing that then that he would have no stomach for getting the united states and nato together to oppose a ukraine invasion. now, putin got that wrong. biden did rally nato to come together, found a way to do it without committing us war nato troops and poured a lot more resources into ukraine than i think, and intelligence and help and so forth. then putin possible. but i do think that afghanistan contributed to putin's thought that the us would not the end get in the way here. by the way, you mentioned what happened with colonial. let me quote this you stated

quote ours the war began demonstrated how radically different this new era was. wars past and the cold war. you refer to, quote, the digital war could spread much more quickly and changed the dynamic, turning a war against ukraine in a against nato. explain that. sure. so a lot of people think that this war has been completely the physical one you're seeing on screen. but it has also been a digital one. in fact, there's a place early in the book where i quote mark milley, the former chairman of the joint chiefs and. i'll clean up the language here because one of the nice c-span. but he bases great quotes in his book. i have to say, it's outstanding research, really. so milley said to me one day over lunch he said, you know, david. he said, at first we thought this was going to be a pure cyber war. you know, because russia had

gone after ukraine with cyber attacks. it turned off the power many times. so then we thought it was world war two style tank war and then we thought it was a blanking world war one trench war. you know, and the reality is, it's been all three. so in the days before the attacks started, the russians took out viasat, which is the satellite european satellite network that the ukrainians depended on. okay. and they took it out without ever attacking the satellites in space. we did a pretty brilliant cyber attack. the modems on the ground that fried enough of those that the communications with the satellites went out. then in the 24 hours before the war microsoft and and book takes you into 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 of the ukraine and government agencies. and there was a remarkable rush by microsoft and by amazon on 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 and everything from pension payments to health care plans to how the military communicates to the leadership's communications were sitting in servers around that were sitting ducks from missile attacks and by moving it into a cloud it assured that when those centers got destroyed and they were destroyed within

ukraine could keep running. that didn't happen in the cold war. that's absolutely correct. and also the fact that you document this in the book is so crucial because it's not a fact that's focused and really focused on it's not only about the tanks and, if you will, the ground warfare. but that's why i read this of yours, because it the digital war what's different in the new cold war's? well, one of the things that saved them was elon musk. and we all have issues about elon. okay. i'm not a big fan of what he did with twitter, but had he not bought starlink units in the ukraine. they would have no way to communicate with that cloud or ultimately to target it their own military hardware. right. they're not hitting these ships that are russian ships off crimea because they've got like, you know, remarkable vision

across the sea. they're doing it because they've got the starlink communication. and it has been an amazing laboratory for the us military, which has suddenly discovered that these $5 billion satellites that we put up are sitting and they need something much more like starlink, which puts up thousands of small satellites in these constellations that can repair themselves. absolutely. you do have some wonderful quotes in this book, and this enables me to segway to the china russia relations ship. first, the bill burns quote quote, who lost russia? it's oldrgent and it misses the point. russia was never ours. lose to starting with that that really just on point. and then you know in the chapter where you do on the relationship and what is it you know it's interesting kurt campbell who's now deputy secretary of state. he said it's not a a a, you

know, a marriage of convenience. that term has been used. he calls it a coalition of the aggrieved. now. that term, i felt quite interesting. there have been those that have used alignment. in fact, if i may say i wrote a piece with steve hadley and used the word a new alignment. there are others who are using word alliance. how do you see it? describe how this relationship evolved. so first of all, i don't think there's unanimity inside the biden administration about how to much less respond to the russia, china relationship. certainly, they have come together in all kinds of ways. secretary blinken was just in china and. he said publicly, what we've all reported and known which is the chinese are moving huge amounts of technology, not weapons, but

dual use technology to russia. they are continuing buy russian oil. they're not the only ones the indians are buying russian oil. right. which is helping the war. they are meeting on all kinds of other strategic they're doing military exercises together. and both of have developed a relationship. iran. iran is russia with the shaheed drones that are being used so effectively against ukraine. the there is concern that iran will provide. we are already seeing the north koreans provide both artillery and, some missiles to the russians for this half them don't work because they're north korean. but half of them do. so i think that kurt campbell's statement, they are about the

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

will that continue. are we going to see that deepening? i suspect that we will. it's not going to be without tension. look in the old cold war, whenever the russians showed up in china, the soviet was the top dog there. and the chinese were still an agrarian society. that dynamic been flipped when vladimir putin shows up to xi jinping or when she 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's got the depth. putin needs the chinese more than the chinese need. putin. but putin serves enormously useful role for the chinese, which is the more he keeps, the united states, tied up in ukraine, the more that the east blows up some of it with russian

help, particularly syria, the more united states is incapable of exercising the pivot asia that every president's bill clinton has talked about. and that has never really been fully executed on. so sputnik moment really fascinating chapter and let's go to this because draw you out on specifics you have actual detailed conversations with general heighton referenced in there and this is the issue of the chinese hypersonic missile tests breathe life that chapter. let's share that because it was very i mean that just jumped off the pages. so hiten was the former head of, the unit within the us government or the us military at the time, the supreme command that had that had watched space command. right. it was not yet the us space

force and then it became part of the strategic command. that's right. he ran strategic command, which of course runs nuclear weapons, but also has, you know, a lot of interest in the space assets. and then he became the vice chairman one day sitting in his office, he gets a phone call from the defense department's main operations center, which runs 24 seven deep underneath the pentagon. and they said, sir, we've seen a really unusual chinese launch. and it turned out it a missile launch. he said, well, their missile launches all the time. he says, yeah, but this going in the wrong direction. okay. normally, missiles are launched in direction mostly toward the east. this was going in the reverse and it was because it was the first detailed demonstrate nation of a chinese hypersonic capability that we did not know

existed. they loop all the way. the earth went over. the united states and then basically the hyperspace sonic vehicle managed go station itself in a place where it could then move in erratic pathway, not the easy parabola of intercontinental ballistic missile. and it landed back inside china and the pentagon was stunned. this leaked out laterhe financial times and they wrote the first stories about it. and at that moment. general mills, this what should be a sputnik moment for the united states, in other words, referring to the satellite launch that the soviets had done, you know, back in the fifties and he was saying it should basically bring about a reaction of some kind. i'm not sure it out to be that

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

and they were on the exact same page that you are on now. so at that moment, first of all, what would the policy have been then and then be? would it have been both politically and bureaucratically feasible? so the political hard part here was that one 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't fault them for attempting to build up as good a relationship as possible. but you can't fault them for two things. and this is a bipartisan complaint. i have and i'd be interested in your reaction to it, because you

were in the in the state department at the time, some of this was going on. first, we paid a very serious price for focusing on counterterrorism and the east for 20 years. you remember these days in the state department, if you were going to get as a diplomat, you wouldn't have to spend your time in iraq and afghanistan. that was just i mean, it was the unspoken rule in military. you certainly did, because was the only way you were going to get battle experience. and, you know, thus the the 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 required a completely different set of, of

talents than dealing with the economic rise of china or a revanchist russia that was once again becoming aggressive and willing to risk a full scale war in europe. and so the book argues one of the prices we paid for the counterterrorism wars was a lack of attenti othe area that would become the central challenge to the united states for the half century. and the signals that you out. so my answer would be we ignored the signals. we have been paying attention to the signals. we should have been able to do both. we, quite frankly, over over reached on the if you're going to be a superpower, you've got to be able to go maintain a regional presence and still keep your focus and big competitors. and we've failed at doing both. do you think it was this

chinese, russian? you know alignment? i'm going to use that term, the chinese. the russian alignment. was it inevitable it would happen because historic early they they, as we know, have had tensions. they have they've had a lot of them. and inevitable we'll no likely enough that we had to begin to think about how we would plan against. yes. because now it's probably too late to interrupt in any serious way. so i mentioned before that nixon and kissinger had sort of focused on preventing this by doing the recognize asian to try and china and for nearly a century that that worked out well. i discussed this with kissinger in the last months of his life because i was at work on what the new york times obituary for kissinger, which was a not as long as this book, but felt like it was at various moments

fascinating life. and he was concerned that this this coming together of putin. and she was undoing much of his lifetime work. in. interesting question of whether not the united states could have gotten in the way. i think that president trump would have told you that his trade deal that he pursued so heavily with china would have been a way toward that. actually, don't think it would have. i think the chinese 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 interests that you mentioned? and what worry is we're not debating that in this current

presidential campaign. we are so wrapped up in the the internal of the united states in arguments over social issues. it is black lives matter or abortion. you pick your hot button issue. but, you know, if you go back and, you listen. paul, what to the fun experiment to the nixon kennedy debates from 1960 so turn off the video so you're not focused on looks young and who looks sweaty and you know all that and just listen to the conversation. it's an incredibly level sophisticated conversation about the containment of the union and how you go about doing. and they had two very different approaches. and for another episode, another time, we can argue about whose approach might have been better or worse. can you imagine having that conversation in the current political environment in the united states? you can't. in part of our own divisions, in part because we took a 30 year holiday from strategic

discussion because we didn't think it was at the time that america was the sole power out there. and now suddenly we need to do it and we've kind of lost the skills. so we have to learn how to get back on the bicycle and learn how to ride it again. but 30 years ago, you would say that it was politically feasible, maybe even bureaucratically feasible. i think, yeah, it would have been politically difficult because as we were in the political difficulty is we were some early progress. we negotiated through the nunn-lugar money, the the billions of dollars that went to dismantling of the old soviet nuclear infrastructure so that that fuel was blended down and burned off in nuclear power plants in middle of the country. so people were reading their kids bedside stories at night with under lights, were basically being fueled by old soviet nuclear weapons. that's pretty great.

but we then convinced ourselves that that was going to be uninterrupted path of our future. so the question will xi invade taiwan? that's one of the questions that you actually pose for yourself in the book. will he or won't he? so we spent a lot of mary brooks and i spent a lot of time, an entire for the research on this book. and we spent most of it not with the government, but at taiwan semiconductor, this incredible gem arm that dominates the island and certainly done dominates its economy. taiwan semiconductor is the producer. of 90 to 95% of all the most advanced semiconductors in the world. they're what power? you're the microprocessor processor at the core of your iphone. so if china invades taiwan, don't break your iphone. paula. okay. it's going to be really a long time before you can replace it.

i had the advantage of going to taiwan and actually seeing those very buildings where these chips are made. it's really great. the fabs are amazing, right? but the problem is we have consolidated so much of the world's chip making operations in these highly vulnerable buildings. so the question that we went to taiwan to answer was, is there a silicon field? in other words, since china needs those chips as well as we do, would they not invade taiwan? because cause they couldn't afford to lose taiwan semiconductor and to cut to the chase the conclusion i came to was, 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 has executed quite well. i think a program to deprive the

chinese of the equipment needed to make the most sophisticated chips and to deprive them of the chips themselves that come out of taiwan semiconductor. and that's what xi jinping spends most of his time complaining about. the president, which tells you that they've gotten under his skin with this. i think we bought some time. what i worry about is we're not using it well enough. you know, president biden is around the country every time there is a new semiconductor plant to go dedicated. he was just up at one in upstate new york. he's been to arizona where taiwan semiconductor and intel and others are building in the southwest. my concern is we're not building our capacity fast enough that. we will not have to be reliant on taiwan or china and then another question that you do pose, and this is all cited, will the mistakes that putin made in his invasion of ukraine

prove to be his undoing? leading him to reach into his nuclear arsenal? or will the u.s., you know, short attention span, signal kiev's do so let's take the nuclear arsenal part of this first milley had this great general milley, which was that we are faced with the nuclear paradox that the the russians do in ukraine. the more likely their nuclear use, the better they do. the least likely their nuclear used. and that the high point of the concern that they were going to use nuclear weapons. and i tell story in the book came in october of 2022 when the us picked up intercepts from russian generals who were responsible for moving nuclear around battlefield tactical nuclear weapons and. it was clear that they were discussing moving some of these into ukraine for possible use 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 this sent a panic throughout. the biden administration. it was an evening when biden shows up at the new york townhouse of james murdoch for a fund raiser. some member of the murdoch family. but probably the only democratic fundraiser within the within the murdoch family. and, you know, everybody is milling around, looking at murdoch's spectacular art collection, is thinking to themselves, this is going to be 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've ever been to a nuclear exchange since the cuban missile crisis in 1962, which was six years to the week before that, when when biden was speaking and he went on to describe not intelligence, but the problem that we faced i

think most americans were that we were in the middle of a nuclear crisis. they did get china and india to quietly signal the to the russians to putin that there was no room for nuclear use in this conflict. and after a number of weeks, the crisis. but many who i interviewed think that we were at a sort of 5050 point about nuclear at that moment. that's pretty chilling because here was a nuclear armed country thinking about using a nuclear against a non-nuclear country. we have a few minutes to go. and i just want to ask just a few a very precise question. so what's your core message for this book? summing it up in one minute. the core message for book, paula, is 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 and of russia and china and some of the outsiders who are there that we have not absorbed 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, there is a huge to american polity as there are too many countries, but we have to regain our strategic edge here. and that means thinking about a future in which this of confrontations is the one we're going to have to manage for decades to come. david, congratulations. a hearty congratulaton this fantastic, mean, truly, as i use before the term masterpiece repeated it a masterpiece of reporting, revelations and analysis. it really is an amazing.

david sanger as new cold war's china's rise, russia's invasion and america's struggle to defend the west. it's a terrific, terrific read. thank you for coming today for this interview, david. thank you, paul. great to be with you. thank>> i also want to say thats

wonderful to be here with you all. i