‘New Cold Wars’: Book Illuminates Tensions Between U.S, Russia and China

First draft of 21st century geopolitical history comes from veteran NYT correspondent

If you want to grasp the geopolitical dynamics the new president inherited on January 20, 2025, I have a book for you.

Those of us who grew up in the first Cold War between communism and capitalism may be confident of America’s ability to win a global economic competition. We are probably less confident about guerilla warfare, aware that it defeated the Americans, Russians, French, Spanish, and British Empire on every continent.

But we are now in a new era, far more complex.

In the 2020s, there’s cyber-warfare using the most advanced technology, including artificial intelligence. There are intense economic and tariff wars and the potential stealing of trade secrets. Corporations often have more critical information about national and international security than governments. There’s systemic competition over which forms of government work best — democracies or dictatorships. And potentially a new space race that includes China, India, and Japan.

In Ukraine and Gaza, there’s an old-fashioned trench and building-to-building street warfare like WWI (1914), as well as WWII tank warfare circa 1941, and a touch of David vs. Goliath. Home-made Ukrainian drones have destroyed Russian tanks.

For Christmas, I received David E. Sanger’s book New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West. Sanger, a Harvard graduate, has been a reporter for The New York Times for four decades. He is currently the chief Washington correspondent with a specialization in national security. He has been a member of three teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, including in 2017, for international reporting.

To lend credibility to his analysis, his previous bestsellers were