David E. Sanger - “New Cold Wars” with Russia & China | The Daily Show

David first of all thank you it's nice to see you again good to be here uh is the premise that the United States did a poor job of managing risk after uh the fall of the Soviet Union well we certainly made a lot of false assumptions bad assumptions that doesn't sound along the way nah wouldn't be us wouldn't be us and the fundamental argument of the book is that we believed somehow we deluded ourselves John into believing that ch and Russia each for their own different reasons would like to sign up to the Western world that we were going to go say look we got this whole thing figured out all you guys do is come in here and sign on the dotted line right we're going to do a rules-based democratic Foundation order and everybody will be cool with it and that was supposed to be the end of History because right we was over Francis fugami said uh it's the end of History uh Western liberalism is triumphant and uh we can all uh just at on the Glorious booty that we get from it right now you can't blame just him cuz there were a lot of other people blame just him okay and I signed on to a little bit of this myself so I I confess but I got to tell you this basically went on for 30 years good 25 anyway because we were busy doing the wars on terror you were just talking about those a little well you talk about in the book there's a lot of stories of how uh George Bush thought that there would be a great reproach M with Putin over their shared dislike of of terrorism and the two of them I mean there's stories in there that come out of James Bond you're on a yacht with George Bush and Putin and they've just seen a very dark version of The Nutcracker you're like it's not even the regular Nutcracker it's the dark Nutcracker you're like I bet Bush really enjoyed that I'm sure he loves anything hi so um so this was 2002 we were in St Petersburg uh we were floating down the neeva river they're in a great party boat there's this guy wait you were floating down the river with them I was floating down on the boat behind it we weren't even what are you like tubing they're in a yacht it's what White House reporters do isn't it no no we were in the the pools just this time the pool was a river right okay so um so we're following him down and uh there's this guy serving dinner he's kind of big and hulking it turns out it's PR okay jny Pan the the head of the terrible uh Army well at the time yeah he was Putin Chef okay his only job was make sure the meals were good and he had really glowering look wait wait wait wait so he's like Bobby fle and then he turns into the head of a mercenary Army well before he did that he ran the internet research agency and tried to fix the 2016 election with thisinformation they really are renaissance man it really is I mean that's talent that's talent that's so now this appears to be going along uh until uh George Bush wants them to go after Islamic terrorism and and uh then at that point Putin wants them to go after cha right or at least Putin wants to use the excuse to go after ches and that was the beginning of bush beginning to think you know maybe this guy isn't the one we thought he was he looked into his soul yeah well you know he may have looked at the wrong Soul so so in 2007 Putin shows up at this thing called the Munich security conference and he says you know there are parts of Russia that have been separated from us that really belong to us that to the Russia that Peter the Great created and remember Putin isn't trying to recreate the Soviet Union he thinks the guys who ran the Soviet Union were idiots right you go into his office he's got a big bust of Peter the Great there so who do you think he thinks he is prosan no no no how do we miss all of this and even if we had been on to it what would we have done differently so first it was a combination of sort of bad intelligence wishful thinking oh sure he's going to be Troublesome but at the end of the day he cares about his oil exports his gas exports more than he really cares about this and look up until the weekend before The Invasion happened there's a story crime of no The Invasion UK Ukraine in 2022 so this is not this is all past 2014 this is all yeah 2014 comes he takes Crimea Obama says I'm not going to war for something that used to belong to Russia nobody does sanctions for a year right and the next year the chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel signs the nor stream 2 agreement it creates this pipeline that runs from Russia around Ukraine so it doesn't get any revenue from it and straight into Europe and he says she says you know Putin's a reliable supplier he's realistic yeah right okay reasonable assumption maybe because he really hadn't cut off gas supplies so what happens next seven years later he goes after full on Ukraine the US reveals the intelligence in starting in in the late fall they get this remarkable intelligence they send Bill Burns the CIA uh director who used to be ambassador to Russia to say this would be a really bad idea Putin says oh I'm not you know I'm not doing anything and the weekend before everybody's back in Munich and there are a bunch of Europeans saying to me and everybody else oh he's not really going to invade he's just bluffing he wouldn't risk his oil revenues four days later he invades I me the intelligence chief for Germany was in keev the morning of the invasion they had to evacuate him because he didn't believe they would invade so what did he think that noise was he got out of town kind of fast so this is all hindsight though in truth what could we other when someone is imperialistic in that way what can other powers do short of an actual shooting War to prevent these kinds of things there's no guarantee that tougher sanctions uh after Crimea would have deterred him it sounds like this is kind of his Destiny and he's fulfilling that Destiny come hell or high water so that's the other piece of this which is we impose our values on Russia China and we think well we're not going to do something that would get in the way of our economic interests neither would they so China is a really interesting example xijinping comes in more 10 years ago um Joe Biden spent a lot of time with him traveled around with him but the intelligence reports of a are this guy's not going to challenge the West he's going to tend to his economy make sure all is good right we now discover and you read about in the book there are these secret speeches that he gave almost as soon as he came into office saying we're going to build up our nuclear forces to the size of the Russians and the Americans we're going to make sure that we take our claims in the South China Sea mhm I was out on the in the Rose Garden of the White House when she came to visit and promised everybody he wasn't going to militarize these islands they're building in the South China Sea a year or two later you look on Satellite photographs there are fighter jets showing up on the islands kind of looks like military that's just convenience that's not are we lying to them or are we lying to ourselves I think more to ourselves so you know we did not want to conceive a World in which we were back in superpower conflict we wanted to live in the world in which the US was the predominant power we finally calmed down the Middle East we're doing real well with that and um and uh that we could G focus on competing with China some containment of Russia and you know Biden happened to be the one sitting in the office sitting in office when this all fell apart and most of the book is the story of what happens when that fell apart it's the story of how the zapar Regan nuclear plant in Ukraine the biggest nuclear plant in Europe suddenly everybody's afraid is going to become the world's biggest uh dir bomb yeah right and there's an amazing story right from New York City uh two years ago October of 2022 when President Biden shows up at a fundraiser at James Murdoch's house uh they're nice New York not familiar with the last name but go ahead yeah he's actually sort of the the black sheep of the family he's the Democrat who raises money for for Biden among others so they're you know nice New Yorkers walking around with their wine looking at his art collection the president comes in and says by the way we're going through something that is the closest to nuclear war we've had since the Cuban Missile Crisis they were all looking at each other like he drops that at a cocktail party I'm sure they all thought that it was really the moment to get out to the Hamptons think he drops that and then it's like do you guys have Brie like what that he does actually people in the White House were amazing Now call it his Armageddon speech because he had it just said the same thing in the Oval Office right then then he turn to everybody and go and my word is don't that's his big thing now he tells he tells dictators don't don't and they're like oh okay haven't we sewed the seeds of this with our own arrogance and Cavalier approach to a lot of these foreign policy conflicts a we always frame things as this is a battle between democracy and the Free World and Liberation and authoritarianism but the truth is we're fighting for trade channels and resources like this is all a function of competing capitalist powers and aren't we the ones I mean we've invaded more countries than Russia and China combined so how do we give ourselves somehow the pass as the white hat guys when a lot of our policy has created a lot of the chaos that they're taking advantage of it is I'm done I'm out of here so there's been a lot of that going on in American history for a long time Teddy Roosevelt you know took over his fair share of territory um but I think in the Biden Administration we've had to sort of face these contradictions because at the beginning of the administration the president was saying just what you said this is a battle between democracy and autocracy and everyone said okay that's pretty clean then he goes to it's not true yeah then he goes then he goes to Saudi Arabia does the fist bump with MBS right and and I was on that trip they weren't quite sure how that are you ever home no when you cover the White House you got to go with the president go it's part of the job um and then uh you know we move on to what's been happening in Israel and uh and the Israel Hamas war and as you said earlier we are in the very odd position of both providing Aid and providing the arms that are being dropped on Gaza and I think this Administration has had the hardest time trying to go write that and obviously is causing a lot of pain not only for gazin but for for people in the administration who are having a hard time living with it would it simplify our position if we stopped pretending our morals were beyond the the reproach of all these other countries would it help us to not have to scold everybody for failing to live up to principles that we very clearly do not uphold well at least we have some principles okay that that's the one thing that we say that but you know you can't invade a country what happened in Iraq that's right uh you you can't call for regime change what did we do in Libya every time we say these things we undercut our own position with I mean for God's sakes Iran is an enemy today because we overthrew their democratically elected government in 1953 that's right so at what point do we just admit that this is how we're behaving the odd thing is at the moment that uh presidents do admit that they get chewed up for admitting to American error Obama went and apologized to the Iranians I'm not saying apologize I'm just saying like take off take off the mask and go you know what this is it strikes me as it's colonialism and imperialism in a more modern form China is in Africa trying to extract we're trying to extract we're militarizing economic rivalries and creating all kinds of chaos and death over what is ostensibly trying to get better deals well some of it's better deals some of it is protecting technology and I argue in here that with China as opposed to Russia this is first of all this is a incredible competitor and and it's a competitor in the military sphere in the technology sphere in finance in economic and we're their best customer and and they are ours and that's really what makes this different from the old Cold War so a reason there's new in new Cold War Wars and there's a reason there's an S at the end first of all we're fighting two simultaneously okay uh the old cold war that wasn't the case fighting the wrong terminology because isn't that look the only people that never lose a war are the military industrial complex are are the people that sell the weapons and if we continue to if if we continue to push that you know weaponization of these economic rivalries aren't we just playing into that C we are playing into the cycle but if you're in a world in which vacuums happen if we say okay we're done with this you're going to go back and build our big walls and sort of recede from it someone fills that space and that space is going to get filled largely by China some by Russia some by other authoritarian regimes and so we've got to make a really hard and bad choice which is do we want to be the one trying to to fill that void with our technology and our principles understanding that we violate them all the time or do we want to let an authoritarian regime go fill that space which we know how that that's going to look it seems like what we should do is be honest about what our aims are in the way that China went into Africa and did belt and Road knowing that really it's about Cobalt and lithium and rather than us going into Africa and just building up all these small military hunas that end up creating all those dictatorships that create so much chaos and pain for those countries well I'd argue that now we're not doing it with Cobalt we're doing it with semiconductors right so the the big story that we tell in here went to Taiwan spent a lot of time at Taiwan semiconductor which is the biggest producer of the most advanced semiconductors in the world and you know looked at the question does that create a silicon shield for the United States and for Taiwan in other words that the Chinese would not dare take over Taiwan because they would lose access to Taiwan semiconductor when are we going to learn any sense that begins with would they dare yes they would dare and so would we and so and so my argument here is it's a silicon shield for a little while John but eventually the Chinese are going to learn how to make everything Taiwan semiconductor is making and at that moment we've got a real Taiwan crisis and so the book is sort of a warning ahead to what these next 20 or 30 years are going to look like because this is not a world in which these new cold Wars are going to end sometime soon they are going to be the dominant theme of the next 20 30 40 years long after Putin and she are are gone and long after Joe Biden and Donald Trump are gone I don't believe that last part that Trump's never leaving I I think the two of them honestly it be like 2084 and they'll be like it's another Biden Trump rematch I can't believe it two heads in a jar uh new cold Wars it is available now David serer [Music]

Channel: The Daily Show

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Keywords: the daily show, the daily show episodes, comedy central, comedians, comedian, funny video, comedy videos, funny clips, daily show, news, politics, jon stewart, david e. sanger, white house, white house correspondent, putin, trump, donald trump, russia, china, cold war, new cold war, journalist, journalism, biden, joe biden

Id: 0CeLoP730sY

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024