Leslie H. Gelb Memorial Event: Common Sense and Strategy in Foreign Policy

David E. Sanger discusses U.S. rivalry with the other two great nuclear powers—Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia—the choices that lie ahead, and what is at stake for the United States and the world.

This special event is being held to honor the memory of Leslie H. Gelb, CFR’s president from 1993 to 2003 and a dedicated member for forty-six years. Gelb modernized the institution to reflect the changing realities of the post-Cold War era, and was a passionate advocate of common sense and strategy in U.S. foreign policy.

FROMAN: Good evening, everybody. Welcome. My name is Mike Froman. I’m president of the Council, and it’s a really great honor and pleasure to convene tonight’s meeting, the Leslie H. Gelb Memorial Event: Common Sense and Strategy in Foreign Policy. 

Les’ biography I think is known to all of you, so I won’t go through it in any in any detail. But I did want to talk a little bit about his legacy here at the Council and three things came to mind.  

First, the Term Member Program. He was very much devoted to helping to identify and develop the next generation of foreign policy experts, and looking around the room I think many of us came into the Council under Les’ tutelage. He really recruited a lot of us. He put his arms around us. He tortured us. (Laughter.)  

You know, I think Jake said it—Jake Sullivan was here for his memorial service, I remember, and said he wasn’t a mentor. He was a tormentor—(laughter)—and I think that’s absolutely, absolutely right. But I continue to run into people whose experience with the Council really began with Les and that—and through the Term Member Program in particular. 

And I remember, you know, he would just come and yell at us about, you guys aren’t doing enough for your generation. You need to get yourself organized. You need to do more. And I remember late in his life I went to his apartment to see him. His eyes were already failing quite a bit and he was lecturing me again about how we’re not doing enough. I said, Les, I’m fifty years old—you’re talking to the wrong generation. Like, you know, it’s time to talk to the thirty-year-olds. But he couldn’t—he didn’t see that.  

The second piece that was, I thought, noteworthy, one of the many noteworthy things about his legacy here, was he was really among the first to understand and push for the convergence of economics and foreign policy and the creation of the geoeconomics center and really understanding just how important international economics and domestic economic policy were to America’s ability to operate in the world and that’s something, obviously, we’re continuing and ramping up further today.  

And then the third, which relates to that, is his focus on power, which was the subject of his last—I believe it was his last book, Power, and all the elements of power, how states operated, what goes into the notion of power and just how important it was to look not just at military capacity but also diplomacy and very much economics.  

And it’s in that context that I think there’s no better person to do this lecture today than David Sanger who’s recently come out with a new book, which you can, by the way, happen— coincidentally buy in the back of the room, New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West.  

David’s biography is also well known to all of you but he was a colleague of Les’ at the New York Times. He is, of course, the White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times. He’s been part of, I believe, three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes including the most latest on Russia’s role in the 2016 election, and the author of four books including the one that we were just talking about today.  

David is going to come up and talk for twelve minutes and then we’ll have a conversation and open it up for questions from the audience. 

David Sanger? (Applause.) 

SANGER: Well, thank you, Mike, and thank you all for coming here today. It’s really terrific to see so many friends in the audience and so many members of the Council. And, Mike, thank you, really, for your remarkable first year as president of the Council where I think you’ve built so well on the legacy that Les Gelb and Richard Haass left over these past two decades. 

I’m regularly astounded at the talent you have assembled here and in the Washington office where I am coming in now a little bit more often, and the new ways that you and your colleagues are thinking about addressing what I think is probably safe to say the most challenging national security environment the United States has faced in seventy or eighty years.  

And it’s a particular honor to be asked to give this talk in Les’ memory. I’m delighted that Judy is here. Judy, where are you? There you are, right there. Thank you very much for coming. (Applause.) And Caroline and Alison, their families, to Les I think your presence would have really made all the difference here.  

It took us a few years, thanks to COVID, to get this lecture series going but I think it’s now one of the Council’s newest and best traditions, talking about common sense solutions to national security issues. It was chosen carefully because this was one of Les’ great clarion calls, which is thank you for that nice theory—I’d be interested in something that actually works.  

In fact, you can’t work in the national security side of the Washington bureau of the New York Times without being aware each day of Les’ legacy and forever striving and, in my case, usually failing to live up to it, and Les would be willing when he was around to let you know when you were failing to live up to it.  

I was just talking about Les last night with Nick Burns, the American ambassador to China who knew Les so well as a reporter, as a columnist, as a government official, and Nick had just the right word for him. He said he was a protean figure—an academic, a government official, a journalist, and, of course, a CFR president. In Greek mythology Proteus was able to tell the future and could shift shapes and Les, of course, could do both of those.  

He had many remarkable qualities but one I valued the most traveling with him in Asia when I was the Tokyo’s—Tokyo bureau chief for The Times grew from his conviction that while national security often involve lots of rockets it didn’t need to be rocket science.  

He bristled when there was elaborate game theory that was overtaking sort of a common understanding of what the reaction and counter reaction of power politics were all about. In his writing he was constantly urging us to try to simplify, not to complicate.  

He always reminded us that when we hadn’t figured out the answer perhaps it was because we hadn’t done enough reporting on the event, and as Jake Sullivan reminded us during the first of the Gelb lectures, the essence of foreign policy decision making is that we’re all working with imperfect, often outright wrong information, we’re selecting among highly flawed choices, and the people making the decisions are themselves somewhat shy of perfect. Except, of course, all of us here in this room. So it’s actually amazing that we get anything right.  

But one more memory of Les before I turn to the main topic today, and it gets to exactly what Mike was discussing, he was a relentless mentor even if there was a bit of torment in it. He found promising young talent in the newsroom or in the halls of CFR. He wrapped them into his world. He infused them with his contrarian questions. He made them question their assumptions.  

Eric Schmidt, our remarkable defense correspondent, remembers Les finding him back in the days when Eric was Scotty Reston’s clerk—news clerk—and Les came up, said, I need some help on a story, and soon Eric was delving into Russian weapon systems. He was helping Les on a book. And what Eric found remarkable was that here he had just arrived in the newsroom fresh out of Williams College and he said, the amazing thing was Les was even talking to me. 

I was a similar beneficiary when we were traveling around Seoul trying to unlock the mysteries of the North Korean nuclear program, and you’ll all be glad to know we really got that problem licked. (Laughter.) 

So when I started working with Mary Brooks and CFR’s own Michelle Kurilla on New Cold Wars, the book that Mike referred to before, I tried to approach the reporting the way I hope that Les might—would have wanted me to, which was asking a really fundamental question: what did we get wrong after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago? Because that question really underlies the global shock that took Washington by surprise in the past five or six years, the return of superpower conflict. 

We simply did not see this coming as a nation. When I got back to Washington after my happy life as a foreign correspondent thirty years ago—some people say that happiness at the New York Times is in direct proportion to your distance from Times Square but that would be—you know, who knows?  

It was assumed in Washington that democracy had won out and that the greatest byproduct of America’s undeniable victory after the Cold War would be something of a permanent era of peace among the world’s nuclear superpowers, and there was a pretty universally held belief that Russia and China—a fast declining power and a fast rising one—would integrate themselves into the West in their very own ways—that they had an overwhelming national interest in keeping their products, their oil, their profits flowing—that their economies were becoming so intertwined—China’s with the United States, Russia’s with Europe—that economics would ultimately trump territorial ambitions or nationalism.  

As I was doing the interviews I sat down with one of President Biden’s closest advisors, one who had been with him for many years, and he said to me, I think it’s fair to say that every major assumption across different administrations was wrong—that the internet would bring about political liberty, that trade would liberalize the regime. His list went on and on. You are all familiar with it.  

So I think it’s also fair to conclude now with the benefit of nearly a quarter century of hindsight that this was more than just an intelligence failure. An intelligence failure is getting the number of weapons of mass destruction wrong in Iraq. But this was about something more fundamental.  

It was a fundamentally wrong assumption about the nature of geopolitics, about what was driving big nations and what was driving their leaders. It was the product to some degree of wishful thinking, of figuring out how we wanted the world to work and then over emphasizing every example of the United States, China, Russia, and some other nations but those three in particular, working together.  

When we had an agreement on climate as President Obama struck with Xi Jinping, when we thought we had an agreement together on Iran’s nuclear program, we always emphasized all of the commonality of interests and, in fact, it’s a really prime example of how the world has changed in just seven or eight years that when we did sit down with the Iranians in 2014 and 2015—covering that agreement, you know, took a year and a half of my life that I’ll never get back—the Chinese and the Russians were sitting on the American and European side of the table staring at the Iranians.  

When they took a vote earlier today in Vienna to censure Iran for its noncompliance with the international inspectors over the past two years only two countries voted to protect Iran, China and Russia.  

If we got those negotiations together again now, and we won’t anytime soon, I think it’s pretty fair to say that China and Russia would be sitting on the other side of the table and I think there is no more vivid sort of sense of where the power politics of this has moved.  

But these assumptions we made were completely bipartisan. I was with Bill Clinton at Beijing University when he declared to students that the internet would undercut the authority of the Chinese Communist Party and instead, of course, it unleashed a set of technologies, from facial recognition to cell phone tracking to more recently artificial intelligence techniques, that the Party has used to perpetuate its rule and to bring about some of the fiercest crackdowns we’ve ever seen.  

I was in the boat behind the yacht where George W. Bush and his wife Laura were floating down the Neva River in St. Petersburg in 2002, a moment that I capture in the first chapter of the book, as probably the great single example of the high point of the U.S. relationship with Russia.  

Bush and Putin had two dozen meetings together. President Biden has had one, and I will be willing to wager that no matter how the election turns out in November the number will still say one. Aboard that yacht where dinner was being served by a hulking man who we would come to know twenty years later on, Yevgeny Prigozhin, they talked about Russia joining the European Union and maybe one day NATO, the alliance created to contain the old Soviet Union.  

This sounds crazy to us today but at the time it seemed like the natural course of history. It actually seemed sort of inevitable. So we weren’t listening carefully enough when Putin told the Munich Security Conference in 2007 that there were parts of Mother Russia, of Peter the Great’s Russia, that needed to be returned to the fold.  

We didn’t react strongly enough when seven years later he annexed Crimea. And the next year, 2015, the year after that annexation, Chancellor Angela Merkel signed the Nord Stream 2 agreement with the Russians, a way to get gas around Ukraine where Ukraine couldn’t benefit from it financially into Europe, and she called Putin a reliable supplier.  

At the same time, President Obama refused to name Russia as the culprit when its cyber forces went into the State Department, the White House, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff because the theory at the time was calling them out would only worsen the problem.  

So Putin had every reason to believe that the U.S. would probably under react if he tried to take all of Ukraine.  

China was a different story that I unfold differently in the book. It actually did move toward democratization for a brief period of time. There was a more liberal approach to the media. You read criticism of the Chinese leadership.  

But we fundamentally didn’t understand Xi Jinping or his determination to match America’s nuclear arsenal or to become the world’s largest military, technological, financial, and political power by 2049, the hundredth anniversary of Mao’s creation of the People’s Republic.  

When I sit down with Mike in just a moment we can talk about where this takes us today. But just a few quick points.  

Les told us to focus on power, and I think if he was surveying the world today he would probably say that the most important single new dynamic that we’ve seen since his passing was the coming together of Russia and China and, to some degree, Iran and North Korea around them, not in a real alliance but in a partnership that is really motivated by one common purpose, which is to provide an alternative to American dominance and to chip away at that dominance.  

And the pragmatic question that I think we have to be asking today is how does the U.S. interrupt this if, in fact, it is interruptible. It’s what Nixon and Kissinger, with the help of some people in the room today including Winston Lord, were thinking about when the opening to China happened because the creation of two Cold War adversaries working together and working together militarily creates an entirely different dynamic that could fundamentally change the way we think about arms races once the last arms control treaty expires in just a year and a half, the way we think about power around the world, the way we think about what our alliances need to do, the way we think about how much we and particularly the Europeans and Japan and South Korea need to spend on defense and what kind of role they play in that. And, yet, so far in our presidential campaign the topic has not come up even once.  

The second big lesson is that the technological competition underway right now is really what distinguishes this from the old Cold War. The book is called New Cold Wars with an S because we have this combination of forces.  

But the newest part of it is that fundamentally it is being fought in the technological arena. The Biden administration, to my mind, has done a very good job of trying to focus on this by denying China the most advanced chips and the equipment to go make them. But that alone is not going to do it. That buys us some time. The question is what do we do with that time. 

We’ve begun to see a little bit of that with the construction of semiconductor plants around the country, and Joe Biden never misses an opportunity to do a groundbreaking at one or two of them in the course of a day.  

But the fact of the matter is that even by the administration’s own projections, if they are completely successful by 2030 we will only be dependent for our most advanced chips for 80 percent produced outside the United States and only 20 percent in the U.S. and if there is a conflict over Taiwan, since most of these are coming out of Taiwan Semiconductor, that 80 percent is a number we really have to focus on.  

I think we’re still thinking in Washington in pretty conventional terms on these issues. Toward the end of the time I was working on the book I sat down with a senator who’s been active in this area and I said, if the administration came to you and said that since China is building up such a larger Navy than we are we need ten more aircraft carriers—and I wouldn’t advise building ten aircraft carriers, given what we’ve learned about their vulnerability these days—do you think we’d get it through Congress? He said, yeah, I think, you know, after some backing and forthing we would.  

I said, if we went to Congress to build ten new semiconductor fabrication plants, which, by the way are slightly more expensive, each one, than an aircraft carrier would we get that? And he said, no, you’d hear about industrial policy and the usual splits would take place.  

Now, Congress did pass $52 billion for the chip bill two years ago. Hard to imagine that that would get through today.  

A last point. The biggest national security threat we have today, I’m pretty well convinced, is here at home, that we can’t really address these issues because we can’t really decide within our own electorate not only who’s going to be dealing with them but whether or not we want to be engaged in the world in the way we were during the Cold War and the way we were during the post-Cold War.  

It was pretty remarkable that when the aid bill to Ukraine passed a majority of Republicans still voted no. Now, I’m not necessarily blaming them for that. For a lot of them it was a free vote. They knew the bill was going to go pass.  

But it does tell you that both in the Republican Party and on the left wing of the Democratic Party we have an isolationist tendency that has grown up and that in the end I think could well decide how it is that we approach each of these issues or whether we approach them at all.  

We live in a world, as Les frequently reminded us, that in which the absence of power gets filled. A series of vacuums approaches and we know if the United States isn’t filling them who will, and so then we have to begin to think about what the world looks like if that’s the case. 

I thank you all for coming here tonight. I’m really looking forward to the discussion with Mike. (Applause.) 

FROMAN: Thank you, David, for starting us off that way and let me also—and just to thank Judy and her family for being here.  

Let me also thank Win Lord and Frank Wisner for being provocateurs behind this event and very much helping us organize it. So thank you all. And it’s good to see so many of Les’ friends in the audience as well.  

David, you mentioned the fact that Bush and Putin met two dozen times, Biden once. Putin and President Xi have met over forty times. 

SANGER: I just did the count the other day. It’s actually now at fifty. 

FROMAN: Fifty. So and they’ve got, whatever they call it, a friendship without limits, friendship with benefits, whatever you want to call it. (Laughter.) 

SANGER: I think that’s got a different connotation, Mike. Yeah. (Laughs.) 

FROMAN: OK. My question for you is, you know, and as we all grew up learning about political science, international relations, there were theories about it’s about states and state interests or it’s about bureaucracy and, of course, Les wrote a great book on Vietnam, about the bureaucratic politics of it.  

But there are also theories about the role of individuals and the role of individual leaders. How important, when you look across as history, is the role of individuals and their relationships with each other to the outcomes that we have? 

SANGER: Well, you know, I went into my coverage of national security issues pretty well doubtful of the sort of individual leader kind of theory, that, you know, I had been trained as many of us have to think about bureaucracies, to think about political forces and all that. But, boy, the Russia and China cases really make you question your own assumptions here because China was on a pretty different path until Xi Jinping came along and we got him wrong. 

Everybody understood that he was going to take over as the leader. There was an assumption that he was pretty Westernized or at least had an appreciation for— 

FROMAN: He had spent a month in Kansas, right? 

SANGER: I think it was Iowa, but same—  

FROMAN: Oh, it was Iowa. 

SANGER: Yeah. Right. And he sent his daughter to Harvard as an undergraduate. She came back as a graduate student. He had seemed pretty international. And so the Obama administration, and you probably remember this from your time, assigned one person to sort of get to know him and dig in deep with him. His name was Joe Biden, right.  

FROMAN: At the time Xi was vice president. 

SANGER: Xi was—so it seemed like the natural thing to go do. Biden invited him here. I remember going to some big State Department dinners that they would have and, you know, White House dinners and so forth.  

They flew around the country together including going back to Iowa where Xi Jinping had stayed in—with a family living in the room of their son with all, like, the basketball posters around and all that. I mean, how much more Americanized can you get, right? If that didn’t do it what would? And then Biden went to China and Xi took him to his hometown and so forth.  

And I remember in the Obama White House at the end of their term the theory was that Xi would focus on the domestic economy, that he recognized that his greatest political risk was unemployed young male workers coming from the middle of the country out trying to find jobs on the coast and not finding them so he needed to keep the growth going. That he wouldn’t take on the United States.  

When the OPM hack happened in which China got the security files of 22.5 million Americans with security clearances—they’re still flipping through yours, Mike. That’s taking all the time. (Laughter.) 

FROMAN: Fascinating reading. 

SANGER: Yeah. And these are not just your, like, Social Security numbers. These are—for anybody who’s gone through a security clearance process and I know many of you do have, this is the forms you fill out with your financial relationships, every foreigner you’ve ever known, your medical history, every relationship you’ve ever been in.  

It’s exactly what the Chinese would want to know about the elite of—in fact, for a while they were hacking into CFR as I—that was before your time. (Laughter.) I think they were trying to get all those study reports, you know. 

So, anyway, the fact of the matter is that when Xi came here he said, the hacking will stop and we are not interested in militarizing the South China Sea, and a year later we’re publishing satellite photographs of fighter jets on the islands they were building up out of no place.  

So I think that Xi changed the course of China just as Putin with his obsession on Peter the Great changed the course of Russia, and we were unlucky enough that these two happened at the same moment.  

FROMAN: And do you—well, let’s—so do you think that there was always this desire to displace us and it was only a question of time? Or it was particular events that happened like the global financial crisis that led the Chinese to believe, OK, the U.S. is in terminal decline, we’re on the rise, it’s time for us to step out from under our bushels? Or Xi just wanting a legacy? 

SANGER: So let me start that question with Russia. I’m not sure when they were floating down the river that Putin had made up his mind yet whether he was going to try to cast his lot with Europe and the United States or not. But by 2007, five years after that, he had clearly pretty well made his conclusion. 

For China, I suspect that Xi’s predecessors were pretty willing to go build up in the system because they thought that China’s own weight could change the system. You’ll remember during the Clinton administration when China came into the WTO, all the discussion was how the WTO would change China. And very little of it was about how China would change the rules of the WTO and other international institutions that it—(inaudible). So we came at this with fundamentally different goals, I think, and maybe didn’t understand each other. 

But I think by the time that Xi came to power—partly because of the financial crisis, partly because of a sense that the United States was in power decline. Maybe in their sense, in their view, it was also in either a moral or economic decline that they saw their chance. And remember that when Xi first came in, there was still—they still used this phrase, “peaceful rise.” When was the last time you heard that one, you know? 

Two-and-a-half years ago, when Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine, I remember being at the Munich Security Conference—this is actually the opening scene of the book. Blinken was there and others. And Wang Yi, now the top foreign affairs official for China, gave a speech in which he said, China believes in the sovereignty of all nations, including Ukraine. Today they would not give that speech. Today they are not only fully in on the war, but they are rebuilding with their technology the Russian military. 

FROMAN: Let’s talk about Russian and Ukraine. You wrote another book on cyber warfare. Are you surprised this war turned out not to be a cyber war, really, but more of a traditional World War II or even a World War I trench warfare? What lessons can we draw from that? 

SANGER: So the first one is there was more cyber in it than you’d see, and I pace people through this some in the book. A week before the war happened, the Viasat satellite networks that are used widely in Europe and almost exclusively in Ukraine magically went out of business for a period of time, not because of some fancy space warfare, but because the Russians did an extraordinarily effective cyberattack on the modems that connect those satellites— 

FROMAN: The ground— 

SANGER: —revealing to us a huge vulnerability in our systems that we did not really look at. The opening days of the—opening hours of the war, Microsoft sent up a flare that Russia was activating the malware that they had put in Ukrainian government systems, and that warning went from Microsoft to Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber at the White House, to Jake Sullivan, and was one of the early indicators that the war was about to break out. During the war itself, we are now seeing that there have been coordinated cyberattacks and other attacks.  

But, you know, I quote General Milley in the book—I went to go see him a few times on this—and I’ll clean up the language here for a CFR audience as he speaks Army as his first language. But he said—similarly to what you said here, you know—first we thought this was going to be a cyber war, then we thought it was going to be a World War II-style type, or—then it was a blanking trench warfare; you know, World War I. And he used to keep in his office—and it was there when you go in to see him—these two pictures of soldiers in trenches, just covered in mud. And he made you sort of look at them carefully and figure out which one was World War I and which one was Ukraine. And only from like the shape of the helmets could you figure this out. And his point was this is all three at once. And that shouldn’t surprise us.  

I argued in The Perfect Weapon that cyber was kind of like the airplane. We thought there would be separate air wars around World War I; by World War II it had been integrated into general combat and used to drop a nuclear weapon, right? And today we just think of air and ground as coordinated, and that’s the way you should think about cyber. 

FROMAN: Let’s talk about nuclear. You mentioned it in your remarks. China is engaged in one of the most ambitious buildouts of a nuclear weapons program. Putin has, at times, threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine. Do we—and arms control, as you said, is about to expire, the last agreement going away in a year and a half.  

Do we need to rethink our nuclear strategy and nuclear posture to take into account two very large nuclear forces opposed to us? 

SANGER: From top to bottom. First of all, there’s a chapter called Nuclear Paradox in the book, which is the phrase the Biden administration was using, that the closer Putin came to losing the war—and this would have been in late 2022 when they had been rousted out of Kyiv and so forth—the greater the nuclear threat rose. So nobody was really quite sure how quickly they wanted or how fully they wanted Russia to lose. And I would say the scariest part of the reporting in this came from delving into the October 2022 nuclear incident. It was exactly 60 years to the week from the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Biden shows up here—just a few blocks from here at James Murdoch’s house for a fundraiser and, you know, everybody is walking around with a nice glass of wine, and looking at the art collection, and Biden comes in and says, we may see in the next two weeks the first nuclear detonation that we’ve had since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And everybody is thinking, gee, this would be a, really, weekend to get out of town and maybe start digging a tunnel. 

FROMAN: Time to go to the Hamptons. (Laughter.) 

SANGER: Yeah, definitely. I’m sure Putin has no idea where the Hamptons are. 

So anyway, this was the moment when the administration thought there was a 50 percent chance of nuclear use, and it came from a series of intercepts of Russian generals who—maybe for our benefit since they knew we were pretty well tapped into them by then, or maybe not—were talking about using a nuclear weapon against a Ukrainian target. That issue has come back and back again. 

China is watching it, and I think recognizes the degree to which this is the one thing that sets us off. And I think they’ve learned a lot of lessons from the way the Russians have used just the threat of tactical nuclear weapons to try to keep us at some distance, and they are thinking about that in terms of Taiwan. It’s the reason that it took until a week ago—just one week ago tomorrow that President Biden decided to allow American weapons to be fired into Russian territory because it was the fear of nuclear escalation that has really driven him through this. 

Going forward, you know, I think the chances of negotiating a successor to the START Treaty are about zero, so there will be no limits on strategic nuclear weapons starting in mid-February 2026. And we have to be thinking ahead about do we want to get into an arms race. It doesn’t seem to me to make sense, Mike, that we have to match a combined China and Russia force, but we have to rethink our strategy if they decide to coordinate enough that they’re thinking of first and second strike between them. And I think this is going to be occupying strategists for a long time. 

FROMAN: I’ll ask one more question and then open it up to the audience, so please be prepared with your own questions. 

Military buildup, one way of enhancing power potentially, but let’s go back to Les Gelb talking about how power can’t be based on military strength alone, and that economic—the underlying economic strength of the country is what matters. You said something a few minutes ago about how we expected the WTO to change China; instead, China changed the WTO. One could expand that a little bit that we, the U.S., used to urge China not to engage in protectionism, not to restrict foreign investment, and not to engage in subsidized industrial policy. Having had limited success in changing their policies or making them more like us, we’re becoming more like them. 

SANGER: Dramatically more like them, yeah. 

FROMAN: Do you think we’re on the right path towards maintaining that economic strength that is so key for the exercise of American power? 

SANGER: So I can understand why every American president is tempted to go do this, and I think it is notable that President Biden has not rolled back any of the tariffs that his predecessor put on China, or on Iran—or the sanctions on Iran, and has doubled down on this. I think the tariff piece of this has to be separated out from the technology limits. The technology limits have a real military purpose to them. If you are shipping to China chips that operate on 3-nanometer circuitry—that’s one of the smallest that we’ve seen coming out of Taiwan Semiconductor—it’s going to go right into their weapon systems, and it ultimately is going to bleed through to what they’re selling to the Russians, and it will aid them in the AI race. And I can understand why the president wants to go limit those. 

That’s a very different thing from the tariff systems, which strike me as much less directed at our national security concerns and much more at like plain old protectionism. And I think one of the things we have to worry about here is that the combination of them is viewed by the Chinese as the new form of containment; that if containment in the Cold War had one meaning, today it’s that combination of economic containment using tariffs, technological containment using the export controls. 

And it’s not clear to me that we’ve been guided by a strategy here. I think we have been guided by a series of individual decisions, each one of which you could justify by saying they’re doing it to us—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are building it for your own economic benefit. 

FROMAN: Great. All right, let’s open it up—first, people in the room. We also have 300 people on Zoom. So Frank Wisner. 

Q: David Sanger, Mike, thank you, David—splendid. Frank Wisner, former diplomat. 

David— 

FROMAN: We consider that you are still very diplomatic. (Laughter.) 

Q: David, I was spellbound by what you had to say, the emphasis you gave on great power relations, the emphasis you gave on our domestic situation, the emphasis you gave on technology. But there is another aspect, and that is America is not only about its relations with Russia and China; rather, we have broad, international interests. 

I’m particularly struck your remarks never mentioned, for example, the Middle East, and we have an awkward experience of finding ourselves wishing to take our eyes off the Middle East only to have the back of our necks grabbed and pulled back into it. How—as you look at the great choices in American foreign policy—do you balance these regional challenges, compulsions with the great power priorities that you’ve correctly identified? 

SANGER: Well, thank goodness you said Middle East, Frank, because when you stood up I was thinking you were going to chew me out—rightly—for not focusing on India, which I should have. (Laughter.) 

FROMAN: That’s what I thought. That’s what I thought. 

SANGER: And India is a—you know, the core of the country is saying, don’t make us choose right now between the U.S. and China. They would love to go run the difference between them. And until October 7th, that was what was happening in the Middle East, too. Biden said, I don’t want to be as engaged in the Middle East as each of my predecessors have been. He began to pull out. The Chinese saw an opportunity, they were investing heavily back in the Middle East, and you’ve seen this administration suddenly have to go—even separate from the October 7 events, which I will get to in a moment—have to go reconsider their view. 

The most interesting business deal, I think, that has happened in 2024 was cooked up, not in the boardroom, but in the situation room. It was an investment that Microsoft made of one-and-a-half billion dollars in an AI company in the United Arab Emirates, and it was completely to try to block out the Chinese from the region. So the first question that the administration had to go face was, if you pull back notably from an area like the Middle East, who then fills that vacuum, and I don’t think that they had fully considered how quickly the Chinese would move.  

Then came October 7, and suddenly we were confronted with the two things that had really distracted us from superpower competition over the past 25 years: horrific terrorism, an attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and was their equivalent of 9/11, but given the population differences, even worse to them. Intelligence failures—obviously, we now know from reporting in the Times and elsewhere that the Israelis had indications this was coming, and an extraordinarily poor military response to it. And then the retaliation in Gaza, which has taken up so much of the administration’s attention and angst as they have tried to keep Prime Minister Netanyahu from pursuing a war using American weapons, where the degree of killing has now reached a point where famine is taking over, and you’ve all seen the destruction. 

It tells you that if you are going to be a superpower, you’ve got to actually play regionally and with the largest powers at the same time. And I think when we look back on this period of time, we’ll give a lot of credit to the Biden administration, and actually, many in the Trump administration—though not President Trump himself—for refocusing us on great power competition. But I think that there was an element of we’re going to let the Mid East sort itself out. And of course that never happens. You get dragged back in, and we’ve seen, you know, the most horrific examples of that now. 

And we’ve also seen a tearing away at the U.S.-Israeli relationship that I think is painful for everybody to watch because of the nature of the reaction and how the United States has tried—first, behind the scenes and now quite overtly—to bring an end to this. And I’m not sure that the strategy that the president is using is actually going to bring an end to it. 

FROMAN: Win Lord? 

Q: I want to add my thanks to our speaker tonight, your remarks clearly in the spirit of Les Gelb in strategy and common sense, and also to Mike and his team, and Nancy and others for arranging this yearly event for Les, and it’s very meaningful to all of us in this room. 

You touched on the Sino-Soviet alliance, and my question to you is how fundamental and enduring is this, and how much is it tactical and transactional. They have an open border, they have a history, they have chemistry problems, they’ve got economic interests elsewhere. So is this going to outlast Putin and Xi, or is this something that’s a temporary phenomenon, serious and difficult to deal with, but one we can get through? 

SANGER: So I think you’ve asked, Win, as I would expect, the most fundamental question that no one in Washington can answer right now. During the—when we saw the first rumblings of this during the Trump administration, I remember going in to see Mike Pompeo one day and raising it with him. And he said, oh, these are two countries that will never be able to get along. 

During the early days of the Biden administration, there was a lot of debate about how real this was, even after Putin went to the opening days of the Olympics and announced the partnership without limits. And then, maybe a year into it, I remember sitting in an on-the-record briefing that Colin Kahl was giving when he was still the number three at the Pentagon. And he was the first Biden administration official I heard—Colin, of course, was in the Obama administration with Mike, but also was a Stanford professor—and he said, you know, this is now looking real. We recognize that it’s a, you know, limited partnership because of a confluence of interests that may be temporary, but boy, it is deepening quickly. 

Xi calls Putin his best friend. Maybe he’s just saying that; maybe not. The fifty meetings are impressive. It tells you that there is a strategic import of this to both sides. It can’t be easy for Putin because when Soviet leaders went to go see the Chinese, they were the ones with all the money and all the leverage, and now its China that’s got both the money and the leverage—although less money than they had—to go do this. 

The day after Colin gave us this briefing, President Biden had a news conference, and I was sitting in the Times chair, and he called on me for the very last question. And I asked him the same thing you’ve asked me, and he said, I don’t think this is for real; I don’t think these two can get along. He was reacting, I think, very much from what his experience had been when he was running the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I think he has revised his view, and I think now that the Chinese have gotten all in on the Ukraine war, it has really struck a very different tone. I think that—more than I would have even said six months ago, I think there is sort of widening view in the intelligence community that while what we’re seeing may not be permanent, it’s real and it will be long-lasting. 

FROMAN: Do you think the Europeans share that view? 

SANGER: Not yet. I think they are more aware of China today, but I lived in Berlin for a couple of months filling in at our bureau at the end of last year and early this year, and I was struck by how much the first thing the German leadership will tell you is how central China is to their auto industry, you know? And they don’t feel, I think, the sense of daily competition or possible confrontation over Taiwan that you hear in the U.S. 

FROMAN: Yes, here. It’s coming to you. 

Q: Hi, I’m Maryum Saifee. I’m a Foreign Service officer, and your co-author of your book, Mary Brooks, now works in our office in the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy. 

So my question is on technology. The State Department recently released our international strategy on cyber and digital policy, and there is sort of this balancing act of maintaining our competitive advantage around innovation, but establishing guardrails, right, like we no longer can have this move-fast-and-break-things approach. So what are your thoughts on how to sort of, you know, strike that balance of putting in place the regulatory guardrails, but also making sure we kind of win the AI arms race with innovation? 

SANGER: It’s a great question, and your asking it gives me a moment to say something briefly about Mary, who worked with me for six years across two books, and two documentaries, and is a wonder. And I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to operate going forward now that the State Department has taken her, but it’s a great place for her talents. 

So your question is how do we put guardrails on AI internationally when we haven’t decided what guardrails we’re going to put on it domestically, which is a hard enough issue. And while a year ago you saw the leaders of most of the AI companies come out and talk about how they wanted some level of government guidance and regulation, we had a story even today in the Times, by my colleague, Kevin Roose, about how open AI is basically racing for whatever it is they could do, and I suspect some of the others are, as well. 

There was, very quietly two or three weeks ago, the first meeting between the U.S. and China on how you would regulate the most dangerous uses of AI, and what’s the one that comes naturally to mind? It’s could we have a basic agreement that says automated decision-making, whether it is AI driven or in other forms, autonomy is not a good thing to mix with your nuclear weapons arsenal, OK? (Laughter.) It seems like an area where we could all sort of like come to an early and great agreement. 

FROMAN: Pros and cons. 

SANGER: Pros and cons, yeah. Well, that’s kind of what the Chinese said, you know, and we have a great difficulty here because in traditional arms control, you know, you can get out and count missiles, and count warheads, and watch things being moved around, and send inspectors around. You can never do that about an AI-driven command and control system. And so we are searching not only for what the principles are going to be, but what would be the mechanism of actually doing it, verifying it, all the usual things you would do in an arms control regime.  

And it’s a fascinating new area. One of the reasons that the Biden administration is pursuing this conversation with the Chinese is that it’s a back door to arms control. The Chinese will not talk to us about limiting the number of their weapons. They say we’ve got four or five hundred; you’ve got 1,500. When we’ve all got the same number, let’s talk—which the Pentagon would tell you in their unclassified reports is probably by 2035, maybe a little bit earlier given the pace at which the Chinese are moving. 

I think one of the most fascinating new areas of foreign policy is exactly what you and Ambassador Fick, who is running the cyber division, are working on right now, which is how do you even establish a common language that would enable us to have those guardrails? I wouldn’t call it arms control. I would call it limits in areas where we just all agree it’s too dangerous to go. And my concern here is that the technology is moving so much faster than the diplomacy that we’re not yet—we can’t even imagine what it is that we do to control the technology because we’re not sure what the technology is going to look like by the time you got your negotiation done. 

FROMAN: We’ll take the next question from our online audience. 

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from David Aaron. (Pause.) Mr. Aaron, please accept the unmute now prompt. 

It looks like we’re having technical difficulties with that line. We’ll take the next question from Sarah Leah Whitson. 

Q: Hi, there—fascinating presentation. Sarah Leah Whitson from DAWN. 

I’m struck by your presentation because I was expecting you to address what happened in the post-war era that led America’s standing to be what it is today, to have the lack of global support that it has. And instead, the conversation was I think at most critical of our failure to recognize how far China was going. 

I wonder what you would identify as America’s failures to make its status as a superpower something that is not loved around the world, and whether you see America’s responsibility in fueling a global arms race. And finally, am I correct in assuming that your sort of operating assumption is that the United States should be the primary, dominant superpower of the world such that it must maintain, for example, its authority in the Middle East, for example; that this is some sort of unique role that the United States alone should be playing in the world? 

SANGER: Great questions on which we could, you know, put together completely separate seminars. But to your last question, which I think is sort of the most fundamental of this, do we still view the United States as what Madeleine Albright called the indispensable nation, the one country that needs to go intercede, and that frequently angers the rest of the world when it does that because not everybody shares our values, and many think that we don’t share our own values; that frequently we step into things for the most self-interested purposes. And at moments in our history we have. 

It has been a unique element of American national security policy and foreign policy in the post-World War II period—and interesting to come on this on the—you know, tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and President Biden will be out with other leaders there. What made that era so fascinating was that we persuaded ourselves that the United States would, at times, operate not for its own national interest but for a greater global good. And at moments we did; and at other moments, we certainly failed to go do so. But we were trying to base, at the time, from the Marshall Plan forward, a foreign policy on the theory that the United States had the power and the reach to be a moral force that could sometimes allow activities to happen—or be in favor of activities that might be against our narrow interests but would bring development throughout the world. And I’m not saying for a moment that we lived up to that anywhere near as often as we should. 

The fundamental debate underway now with America First is whether we actually want to continue with that or whether we want to return to a much more narrow, traditional American interests element. We saw the first rumblings of America First in the first Trump administration. If there is a second Trump administration, it would be interesting to see whether that is taken to new heights. It’s certainly—the party around him has gone much further in the thinking about a return to narrow American interests than Trump himself executed in the first term. And it’s interesting because among the America Firsters, they are the first ones to say, we shouldn’t be interceding in the events around the world because it costs us a lot of money, and let the world just sort of hash it all out as long as they don’t attack us. 

And I think the central question—you know, you’ve come to it from the question of should we be that power—that premier power in the world, and yet the flip side of looking at that is what vacuums get created if you are not and who fills them. 

FROMAN: I’m reasonably confident that Les would think this was a good evening, but having never been satisfied, he would say, it didn’t go far enough. (Laughter.) 

So we look forward to continuing this discussion with you, David, and with others in Les’ honor. Please join me in thanking David for talking to us. (Applause.) 

(END) 

This is an uncorrected transcript.