Hello and welcome to this edition of Slate GabFest Reeds. I'm John Dickerson. We are talking today

about new Cold Wars, China's rise, Russia's invasion, and America's struggle to defend the West.

And the author is David Sanger, who is the White House and National Security correspondent for the New York Times,

bestselling author of previous books, The Inheritance,

Confront and Conceal, The Perfect Weapon,

also on three Pulitzer Prize winning teams

and someone I spent a long time covering various White Houses with.

David, it's great to be with you.

John, great to be back with you.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this book.

It seems like it comes out at the perfect time, and we'll get to why I think it's perfect.

But let's go back in history a little bit.

I want to start if we could with the period before the China and Russia we think of today.

Give us a sense of how the Washington consensus, what it looked like,

let's say during the Clinton administration, what their view of things were and how they got

things wrong. And was it blindness or was it kind of an honest mistake of misreading events as they were

unfolding? It's so great to be back with an old friend. We've traveled the world together. So you were

in for many of the early moments of the reporting in this book. And if you don't mind, I'd like to go

back even a little earlier than the Clinton administration,

because the consensus formed really after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And all of a sudden, we were in a situation where not only was America the great unipower,

but that there was an assumption that China and

...