May 3, 2024 • 18 mins
David E. Sanger, White House and National Security Correspondent, sits down with Jon Stewart to discuss his new book, "New Cold Wars," and how America miscalculated Russia and China's power after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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Speaker 2 (00:05):
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Speaker 3 (00:08):
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In the meantime, enjoy today's episode.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
What Am I Come? I Got?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Tonight?
Speaker 4 (00:23):
A White House a national security correspondent for The New
York Times. His latest book is called New Cold Wars,
China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's struggle to defend the West.
Please welcome back to the program, David Tanger, Sir, you
(00:47):
wrote another bat New co Wars. David, First of all,
thank you. It's nice to see you again.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Good to be here.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Is the premise that the United States did a poor
job of managing risk after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Well, we certainly made a lot of false assumptions, bad assumptions.
That doesn't sound along the way, Yeah, I wouldn't be as,
wouldn't be as. And the fundamental argument of the book
is that we believed, somehow we deluded ourselves into believing
that China and Russia, each for their own different reasons,
would like just sign up to the Western world. That
(01:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
We're going to do a rules based democratic foundation order
and everybody will be cool with it.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
And that was supposed to be the end of history,
because right we were.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Said, it's the end of history.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
Western liberalism is triumphant, and we can all just skate
on the glorious booty that we get from it.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Right now, you can't blame just him, because there were
a lot of other people, believe, okay, And I signed
on to a little bit of this myself, so I confess.
But I got to tell you this basically went on
for thirty years, good twenty five anyway, because we were
busy doing the wars on Terry. We're just talking about those.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Little when you talk about in the book, there's a
lot of stories of how George Bush thought that there
would be a great Reproachmont with Putin over there, shared
dislike 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.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Very dark version of the Nutcracker.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
You're like, it's not even the regular Nutcracker, it's the
dark Nutcracker.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
And you're like, I bet Bush really enjoyed that.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
I'm sure you love anything high.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So this was two thousand and two. We were in
Saint Petersburg. We were floating down the Never River. They're
in a great party boat.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
There's this guy s wait, you were floating down the
river with them.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I was floating down a boat behind it.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
We weren't eat like tubing.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
That's what white House reporters do, isn't it. We were
in the pools, just this sign. The pool was a river,
all right, Okay, So we're following him down and there's
this guy serving dinner.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
He's kind of big and hulking.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
It turns out it's Pregosion.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
If Jenny Progosion the head of the Terrible Army.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Well, at the time, he was putin chef.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Okay, his only job was make sure the meals were
good and a really glowering wait.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
So he's like Bobby Flay and then he turns into
the head of a mercenary army.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Well before he did that, he ran the Internet Research
Agency and tried to fix the twenty sixteen election with
this information.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
They really are renaissance, man, it really is. I mean,
that's talent, that's talents.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
So now this appears to be going along until George
Bush wants them to go after Islamic terrorism. And then
at that point Putin wants them to go after chech Nan, right,
or at.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Least Putin wants to use the excuse to go after Cheschney.
And that was the beginning of Bush beginning to think,
you know, maybe this guy isn't the one we thought
he was.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
He looked into his soul.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah, well, you know, he may have looked at the
wrong soul. So in two thousand and seven, 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.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
The Great created.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
And remember Putin isn't trying to recreate the Soviet Union.
He thinks the guys who are in the Soviet Union
were idiots. 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.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Progosian. No no, no, no, how do we miss all
of this?
Speaker 4 (05:04):
And even if we had been onto it, what would
we have done differently?
Speaker 2 (05:08):
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 the invasion of Ukraine in
(05:32):
twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
So this all past twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, twenty fourteen 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 nord Stream Too agreement, creates this pipeline that runs
from Russia around Ukraine's what doesn't get any revenue from it,
(05:56):
and straight into Europe. And he says, she says, you know,
Putin's a liable suppliers 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
(06:19):
the late fall, they get this remarkable intelligence. They send
Bill Burns, the CIA 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,
(06:41):
he's not.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Really gonna invade. He's just bluffing.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
He wouldn't risk his oil revenues. Four days later he invades.
The intelligence chief for Germany was in Kiev the morning
of the invasion. They had to evacuate him because he
didn't believe they would invade.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
So what did he think that noise was? He got
out of town kind of fast.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
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 after CRIMEA would have deterred him. It sounds
(07:27):
like this is kind of his destiny and he's fulfilling
that destiny, come hell or high water.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Neither would they.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
So China's a really interesting example. Jijinping comes in more
than ten years ago. Joe Biden spent a lot of
time with him, traveled around with him. But the intelligence
reports of as 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, they're these secret speeches that
(08:08):
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. I was out on in the rose
Garden of the White House when she came to visit
and promised everybody he wasn't going to militarize these islands
(08:29):
they're building in the South China. See a year or
two later you look on satellite photographs there are fighter
jets showing up on the islands.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Kind of looks like, no, that's just convenience.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
It's not are we lying to them or are we
lying to ourselves?
Speaker 1 (08:45):
I think more to ourselves.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
So, you know, we did not want to conceive of
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, doing real well with that, and and that
we could focus on competing with China, some containment of Russia.
(09:10):
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 a story of what
happens when that fell apart. It's the story of how
this Opera Regia nuclear plant in Ukraine, the biggest nuclear
plant in Europe, suddenly everybody's afraid is going to become
the world's biggest Uh.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, right.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
And there's an amazing story right from New York City
two years ago, October of twenty twenty two, when President
Biden shows up at a fundraiser at James Murdoch's house.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
They're nice, not familiar with the last name, but go ahead.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, he's actually sort of the black sheep of the family,
a Democrat who raises money for Biden, among others. So they're,
you know, nice New Yorkers walking around with their wine
looking at his our 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're all looking at each.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Other, like he drops that at a cocktail party.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
I'm sure they all thought that it was really the
moment to get out to the Hamptons.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Don't you think he drops that? And then it's like,
do you guys have breathe like he does.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Actually, people in the White House were amazing the now
call it his Armageddon speech, because he had just said
the same thing in the Oval office.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
Right, and then then he turned to everybody and go
and my word is don't.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
That's a big thing. Now he tells dictators don't don't
And they're like.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
Oh, okay, haven't we sowed the seeds of this with
our own arrogance and cavalier approach to a lot of
these foreign policy conflicts. A we always frame thing says,
this is a battle between democracy and the free world,
(11:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
And aren't we the ones?
Speaker 4 (11:19):
I mean, we've invaded more countries than Russia and China combined.
So how do we give ourselves somehow the passes the
white hat guys when a lot of our policy has
created a lot of the chaos that they're taking.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Advantage of, it is I'm done, I'm out here.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
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. But I think
in the Biden administration we've had to sort of face
these contradictions because at the beginning of the the president
was saying, just what you said, this is a battle
between democracy and autocracy, and everyone says, Okay, that's pretty clean.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Then he goes to just not true.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, then he goes then he goes to Saudi Arabia,
does the fist bump with NBS, right, And I was
on that trip.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
They weren't quite sure. How that are you ever home?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
When you cover the White House, you got to go
where the president goes as part of the job. And
then you know, we move on to what's been happening
in Israel 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
(12:42):
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 Gossen's
but for people in the administration who are having a
hard time living.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
With Would it simplify our position if we stopped part
tending our morals were beyond 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.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Well, at least we have some principles. Okay, that's the
one thing.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
We say that.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
But you know, you can't invade a country. What happened
in Iraq, that's 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 nineteen fifty three. Right, So at what point
(13:40):
do we just admit that this is how we're behaving.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
The odd thing is at the moment that presidents do
admit that, they get chewed up for admitting to American error.
Obama went and apologized to the Iranians.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Saying apologize. I'm just saying, take off the mask and go,
you know.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
What this is?
Speaker 4 (14:04):
It strikes me as it's colonialism and imperialism in a
more modern form. China is in Africa trying to extract,
and 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.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
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 an incredible competitor, and it's a competitor in a
military sphere, in the technology sphere, in finance, in economics.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
And we're their best customer and then they are ours.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
And that's really what makes this different from the old
Cold War. So reason there's new in new Cold Wars,
and there's a reason there's an ass at the end.
First of all, we're fighting too simultaneously. Okay, the old
Cold War, that wasn't the.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
Case, fighting the wrong terminology, because isn't that Look, the
only people that never lose a war or the military
industrial complex are the people that.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Sell the weapons. And if we continue to.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
If we continue to push that weaponization of these economic rivalries,
aren't we just playing into that cycle?
Speaker 2 (15:24):
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
(15:45):
really hard and bad choice, which is do we want
to be the one trying 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's going to look.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
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 Belton 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
juntas that end up creating all those dictatorships that create
(16:28):
so much cash and pain for those countries, Well.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I'd argue that now we're not doing it with cobalt,
We're doing it with semiconductors, right, So yes, 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.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And you looked at the.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
And are we going to learn any sentence that begins
with would they dare?
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yes? They would dare, and so would we, and so
and so.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
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 head to
what these next twenty or thirty years are going to
look like, because this is not a world in which
(17:33):
these new Cold Wars are going to end sometime soon.
They're going to be the dominant theme of the next
twenty thirty forty years, long after Putin and She are gone,
and long after Joe Biden and Donald Trump are gone.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
I don't believe that last part. The Trump's never leaving.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
I think the two of them, honestly, it'll be like
twenty eighty four and they'll be.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Like, it's another Biden Trump rematch. I can't two heads
in a jar, he call wars.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by
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Stream full episodes anytime on Paramount.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Plus this has been a Comedy Central podcast.
You're listening to Comedy Central.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
The Daily Show is taking a break this week, but
don't worry.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
We have some specially selected episodes from the archives just
for you.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
The Daily Show will be back with brand new episodes
next week.
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In the meantime, enjoy today's episode.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
What Am I Come? I Got?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Tonight?
Speaker 4 (00:23):
A White House a national security correspondent for The New
York Times. His latest book is called New Cold Wars,
China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's struggle to defend the West.
Please welcome back to the program, David Tanger, Sir, you
(00:47):
wrote another bat New co Wars. David, First of all,
thank you. It's nice to see you again.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Good to be here.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Is the premise that the United States did a poor
job of managing risk after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Well, we certainly made a lot of false assumptions, bad assumptions.
That doesn't sound along the way, Yeah, I wouldn't be as,
wouldn't be as. And the fundamental argument of the book
is that we believed, somehow we deluded ourselves into believing
that China and Russia, each for their own different reasons,
would like just sign up to the Western world. That
(01:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
We're going to do a rules based democratic foundation order
and everybody will be cool with it.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
And that was supposed to be the end of history,
because right we were.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Said, it's the end of history.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
Western liberalism is triumphant, and we can all just skate
on the glorious booty that we get from it.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Right now, you can't blame just him, because there were
a lot of other people, believe, okay, And I signed
on to a little bit of this myself, so I confess.
But I got to tell you this basically went on
for thirty years, good twenty five anyway, because we were
busy doing the wars on Terry. We're just talking about those.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Little when you talk about in the book, there's a
lot of stories of how George Bush thought that there
would be a great Reproachmont with Putin over there, shared
dislike 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.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Very dark version of the Nutcracker.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
You're like, it's not even the regular Nutcracker, it's the
dark Nutcracker.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
And you're like, I bet Bush really enjoyed that.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
I'm sure you love anything high.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So this was two thousand and two. We were in
Saint Petersburg. We were floating down the Never River. They're
in a great party boat.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
There's this guy s wait, you were floating down the
river with them.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I was floating down a boat behind it.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
We weren't eat like tubing.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
That's what white House reporters do, isn't it. We were
in the pools, just this sign. The pool was a river,
all right, Okay, So we're following him down and there's
this guy serving dinner.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
He's kind of big and hulking.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
It turns out it's Pregosion.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
If Jenny Progosion the head of the Terrible Army.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Well, at the time, he was putin chef.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Okay, his only job was make sure the meals were
good and a really glowering wait.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
So he's like Bobby Flay and then he turns into
the head of a mercenary army.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Well before he did that, he ran the Internet Research
Agency and tried to fix the twenty sixteen election with
this information.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
They really are renaissance, man, it really is. I mean,
that's talent, that's talents.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
So now this appears to be going along until George
Bush wants them to go after Islamic terrorism. And then
at that point Putin wants them to go after chech Nan, right,
or at.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Least Putin wants to use the excuse to go after Cheschney.
And that was the beginning of Bush beginning to think,
you know, maybe this guy isn't the one we thought
he was.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
He looked into his soul.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah, well, you know, he may have looked at the
wrong soul. So in two thousand and seven, 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.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
The Great created.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
And remember Putin isn't trying to recreate the Soviet Union.
He thinks the guys who are in the Soviet Union
were idiots. 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.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Progosian. No no, no, no, how do we miss all
of this?
Speaker 4 (05:04):
And even if we had been onto it, what would
we have done differently?
Speaker 2 (05:08):
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 the invasion of Ukraine in
(05:32):
twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
So this all past twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, twenty fourteen 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 nord Stream Too agreement, creates this pipeline that runs
from Russia around Ukraine's what doesn't get any revenue from it,
(05:56):
and straight into Europe. And he says, she says, you know,
Putin's a liable suppliers 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
(06:19):
the late fall, they get this remarkable intelligence. They send
Bill Burns, the CIA 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,
(06:41):
he's not.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Really gonna invade. He's just bluffing.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
He wouldn't risk his oil revenues. Four days later he invades.
The intelligence chief for Germany was in Kiev the morning
of the invasion. They had to evacuate him because he
didn't believe they would invade.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
So what did he think that noise was? He got
out of town kind of fast.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
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 after CRIMEA would have deterred him. It sounds
(07:27):
like this is kind of his destiny and he's fulfilling
that destiny, come hell or high water.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Neither would they.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
So China's a really interesting example. Jijinping comes in more
than ten years ago. Joe Biden spent a lot of
time with him, traveled around with him. But the intelligence
reports of as 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, they're these secret speeches that
(08:08):
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. I was out on in the rose
Garden of the White House when she came to visit
and promised everybody he wasn't going to militarize these islands
(08:29):
they're building in the South China. See a year or
two later you look on satellite photographs there are fighter
jets showing up on the islands.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Kind of looks like, no, that's just convenience.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
It's not are we lying to them or are we
lying to ourselves?
Speaker 1 (08:45):
I think more to ourselves.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
So, you know, we did not want to conceive of
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, doing real well with that, and and that
we could focus on competing with China, some containment of Russia.
(09:10):
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 a story of what
happens when that fell apart. It's the story of how
this Opera Regia nuclear plant in Ukraine, the biggest nuclear
plant in Europe, suddenly everybody's afraid is going to become
the world's biggest Uh.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, right.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
And there's an amazing story right from New York City
two years ago, October of twenty twenty two, when President
Biden shows up at a fundraiser at James Murdoch's house.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
They're nice, not familiar with the last name, but go ahead.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, he's actually sort of the black sheep of the family,
a Democrat who raises money for Biden, among others. So they're,
you know, nice New Yorkers walking around with their wine
looking at his our 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're all looking at each.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Other, like he drops that at a cocktail party.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
I'm sure they all thought that it was really the
moment to get out to the Hamptons.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Don't you think he drops that? And then it's like,
do you guys have breathe like he does.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Actually, people in the White House were amazing the now
call it his Armageddon speech, because he had just said
the same thing in the Oval office.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
Right, and then then he turned to everybody and go
and my word is don't.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
That's a big thing. Now he tells dictators don't don't
And they're like.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
Oh, okay, haven't we sowed the seeds of this with
our own arrogance and cavalier approach to a lot of
these foreign policy conflicts. A we always frame thing says,
this is a battle between democracy and the free world,
(11:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
And aren't we the ones?
Speaker 4 (11:19):
I mean, we've invaded more countries than Russia and China combined.
So how do we give ourselves somehow the passes the
white hat guys when a lot of our policy has
created a lot of the chaos that they're taking.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Advantage of, it is I'm done, I'm out here.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
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. But I think
in the Biden administration we've had to sort of face
these contradictions because at the beginning of the the president
was saying, just what you said, this is a battle
between democracy and autocracy, and everyone says, Okay, that's pretty clean.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Then he goes to just not true.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, then he goes then he goes to Saudi Arabia,
does the fist bump with NBS, right, And I was
on that trip.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
They weren't quite sure. How that are you ever home?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
When you cover the White House, you got to go
where the president goes as part of the job. And
then you know, we move on to what's been happening
in Israel 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
(12:42):
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 Gossen's
but for people in the administration who are having a
hard time living.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
With Would it simplify our position if we stopped part
tending our morals were beyond 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.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Well, at least we have some principles. Okay, that's the
one thing.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
We say that.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
But you know, you can't invade a country. What happened
in Iraq, that's 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 nineteen fifty three. Right, So at what point
(13:40):
do we just admit that this is how we're behaving.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
The odd thing is at the moment that presidents do
admit that, they get chewed up for admitting to American error.
Obama went and apologized to the Iranians.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Saying apologize. I'm just saying, take off the mask and go,
you know.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
What this is?
Speaker 4 (14:04):
It strikes me as it's colonialism and imperialism in a
more modern form. China is in Africa trying to extract,
and 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.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
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 an incredible competitor, and it's a competitor in a
military sphere, in the technology sphere, in finance, in economics.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
And we're their best customer and then they are ours.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
And that's really what makes this different from the old
Cold War. So reason there's new in new Cold Wars,
and there's a reason there's an ass at the end.
First of all, we're fighting too simultaneously. Okay, the old
Cold War, that wasn't the.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
Case, fighting the wrong terminology, because isn't that Look, the
only people that never lose a war or the military
industrial complex are the people that.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Sell the weapons. And if we continue to.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
If we continue to push that weaponization of these economic rivalries,
aren't we just playing into that cycle?
Speaker 2 (15:24):
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
(15:45):
really hard and bad choice, which is do we want
to be the one trying 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's going to look.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
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 Belton 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
juntas that end up creating all those dictatorships that create
(16:28):
so much cash and pain for those countries, Well.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I'd argue that now we're not doing it with cobalt,
We're doing it with semiconductors, right, So yes, 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.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And you looked at the.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
And are we going to learn any sentence that begins
with would they dare?
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yes? They would dare, and so would we, and so
and so.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
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 head to
what these next twenty or thirty years are going to
look like, because this is not a world in which
(17:33):
these new Cold Wars are going to end sometime soon.
They're going to be the dominant theme of the next
twenty thirty forty years, long after Putin and She are gone,
and long after Joe Biden and Donald Trump are gone.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
I don't believe that last part. The Trump's never leaving.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
I think the two of them, honestly, it'll be like
twenty eighty four and they'll be.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Like, it's another Biden Trump rematch. I can't two heads
in a jar, he call wars.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by
searching The Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts. Watch
The Daily Show weeknights at eleven.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
Ten Central on Comedy Central, and.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Stream full episodes anytime on Paramount.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Plus this has been a Comedy Central podcast.
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