InsideOut Interview: David E. Sanger

by Owen Lipstein March/April 2009



David E. Sanger is The New York Times’ chief correspondent in Washington, D.C. In addition to being one of the capital’s most trusted journalists, he has twice been a member of reporting teams awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Former President George W. Bush, known for nicknaming those with whom he has close contact, called Sanger “that guy from Gerald M. Boyd’s paper.” (Boyd was the Times’ first African American managing editor) When we spoke with Sanger about his new book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to America’s Power (Harmony, 2009), he succeeded—momentarily—in taking our minds off the economy.



InsideOut: It’s difficult, at least if you live in the Hudson Valley and put a magazine out here, to talk about anything other than money. But to be engaged by some of the global issues in your book is to think, “Oh, my God: What’s losing half our wealth in a couple of months?”



David E. Sanger: What’s the big deal, right?



IO: For those who haven’t read your book, how, for example, does Pakistan’s economic instability affect us here in the United States on a day-to-day basis?



DS: Well, this is a two-way street. Our economic instability, and the world’s, is affecting Pakistan. We have debated in the United States, for eight years now, what we can do to help the development of Pakistan. And actually, the simplest thing we can do is the one thing we couldn’t get through Congress. I didn’t go into it in the book, but what they desperately wanted was lifting tariffs on textiles. There were—in the villages, and so forth—[a] significant [number of] textile makers, right? And that was the one thing George Bush couldn’t do for them. And he’d give them $10 billion in economic aid, but he couldn’t get past the textile lobby in Congress.
But the economic downturn has a very big effect on Pakistan, which is that it makes far more distant the prospect that through trade or development, through relationships with the United States and the West, there’s great economic benefit. And therefore, they become more ripe for what is already happening, which is the Talibanization of the country. If you feel as if the world is oppressing you, and there’s no way you can get up out of the poverty you’re stuck in, you are more vulnerable to the appeal and argument of the Taliban, which has been, basically, that the West is trying to keep you—you in particular, and Islam in general—down.



IO: If there’s a strange noise in the background, it’s because we’re sitting here in InsideOut’s office, in a cabin overlooking the Hudson River, and we have a squadron of squirrels in the walls.



DS: Oh, OK. Well, that’s always good. Keep them out of my cabin up in Vermont. [Laughter]



IO: Among our other worries, in addition to those you detail in your book, is that this band of squirrels will gnaw some electrical line and we’ll all be burned down. But compared to the other worries, what the hell? It appears that this incredibly well-armed country—Pakistan—could potentially land in the hands of the Taliban.



DS: Right. Which is why I spend 20,000 words of the book taking you inside the Pakistani nuclear program. That hadn’t been done in a book that I knew of, anyway, in the United States (or at least, hadn’t been done on a non-classified basis). And frankly, the more you read the headlines out of Pakistan, the more that’s your big worry. Would we worry about Pakistan as much if they didn’t have 100 nuclear weapons? Yes, because of Afghanistan. Would we worry about [Pakistan] as a place where the world could come to an end? No. But with 100 nuclear weapons, it’s a problem of vastly different proportions, even if the possibility that one of the weapons could go loose is low. And the argument I make in the book is that I’m fairly convinced the weapons themselves are well-protected. I’m not at all convinced that the labs are; and the infiltration of the labs is, I think, the serious issue.



IO: The guiding premise of your book, it seems, is the cost of the Bush presidency’s squandered opportunities. It’s not so much what he did, but what he didn’t do. Can you tell us more about that?



DS: Well, the fundamental premise of the book is this: that the biggest cost of Iraq was a distraction cost. We were distracted from much bigger threats that were emerging: Iran, North Korea, Pakistan for sure, and Afghanistan and the opportunity to win there. And we were distracted from much bigger opportunities that we never exploited. That’s what the China chapter is symbolic of.
In Pakistan’s particular case, we layered the distraction of Iraq—and when I call Iraq a distraction, I don’t mean that it was the right war to fight, or the wrong war to fight, or that it was the right war that we just executed badly. What I mean is that it so occupied the attentions of the central government of the United States, or the top players of the government of the United States, that they didn’t have the bandwidth, if you would, on other issues.
So what they persuaded themselves in Pakistan’s case was that they had found a military leader who was going to solve their problem for them. And let’s face it: Not only couldn’t he, but as you learn as you read into it, and you discover that he was an ally on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and supporting the Taliban on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you quickly come to the conclusion that in fact, we allied with a guy who, at best, was playing both sides of the game. And that was our fundamental error.



IO: In descending order of scariness, what keeps you up most at night?



DS: I think the chances of bringing a weapon into the United States are relatively low. But as you can see from what I wrote, clearly we’re not investing what we need to invest to keep that from happening. You know, we were putting $500 million a year into nuclear detection equipment that doesn’t work. And that’s the equivalent of about 28 hours of operation in Iraq….
You have a billion dollars to spend. Is it more directly related to your safety to spend that on Iraq, or to spend that on actually developing and deploying a nuclear detection system that works? I think the question sort of answers itself. The only issue that George Bush and John Kerry agreed on, in the debates of 2004, was that a nuclear weapon going off in the U.S. was the single greatest threat to the [country].



IO: But as you say in your book, everyone agrees—everyone has always agreed—that we should pay down our debt.



DS:: Right.



IO: It’s a great thing to agree on.



DS: Right. And it doesn’t happen.



IO: What about some of the other worries in your book?



DS: The one that concerns me the most I put at the beginning and end, which is that global economic downturns lead to bad things happening politically.
And that was the theme of Tony Blair’s testimony last week [before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which met for its Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community]. It’s the theme in the prologue and epilogue of The Inheritance. You want to make sure that you pay attention to the economy not only because you have to put people back to work—and God knows we do—but because you want to make sure that you’re keeping the country as safe as you can. Economic instability leads to political instability. And we learned that in its worst ways in the 1930s.



IO: Bearing that history in mind, under what circumstances now could you see North Korea or Iran unraveling?



DS: Right. Two very different cases. In Korea’s case, the biggest concern that I have is actually a proliferation threat. I don’t think North Korea is going to launch its nuclear weapon at anybody. That’s not a serious concern because they’re mostly about the survivability of the regime. But as you saw from the Syria case, where they had exported the equipment and the expertise, [North Koreans] are so desperately poor that the one thing they have to sell that’s of significant value is their nuclear technology. So that’s my North Korea worry.
The Iran worry is that they would get to a point where they’re just on the edge of nuclear capability, and use that to become the greatest power in the Middle East, and start off an arms race within the Middle East that would involve Saudi Arabia, Egypt—everybody who is more worried than even the Israelis are about an Arabian nuclear capability. And just given the volatility of the region, it’s the last region in the world we want loose nuclear weapons lying around.



IO: You speculate in The Inheritance about how long Obama will have, effectively, to decide what he’s—



DS: Gonna do on Iran?



IO: Yes.



DS: I think it’s a year or two. I don’t think it’s a whole lot longer than that. Because I think Iran will reach a point where they are so far down the line on uranium enrichment production that they’ll have enough fuel that they could threaten at any moment to throw out the inspectors, and turn [that fuel] into weapons—exactly what North Korea did in 2003. So you want to be able to deal with this problem before they have enough material in hand to make a viable threat in that way.



IO: Can you share with us your understanding of how cyber warfare might be waged?



DS: Cyber warfare is the one sort of unexpected one in all of this. You know, [with respect to] the nuclear stuff: If you watch, you’ve got an outline of the problem. [Regarding] biological warfare, if you paid attention to the 2003 anthrax attacks in Washington, at least you understand the threat on a small scale. (That’s another area, by the way, where we can and should be doing a lot better detection work.)
But cyber is entirely new. It’s new, and it’s also the area where we are the most vulnerable. And we are vulnerable, because most of the targets in the United States are not government targets; they’re basically commercial networks. When I was doing the interviewing on this in the summer of last year, people were saying to me, including Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence—you know, imagine if somebody was able to mess with the computer systems of the markets well enough that the credit markets froze up, and nobody could get any credit.
Well, what happened two months later, without any help from the Chinese, the Russians, or anybody with their hands on the keyboard? The credit markets froze up, and we saw the results. Now, that’s supposing this was an imposed problem, which you could easily imagine at any moment—that you could interfere enough [to wreak havoc] with the electronic systems that make the credit markets flow, and that build the trust system. So that’s the biggest fear on that end.
The other fear is that infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable. The story in [the book] about the power plants that are on the Internet, and that in this test a bunch of youngsters were able to go crash [that network] relatively easily, tells you about a vulnerability that we’ve got across the country. And you can imagine [the consequences] if you compounded America’s current economic troubles with the inability to have electric power flowing in vast parts of the country.
So that’s one that we need to be putting significant investment in. And Obama is. He’s just called for a 60-day review of where we are in the cyber issues. He’s hired McConnell’s old expert on this to go run the review. And I actually think that there’s a fair bit of energy under way on the issue.



IO: You worry in the book that Obama may suffer from the great expectations placed on him, and the degree of freedom that he will have, given these seemingly intractable problems.



DS: That’s right. And I think that is a significant issue, because expectations are very high. And there’s no way anybody could meet them, particularly if you were trying to deal with an economic fire like this one while you were dealing with the international issues that I described in the book.



IO: Some of the issues you’ve discussed in the book seem so remote, and some of your sources for them so hard to reach, that it must have been just like a detective story, finding people who would speak on the record about these issues for what sounds like the first time. How do you make it sound as if someone like McConnell is speaking on the record, when it seems that he really hasn’t?



DS: It’s a question of building trust over time. I mean, I was lucky enough to be covering the White House for seven of the most dramatic years in the development of American foreign policy. And over that time, you’re dealing with a lot of people. And many of the stories that you see in The Inheritance have appeared in some form or another in the paper. But they’ve been disconnected from each other.



IO: That’s true.



DS: You simply don’t have the room to go sew up [the larger story]. And so it’s a running narrative in my head, but only in my head, right? And so the advantage of a book like this is, it’s a chance to sort of take a deep breath, throw out stuff that turns out to be less important, and then put all that connective tissue in so that the bones all operate together. And I think the greatest strength of the book is the connective tissue. And also to have news: news of the Israelis coming to the Bush administration seeking the bunker busters, and the filling capability, and all that.



IO: Are you surprised by the response to The Inheritance? Because it’s complex, and really takes serious thought. It’s dense. It makes arguments. And it seems to be doing very well. What’s your reaction to that?



DS: Well, I’m pleased about it, because the foreign policy books are usually not enormously popular. They usually get published by think tanks, and they’re only in Washington [D.C.] and Cambridge [Mass.] and Stanford [Calif.], right? I deliberately wrote this to try to make it as accessible as I could.
I mean, what I wanted to do was make the tale strong enough that it would suck people in, and then give them the complexity of the underlying foreign policy issue[s]. Because, you know, there would be another way to write this book, which would be to do it in a policy book. And I think it would be a tough read.