DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies.
The inauguration of Donald Trump to the presidency is just days away, which means, among other things, that U.S. foreign policy is about to see an adjustment. In addition to some major known challenges - the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Iran's nuclear program, and relations with China - Trump has thrown some new initiatives into the mix. He's revived his interest in somehow buying or annexing Greenland and said he wants to take control of the Panama Canal, refusing to rule out military action to achieve both objectives. And for good measure, he said Canada would make a nice 51st state and said he might use economic force to make that happen.
Our guest, New York Times White House and national security correspondent David Sanger, has written that Trump's recent comments are a reminder that something else is coming back to Washington, a chaotic stream-of-consciousness presidency.
Sanger has spent four decades at the Times, covering five presidents from Clinton to Biden and sharing in three Pulitzer Prizes, most recently for coverage of Russia's role in the 2016 election. Last April, Sanger published his fourth book, one which offers a framework for understanding the challenges the United States faces in an increasingly dangerous and volatile world. It's called "New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, And America's Struggle To Defend The West."
We've invited him back on the show to share some insights on what we might expect from a Trump foreign policy. Well, David Sanger, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
DAVID SANGER: Dave, great to be back here with you.
DAVIES: Let's start by listening to a bit of the news conference that Trump had in Mar-a-Lago. This was last week. And this is a moment where you're asking him about some of this - you know, ambitions that he has articulated for taking Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal. Let's listen.
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SANGER: Can you assure the world that, as you try to get control of these areas, you're not going to use military or economic coercion?
DONALD TRUMP: No.
SANGER: And can you tell us a little bit about what your plan is? Are you going to negotiate a new treaty? Are you going to ask the Canadians to hold a vote? What is the strategy?
TRUMP: Yeah. I can't assure you. You're talking about Panama and Greenland. No, I can't assure you on either of those two, but I can say this. We need them for economic security. The Panama Canal was built for our military. I'm not going to commit to that now. It might be that you'll have to do something.
Look, the Panama Canal is vital to our country. It's being operated by China, China. And we gave the Panama Canal to Panama. We didn't give it to China, and they've abused it. They've abused that gift. It should have never been made, by the way. Giving the Panama Canal is why Jimmy Carter lost the election, in my opinion, more so maybe than the hostages.
DAVIES: And that is Donald Trump speaking to our guest, David Sanger, last week at Mar-a-Lago. Before we get into the substance of all of this, one quick fact-check - is China operating the Panama Canal?
SANGER: It is not. The Panamanians are operating the Panama Canal. China does have ports at both ends for its ships, as does the United States, and others make use of these. They've had them there for years and years and had them there during President Trump's first term. They have tried to exert some economic influence throughout Latin America and Africa and Eastern Europe and other places. But let's say that it was beyond a stretch of the facts to say that they are operating the Panama canal.
DAVIES: I have to ask you, you know, with all of the known serious foreign policy challenges that Trump has to tackle, why do you think he chose to bring up these American expansionist ambitions now? I can't believe it was an accident.
SANGER: No, I don't think it was an accident, and you might argue - some have argued - that it's to distract from some of the controversies around some of his cabinet appointees. Pete Hegseth is up for hearings this week. There are some issues - a lot of issues around Tulsi Gabbard, who's his nominee for Director of National Intelligence, and, of course, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But there's a reason, Dave, that I asked the question and the way that I asked it. In the first term, you may remember that President Trump brought up the possibility that the United States might be interested in acquiring Greenland. And at the time, it seemed like a real estate developer's dream with a slightly nationalistic turn. But it was, at its essence, an offer. Greenland said it wasn't interested. But more importantly, Denmark, which controls Greenland's security and foreign affairs, said they weren't interested, and the issue was kind of dropped.
It wasn't a crazy idea. Harry Truman wanted to buy Greenland. And you can understand now, at a moment that polar ice caps are melting away and the Chinese and the Russians are running more ships, nuclear submarines and so forth through the sort of creation of a new Northwest Passage, why we would have security interests there. And of course, President Trump has always been interested in the minerals, rare Earth minerals and others, that might be mined there.
But what's happened in the past couple of weeks is that his comments took a much more martial turn. They no longer became a, would you be interested in selling - to a, this is a central vital national security concern of the United States, so you must sell. And similar lines about taking control of the Panama Canal - and so the reason I asked it the way I did, which was, are you willing to use military or economic coercion, is basically to try to elicit from him, was he trying to say that he was going to make an offer you can't refuse? And his immediate answer was, yes, that's exactly what I'm doing. And it's unusual, particularly in the case of Denmark, Greenland, because we don't usually threaten to use our military against NATO allies.
DAVIES: Right. Right. You know, it's a self-governing territory of Denmark. Does anyone think the U.S. could legally use force to take Greenland? I mean, what's been the reaction in Congress and foreign capitals to this kind of talk?
SANGER: So the foreign capitals were predictable, and I think they were getting a little taste of what negotiating with Donald Trump is like. And maybe this is just a negotiating position. You know, maybe in the end, all he wants to do is make an offer that they actually will take. The reaction in Congress - Democrats were saying exactly what you would expect, which is that the old America First may have sounded isolationist. The new America First - and I would argue the America First that Donald Trump always had in mind, since I first discussed it with him in an interview of Maggie Haberman and I did in 2016, has a really much more nationalistic turn.
So, you know, Donald Trump's idea of America First is less 1930s isolationism and more 1890s expansionism, when McKinley and then Teddy Roosevelt took the Philippines. It's when the United States got Guam. It's when the U.S. took control of some other territories, Puerto Rico included. So what we're facing here is a Donald Trump who is thinking in terms of going back to the era when the U.S. had expansionist ideals.
And look, we had them in the Louisiana Purchase. We had them in the purchase of Alaska, Seward's Folly, as you may remember from 11th grade, right? And we had them in the 1890s. We just haven't had them since.
DAVIES: Yeah, well, I mean, the whole kind of notion of the world order led by the United States - an important element of it was that international boundaries are not open to negotiation or change by force. This is a pretty dramatic turn, isn't it?
SANGER: If, in fact, he means what he said to me, it would be. It would also be welcomed in many ways by President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. If you think about Putin's argument for taking Ukraine, what it came down to was, we have a strong national security interest in reuniting Peter the Great's old empire, and he doesn't want to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. He thought the old Soviet leaders were idiots. What he wants to do is restore Peter the Great's Russia. And I've only been in his office once, Dave, but the one time I was, I noticed there were no pictures of Stalin and Lenin, but there was a bust of Peter the Great.
So if you are Putin, you're thinking, wow, this is terrific. We have a president of the United States coming in who has dropped the line about international legal order and all the things that Joe Biden was saying about why we could not take Ukraine. And we've got somebody who now believes that, you know, force can be used if you believe taking territory will improve your national security. And Xi, of course, would look at that and think about Taiwan.
DAVIES: Right, and other places in the South China Sea, I guess - Canada is certainly a different animal in a way. I mean, what has been the reaction to him suggesting that Canada should join with the United States?
SANGER: So this started as kind of a joke, right? And he called Prime Minister Trudeau - who, of course, is on his way out - Governor Trudeau, and he talked about how much easier it would be if Canada was just a state. I'm not sure he really believes that. I'm not quite sure how many votes for Donald Trump or people like him that would necessarily be in Canada, but, you know, we'll set that aside for a moment. But it began as a joke that then took a more serious turn.
Now, Trudeau was in Washington last week for President Carter's funeral. And he went on television, I think with Jen Psaki's show, and she asked him, did President Trump bring this up during your meeting with him? - when Trudeau came a number of weeks ago. And he said, yes, he did. Trudeau said that he tried to sort of make light of it by suggesting that maybe we could do land swaps, and we could trade for California and Vermont, two reliably blue states. But I'm not sure that's really what President Trump has in mind.
DAVIES: You'd have to think if you were serious about any of these initiatives, you wouldn't start with public declarations. You would have a plan. You would meet privately with all of the relevant players, wouldn't you?
SANGER: Absolutely. And that would be the way to get this done. And John Bolton, his former national security adviser, or one of the four during the first term, has made that point repeatedly. If you're going to do this, the surest way to get people's back up is to do it in public and make threats.
But there's a pattern here. You may remember that before he negotiated with North Korea, he declared that Kim Jong Un was little rocket man and threatened - you know, said, I have a bigger red button on my desk than you do, basically threatened destruction and then got into a negotiation. Now, what people forget is the negotiation failed, and North Korea now has more nuclear weapons than it ever had before. But this would be a sort of Trumpian (ph) pattern to go out and do this. And you know what? It kind of thrilled his base. You didn't hear anybody in Congress on the Republican side really criticize him for it. A few rolled their eyes.
And I think what you have begun to hear from people close to President Trump, including his incoming national security advisor, Mike Waltz - that we are headed to a Monroe Doctrine 2.0. Now, you may remember the Monroe Doctrine was what established that the United States had a sphere of influence in our own hemisphere. And that's sort of what he is saying about Greenland, Panama Canal, for sure, maybe even adopting Canada as a 51st state. The difficulty with this is it plays right to the Chinese argument that they, too, have a sphere of influence, and it's most of the Pacific.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with David Sanger. He's a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with David Sanger. He's a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. We're talking about what to expect in foreign policy from the Trump administration. Sanger's book, published last April, is "New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, And America's Struggle To Defend The West." A paperback edition will be coming out later this spring.
Let's talk about Ukraine and Russia. You know, Trump has expressed admiration for Putin. That's well known. And he has said that, you know, this war is horrific, would never have happened on his watch and that he will quickly resolve it without ever saying how. Now he's going to have to actually do something. What are you hearing from sources about what that might be?
SANGER: Well, this is going to be the fascinating sort of opening gambit in his time in office. He takes office in a little less than a week. And he - of course, he said during the campaign that he would solve the Ukraine problem in 24 hours. In fact, he said during - at one point during one of the debates, that he would try to get it resolved even before he took office. He's now recognized that it's a lot more complicated than maybe it looked on the campaign trail. And his designated special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, who - a former military official who was also in the first-term National Security Council - has sort of set 100 days to get a negotiation going.
So first of all, nothing wrong with the idea that there needs to be a settlement here. We've been through, as of next month, three years of horrific killing. And it's pretty clear that the Russians are not going to be able, at least this round, to take all of Ukraine. And it's pretty clear that the Ukrainians are not going to be able to expel the Russians. So we're kind where we were in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953, where you're at that static moment where maybe there is a moment for an armistice, not a peace treaty, but just a ceasefire where everybody is sort of locked into place, and then you try to come up with a mechanism where you are going to negotiate the borders later on.
So the big question, Dave, would be what kind of security guarantee could the United States and the West give the Ukrainians so they would have confidence that Putin would not just simply use the time to reconstitute his forces, regroup, build up a stronger attack plan and the manpower and the equipment to do it and then take Ukraine again sometime later in the Trump administration or beyond?
DAVIES: I think you asked Donald Trump that question at Mar-a-Lago, didn't you?
SANGER: I did, and I didn't get an answer, as you may have seen. So he did say that he opposes letting Ukraine into NATO. And that wouldn't put him all that far from President Biden, who, along with the Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, got in the way of specific commitments about when Ukraine would join NATO. They only passed these sort of vague commitments that, at some point, Ukraine would be ready to go do it.
So the issue is, could you establish a force of allies with the French, the British, the Germans, maybe backed up with the United States intelligence and others who would basically put a peacekeeping force on the borders to keep the Russians from coming over and having. They would then be attacking NATO forces, and presumably that could invoke a NATO reaction under Article 5, the treaty. You know, an attack on one is an attack on all. That's essentially the same as putting them into NATO.
But we don't know if President Trump is willing to go do that, and certainly Vladimir Putin would oppose it. So as you're thinking about these negotiations, don't simply think about land. Think about how you would sustain a Ukrainian state. And we don't know how committed President Trump is to that concept.
DAVIES: Right. I mean, we should just note in passing that President Zelenskyy of the Ukraine has categorically rejected the idea of ceding any territory to Russia. I realize that an armistice isn't exactly the same thing as that, but that wouldn't be easy to sell. But there's also the fact - and in your book, you note that Trump essentially kind of agreed with Putin that Ukraine isn't even a real country. He's been very warm towards Putin. He's expressed sympathy with the idea that it was provocative to even talk about putting Ukraine in NATO. So I guess another question is, is Trump going to do all he can to shut off all U.S. military assistance to Ukraine and try and get allies to do the same?
SANGER: Well, first of all, back in 2016, in the campaign when Maggie Haberman and I were interviewing him in a series of foreign policy interviews, he went out of his way to say, A, Ukraine's not our problem. It's the Europeans' problem. This was long before the current war started. But, of course, already some land and Crimea had been seized.
So, yes, he believes - or at least has voiced belief - that Ukraine may not be a true country. He hasn't quite come out and uttered the same words that we've heard from Mr. Putin, but it's been pretty close. And same for Tulsi Gabbard, who is, of course, his nominee to be director of National Intelligence. And it'll be interesting in her hearings to see how she navigates that wording.
But I think the critical fact of the matter is that Zelenskyy knows that in any negotiated agreement, this is essentially going to look like the Korea Armistice, which is to say, you're not going to get the Russians to back off to the borders of a traditional Ukraine from years ago. You might go back to some of the borders of February of 2022, but at that point, the Russians were already into parts of Ukraine and, of course, had Crimea. So Zelenskyy understands the territorial reality. I think his brain is focused on the security question that I mentioned.
DAVIES: You know, there's also the broader question of Donald Trump and his attitude and relations with Russia and Putin. You know, he's always said very warm things about him. Seems to think he can do a lot because of their personal relationship.
SANGER: Dave, I once asked him why he said these things. And he said, well, he always says very nice things about me.
DAVIES: What's not to like, huh? We are speaking with David Sanger. He is the White House and National Security correspondent for the New York Times. His latest book, published last April, is "New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, And America's Struggle To Defend The West." A paperback edition will be coming out later this spring. We'll talk more after a break about the challenges facing the Trump administration. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We're speaking with New York Times correspondent David Sanger about the foreign policy challenges Donald Trump will face when he takes office next week. They include the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and Iran's growing nuclear program. And Trump has talked about acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, even making Canada part of the United States. David Sanger's latest book is "New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, And America's Struggle To Defend The West." A paperback edition is expected this spring.
You noted recently that when President Biden agreed to let Ukraine send long-range missiles deep into Russia, Russia formally announced a change to its policy on the use of nuclear weapons. This is interesting. What was the change?
SANGER: So the change was one that basically said Russia could imagine the use of nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear attack. So what it was trying to do was basically say, we are reducing the threshold about when we could introduce nuclear weapons. Now, there have been elements of this in Putin's wording back and forth. And the scariest moment of the war so far for the United States came in October of 2022, when U.S. intelligence picked up indications that the Russians were considering using a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine. And had they done it - they didn't, obviously - it would've been the first use of a nuclear weapon in anger since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it would've changed, I think, the world. And it would've changed the nature of these new cold wars.
And it would've, I think, also changed our understanding about when nuclear weapons would be used. I mean, after all, Ukraine is a non-nuclear state. Now, President Trump in his first term, had a national security strategy that also envisioned the possibility that in a case of a particularly crippling non-nuclear attack - say, a cyberattack that took out all of the country's communications - the U.S. might use nuclear weapons in response. It didn't survive into the Biden administration. But what worries me about this era, and what makes these new cold wars so much more dangerous than the old Cold War, is that we have seen general discussion about loosening the conditions under which nuclear weapons would be used.
DAVIES: I mean, the other thing, I guess, is the buildup of weapons. And the START Treaty, which limits nuclear weapons, expires, I think, early next year, right?
SANGER: February of 2026. So the president will have 13 months to go renegotiate a treaty that - and, you know, have me back here to call me wrong, David, but there's no way this treaty is getting renegotiated. It can't be extended under its own terms. Now, you may remember the New START Treaty is what brought the Russian and U.S. forces - nuclear forces, deployed forces - down to 1,550 weapons each. And then, of course, we've got many thousands more in storage, as do the Russians. It is the last surviving nuclear accord. And the Russians have already violated many provisions of it, but they've held to the numerical limits.
Those will go away in February of 2026, at the very moment that China has radically changed its approach and is expanding its nuclear arsenal. The Pentagon recently said they are up to 500 nuclear weapons from maybe a hundred to 200 back in the days of Mao's minimum deterrent. This is all fairly recent. They're heading to 1,000 by 2030. Fifteen hundred, roughly the number the U.S. and the Russians maintain, by 2035. And if you ask people in the defense community, they will tell you that the Chinese are actually ahead of schedule. But here we are in a world in which we could have no restrictions on the size of the Russian arsenal and a growing arsenal from China, which of course was never a signatory to New START or any other nuclear limitation treaty that limited their number of nuclear weapons. So we could be back in a third nuclear age here pretty fast.
DAVIES: And, of course, it's more complicated because in the old Cold War, it was the United States and the Soviet Union. I mean, the stakes were terrifying, but there was a stability to it. Now you got the United States facing a Russia and China that are increasingly cooperative with each other and with North Korea and with Iran. And the stakes and, you know, the methods of contention are different. I mean, cyberattacks are a part of this. You know, access to technology and precious metals are part of this. It's a lot more complicated, isn't it?
SANGER: It certainly is. And the result is, as I argue in the book, that the old Cold War, which had this stability, as you referred to it, is very unlike the new cold war. In the old Cold War, we had one major adversary, the Soviet Union. And while it had its terrifying moments like the Cuban missile crisis, we fundamentally got to a point where we understood if we did X, they would do Y. We had these red phones. You had a pretty high confidence somebody would answer the other end. You knew everybody who had nuclear control there. That's what allowed the stability.
In the three-way relationship between Russia, China and the United States that is really the newest and most important single feature of the geopolitical world today, you don't have that stability. Introducing a new player makes a very big difference. The cyberattacks have given all of the players, but particularly China, a new way to have attacks that threaten to cripple the United States - its utility grid and so forth - without ever actually launching an attack. And that's the core of an operation called Volt Typhoon, which is the Chinese code in our utility grid. There's been another one for surveillance that got in recent months into the telecom system. The fact that the Chinese can do this so effectively, even after we've raised these defenses, tells you that we are in a new and much more volatile kind of competition.
DAVIES: You know, the fact that these challenges are so much more complicated comes at a time that we have a president who famously doesn't have a lot of patience for listening to detailed briefings or reading detailed policy papers - and, you know, who has said his unpredictability is an asset, the fact that, I think he once said, Xi Jinping knows he's F-ing crazy.
SANGER: Referring to himself.
DAVIES: Referring to himself.
SANGER: Yeah.
DAVIES: Yeah, yeah, referring to himself. Is Trump suited for the challenges here? Well, we're about to go find out. And we're conducting a, you know, big national experiment in that. You know, buckle up for this one. Here's what we know from the first term - he does not respond well to being given big written reports. He will not read them. He will respond to oral presentations and visual presentations. And if you go back into the memoirs of people like John Bolton or H.R. McMaster, both of whom served as his national security adviser, you'll hear about briefings that are tailored to him. Showing him what the investment in real estate - something he knows well - is like, what occupancy rates are like in hotels. Things that would enable him to sort of tap into the condition of, say, rebuilding Afghanistan, which is the examples that they were using at that time. He has embraced the sort of Nixon Madman Theory, but the fact of the matter is the rest of the world knows that, too.
And we also discovered in the first term that he's very susceptible to the promise of a really great trade deal. There was one famous conversation with Xi Jinping in which he said to him, you know, I'm not going to beat up on you for how you're treating the people of Hong Kong if we just get our Phase 1 and Phase 2 trade deal. He got Phase 1. He never got Phase 2. So I think the Chinese are going to approach him by saying, let's work out our trade differences, knowing that if he could go do that, he would be susceptible to it. It's an important thing now, especially because China has a trade surplus now on a scale unlike any we saw when Trump was last in office because they are wildly overproducing, and they can't buy enough in their own economy.
They now have some weaknesses. We are going to see whether or not President Trump can actually negotiate a new deal with Iran, or whether he's going to use this moment of Iranian weakness and American and Israeli power, after the defeat of Hezbollah, to take out the Iranian nuclear program. So this is going to be probably one of the most consequential years in the use of American power that I can think of in the post-Cold War era.
DAVIES: We are speaking with David Sanger. He is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His book published last April is "New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, And America's Struggle To Defend The West." A new paperback edition will be out this spring. We'll continue our conversation after this break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with David Sanger. He's a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. We're talking about the foreign policy challenges the United States will face in the Trump administration and how President Trump may address them.
Let's focus on Iran a bit. You know, there are some big decisions coming here. Trump pulled the United States out of the nuclear deal that the Obama administration had negotiated with Iran, saying it was a terrible deal. Let me just ask you first of all, was it a bad deal in the eyes of independent analysts?
SANGER: It certainly had weaknesses, but it had one big success, Dave. And that was that under the 2015 deal, the Iranians shipped out of the country about 97% of the material that they had from which you could make a nuclear weapon. Not 100%, but enough that we would've had about a year's warning if they were going to build a weapon because they would have to build up their stockpiles again. And that material got taken by the Russians. They were well-compensated for it, but they did cooperate in taking it out. When President Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018, he said the Iranians would come begging for a new deal. They did not.
And in fact, after a couple of years, that all fell apart. And the Iranians began producing new nuclear material, lots of it and at a much higher level of enrichment than they were doing prior to the 2015 deal. They are now enriching uranium at 60% purity. Ninety percent is what you need to make a nuclear weapon. Prior to this, they hadn't been any place close to that. So they are now in the position where in a few weeks' time, they could produce enough 90% fuel to build four nuclear weapons, maybe a little bit more. And they are stepping up that production. We would have very little warning.
And while initially, we thought it would be a year or a year and a half before they could actually produce a warhead, they look to be working on some programs that might speed that up as well. So we don't have a lot of time here. And I think we're at a point where the Iranians are feeling extremely vulnerable. They have lost their proxy forces, most importantly Hezbollah, which the Israelis, against the advice of the United States and the Biden administration, attacked and were - they were wildly successful. Obviously, with the collapse of the Syrian government, they're exposed at that end. The result is that Iran no longer has a proxy force that could strike deep into Israel.
DAVIES: Trump has talked about maximum pressure - right? - sanctions, cutting off oil, that kind of thing. You know, this has happened before. Is it effective?
SANGER: It would be effective if the rest of the world cooperated. But the fact of the matter is the Chinese have been buying a lot of Iranian oil and buying it at a discount. They've been buying Russian oil and buying it at a discount. You know, sanctions are a great thing. They make you feel wonderful because you've done something, and you've done it without committing troops. But they only really work if all the major buyers in the world go along with them.
DAVIES: And the fact that Iran has these alliances with Russia, right, and China, does that make it trickier?
SANGER: Oh, it certainly does because what's happened now is the Russians need something from Iran, and what they need is the Shahed drones. Iran is now actually producing some of these in Russia. They've built a plant in Russia. And there are other military goods they need. And same thing for North Korea, Dave. I mean, for the past 70 years, what has anyone in the world needed from North Korea? Nothing, right? They've been a desperately poor country. Suddenly, Russia comes along and says, I'll take millions of rounds of your artillery. And we'd like some of your missiles as well. And so they've suddenly got a real customer. And of course, China has not been providing arms directly to Russia, but it has been providing the technology that Russia needs to rebuild what was a corrupt and technologically behind military force.
So the question I'd really like to ask President-elect Trump is the same one I asked President Biden at his last press conference, what will almost certainly be the last full press conference of his presidency at the NATO Summit, which is, do you have a strategy for getting in the way of the Russia-China alliance, and with that, Iran and North Korea? And President Biden, after winding around for a bit, said yes, we do have such a policy, which was a big change. Now, he's since signed out what that policy is, but they classified the whole thing.
DAVIES: We are speaking with David Sanger. He's a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His book published last April is "New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, And America Struggle To Defend The West." A paperback edition will be coming out later this spring. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with David Sanger. He's a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. We're talking about the challenges Donald Trump will face in foreign policy when he takes office.
Well, let's talk a little bit about the Middle East and specifically Israel. You know, it's interesting that - I think you wrote that at Donald Trump's news conference in Mar-a-Lago last week, four times he repeated what he has said, that if the hostages taken by Hamas are not out by Inauguration Day, quote, "all hell will break out in the Middle East," unquote. Do we know what that means? Do you have a sense of how he's going to approach this?
SANGER: We don't have much. We heard a little bit more from this over the weekend from JD Vance, the vice president-elect, who basically said that, working through Israel, there would be a lifting of any restraint on attacking the last of Hamas. Now, of course, if you did big attacks on the Hamas leadership, you might wipe them out. The risk is, of course, also that the remaining hostages could be killed in the process. And that's what everybody's trying to avoid. So there is a lot of discussion of putting a deal together for 34 hostages, which would be probably a little less than half of what we believe is the current number of hostages who remain alive and in captivity, and a ceasefire that would last for about 42 days - meaning that, of course, the renewal of it and turning it into something permanent would be up to the Trump team.
If this has echoes to you of the Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan handoff, where of course, the hostages in Iran were released just hours after inauguration - and Carter, as you saw in some of the memorials to him and the obituaries, went to go greet the released hostages and so forth. You could see a scene taking place kind of like that. We would be lucky to see that because obviously these hostages have now been in place for nearly a year and a half, since October 7 of 2023. And the hope is to get them out as quickly as can be. And if the inauguration is the moving moment for that, that would be terrific because the administration has been so close to agreements in the past that fell apart at the last minute. I'm told by the negotiators that the big obstacle here has been the Hamas leadership, which, as you can imagine, is in considerable disarray after the Israelis killed their longtime leader, Sinwar.
DAVIES: You know, there's still these huge, you know, questions that remain even if there's a truce and return of some hostages like who's going to govern Gaza in the future, and what sort of autonomy will Israeli forces give it? And what about the broader question of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? I mean, you know, Trump has gotten some credit for the Abraham Accords, which, you know, established relations between Israel and some Arab states. Do you have any sense that there's any commitment to or prospect of broader progress on these issues?
SANGER: Oh, I think there is. And, you know, I don't think that we should rule out the possibility that President Trump could make some significant agreements in areas where you might not suspect. So we were just discussing one, Iran. I think it's 50-50 he could strike an Iran deal. Now, whether or not it does what we want to do with the nuclear weapons or is broader is a big question. Same thing for the Middle East. I would say that the biggest single diplomatic accomplishment of Trump's first term was the Abraham Accords. The Biden administration tried to expand them. And obviously, the biggest expansion would be an agreement with Saudi Arabia in which Saudi Arabia was negotiating to recognize Israel.
But they had two conditions on that, and one of them was the creation of a Palestinian state, which Netanyahu was not about to go do. And the second is the ability to go enrich uranium themselves, obviously to counter the Iranians, which I think the U.S. was preparing to allow them to do. All of this fell apart on October 7. In fact, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, had been planning to be in the Mid East negotiating with the Saudis and others. Shortly after October 7, obviously, all of that collapsed right after the terror attacks. And the question now is could Trump actually use his relationship with both the Israelis and the Saudis to put that back together? And he might be able to, but it's hard to imagine right now the Israelis or the Israeli public, given their current views after the attack, agreeing to a separate Palestinian state.
DAVIES: You know, David Sanger, before I let you go, I want to just ask you a bit about the reporting process here. I mean, you've covered five presidents, and one of them was Trump in his first term. You've written that one of the characteristics of Trump's presidency is conspiracy theories and made-up facts. How do you deal with facts that are made up, particularly if you have a press office that, you know, isn't going to run to try and clarify or, you know, walk them back at all?
SANGER: This is one of the hardest problems in modern journalism. We come out of - The New York Times and other major news organizations - out of an old-school theory that you go back and establish what the underlying facts are. So when the president says the Chinese are in control of the Panama Canal, you go back and, with your fact-checkers and with interviews and all that, you answer the reader question. Do the Chinese control the Panama Canal? And you come back, and you say no.
The difficulty we're running into right now is that we are in an era of such partisanship where everybody believes they are entitled to their own set of facts, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say. You see it in the Israel-Hamas War. You see it at the White House podium. You see it as companies try to explain why they have changed their policies, as Microsoft has so publicly on DEI in recent times. And so the question is, even if you employ an army of fact-checkers, do the real facts ever catch up with the assertion? And are readers open to the possibility that the facts of the world that they think surround their worldview may not be right?
And this is, like, one of the biggest changes in the 43 years I've been working for The New York Times, which was you could establish a set of facts as a neutral observer. And, by and large, most people, if they have confidence in your news organization, would adopt that and say, well, The New York Times says, whatever the President said was wrong, right? That's the hardest part of the environment to navigate now because people assume that even your fact-checkers are coming to this with bias, and it's hard to persuade people otherwise. And I don't know how you do it other than establishing a long track record that the world can trust, but it's not an easy thing these days.
DAVIES: Well, David Sanger, thank you again for speaking with us.
SANGER: Thank you.
DAVIES: David Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His latest book, "New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, And America's Struggle To Defend The West," comes out in paperback this spring. We recorded our interview yesterday.
On tomorrow's show, Pico Iyer talks about his memoir that's sadly a little too relevant. It's called "Aflame: Learning From Silence." It's about his many retreats to a Benedictine monastery in California's Big Sur and the wildfires that have threatened the monastery and burned down his mother's home while he was there. He nearly died in a fire. I hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram @nprfreshair.
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DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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