New Cold Wars Quotes

“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.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Clearly, the “peace dividend” that dominated Washington rhetoric after the end of the Cold War—taking the money spent on the military and moving it to projects at home—is long gone. (Thanks to Afghanistan and Iraq, the dividend never paid out.) The money we hoped to spend on improving the climate, or education, or ending income inequality will get sucked into bolstering our forces in Europe, even as we “pivot” to concentrate more firepower in the Pacific.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“All of this was an important reminder that America’s adversaries were not ten feet tall. They had weaknesses, just as the United States does, though ours are often on more vivid display.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“was with Bill Clinton at Beijing University in 1998 when he told students that the internet would undercut the Communist Party by exposing young Chinese to democratic ideals and the corruption of the Chinese system and lay the groundwork for democratic rejuvenation.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Now the price of that distraction was clear to all. The man who had defeated virtually all opponents over the years by campaigning as the one leader who kept Israelis safe had clearly misread the threat gathering on Israel’s southern border. Netanyahu”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Biden and many of his aides were convinced it was also the result of the hubris of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the extremism of the right-wing coalition that he had assembled to cling to power.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Now he was declaring that Israel’s government had failed at its most basic task because “its intelligence and military institutions were unable to keep citizens safe.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“The Israel Defense Force was pitifully slow to respond. “On that fateful day, the country’s long-standing security doctrine crumbled in the face of a perfect storm,” wrote Amos Yadlin, the country’s former military intelligence chief, and Udi Evental, a retired colonel in the Israel Defense Force.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“In an instant, almost everything the world had come to take for granted about the omnipotence and competence of Israel’s security institutions seemed wrong.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Even as Sullivan’s essay was coming off the printing presses, thousands of militants from the Iran-backed terror group Hamas broke out from the Gaza Strip—the tiny, impoverished, occupied Palestinian enclave on the southern coast of Israel—in a long-planned attack that resulted in the bloodiest day for the world’s Jews since the Holocaust.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Ukraine’s future is in NATO”—without saying how or when.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“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.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“the Chinese appeared happy to keep supplying both sides and keep the war going.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“In a December 2022 column for The Washington Post, David Ignatius described this as the “wizard war,” suggesting it was “a big reason David is beating Goliath” on the eastern plains of Ukraine.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“And, of course, they drew on their remarkable collaboration with the CIA, which, for years before the invasion, had been training Ukrainian operatives, including in the United States, in tradecraft and providing them with equipment. That investment proved critical once the war began, although the United States steered clear of the targeted killings of Russians that Ukraine was carrying out.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“At the outbreak of the war, the Ukrainian military leadership might have been taken aback by the American capabilities. But their surprise didn’t last long. Even before the invasion, Ukraine was known as one of the most tech-savvy nations in Eastern Europe.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Maybe, one leading Taiwanese legislator told me, “China is just a paper tiger.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“the great Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“the People’s Liberation Army was installing lasers designed to blind the optical sensors on American spy satellites.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“the United States was still trapped in the midst of a pandemic that had killed more Americans than World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined—and that would, inevitably, kill tens of thousands more.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“JANUARY 6 WAS an embarrassment for the United States and a stain on the country’s democratic ideals.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“As one senior official said to me when The New York Times was about to reveal one such operation, “we try not to trouble the president with too many details” about what the United States was doing to counter Russia. In short, they acted as if they had a Russian stooge—a “useful idiot”—presiding over the United States government.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“IN THE TRUMP YEARS, America’s capability to shape the world shrank.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Indeed, at times we have the impression that U.S. policy was so successful that many American officials have now concluded that our region is fixed once and for all…. That view is premature,” they warned. “Russia is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods.” It was published in mid-2009—and would prove entirely prophetic.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“George Kennan, the famed Cold War diplomat, believed the West would come to regret NATO expansionism:”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Mary Elise Sarotte,”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Biden laid out two goals, in tension with each other: Do everything you can to help Ukraine, and don’t get sucked into World War III.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“Milley had put his finger on one of the most unsettling features of the new geopolitical era: It is part 1914, part 1941, and part 2022. All at once.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“when Google and others turned to the U.S. government as well—it wasn’t simply to notify the authorities. It was to coordinate the rollout of protections and defenses, starting with moving the operations of the Ukraine government to the cloud so that Russia could not take out the government by bombing Ukraine’s servers.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West