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

by David E. Sanger

fast-rising one—would integrate themselves into the West in their own ways. Each, it was argued, had an overwhelming national interest in keeping its products, profits, and financial interactions flowing, even with geopolitical adversaries. Economics would ultimately trump nationalism and territorial ambition.

Zhu was “an enormously impressive man,” Rubin recalled with some nostalgia. He and Zhu had grown close because of Zhu’s single-minded determination to move China from a state-run economy dominated by overstaffed and inefficient state-owned firms to a market economy more in line with the West. The two made an odd couple: the communist preaching capitalism-with-Chinese-characteristics and the former Goldman banker trying to coax China into adopting Western rules. Zhu talked of market reforms and capital flows so easily that Rubin joked with him that if it weren’t for America’s constitutional restrictions “what he ought to do was leave China and come to the United States and run for president.”

That narrative fit Washington’s global agenda so perfectly that few questioned the underlying logic. And so Washington—willfully—began to see every bit of progress in China through this lens and every setback as a brief deviation from Beijing’s inevitable destiny. Over the next two decades Washington assumed China’s economic interests would overwhelm its other national objectives. For years, until they could no longer ignore what was occurring in plain sight, Republican and Democratic presidents publicly played down the mounting evidence that China had territorial ambitions that stretched throughout the Pacific, that its use of cyber tools to steal both industrial and state secrets was designed to serve a broader national agenda, and that its growing economic power would foster a commensurate desire for political influence—as it did for every other rising power across history. Some of this misreading was encouraged by the Chinese leadership, who talked about the need to “hide one’s strength and bide one’s time,” but few asked many questions about what would happen when China moved to the next phase.

But the far larger problem arose from China’s accelerating theft of Western technology, a systematized, frequently government-commanded campaign to acquire intellectual property and know-how in any way that worked. Sometimes that meant entering a joint venture with a company, then stealing the inventions and manufacturing processes of its partners. One of the most famous campaigns began in 2010 when China’s largest airplane manufacturer collaborated with GE Aviation to produce a new jet engine for the Chinese market. Within a few years the Chinese manufacturer had penetrated the company’s suppliers, had stolen their designs, and was busy making component parts without them.

Increasingly, China relied on a sweeping array of cyber exploitation campaigns to siphon key commercial and national security data to Beijing. Nothing was off-limits: Reams of details on American naval warship capabilities and nuclear test data were collected side by side with the trade secrets of General Motors, DuPont Chemical, and Boeing. In one of the worst instances, Chinese hackers broke into the defense contractor Lockheed Martin and stole the plans for the Pentagon’s cutting-edge new joint strike fighter, the F-35. The Chinese air force decided to test-fly the plane just as Robert Gates, the American defense secretary under Bush and Obama, was visiting the country.

They hunted down nearly two dozen of the agency’s sources, executing some of them—including one whom my Times colleagues reported had been “shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building” to send a message to others who might have thought about being useful to the Americans. It was both a human tragedy and a huge setback for the CIA, forcing the agency to spend years rebuilding its assets in China and setting off a hunt inside the agency to determine whether an insider had betrayed the spies. The dismantling of the human intelligence network was kept secret in both Beijing and Washington, not surprisingly, until word of the damage it did leaked out years later.

Subtler efforts were aimed well beyond China’s shores—most notably, the 2013 announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative: a state-subsidized effort to bring countries from Africa to the Pacific Islands into China’s orbit by building their ports, hospitals, schools, and stadiums. It was often a package deal, one that threw in 5G networks built by Huawei and other Chinese manufacturers, giving Beijing control over a nation’s communications. At first the Obama administration dismissed Belt and Road as “a silly combination of existing programs, nothing more,” Barshefsky recalled. Then, realizing it was part of a larger plan, the United States belatedly raced to catch up. But the American plans came with human rights requirements and demands for financial transparency. Autocrats were happy to stick with China’s aid program.

Some of the activity was happening in the American heartland. Officials watched with suspicion as China bought up parcels of American farmland and the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei offered remarkably cheap bids to build the 3G and 4G networks of rural telecom carriers located around the country’s nuclear missile silos. But much of it was taking place on a national scale. When the FBI discovered a Chinese police ring in 2015 operating secretly in the United States to target “fugitives”—often Chinese dissidents—the Obama administration quietly told Beijing it had to shut down the illicit “police stations.” After Unit 61398, a hacking operation run by the People’s Liberation Army, was caught in a broad campaign of stealing corporate secrets for the benefit of Chinese companies, the Chinese military officers who led the effort were indicted in the United States.

And in 2015, the Ministry of State Security was discovered to be the mastermind behind the theft of the digital security clearance files of 22 million federal employees and their families—part of a broader campaign by China to understand every detail and vulnerability of the American elite. For many in the national security apparatus, it seemed like a breaking point. After all, what the Chinese had stolen was their personal information, down to medical and financial histories, and details about children and past relationships.

The CEOs were chiefly worried about their long-term competitiveness. But the security implications were obvious: A China that dominated the creation and production of semiconductors—the foundational technology at the core of every computer, car, refrigerator, or fighter jet—would exercise untenable influence over the global supply chain. Given China’s growing hostility, that wasn’t a world the United States wanted to see.

Yet there was little appetite, particularly beyond Ukraine, for making Putin pay a heavy price for the invasion. The United States was in no mood to tangle with Putin over a piece of territory that had changed hands—and governments—several times over the previous few centuries. The Germans had made clear that they did not want to endanger their gas supplies or their broader relationship with Moscow. The rest of Europe was divided, and there was considerable wariness over Ukraine’s well-deserved reputation for corruption. Now that Putin held Crimea, the Europeans argued, he wouldn’t go beyond the Russian-speaking part of the Donbas—Ukraine was too big to swallow, and a full invasion was too risky for Russia’s economic future. The argument assumed that Putin was driven by the same economic logic that was guiding European leaders: in short, projecting European and American thinking onto an authoritarian regime that Bill Burns argued was sustained largely by “high energy prices and wounded pride.” And it ignored when he had signaled his intention, at Munich in 2007 and after. There was one more miscalculation in the mix, and it was Putin’s. He got away with taking a piece of Ukraine in 2014. Why couldn’t he get away with taking all of it in 2022?

VLADIMIR PUTIN’S ROAD to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was not a straight line. But once the invasion was a reality, the most introspective of American officials looked back at the signals they had missed as the relationship between Russia and the West began to come apart. Most concluded that the United States had made a series of bad assumptions about how far Putin would pursue his ambitions. In retrospect, they blamed themselves—and the Europeans—for not pushing back faster and harder against the episodic acceleration of Putin’s aggressions, particularly the annexation of Crimea.

seven to eight years Putin ended up trying to seize or otherwise bring to heel another part of the old Russian empire. Chechnya in 1999–2000, Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and then all of Ukraine in 2022.

Ukraine, of course, was an internationally recognized and independent state with a seat at the United Nations. But the links between the two countries certainly were complex: Millions of Ukrainians had Russian relatives, and both Russian and Ukrainian were widely spoken in Ukraine. The country’s famously fertile wheat fields had sustained both tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union—at least, until Joseph Stalin’s policies created a horrific famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor, that killed roughly 10 percent of the population.

Then Russian forces took a step that forced Europe to respond—and revealed Putin’s recklessness. On July 17, 2014, a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet carrying nearly three hundred civilians was shot down over southern Ukraine. It quickly became clear that it had been taken down with a Russian-designed missile by pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine, who later claimed they had mistaken it for military aircraft. Ultimately, Dutch investigators found that the weapons transfer to the rebels had likely been authorized by Putin himself.

In June 2015, Royal Dutch Shell and a handful of other Western European oil and gas producers announced a new agreement with the Russian energy giant Gazprom, a new $10 billion–plus pipeline project called Nord Stream 2 that would run nearly eight hundred miles from Russia to Germany along the bottom of the Baltic Sea. It would parallel Nord Stream 1, the pipeline that had been supplying Europe’s biggest economy with much-needed energy since 2011. The billions Russia would reap in revenues every year would dwarf the cost of the sanctions it had endured since the Crimea land grab.

Not surprisingly, Ukraine immediately objected, realizing that one of Putin’s goals was to route more gas around Ukraine, depriving the country of the transit fees it was accustomed to receiving for Russian gas imported by Europe through the old Soviet-era pipelines. But a new pipeline would do more than deprive Ukraine of up to $3 billion a year; it would also deprive it of the potential power that comes from the ability to shut off exports from Russia in the event of a confrontation—or a war—with Moscow. “Nord Stream 2 is a political bribe for loyalty to Russia, imposing an economic and energy blockade on Ukraine, which will hurt us greatly,” President Poroshenko warned the Germans. Röttgen concurred. “Nord Stream 2, from the start and by conception, was constructed as a political weapon by Russia against Ukraine,” he told me years later.

Following the remarkable victory of free nations in the Cold War, America emerged as the lone superpower with enormous advantages and momentum in the world. Success, however, bred complacency. A belief emerged, among many, that American power would be unchallenged and self-sustaining. The United States began to drift. We experienced a crisis of confidence and surrendered our advantages in key areas. As we took our political, economic, and military advantages for granted, other actors steadily implemented

their long-term plans to challenge America and to advance agendas opposed to the United States, our allies, and our partners.

As for McMaster, he argued that it was more important to pay attention to what Trump did, not what he said. “We imposed more sanctions on Russia in the first four months of the Trump administration than the entire eight years of the Obama administration,” he insisted. What was more, he said, Trump sold Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine when Obama had not. (That was true but oversold: the 210 missiles sent in 2018 had to remain boxed in storage facilities far from the front line to serve as a symbolic “strategic deterrent.”)

Tom Bossert, the homeland security advisor—were quickly fired, or their positions dissolved entirely. When he developed new policies, he deliberately brought them to be signed by Trump when the president was watching television in the small dining room off the Oval Office. He knew the president didn’t read much of what was put before him—especially if it competed with TV time.

Bolton entered the White House, one of his top goals was to transform the way America dealt with the breadth of the China problem—its coercive use of trade deals around the world and its challenge to America in space, in cyberspace, and in the Pacific. After railing for decades that politicians and policymakers were getting China wrong, Bolton saw this as his moment to get tough on Beijing across the board. “I had huge ideas about how to change China policy,” Bolton recalled, but what he quickly discovered was that he was working for a president whose interest in China started and ended with trade deficits and who would not sit still for discussion of much else.

joined the Marines after 9/11, serving one tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan—experiences that made him acutely aware of the limits of American power. Inside the Trump White House, he was among the first to raise the alarm about COVID when it was still primarily a Chinese phenomenon. Trump famously mocked him for wearing a mask early in the pandemic.

Pottinger’s office quickly became known as the place where the puzzle pieces of China’s actions were collected and interpreted. And the pieces were many. When Trump came to office in 2017, satellite photographs were already circulating showing new runways, fighter jets, and missile emplacements on remote Chinese islands in the South China Sea—the place that Xi had promised, during a 2015 visit to the White House, never to militarize. Reports from the Middle East and Southeast Asia detailed new Chinese efforts to build ports that seemed likely to have military uses. Even more concerning were indications that NATO countries—notably Italy—were preparing to sign on with Chinese telecommunications manufacturers to build the latest generation of cellular networks, with no apparent concern about the potential security implications.

At the end of the night, Krach told me, he laid it out for the executives: “We all believe in the free market. But when somebody doesn’t play by the rules, the market is no longer free,” he said. “If I can buy your companies but you can’t buy mine…I get access to your data but you get none of mine…and if I don’t have to obey the law or I am the law: I am going to beat you every time.” The only solution, he argued, was to band together—U.S. government and private sector alike—to protect themselves. Over the next year, Krach and other members of the administration spun out a series of new initiatives that—though no one could have known it at the time—would become the core of Biden’s approach to China a year later.

there was a program to maintain “clean networks”—an effort to block a range of Chinese-made technologies from the digital systems of American allies. It centered on a diplomatic approach to bringing allies together around a single strategy, a vast improvement over Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s disastrous first efforts, which involved threatening allies with a cutoff of U.S. intelligence if they struck deals with companies like Huawei.

third element of Krach’s plan was a far more severe crackdown on Huawei itself. The Chinese company had easily circumvented the Trump administration’s first, ill-executed efforts to choke off the computer chips that the company needed to produce cellphones and network equipment. Huawei was able to buy almost all of what it needed from other countries. By the end of the administration, the Trump team had gotten smarter, expanding an obscure Commerce Department rule to require that any microelectronic component based on U.S. technology could be subject to American export controls—even if it was manufactured abroad and never entered the United States. This became a powerful tool in the American arsenal, and over the next few years it devastated Huawei’s revenues.

The ironic result was that a handful of Trump’s aides laid the foundation for one of the signature efforts of the Biden administration. (Biden adopted much the same approach on two other major Trump-era initiatives: the Abraham Accords in the Middle East and Operation Warp Speed, the effort to develop COVID vaccines.) In 2022, Kurt Campbell, Biden’s Asia coordinator, personally credited Krach’s efforts for creating a foundation for Biden’s team to build on. The initiatives Krach and his team introduced during their final year in office “have been followed on in this administration,” Campbell said, “and, in many respects, that’s the highest tribute.”

In fact, Trump had two obsessions about Ukraine. The first, which he started pushing in April 2017, was that it was the Ukrainian government and not Putin’s Russia that had sought to manipulate the 2016 American presidential campaign—and that there was proof on a computer server belonging to the Democratic National Committee. The problem, he claimed, was that the FBI was being kept from investigating the server, which he alleged had been spirited out of the United States and taken to Ukraine by Crowdstrike, which he called a shady Ukrainian cybersecurity company.

American intelligence agencies had concluded in 2017 that Russia, and Russia alone, was to blame—and the Republican-controlled Senate committee had agreed.

this, of course, led to Trump’s first impeachment. Zelensky found himself caught in the midst of a pitched partisan battle in the United States—exactly where he did not want to be. In the impeachment hearings and the trial that followed, it was clear that Trump had sought to extort a foreign leader for his own reelection purposes. In a verdict that was entirely predictable, the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump on what was a purely party-line vote in February 2020; among Republicans, only Senator Mitt Romney of Utah crossed party lines to vote to convict Trump of abuse of his presidential power.

Yet at the White House, the Trump administration was spending its final weeks in office pretending nothing of significance was happening. Trump knew the SolarWinds hack was the work of the Russians, of course—every intelligence briefing on the subject made that clear. Yet because of his long-running unwillingness to confront Putin or his singular focus on denying Biden the election he clearly had won, or some other factor we can only guess at, Trump was doing nothing about it. He blew up at his briefers one day, claiming they had no way of knowing that Putin was behind the SolarWinds hack. Then he tweeted out that maybe it was the Chinese. “The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality,” he tweeted. “I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control.”

Tellingly, though, American intelligence officials quickly noticed that the Russians and the Chinese exploited the moment differently. The Russians took the imagery of the mayhem and broadcast it around the world in an effort to undercut the American brand and heighten American embarrassment. In contrast, the Chinese broadcast the imagery mostly at home, in an effort to undercut the lectures from American presidents during visits to Beijing. The implication was clear: The American model would undo all the progress that China had made over decades to modernize its economy, elevate its populace from poverty, and unify its people ideologically.

“Chinese-style democracy,” he said through a translator, was clearly superior to America’s—just look at what had happened at Washington’s own vaunted Capitol just a few weeks earlier. And Blinken and Sullivan must surely know, he said, that America was a bundle of quivering contradictions, something the Chinese had often talked about in their own press but had rarely flung in the faces of U.S. officials.

“They wanted everyone to know,” one American participant told me, “that China wasn’t going to ‘eat its bitterness.’

Biden wasn’t the only one taken aback by the intelligence briefings that he received about China during the transition. So were many of the returnees from the Obama administration, who had been out of the intelligence stream for four years and saw how much had changed—almost all of it pointing toward a comprehensive plan by Xi’s government to challenge American interests across the globe.

we left in 2017, China was largely still a regional player,” one of those officials told me. “When we came back, it was global.” There was an intelligence-gathering base in Cuba, ninety miles from the shores of Florida, where China was improving its ability to collect data on the United States—less worrisome in the cyber age than it was back when the Russians were building bases in the runup to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but worrisome nonetheless. Strange surveillance balloons were showing up around Hawaii and other key strategic areas—a cheap, innovative way to tap into American communications and learn details that couldn’t be obtained by satellite. There were silos appearing on Chinese territory, signs of a potential expansion of its nuclear program, and evidence of preparations for a nuclear test, the first in decades, at the old testing ground at Lop Nor.

The Biden administration ran into one of those Chinese groups, called “Hafnium,” in its first few weeks. Hafnium installed back-door access on tens of thousands of corporate computer systems, many of them run by defense contractors. It was, as one official put it to me in those first weeks of the new administration, “a sort of welcome note.”

To build consensus and a rationale for change, Campbell set up what he later termed a “listening tour,” going country to country to hear out the fears surrounding China’s behavior. The list was long. Publicly, the Australians complained about economic coercion and retaliation. India detailed skirmishes on its border with China. The Philippines and Taiwan worried about the militarization of the South China Sea: Satellite photographs made clear that the islands that Xi promised would never be militarized were now air bases for fighter jets, visible wingtip-to-wingtip on the “reclaimed” islands. Even the Germans—who were mostly interested in selling luxury BMWs and Mercedes in the Chinese market—had begun thinking about China as a strategic problem.

second tactic was to rebuild at home. To Biden, that meant deep investment in America and the reinvigoration of its domestic economy. Biden said that his vision of competition and survival was very different from Trump’s “America First.” It certainly didn’t include the go-it-alone approach, isolationism, or the air of xenophobia that had permeated Trump’s term. But Biden’s approach shared with Trump’s a conviction that the only way to counter China was by building up capabilities in the United States that had gone fallow. Both men seemed fine with tariffs. (While Trump visited coal mines, though, Biden spent his time attending groundbreaking ceremonies for semiconductor plants.)

The administration’s third tactic was the most novel: an effort to cut China off from the American technologies it was using to fuel its military and intelligence services. In the Trump years, the Department of Justice had begun to aggressively investigate Chinese researchers and students in the United States, looking for signs that they were exploiting the openness of American universities to funnel technology to China. The Biden approach was more targeted: His Commerce Department began to draw up lists of products that would no longer be exported to Beijing—and to limit sensitive technologies, especially in communications, that China would be permitted to sell in the United States. To Biden and his aides, this recalibration was long overdue. The Chinese saw it differently: Xi would later label it “containment, encirclement, and suppression.”

Biden had come to much the same conclusion. Even as Colonial Pipeline was struggling to bring its systems back online and get fuel flowing, he told his advisors to think about how to use the incident as leverage to force Putin to crack down on the near-constant stream of ransomware attacks on the United States. While there was no evidence Putin had had anything to do with the disruption, his government harbored DarkSide and other ransomware gangs: tolerating their attacks as long as they were focused on the West and not on Russia or its immediate neighbors and, occasionally, tapping their expertise for the government’s own ends.

What this meant, she said, was “stop waiting for [the Russians] to move and then react. Try to create the environment in which we want to live,” she told me in late 2021. Yes, there was lots of room to work with Russia on issues like climate change and nonproliferation and Iran—all areas where Putin had cooperated before. But Nuland believed that Putin respected only a show of strength, and that meant “being absolutely firm in strengthening our deterrent and the deterrent of our allies against malign influence and aggressive behavior by Russia.”

IT WAS LATE March 2021, recalled Jake Sullivan, when “we began to see indications of a massive Russian military buildup around Ukraine: the movement of thousands of troops, of tanks, of personnel carriers—armored personnel carriers—and of other sophisticated, advanced weaponry.” No one was quite sure how to read the situation. Putin clearly knew that American satellites would pick up the armored personnel carriers, the missile launchers, and the tent encampments. Troop numbers were increasing every week. None of the buildup was designed to be subtle.

Biden handed Putin a list of what he considered off-limits: the sixteen sectors that the United States Department of Homeland Security designates as “critical infrastructure.” These, he warned Putin, were America’s red lines. He should know that if he crossed them—if he messed with the infrastructure that held the country together, as the ransomware actors had done with Colonial Pipeline, followed in the weeks after by an attack that disrupted one-fifth of the United States’ meat-processing capacity—the price would be high. He was not specific.

— JUST TWO AND A HALF weeks after the Geneva summit came the moment of truth: A Russian-speaking ransomware group called REvil that used similar techniques to those of DarkSide struck. This time the group had gained access to a software company named Kaseya that served, indirectly, thousands of small businesses around the world. The damage from this REvil attack was limited, in part because Kaseya was able to get hold of a decryption key and shared it widely. But REvil was clearly emboldened—it was now responsible for a quarter of all the ransomware attacks emanating from Russian soil toward the West.

But, she admitted, there was nothing in their analysis—or imagination—that suggested Putin was readying himself to launch the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. “There was a real concern before the Geneva summit,” Haines later told me, that the Russians might use their military to force Ukraine to concede parts of the Donbas, near the Russian border. “At that time, the most significant and aggressive move we could imagine was an incursion into eastern Ukraine.”

Biden was well aware that just about every intelligence analyst, regional expert, and military general on his staff believed that Afghanistan wouldn’t be able to stand on its own for long. In January 2021 the Pentagon’s special inspector general for Afghanistan issued a classified report with a warning to the new president: When the Americans left, the Afghan air force would collapse. It wasn’t an issue of flying the planes: He noted that without American contractors to service and maintain the equipment, the Afghan air force simply couldn’t stay in the sky very long.

Burns left, fairly confident that Baradar “understood the message that I was delivering.” But no sooner had he returned to the United States than his worst fear came true. Just before 1 p.m. local time on August 26, the Pentagon received an intelligence warning that an ISIS attack would be launched that day—likely within the hour. In preparation, stretchers and emergency vehicles were set up to accommodate a mass casualty event. For the rest of the afternoon, nothing happened. The Marines continued to process evacuees. But at approximately 6 p.m. in Kabul, an Islamic State militant named Abdul Rahman al-Logari, who had escaped from prison during the chaos of the Taliban takeover, loaded himself up with twenty-five pounds of explosives, wrapped in ball bearings and other shrapnel, and detonated it in the packed crowds outside Abbey Gate.

More than 150 civilians and 13 American troops were killed, and hundreds more were injured. Over the next few days, the U.S. military launched two air strikes against targets they believed might be planning additional attacks on the ground while U.S. soldiers continued to process the evacuations. One of the strikes hit a car with three suspected ISIS collaborators. The second hit a suspected terrorist who was driving around the city in what the Pentagon thought was an effort to gather materials for an attack. They had it completely wrong. Their “terrorist” was an aid worker gathering water and other supplies for his family and neighbors. But before anyone could figure that out, a drone strike was unleashed, killing the aid worker, two other adults, and seven children. For days, General Milley and the Pentagon insisted it was a “righteous strike” against a terrorist target—even though, seconds after the missile was shot but before it hit the target, the CIA warned the Department of Defense that children had been present.