New Cold Wars

A fast-paced contemporary history of America’s plunge into two very different Cold Wars simultaneously—with its two biggest adversaries working together—based on deep reporting inside the White House, the nation’s intelligence agencies, and around the world from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon.

More than thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States once again finds itself in a volatile rivalry with the world’s other two great nuclear powers: China and Russia. But these conflicts are nothing like the last Cold War; as David E. Sanger explains, at moments this new era looks like World War I, World War II, and a cyber war all fought at once. It is far more complex—and undeniably more dangerous—than the world of a half century ago.

New Cold Wars tells the riveting story of America and the world at a crossroads. At the turn of the last millennium, the era of the “end of history,” the United States was confident that Putin’s Russia and a newly wealthy China could gradually be pulled into the Western-led order. That proved a fantasy. Multiple administrations failed to absorb the looming threats, and by the time Washington emerged from the age of terrorism, three nuclear powers were engaged in a new, high-stakes struggle for military, economic, and technological supremacy—with nations around the world forced to take sides. 

With high-level access to the U.S. government, foreign leaders and the tech companies thrust onto the front lines, Sanger unfolds a riveting narrative spun around the era’s critical questions: Will the mistakes Putin made in his ill-considered invasion prove his undoing, and will he reach for his nuclear arsenal if it does? Will China strike back at the US chip embargo, or seize Taiwan, the world’s semiconductor capital? 

Taking readers from the battlefields of Ukraine to America’s cyberwarfare command centers to the backrooms and boardrooms where diplomats, spies and tech executives jockey for geopolitical advantage, New Cold Wars is a remarkable first-draft history of America’s return to superpower conflict, where the future of freedom once again hangs in the balance.