Brief Book Review: New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West by David Sanger with Mary K. Brooks

David Sanger, a long-time journalist for the New York Times, has written an interesting book with his researcher, Mary K. Brooks, about major global issues confronting the U.S. Most of the focus is on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the economic and political relationship of the U.S. with China, including Taiwan; conflicts in the Middle East (e.g., Iraq, Iran, Israel); and cyber warfare. The narrative jumps around from issue to issue and location to location, but the main point is that the world has become an exceedingly dangerous place with multiple players, any of whom might make a catastrophic mistake. Also, the three main countries (U.S., Russia, and China) have made policy and judgement errors and have had to deal with internal problems with implications for foreign policy. The book recounts fascinating, though selective, recent history.

The analytical points, though, are less well-developed than the stories of recent events. Analysis gets a bit lost in the skipping from story to story and also seems not to be completely formulated. Key questions are sometimes only tangentially addressed. For example, the original Cold War was characterized as both a power and an ideological competition. The new cold wars (plural), as Sanger points out, includes one power, China, having important economic relationships with the other two main antagonists. Is this global state of affairs the result of policy mistakes or was some kind of dangerous competition among these three countries inevitable?  How should policymakers deal with this new, more complicated configuration? Are there policies that can reshape the current relationships among great powers or are we fated to ad hoc reactions to crises as they arise and hope that we can muddle through?

It is unfair to be too critical. The questions, such as the ones I have posed, are difficult, and they and others will generate debate among political scientists and historians. Sanger is right to conclude that recent history demonstrates the dangers we are facing and that the great power relationships are challenging. Fortunately, rationality triumphed to bring an end to the most dangerous episode in the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis. There can be hope, but not assurance, that rationality would triumph once again if the world again faces the abyss. Sanger concludes with more aspiration than prediction that the current great powers can continue “an eight-decade-long streak” of avoiding “direct conflict,” no matter their differences.