David E. Sanger > Quotes

“We are in a strange world,' one senior Israeli official said to me, 'where the defense minister and to a lesser degree the prime minister are focused intently on the military option, and the intelligence services and the military, with some exceptions, are deeply doubtful.”
― David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power

“China's internal divisions have made it far harder to strike the kind of deals that made it possible for the two countries to open up diplomatic relations decades ago or get China entry into the World Trade Organization. If Nixon were going to open China today, the Interior Ministry would probably get into an argument with the Chinese president's office about whether to let Air Force One land, and then demand the plane's antimissile technology as the price for refueling”
― David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power

“Yet as one senior administration official noted to me, 'People who blithely say that we'd win a trade war because China obviously couldn't sustain the damage caused by cutting off their goods are just naive and silly.' Any significant trade restrictions the United States imposed on China would swiftly lead to an equally harmful retaliation on the United States. That is why the most effective lobbyists against tariffs on Chinese goods are American companies that buy from China, do business in China, or have ventures with Chinese firms. So as Obama's outburst [of 'I need leverage!' to staff on a visit to Asia in 2011] underscored, the form of leverage threatened most often by Washington politicians looking for an easy applause line actually offers little leverage at all.”
― David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power

“I mean, there are two kinds of big companies in the United States. There are those who’ve been hacked by the Chinese and those who don’t know they’ve been hacked by the Chinese. —James Comey, then FBI director, October 5, 2014”
― David E. Sanger, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

“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

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

“But of course, we don’t question our own intentions, while ascribing the worst to adversaries.”
― David E. Sanger, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

“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 retreated from Kyiv. They had lost their warship. For the first time it looked like Ukraine might survive. There was even talk about Ukraine winning—if you defined winning as forcing Russia to retreat back to its own borders, the borders that existed prior to February 24, 2022.”
― 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: “[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.”
― 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

“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.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“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.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― 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

“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.”
― 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

“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

“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