The post-Cold War era is over and a dangerous new era of great power competition has begun.

Blog Post by Michelle Kurilla

May 23, 2024 10:42 am (EST), CFR

The latest episode of The President’s Inbox is live! This week, Jim sat down with David E. Sanger, White House and National Security Correspondent for the New York Times. David recently published New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West. They discussed the United States’ return to great power competition.The President’s Inbox

America’s New Cold Wars, With David Sanger

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