It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYc, good

It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. Today on the show,

if the world's situation seems complicated right now, David Sanger from the New York Times

has a way to explain it.

His new book is called New Cold Wars.

And it's his take on how he got from the end of the old Cold War

around 1990 to where we are today.

In 1990, if you've lived long enough, you know, most Western

leaders thought the future would be global democracy and global economic growth. They thought

Russia was done with Empire Building when the Soviet Union

collapsed, that China mostly wanted to integrate with the West through free trade that

would lift all boats, that the emerging new thing called the internet would democratize information

and therefore make authoritarianism harder to maintain and that even the

Israelis and Palestinians would realize that there forever war was benefiting neither of them and figure out a way to coexist.

But where are we today?

Information and disinformation chaos online, right?

The resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism on every

continent. Global trade seen as a failure for the middle class, at least in this country, and

a growing alliance between Putin, she's in ping, and the leaders of

Iran. The old Cold War is over, but the New World Order that the West thought would emerge

is instead giving way to what David Sanger calls new

Cold Wars and the 21st century version of the question how much will leaders everywhere have the wisdom and restraint to keep them from getting nuclear hot?

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