It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC.

Good morning again everyone.

So if the world's situation seems complicated right now,

David Sanger, the New York Times White House and National Security

correspondent, 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 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. The 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, certainly in this country, and a growing alliance between

Putin, she's in ping of China, 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? The full title of the book is

...