30 December 2025
Martin Dewhirst reviews New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West by David E. Sanger with Mary K. Brooks, Scribe, Melbourne/London/Minneapolis, 2024, x + 511 pp. £18.99.
I read and reviewed this book exactly two years ago, but I decided to reread and re-review it again to see whether or not it had stood the test of time. It had. Here are my thoughts in January, 2026.
Rereading this book under a new/old and very different American President was a really alarming experience, ‘thanks to’ his efforts to help his Russian counterpart to weaken most, if not all, of Europe. Which of these two septuagenarian gentlemen is the greater danger to the West is unclear, but that only makes this book even more interesting, important and relevant. It is well written and well organized, but I don’t agree with a few of its leitmotifs, especially the view on when ‘the last Cold War ended’ (p. 26), unless by ‘last’ the author means ‘previous’. Indeed, on p. 453 Sanger himself writes about a ‘strange post-post-Cold War moment’, suggesting, as I read it, that we are now back in a new Cold War. But if so, when did the New Cold War begin? Perhaps when President Trump came back for a second term? Or quite a lot earlier? It should be obvious to all that Putin will do (almost?) anything rather than go down in history for ever as the Russian leader who finally ‘lost’ Ukraine.
Your reviewer wonders whether it began in late 1991, when Yel’tsin was helped by the KGB to replace Gorbachev, and intensified in 1999, when Putin replaced Yel’tsin. In their very different ways, Yel’tsin and Putin were always much more ‘Soviet’ than Gorbachev had become by 1986. In my view, that is exactly why he was replaced in 1991, but for many people, including most Russians, the kopeck has still not dropped. Lenin’s temporary New Economic Policy in the 1920s was ended by Stalin several years later. Will Putin’s successors increase or decrease the role of the State? Sanger’s book, although it takes the story up only to early 2024, prepares its readers to answer this question, not least because it also tackles China, Taiwan, the growing role of artificial intelligence, the crucial role of drones, cyber warfare, semiconductors, new technologies in general and, of course, the New Cold War(s). There is an exceptionally good Index. How much will change after Xi Jinping, Putin and Trump leave the political scene?
This weighty book ‘is the story of how we misjudged what would happen after the last Cold War ended. But it is also the story of trying to discern “what comes next” at a moment of maximum peril’ (p. 26). In 2014, after the illegal Russian takeover of Crimea, President Obama mistakenly thought, on the one hand, that the Cold War was over, and yet that:
‘“Russia’s leadership is challenging truths that only a few weeks ago seemed self-evident – that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters, that people and nations can make their own decisions about their future.” […] Of course, Putin believed the Americans had done exactly that in Iraq in 2003. He himself had already done it in Georgia in 2008.’ (p. 84)
Sanger adds ‘Today what most stands out about the 2014 invasion of Crimea isn’t just the audacity of the invasion; it’s the West’s failure to grapple with the new reality’ (p. 91). In this respect, Trump was no better than Obama – see pp. 99 and 113-115. Probably even much worse.
But how much better was Biden? Sanger asked him whether the USA and the RF:
‘were now on the verge of escalating into a new, digital version of the Cold War. “I think that the last thing [Putin] wants now is a Cold War,” Biden told me, pointing out that the Russian leader shared several thousands of miles of border with China, which was “hell-bent” on becoming the most important and powerful nation in the world. […] He said he’d told Putin that “‘it’s clearly not in anybody’s interest – your country’s or mine – for us to be in a situation where we’re in a new Cold War.’ And I truly believe he thinks that – he understands that”‘ (pp. 163-164; see also pp. 198-199 and 202)
The Epilogue (pp. 435-450) is well worth reading, especially if you’re currently too busy to read the rest of the book. Here the words ‘cooperation’ and ‘collaboration’ are used on p. 435 as if they are synonyms! For me, growing up when so many French people were collaborating with the occupying Nazis, Sanger’s failure to differentiate between the two verbs really hurts. When does cooperating with Russian and/or Chinese institutions, politicians and officials turn into collaborating with them? There was, is and always will be controversy and disagreement about this, especially when ‘business matters’ are being discussed (and not only by President Trump). I suppose compromises are inevitable, but when deals are made mainly on financial grounds the transactions may sometimes turn out to be disastrous or even catastrophic. This remarkable volume contains some examples of this. Money may make the world go round, but it just might result in blowing it up.
