For more than a year, a third-floor office just off the main Wilson Center elevator bank served as newsroom, headquarters, and editing floor of an ambitious project to capture the strange zeitgeist of the current moment in geopolitics: The return of superpower confrontation. 

The result was a New York Times bestseller: New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, by the Times’s White House and national security correspondent David E. Sanger, who has been on three teams that won the Pulitzer Prize over his four-decade-long career. Published in April of 2024 by the Crown division of Random House, the book has appeared on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, was listed by the Financial Times and NPR  in their “Best Books of 2024,” and was selected as an Amazon “Editor’s Choice.” 

An accomplished author—two of his three previous books were also written at Wilson—Sanger returned as a Distinguished Fellow in the fall of 2022, determined to solve a mystery: How did America’s bet that Russia and China would join Western institutions and largely run their governments and economies by western rules go so wrong? Joined by Mary K. Brooks, a Wilson Center Public Policy Fellow who had worked with Sanger previously on The Perfect Weapon, Sanger set to answering that question the way he approaches all such mysteries: With vigorous reporting, sourced from boots-on-the-ground trips around the world.

Sanger and Brooks used their office to launch travel to Europe and Asia, meet with world leaders from Taiwan to India and Finland to South Korea, and interview dozens of Washington DC national security policymakers, including large swaths of President Biden’s national security cabinet. When Robert Litwak, Wilson’s Director of International Security Studies, would drop by the office, it was often to participate in lively debates over how to bring to life the effort to revive America’s semiconductor industry or capture Europe’s unwillingness to believe that Vladimir Putin would actually invade Ukraine—all of which are described in vivid detail in the book.

Sanger often called the Wilson Center as his “intellectual home,” and he and Brooks relied on and contributed to the Center’s commitment to scholarship and and research. As Robin S. Quinville, Director of the Global Europe Program, remarked during the book’s April launch event: “It was phenomenal for those of us around to witness their process—the deep reporting, extraordinary access to top policymakers, and their commitment to distilling complex geopolitics into a compelling narrative.” 

Reflecting on the book’s creation, Sanger highlighted the difficulty of writing about history as it happens, given the fluidity of global events. He described New Cold Wars as an attempt to “frame today’s chaos,” contextualizing the global shocks from the miscalculations made at the end of the Cold War era. Time was of the essence: his goal was to publish the book quickly, so that its picture of a world on fire could illuminate both the presidential election and the inauguration of a new president. 

Addressing questions many readers grapple with—Why was the West unprepared for Putin’s aggression? How did the US become distracted by conflicts like Afghanistan?—Sanger juxtaposes past optimism with sobering lessons. He highlights how misplaced assumptions about democracy’s inevitability and economic interdependence left Western policymakers blindsided by the ambitions of autocrats like Xi and Putin. And he argues for renewed investment in alliances, technology, and industrial policies provides a roadmap for democratic resilience in the face of rising autocratic power. Beyond the corridors of power, New Cold Wars speaks to a broader audience, warning against naivety in the face of authoritarian resurgence and advocating for proactive diplomacy and deterrence.

Ultimately, what sets New Cold Wars apart from Sanger’s earlier works is its scope, which stretches from his return to Washington three decades ago, after years as a foreign correspondent, to the dawn of a new era of superpower competition and America’s simultaneous confrontations with two nuclear-armed adversaries: Xi Jinping’s China and Putin’s Russia. At its core, the book argues that the assumption that neither China nor Russia would challenge the United States or its allies for global supremacy was gravely mistaken—an error that underpins the volatility of today’s geopolitical landscape. Anchored in interviews spanning five presidential administrations and featuring insights from intelligence agencies and global policymakers, the book offers a timely and thought-provoking narrative of US assumptions and decision-making in the post-Cold War era.

Sanger and Brooks are grateful also for the help of Michelle Kurilla, now at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Stephen Stamas, a Wilson summer intern.

This article was researched and drafted by Samantha Carrillo.