New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

by David E. Sanger

But it was clear in Sullivan’s office that night, as the participants mulled Microsoft’s findings, that a new era had dawned. “There was this assumption in the past,” Neuberger told me later, “that governments had access to perfect information. But today it’s reversed. Companies have all the insight.”

“We were hosting a holiday party for FSB contacts in the Pushkin café,” recalled Kolbe, referring to the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to the feared Soviet KGB. “Had the whole place rented out. It was a liaison party, so we brought in the U.S. declared officers, the U.S. Special Services, the FBI. This would have been in 2004. “It was deep in the night, you know, human wreckage scattered around the place. And I’m standing talking with one of the senior liaison officers, this FSB general. He puts his arm around me, and he goes, ‘Oh, Mr. Kolbe’—and he’s standing there with his, like, aide-de-camp—and he says, ‘Oh, Mr. Kolbe, I’m FSB, you’re CIA. We used to be enemies, but the Cold War is over. Now we’re friends and allies.’ And he’s sort of grinning and teetering. “And the young officer standing with him looks up at him—and he’s boring his eyes into him, just glaring—and he says, ‘General, that’s why my generation hates your generation. Because you lost the Cold War, and we’re going to win it back.’ And it was just awkward. The general goes beet red, and I just sort of snapped back and it was this absolute crystallizing sort of moment that the Russia that we expect, that generational change and exposure to the West is all going to make for something that looks more like Western Europe than what Russia really is—this is not where Russia is going.” It struck Kolbe hard because this wasn’t his first exposure to Russia.

George Kennan, the famed Cold War diplomat, believed the West would come to regret NATO expansionism: “[It] would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era,” he wrote in the late 1990s. “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

In 2022, Sarotte was blunt about the way Russians interpreted NATO’s involvement in Kosovo. It “seemed to convince not just the Russian elite but the broad mass of the Russian public that the point of enlarging NATO was to kill Slavs…. We in the West didn’t really understand how widespread that perception was. American diplomats in Russia at the time sent back flashing red alarms: warnings, emails, texts saying, ‘Whoa, this is really not playing well here.’ This isn’t to say there was no hope afterwards. But you start to have a profound distrust, irreparable damage.”

Putin was the opposite of a communist fanatic. He was a royalist. He didn’t keep a bust of Lenin in his office; he kept one of Peter the Great.

$32 trillion.

Biden went along. “You and I have spent a substantial amount of time together, and that’s fairly rare in modern diplomacy,” he told Xi in Los Angeles a few days later. Biden, by his own estimate, had spent some twenty hours in the previous six months conversing with Xi directly—both in the United States that February and in Beijing and Chengdu the summer before. Those long, private, frank conversations, Biden would say, were the highlight of his trip.

The fate of Crimea, Obama determined, was important but hardly a core U.S. security interest. In public, he sought to downplay both the geopolitical significance and the impact that U.S. involvement would have. “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he later said.

If it was unclear that Biden could change the country’s direction, it was because Trump was more a symptom of what was happening to America than the cause. It was easy to attribute “America First” and the country’s seeming lack of faith in science, its political dysfunction and gridlock, to one man. And the Europeans did that plenty. But deep down, they knew that Trump had been a product of many forces, from American anger about trade, about jobs displaced by technology, about the increasingly glaring evidence of economic disparity—and also by legacies of isolationism and racism and distrust of government agencies and most media. Joe Biden’s election didn’t change any of that.

And the fifth group is what Campbell called the globalist school: those who urged the world to move beyond great power politics and focus on the existential transnational issues like climate change and pandemic prevention. In other words, ignore the traditional great power competition and focus on areas of possible cooperation.

But as events on the ground unraveled and the fragile American-backed Afghan government imploded, the optics were the opposite of what Biden sought. Rather than a principled, competent withdrawal that demonstrated American resolve, it looked to the rest of the world like a hasty, deadly retreat. Not surprisingly, adversaries abroad used the moment opportunistically to make their point that the United States was a pitiful, declining power and a deeply unreliable ally.

But of course, we don’t question our own intentions, while ascribing the worst to adversaries.

The ship had already played a short-lived but memorable part in the early days of the conflict. On February 24, during the initial invasion, the crew of the Moskva famously demanded that a garrison of thirteen border guards on the Ukrainian-owned Snake Island—right at a crucial military and shipping access point to the Black Sea—lay down their arms and surrender. Their response, roughly translated as “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” went viral. Barely six weeks later, the ship was aflame in the same sea it was protecting, hit by a pair of Ukrainian-made Neptune missiles. The photographs that followed were yet another embarrassment to Putin: There was the pride of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, christened after its capital city, burning brightly. In state media, the Russian government claimed the ship had caught fire and sunk in bad weather—an excuse that even some of its own state TV hosts didn’t buy. The death toll remained unknown. The successful attack became the first of many stories about Ukrainian inventiveness and pluck. “People are using the MacGyver metaphor,” observed Ben Hodges, the former United States Army commander for Europe, referring to the popular 1980s TV show in which the lead character constantly improvised to get out of impossible jams. “With the Moskva, they MacGyvered a very effective antiship system that they put on the back of a truck to make it mobile and move it around.” More importantly, the war’s narrative was changing. The Russians had retreat...

But even if that happened, Jake Sullivan was quick to point out, Ukraine would be under constant threat for years, maybe decades—a threat so omnipresent that it would need to be able to deter Russia from another invasion, whenever Putin rebuilt his sorry force. Meeting that challenge would require an increase in aid and support on a scale that NATO, that Congress, and that even the Ukrainians had never thought about before. “When you think about what we provided in 2021, it was more than we had provided ever before,” Sullivan pointed out much later, looking back at the early days of the war. “It was less than a billion dollars.” That amount was tiny compared to the kind of numbers now kicking around the Pentagon. For Ukraine to survive over the long term, its military would need to be completely overhauled. It needed to become like Israel, said one former military official who was now serving in the Biden administration. It would have to go from a force that was dependent on decrepit Soviet-era leftovers to modern, Western arms—all while fighting a brutal war in real time on its own territory. It might not be a member of NATO for a long, long time. But it needed to be armed like one. —

Yet as time went on and they learned what Putin would tolerate—or not—new options seemed to open up. What this often meant, in practice, was that decisions that seemed bold or even risky at the time later seemed far too modest. The day after the war began, Biden signed off on a $350 million aid package that contained mostly short-range defensive weapons systems and ammunition, things like Javelins, Stingers, and rifles. At the time, it seemed like a huge risk. No one knew how Putin would respond. One senior official recalled thinking, “If Russia moved 350 million dollars’ worth of American-troop-killing equipment into Iraq or to the Taliban, would we just lie down and take it?” The question was rhetorical. The answer was obvious. But as the war dragged on, the administration kept testing Putin at each turn, cranking up the heat and then checking in on the psychological state of the frog. Biden often said—in public, and in private to his staff—that he had two goals: to liberate Ukraine and to avoid direct conflict between American and Russian forces. But increasingly, he was finding those goals to be in some tension, particularly as different theories emerged about what Ukraine most needed, and how fast.

Zelensky wanted—he needed—air defenses. F-16 fighter jets, to maintain air supremacy against the far larger Russian Air Force. A no-fly zone. Tanks. Advanced drones. Most important, long-range missile launchers. There was one in particular that the Pentagon, with its penchant for completely unintelligible acronyms, called the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). Zelensky wanted to arm these launchers with one of the crown jewels of the U.S. Army, a missile known as ATACMS that could strike targets nearly two hundred miles away with precision accuracy. That, of course, would give him the capability to fire right into command-and-control centers deep inside Russian territory—exactly Biden’s worst fear. In time, Zelensky added to his list of requests another weapon that raised enormous moral issues: He sought “cluster munitions,” a weapon many of the arms control advocates in the Biden administration had spent decades trying to limit or ban. Cluster bombs are devastating weapons that release scores of tiny bomblets, ripping apart people and personnel carriers and power lines and often mowing through civilians unlucky enough to be living in the area where they are dropped. Worse yet, unexploded bomblets can remain on the ground for years; from past American battlefields—from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq—there were stories of children killed or maimed after picking one up years later. Blinken told colleagues he had spent much of his professional life getting weapo...

To some degree, though, the tension was inevitable. Biden’s national interests—and his global responsibilities—ran headlong into Zelensky’s urgent need to survive another day, another month, another year. Biden feared feeding Putin’s narrative—or his paranoia—but Zelensky saw it differently. As that shell fragment near Zelensky’s residence made clear, Putin was out to kill him and eradicate his country. Zelensky was in a war for the survival of his nation, a war he would never win if Putin could fire on Ukraine from Russian territory and he could not fire back. Biden’s preoccupation was avoiding escalation.

same difference with Israel

Soon, the problems of depleted stockpiles and slow production reached well beyond Ukraine. In the summer of 2022, the CIA was circulating an analysis that China could be moving up the target date for attacking Taiwan out of fear that the United States would move quickly to bolster its defenses. The reality was that the United States was so stressed keeping up with Ukraine’s demands and commitments to other allies, like Saudi Arabia, that it couldn’t supply Taiwan with everything it needed. And Biden knew that the American support for Ukraine could begin to erode. He was already facing a tricky political situation at home, with voters understandably more focused on gas prices and inflation.

Over the next year, a pattern emerged. Ukraine’s request for a specific type of arms would at first get a frosty reception in Washington, perhaps an outright no, a one-word answer Biden delivered himself to reporters who asked about sending the F-16s, which could strike Moscow. After saying absolutely not, the Biden White House would then say it was “studying” each request, trying to line up Ukraine’s capabilities with weapons that could do the job. Situation Room meetings would be devoted to the question of whether a specific weapon was truly “escalatory.” Leaks to the press assured that the debate played out in public, creating new pressures. And then, as Biden discovered that Russia’s “red lines” were not as bright as first feared, he would relent, noting that Ukraine’s defense demands had changed—from defending Kyiv to defending vast sections of Ukraine’s industrial east. Eventually, a commitment to deliver weapons previously off-limits would follow. At one point, Zelensky’s representatives argued that the cycle from “no” to “studying it” to “yes” was so well trod that the United States could save itself a lot of time and money by just saying yes from the get-go—or at least begin training Ukrainians on how to fly an F-16 or drive an Abrams tank months before actually agreeing to send the weapons. It would save time, the advisor said to me, “and maybe scare the shit out of the Russians.”

démarche,

In the shock of the invasion, it was a bit lost on the world what a remarkable, dangerous change was under way. Not only was the leader of one of the original nuclear powers threatening to use his arsenal, he was threatening to use it against a non-nuclear state. In fact, he was threatening to use it against a state that had given up the nuclear weapons on its territory nearly thirty years before and turned the missiles over to Moscow in accordance with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine thought that in return, it was receiving an assurance of protection. Instead, it got a threat of annihilation.

Elihu Root did, one of his aides noted later, shaking his head, referring to Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of state, who had, in 1917, traveled to Russia in an effort to open up relations with the Bolsheviks.

As the summer of 2023 faded, it seemed that Prigozhin was not the only one who had miscalculated. All three superpowers—Russia, China, and the United States—appeared less focused on competing with each other than on managing fractures within. Putin might have vanquished his biggest challenger, but he couldn’t hide the substantial casualty count—estimated by U.S. intelligence at over 300,000, including 120,000 deaths—in a war that was supposed to last a matter of days. The Chinese were in a deep malaise, having emerged from the darkest days of COVID only to discover that the days of hypergrowth appeared to be over—and that Xi’s focus on security had come at a considerable economic cost. The United States found itself more divided than ever, with more than a quarter of voters telling pollsters that they thought political violence might be the best way to save what they cherished most about the country. And even the Ukrainians, while happy to have survived a near-death experience, were coming to realize that the West was not rushing to let them into NATO—and that the possibility of abandonment might be real.

The overarching lesson, perhaps, was that none of the three major powers had as much influence and control—over their own populations, their neighbors, or the world order—as they thought. At moments, it seemed like superpower competition intersected with superpower unraveling.