‘New Cold Wars’: NYT Journalist Talks U.S. Relations With China, Russia at IOP Forum

New York Times journalist David E. Sanger ’82 discussed what is at stake for the U.S. in relation to China and Russia’s ever-growing influence at an HKS Institute of Politics forum on Tuesday.

The event — moderated by Meghan O’Sullivan, the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs — also featured former Harvard Kennedy School Dean Graham Allison ’62 and Karen Donfried, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center.

Sanger, a former Crimson News editor, said during the panel that the current domestic and international landscape is plagued by “new cold wars,” the central topic of his forthcoming book.

In an interview with The Crimson before the event, Sanger said that these wars are “more complex, more dangerous than the old one, because China and Russia are teaming up together.”

“We are competing with one country that is a disruptor, and another that is an economic, political, and military competitor,” Sanger said of Russia and China, respectively.

This competition, he said, compounds existing divisions in U.S. politics, which has prioritized industries such as technology and cybersecurity as it navigates relations with global superpowers.

During the forum, Donfried underscored the importance of allies as the U.S. looks to compete with China in the semiconductor industry, specifically with export controls and other containment measures.

She called the U.S.’s bilateral engagement with Japan and the Netherlands over ASML — the self-proclaimed world’s leading supplier for semiconductors — “a real advantage.”

In response to an audience question on the U.S.’s faltering market advantage, Sanger spoke about the differences between how the U.S. and competitors like China respond to changing needs. Sanger pointed, in particular, to the U.S.’s failure to actively follow up on legislative actions and ensure lasting results.

“We tend in the United States to think, ‘Okay, we got a problem here, we’re gonna pass some legislation. Glad that’s done,’” Sanger said. “Whereas the Chinese view of this is, here’s the investment this year, here’s the investment next year, here’s the investment the year after that.”

Sanger spoke about the semiconductor industry as an example of this phenomenon.

“We’ve done $52 billion for the semiconductor industry and billions more for research and development, much of which has not yet been deployed,” he said.

This problem is exacerbated by the U.S.’s political fracturing and internal strife, Sanger said, which may mean the U.S. is unable to plan long-term strategies for these industries.

“And I think China is betting that we are not,” he added.

During the event, Allison called the relationships between the U.S. and China a “classic Thucydidean rivalry.”

“In China we have a meteoric rising power,” Allison said. “In the U.S. we have a colossal ruling power.”

Allison said that in 12 of the last 16 cases that a rising power has endangered the position of a major ruling power, it “ended in war.”

Still, Allison said that though the U.S. and China will be “the fiercest rivals history has ever seen,” there will also be a recognition that “we live on a small planet” and “breathe the same air.”

“So if my survival requires David and me somehow to cooperate, however much we’re being rivals, survival is a pretty powerful instinct,” Allison said. “And so doing these two things at the same time, that’s what Xi Jinping is trying to get his head around.”

During the forum, Sanger highlighted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as a cautionary tale of what global powers are capable of if a geopolitical vacuum is allowed to form.

“When the U.S. doesn’t play, someone’s gonna fill that vacuum. So, you’ve got to think hard about what the world will look like if that someone is China or Russia,” Sanger said during the interview with The Crimson.

“I don’t think that concept has yet fully absorbed into the U.S. voting public,” he added.