Soldiers pose for group photos with a Taiwan flag after a preparedness enhancement drill simulating the defense against Beijing’s military intrusions in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan on January 11, 2023. Daniel Ceng/APCNN —
Tensions are once again ratcheting up in the Taiwan Strait, with China launching military drills encircling Taiwan just days after the democracy swore in a new leader long loathed by Beijing.
The post-Cold War era is over and a dangerous new era of great power competition has begun.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend the gala event celebrating 75th anniversary of China-Russia relations in Beijing, China, on May 16, 2024. Alexander Ryumin/Pool via REUTERS
David Sanger, the White House and national security correspondent for the New York Times, sits down with James M. Lindsay to discuss how the post-Cold War ended and why the new era of geopolitical rivalry began.
Here are four highlights from their conversation:
1.) The post-Cold War era is over. The United States no longer enjoys its unipolar moment. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and through the 2000s, the United States and the West made a series of misjudgments about where Russia and China were headed. They assumed that Russia and China would want to become more integrated into the U.S.-led world order. David acknowledged that Russian President Vladimir Putin stated explicitly in 2007 that he would do the contrary, while China’s ambitions were unclear initially. David said, “this was a failure of imagining a world in which these powers wanted to return to a past era of greatness and weren’t going to sit still for a unipolar world, run out of Washington under Washington values
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