when they face something that's never taken place before, something that could be incredibly disruptive economically, geopolitically, because they can't imagine it, they refuse to imagine it and refuse to look at all evidence to the contrary that it might be taking place. My guest today is Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of CrowdStrike turned geopolitical thinker and author. Dmitri's recent book, *World on the Brink*, makes the case that the United States is already in a second Cold War, this time with China, and our conversation explores what that means and what we should do about it.
China wants to take Taiwan and, I think, is planning an invasion. A lot of people tell me, "Well, this can't happen. This would be so devastating to the world economy, so devastating to global world order that we just can't imagine it happening. So, thus it won't happen."
From China's ambitions toward Taiwan to the lessons of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Dmitri explains why cybersecurity, economics, military power, and geopolitics can no longer be viewed separately.
So there's no doubt in their minds that if we fight, they're going to be defeated. And that's what's necessary for deterrence.
If we fail to recognize how these forces are converging, we'll continue preparing for yesterday's threats instead of tomorrow's realities. This was a fascinating and enlightening conversation, and I'm excited to bring it to you. And now, here's Dmitri Alperovitch.
As you mentioned with your podcast, it's just like, let's jump in, and we just start going. So, we're just going to start going.
So, Dmitri Alperovitch in front of me. I always ask the opening question: who's Dmitri?
Well, I've had a number of acts in my life, a number of careers. The latest career is geopolitics, and I run a geopolitics think tank called Silverado that's primarily focused on China. I've been focused on China since really 2010 when I got into it—we can talk more about it—through the cybersecurity realm. But in 2022, this little thing called the war in Ukraine took place, and I was actually one of the first ones to have predicted it would take place, and for the last four years to kind of divert some of my efforts, not all, but some of my efforts towards the Russia-Ukraine war.
So let's start there with the Russia-Ukraine war, and we can tie it to your background. You have a background with Russia, with an understanding of Russia, and maybe that's what led you to have the right sense of what was going to go on. Can you talk about that?
Yeah, absolutely. So, I was born there, and I left when I was a kid, but nevertheless kept tabs on the country and very much was interested in what was taking place there. I watched Putin since he came into power in 1999 and felt like I, for whatever reason, really understood him in a way that you can understand a bully in your backyard. You know, I grew up around kids like that that are actually cowards, but are strong when they think that they can oppress the weak and beat them up, and have been able to understand his psyche pretty well. Again, not relate to him, but understand it. So, when in 2021, I started to see both the change in rhetoric from him that was markedly different from the way he used to talk about Ukraine, and then the buildup of forces and other indicators in cyber and elsewhere, I became very convinced that the war was going to take place. That came out publicly in December of 2021, almost three months before the war, saying, "This is almost inevitable at this point." I got widely criticized for it as a warmonger and hyping up the threat. And it was amazing to me that very serious people, even days before the war was going to take place,
were convinced that it wouldn't. I remember I was at the Munich Security Conference, right? This confab of diplomats and intelligence and defense officials, and I was talking to some senior people in the German intelligence services, and they were saying, "No, this is not going to take place." And of course, the head of German intelligence was actually caught flat-footed in Kyiv when the war was taking place and was trying to figure out how to drive out of town and across the border. So, it just shows you how myopic people had been.
And I've seen this both in the China book that I wrote and even on the Iran wars, the last two Iran wars that I also predicted, that people just, when they face something that's never taken place before, something that could be incredibly disruptive economically, geopolitically, because they can't imagine it, they refuse to imagine it and refuse to look at all evidence to the contrary that it might be taking place. So I often, when I go on my book tour, talk about the threat of China, the fact that China wants to take Taiwan and, I think, is planning an invasion. A lot of people tell me, "Well, this can't happen. This would be so devastating to the world economy, so devastating to global world order that we just can't imagine it happening. So, thus it won't happen." And of course, time and time again, history proves you wrong on those types of statements.
Do you think that's like a willful burying the head in the sand? Like a denial, because they don't want to, like to your point, imagine what that will be like?
Yeah. I think it's a little bit of a safety mechanism, but also lack of imagination. Like, we've never seen something like this before. We haven't seen it in a long time, right? You know, when you look at the Ukraine war, we hadn't seen a war like this on the European continent since World War II. And many people have assumed that we've moved past all that, that geopolitics has changed and we can now sit down and diplomatically resolve our issues and not resort to the type of territorial conflicts that have defined the 18th century and parts of the 19th century and so forth. And of course, that's not the case, and history has not really changed. You have to look at all possibilities and figure out which one is most likely based on personalities. I think this is one of the things that people tend to underestimate and undercount in international affairs: the importance of people and personalities that are in charge.
So people would often tell me in the leadup to the war, "This is not going to happen because this would be devastating for Russia. It makes no sense for this to happen." And I would actually agree with them. And it has proven correct that it has been devastating for Russia in almost every way. But you have to look at Putin and what his interests are, which are separate and apart from the interests of Russia, right? He's focused on his own legacy, on his own destiny, on his own ego. And that's what drove this invasion, not just the economic factors or what you would term as sort of rational analysis of the situation.
There's something deeply disappointing about two things you said. One, I do remember the leadup. I remember the punditry talking about the buildup of forces along the border, and it was like, this is posturing, it's an exercise, all that like days before. And I remember believing that largely because, to your point, we haven't had this type of warfare on the European continent since World War II. It can't happen. And come on, it's 2020. We've moved past these things. Sure, I would expect there to be some exchange of fire, the special operation kind of thing. But what it's turned into now in hindsight, four years of what looks like 1940s again—trench warfare, this time just powered by some—
Or 1914, exactly. Yeah. Now powered by more technology in some capacity, but still trench-to-trench, hand-to-hand in some cases, you just didn't think was possible. So it's deeply disappointing, because you thought we were past that, or at least the naive thought we were past that.
And the second really disappointing thing is that it does come down to personality. I think that's a huge point that maybe not enough people believe or understand, because you think these are superpowers that represent hundreds of millions of people—in our case, over a billion people in China's case—but just one person with their drive and their power can take a whole country down a dark path.
Yeah. And look, it's not just something that only happens in dictatorships. Look at our own history. Would Iraq have happened, the Iraq War, if George W. Bush had not been in power? If Al Gore had won that election? Almost impossible to imagine, right? So, personalities do matter. Strong leaders that decide to take one action or another absolutely dictate history, dictate world geopolitics. And you have to look at people like Putin, like Xi, when you're analyzing the situation: are they likely to do this or not?
That's my problem with a lot of China analysts that say, "Oh, you know, it makes no sense for China to take Taiwan. They should just engage with the world order on their terms and try to become a richer country, and engaging in a potential conflict with the United States and certainly conflict with Taiwan makes zero sense." Except that it makes all the sense in the world to Xi, and he is the one person that is going to make the decision here. If Deng Xiaoping had been in power, no, we wouldn't be talking about an invasion of Taiwan, because he was focused on prosperity of China, growing its power. That is not Xi. Xi has completely overturned the old refrain that Deng Xiaoping had used with his people of "hide your strength and bide your time," and turned this around into "show off your strength and waste no time" effectively, and has made Taiwan a central pillar of his approach to his legacy, Chinese destiny. In fact, he talks about how this problem cannot be passed off to future generations.
So, these people matter. If tomorrow he has a heart attack and dies—he doesn't look very healthy—we could be facing a very different China, and a lot of the predictions I'm making in the book may not come to pass. But as long as he's there, as long as Putin is there, we're dealing with the policy that they're driving.
Does the current rhetoric of Xi mirror the rhetoric of Putin pre-invasion?
It's quite similar. And I actually started writing this book, *World on the Brink*, right after the war broke out, literally that day. I sort of sat down, because I had made that prediction very publicly three months earlier. It was still a shock to the system, like I think for many people, that this is actually happening, right? It's one thing to sit down analytically and say he's going to invade, and then to be talking to people on the ground, to be watching videos as I was up all that entire night of February 24th, looking at Telegram, looking at everything that was coming across—missiles flying in, helicopter assaults taking place—and still being shocked that this is actually taking place. That early morning, after not having slept at all, I started jotting down why I think this happened and why this prediction came true.
I came up with five drivers of this war. And when I looked at that list, I said, "Oh, my God, this exactly applies to Xi and Taiwan, down to every single one." And those are history—a distorted view of history of both these men that these nations, Taiwan and Ukraine, are not independent nations, that they belong in the respective empires of China and Russia. Geography dictates geopolitics, and Putin often talks about the importance of Ukrainian geography and how critical it is for Russia, and has always been critical for Russia because, both from a defensive and offensive perspective, this has been a buffer land for centuries that has been used to invade Russia. Whether you're talking about Hitler, Napoleon, Teutonic Knights, the Poles, almost all of these invasions of Russia across centuries have either gone through Ukraine or Belarus and were viewed by Moscow as critical lands that gave them time to mobilize and repel the aggressors. And then from an offensive perspective, if you want to dominate Eastern Europe, you need these lands to project power across the continent.
Taiwan is even more critical for China, because China actually faces a complete encirclement. This is a power that thinks it's going to be the world's preeminent superpower this century, eclipsing the United States that it believes is in decline, and nevertheless, it is completely surrounded by our military bases across the region and our allies. When China looks to its east, it sees the Korean Peninsula, half of which is South Korea with 28,000 American troops and air bases and some naval installations as well. Further down, you have the Japanese islands, the headquarters of the US Naval 7th Fleet and the Marine Expeditionary Forces in Okinawa and elsewhere. And on the other side, you have the Philippines, where for the first time since the '90s, we're back. We have nine military bases now deploying intermediate-range ballistic missiles that can range China. And in the center of this all, the so-called first island chain, is Taiwan: the cork that keeps China bottled up in the East and South China Sea.
So when you're a power like China that is extraordinarily dependent on trade—both imports of raw materials and exports of goods that they manufacture mostly through sea lanes—to have your sea lanes completely at the control of your primary adversary in the United States in the first island chain, and then on the other side in the Malacca Strait, is completely unacceptable to you. Taking Taiwan from a defensive perspective allows you to break out of that blockade effectively, but from an offensive perspective, actually turn the tables on us and now interject our sea-based lines of communications to South Korea, to Japan, to the Philippines, and push us out of that region. Asia, of course, is 40% of the world's GDP, most of the economic growth, most of the population, so it's a really, really vital region. So geography matters for both countries.
Destiny matters a great deal, right? So both of these men look at themselves as making their countries great again, to borrow a phrase, right? Putin views himself really as the new Peter the Great that's rebuilding Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and all the disasters of the 1990s, both economically and militarily. From a power projection perspective, he wants to be seen as an equal at a minimum to the United States, as an equal great power. And China, of course, from Xi's perspective, its time has come, and it is now emerging on the world stage as a preeminent superpower. And you can't, again from both perspectives, allow another superpower—the United States primarily and NATO alliance in the case of Russia in particular—to be right on your borders and threaten you in this way, either by enabling Ukraine to get into NATO or deploying training forces and other enablers in Ukraine, and same for Taiwan with Xi.
And then the last piece really comes down to ego and the fact that both of these men look at these problems—quote-unquote "problems" of Ukraine and Taiwan—from their perspective, basically saying in the twilight of their years (both are in their 70s; Xi is just one year younger than Putin), focused on the remaining years that they may have in power and saying, "What's left undone?" At the top of the list are these geopolitical problems that they see in their view, saying, "I don't want to pass this problem to the next generation. I want to be the one that solves it, and I want to be the one that gets credit for it in the pantheon of history."
So I think that dictated the timing of the Ukraine war more than anything else, because coming out of COVID, Putin was incredibly concerned about his mortality. We all remember the memes with the long tables. Everyone had to quarantine themselves for two weeks before they could see him and test themselves incessantly. Being concerned about dying, he was thinking about, "What am I leaving as my legacy?" And with this Ukraine issue still being unresolved, I think he was determined to get it done, and he thought that it could be done easily. He was, of course, deeply mistaken on that. And I think similarly, Xi said publicly, "I don't want this problem to be passed off to future generations. Taiwan has to become part of China, and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," as he says, "cannot be accomplished without Taiwan." Right? So Taiwan now becoming the cornerstone, which it had never been, to the view of China reemerging on the world stage as the greatest power that it's always been in the history of human civilization. It has always been the richest, the most powerful, most populous country, and it's only since the advent of the Industrial Revolution that they first lost that mantle to Great Britain and then to us.
Wow. Okay. We covered a lot of ground there. There's a lot that I want to pull on, and I do want to spend a lot of time talking China. I want to go back just to Russia and Putin briefly, because you mentioned Putin was obviously very wrong about how Ukraine was going to go. I remember again the punditry, like, maybe 72 hours Ukraine will hold up. There was all the anticipation that Zelenskyy was going to flee. Of course he didn't. Of course there was a great defensive effort, and now we're four years in. Where does it go from here?
Yeah. By the way, I want to debunk one myth that exists with regards to the three-day war. There's no evidence that Putin ever thought it would be a three-day war. I think he thought it would be quick, maybe a few weeks. But the three-day thing actually came from a testimony that General Mark Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had given to Congress: that his estimation was that Russia was thinking about a three-day war or could have done it in three days. But there's no evidence that Putin actually thought it would take three days. Nevertheless, he thought it would be much quicker and there would be fairly little resistance.
But I'll say this: most people don't appreciate how close it came. The Ukraine war in many ways mirrored the Afghanistan war, which went really, really well for Russia in the first days and then very poorly for the next eight years, not unlike us in Afghanistan as well. But that plan in 1979 called for special forces to land in the Bagram Airfield, drive into the presidential palace in Kabul, kill the president, and then at the same time, you have a huge invasion force coming over the borders to quote-unquote "pacify" the country and occupy it. That's what they did in 1979, and again, it worked initially, and then the insurgency took place, and of course, it all fell apart. That was almost the exact plan for Ukraine. You had this heliborne assault on Hostomel Airport, an airport just outside of Kyiv, that was going to land significant forces that were going to drive into Kyiv, try to capture or kill Zelenskyy. At the same time, you have this huge invasion force pouring across numerous fronts to try to occupy the country.
The main issue that—there were many issues, but the main issue that they had is that the air assault failed. And it failed almost by accident, because despite the fact that the US had intelligence about this whole plan and we had provided that intelligence to the Ukrainians, as CIA Director Burns has now said, the Ukrainians just refused to believe it, and they were completely unprepared for it. On my last trip to Ukraine, I talked to some of the people involved in the defense of Hostomel, and they were basically telling me it was an individual decision of a National Guard colonel to bomb the runways to prevent the heavy planes from landing with paratroopers that were going to reinforce the base. So it took them almost a day to actually take Hostomel. By that time, there was mobilization of forces; they were surrounded at the airport. It took many other days for them to get there by land through Belarus, and it was a whole different situation at that point. But it came very, very close. And if some of those individual decisions without orders by low-level personnel had not been made, and Zelenskyy had been killed or captured, we could be dealing with a very different situation right now. So it came very close.
Yeah, I hadn't heard a number of those things. The three-day thing is bandied about as almost like the Russians or Putin was so hubristic that he was expecting this to be a three-day thing. But that's interesting that came from Mark Milley.
To the question: Putin's interest is legacy, as you mentioned, or a key part of it. Obviously, things aren't going well, at least that's my view of it or my outside view—I'm not super well-informed on where things stand. But where can he take things from here to still spin things enough for his legacy that he'll capitulate?
Well, again, this is where it really matters in understanding the person and how they look at the situation, because we can look at our reality, but if that's not his reality, it doesn't actually matter. From his perspective, things are not going great, but I don't think he thinks they're going terrible either. He keeps on taking territory at enormous cost, but cost he largely doesn't care about. You know, these people that are dying—they almost certainly have had over half a million dead and many more wounded, severely wounded in Russia. Just to put in context, that's more losses than we took in World War II, right? Total casualties. Russia took a lot more losses, 26 million, 27 million.
Just in Stalingrad, they took more.
Yeah. But nevertheless, this is an enormous impact to the country, but he doesn't care about it, right? He doesn't care about those lives. Lives have always meant absolutely nothing to any Russian leader. And he thinks that he's still progressing. He thinks that he can outlast European support for this war. He feels like in the last year and a half, he's gotten America to largely pull back. We're no longer providing aid; we're still selling some weapons to Europeans who are then passing them on to Ukraine, but we're not directly providing our own out of our own pocket. Some of the weapon systems, like Patriot missiles, are in short supply now to intercept his ballistic missiles.
So he looks at the situation and he's saying, "Well, look, I wish I had taken this in a couple weeks. We're four and a half years in, but I'm making progress, and I've taken over 20% of the country, and I keep on taking territory every single day. And Zelenskyy is weak. Look at what just happened this week with the shakeup in government: a very popular defense minister was sacked by Zelenskyy. There are protests in Kyiv. There are no protests in Moscow," in part because if anyone protests, they'll be thrown in jail. So from his perspective—and Ukrainian intelligence officials tell me that the Russian military, from what they can tell, is still reporting to him that they're going to take all of Donbas by the end of the year, and he believes that. I don't think there's a chance in hell that that's going to happen, but he is looking at different data, and obviously people are lying to him and not reporting the real situation.
So he's not irrational. It's just that his view of the situation is based on very different data than we have, in some cases completely wrong data. But if you or I were fed that data, we might very well think similarly, right? "Hey, maybe I'm winning. It's taking way longer than I thought, but give it another four or five months." In fact, you look at our Afghanistan campaign over 20 years, that was basically our strategy: "Just one more surge, one more year, and we're going to win this thing." So why are we surprised that other leaders are taking the same approach?
Yeah. I guess there's something interesting in a terrible way. You mentioned Russian leaders historically: the cost of life is never too high. I don't know if you can comment on what drives that. Is that just a bad sequence of leadership? Is that something that's—
Just throughout history, there was no value put on life. You look at their tactics for centuries: it's never been "let's invest in the greatest military technologies, greatest strategies." It's been "let's mobilize as many people as possible and throw them as meat at the front." That was World War I, that was World War II, that is now Ukraine. They keep defaulting to the same strategy. That was even Napoleon, right? In every single one of those wars, the Russian casualties far, far outpaced the enemy.
You look at the correlation—even set aside the Holocaust and the atrocities that the Nazis were committing—just military casualties in each battle on the Eastern Front in World War II: the Russian casualties outpaced the Nazi casualties in virtually every battle by a factor of like three. So that tells you how the war was won: by basically expending tons and tons of human lives that Stalin didn't care about, that the Tsar in World War I didn't care about, and now Putin doesn't care about.
It's, like I said, fascinating. It's terrifyingly fascinating, just darkly fascinating that that's the legacy of history there, the lack of appreciation for life. Because I think use Afghanistan as an example of something that we've done: the human life loss there was so minor in comparison for American forces—for the inhabitants certainly was much higher—but we see a couple dozen, a couple hundred thousand is an outright travesty in the States for loss of life. And to hear it's almost certainly half a million in the Russian case, and they're just keeping on keeping on.
This is the one thing that really surprised me about this war, because I did think that Russia had moved on from being able to tolerate this level of casualties, in part because I grew up in Moscow in the 1980s, right? And I vividly remember the protests about the Afghanistan war and the mothers of soldiers, particularly in the late 1980s post-glasnost and perestroika of Gorbachev, really demanding an end to that war, pushing Gorbachev, who didn't want to end that war, to ultimately pull the troops out because of the casualties that they were experiencing. And that was 15,000 across eight years, right? Almost a joke in comparison to what you're seeing now in Ukraine in terms of the level of death that's taking place.
In the first Chechen war in the '90s, you had the same situation where, again by today's comparisons, very small level casualties, but the Mothers of Soldiers, which is this organized committee of human rights organizations, demanded an end to that war. Russia lost that war in 1996 in part because of that domestic pressure and the casualties they were experiencing. When Putin started the second Chechen war after coming to power, he was very concerned about casualties, and they tried to minimize casualties. In Syria and in Georgia, the casualties were very low. In Syria, that was even when they started using these Wagner forces, these paramilitary forces, so that they would not send in regular troops and suffer casualties; they were very concerned about that.
And then in Ukraine, year after year, you're seeing these enormous numbers of killed and wounded, and the country doesn't seem to care. I think in part because you've had this unbelievable repression apparatus that has been ratcheted up since the start of the war, but in part because of how they were able to mobilize these forces. In prior wars, this has been a conscription force, so you had a representative part of the population fighting—people from Moscow and St. Petersburg dying along with everyone else. This time it was different. This is not conscripts. These are so-called volunteers.
Initially, it started mostly as volunteers. But as the war progressed and they got fewer and fewer volunteers, it became more of people sort of gang-pressed into signing contracts, hoodwinked into signing contracts, emptying out of prisons, etc., but mostly not from Moscow, St. Petersburg, or some of the large cities—mostly from rural areas, ethnic minorities wildly overrepresented in casualties as well. People that the leadership of the country doesn't care about, people that don't have the power to articulate for themselves, have a voice in the system, and people that also are living in often extreme poverty.
Life in Moscow, St. Petersburg is great, right? You could be living in New York, right? You've got Michelin-star restaurants and all the luxuries of modern life. You go to a rural village in Siberia or the Far East, and it's a very, very different story. There's lots of unemployment, the men are usually alcoholics, usually abusive. So, this is an interesting tidbit for you, but for a while during this war, one of the top searches on Yandex, which is sort of the Russian version of Google, had been, "How do I send my husband into the war zone, into the special military operation?" And you look at that and you're like, why would anyone do that? And then you start thinking about the perspective of the spouse that is doing those searches: your husband, again, in this village probably beats you up, probably doesn't work, probably is an alcoholic. So one, you send him out of the house, and immediately your life gets better.
Two, it started out with about $30,000; now you get over $60,000 in sign-on bonuses, which is world-changing for you in this rural village to get him out. If he never comes back and dies, which is probably 80–90% chance, a, he never comes back to beat you up again, and b, you get a death bonus on top of that that is incredibly rich, right? So this is part of the situation that's been created, the desperation of these communities, that they have no other options. A lot of these people that are signing up, they're asking, "Why did you sign up?" And they're like, "Well, I had a mortgage I couldn't pay. I didn't have a job. I thought that this was a great opportunity to change life for my family, and I didn't know that my chances of survival within the first 30 days are like 10%."
You mentioned Putin's repression apparatus, right? And that's what comes to mind for me when we talk about the scale of the loss, but the lack of what seems—and again, I have a very outsider view, right? I don't know what's going on inside of Russia, but the outsider view is almost like, how has it not become such a massive domestic issue? Where is the domestic pressure? I remember in the early days seeing videos of protests in Moscow and people just being rounded up, right? And I know Putin's always had something of a hold on things there. Has it just amplified that much more?
It has. And now you're going back almost to Stalinist days where the neighbor is reporting you. There are cases of schoolchildren getting arrested because they were writing on walls or something, you know, "End the war," and their own friends are reporting them to the police, and the kids, or sometimes even their parents, are being arrested for that. So the repression—it's not quite yet Stalinist; you don't have thousands of people getting executed by firing squads, although they might be sent to the war and die there, but it is starting to approach it. That's certainly part of the case.
The propaganda is also incredibly effective, and that's something that is often underappreciated in the West. You look at what's taking place now in Russian schools where they have this
Unbelievable campaign of bringing troops back from the war, to give lectures in schools about how they're defending the motherland and, "You too soon will be part of this incredible honor to fight for our country." They're doing stage games with literally kindergarteners playing soldiers, and then the girls playing widows. I mean, it's...
I mean, it's incredibly effed up, right? But they're basically trying to indoctrinate that generation that this is your duty to the country, that this is your responsibility to fight for the country, to die for it, as a mother to send your kid off to potentially die. And it's working. And the TV propaganda is also incredibly effective. A friend of mine who's Ukrainian was telling me the story that she's from Ukraine, her mother still lives in Ukraine and is under regular bombardment, obviously has no love for Russia. And she told me that at one point she decided to watch some of the Russian TV just to see what they're saying, and she had to turn it off after three days because she's like, "I'm starting to believe it, right? My own mother is getting bombed by them, but I'm starting to believe that this is a righteous war because the propaganda is so incredibly effective."
You would have thought that the internet age was the antidote to propaganda and to social control and social repression. Then you need only look as far as China and things like the Great Firewall going back. But I've always had this idea—and again, it's one of these great disappointments of the last decade maybe—that's made us more vulnerable in some ways, the internet age and the access to information. You hope the democratization of information would slow these sorts of things down. But now autocrats have figured out how to weaponize it.
And not just autocrats, populists across democracies as well, whether it's on the left or the right. The problem is that, yes, there is much more information that's available. But if you are only interested in looking at one set of information, ignoring everything else—which all the studies of polarized societies show that that's exactly what's happening—you're going to get sucked into that vortex and you're going to ignore everything else, right? And that's all fake news, not something you're going to even try to engage with. And that apparently is how most people react, not just Americans, not just Russians or Chinese, but humans.
So we've been talking about the United States' adversary in the first Cold War. In your book, World on the Brink, you're making the case that we are in a second cold war, and this with China. Can you make that case?
Yeah, I actually can't believe that anyone would even argue that this is not a new cold war, and one that is remarkably similar in almost every level to the first one. Let me outline the reasons. So first of all, unquestionably, just like in the first Cold War, we have a geopolitical competition with a primary adversary that is a near-peer competitor. It is diplomatic, it is economic—we have a trade war going on—it is military, it is geostrategic, and it plays out in every single corner of the world. It's not just Taiwan and Asia; it's Africa, it's Latin America, it's the Caribbean. We're concerned about China in all of those aspects, right? Almost no issue that we deal with on a global stage, even the war in Ukraine, even Iran, China is always mentioned as a potential spoiler as they can help Iran and provide military support to them, provide military support to Russia, they're helping them evade sanctions, etc., right? So that is first and foremost the context of this new cold war, just like it was in the first one.
Then you start looking at other things. You have an arms race that is both conventional—literally President Trump has announced he wants a $1.5 trillion budget. Why? To build up weapons to try to deter China. China's been undergoing one of the biggest military transformations in human history over the last 40 years or so with their own revolution of military affairs. And the arms race is also nuclear, where both countries are trying to modernize their nuclear arsenals. China is trying to build it up massively. For decades since they acquired nuclear weapons in the 1960s, they had a stable number of about 300 nuclear warheads, and that's plenty to destroy America. So they thought, "We don't need to match the United States' numbers," which were in the many thousands, and currently our numbers are around 1,500 since the arms control treaties with the Soviet Union and then Russia. Well, Xi Jinping comes to power in 2012 and immediately starts ramping up its nuclear arsenal for the first time in decades. They've now more than doubled their number of warheads, somewhere around 600 now, and the intelligence community estimates that they'll be at a thousand by the end of the decade. And ultimately, the goal is to match our numbers of 1,500 weapon for weapon, right? Sounds very similar to what was happening in the first Cold War.
You have a space race. What are we trying to do by 2028? Get to the moon. Where have I heard that before? Before the enemy gets there, right? Before the Chinese. Talk to our head of NASA: we have to get to the moon before China does. Very, very similar to the first Cold War. We have a spy war. The level of espionage against this nation from China far exceeds, according to the FBI, what we've ever seen from the KGB and the Soviet Union, in part because of cyber. But there are investigations into Chinese espionage, both economic and national security, in all 50 states—just unbelievable depth and breadth of that activity. We have a trade war and economic war, trying to prevent certain high-end technologies going to China, just like we had with the Soviet Union. We have an attempt to build military bases in the region and sort of a scramble for military bases and allies. China is doing that in Cambodia and Pakistan and Djibouti. We're doing that in the Philippines and Japan and Guam, on our own territories there, right? So you have this confrontation, and on top of that, of course, you have this ideological struggle, right, where they believe that their system is a preeminent one. They want to be the world superpower, and we believe that the capitalist system, like we did in the first Cold War, is ultimately the much better approach.
So on almost every level, this is exactly the same, right? And the only difference that people say is, "Look at this economic interconnection that you now have, which we didn't have in the Soviet Union." And as I write in the book, they underestimate the level of economic ties that existed with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, particularly in the latter part, was, of course, already becoming a great exporter of oil and gas, particularly to our allies in Europe, and becoming a major player there. In exchange, we were supplying them with food, and the Western world was actually supplying them with all the technologies needed to extract oil and gas and build pipelines, essentially providing them with the ability to hook us up on this needle of dependency for them. And Western banks, even into the 1980s, right during the whole "evil empire," "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," President Reagan was trying and ultimately failing to get banks in London, in West Germany, and others to stop giving loans to the Warsaw Pact countries that were literally sustaining their economies, right? So you had some interdependency, obviously nowhere near the level that exists now with China, but that's just a difference of magnitude.
And look, we're now in the midst of decoupling. The trade relationship is changing. You have administration officials saying openly that we expect American companies to pull out and decouple from China, and it is getting reversed. So that one thing that you might say is different in this cold war versus the first one is slowly but surely disappearing. And also, if you look at history, you will appreciate that economic ties never actually prevent wars. There were deep economic ties—lots of research on this—between Britain and Germany before World War I. In fact, they continued trading with each other as they were killing millions of their citizens in the trench warfare in Western Europe because of necessities of needing rubber and other materials to sustain the war effort, and yet the war kept going. In fact, up until recently, Russia was, of course, supplying gas to Europe through Ukraine and was paying Ukraine as it was fighting Ukraine—that's just terminated in the last year or so—for the privilege of sending gas through their country, right even in the midst of the war. So those economic links do not actually deter conflict and do not stop it.
And even if they maybe at the scale that we had or have might dissuade it, but as you point out, we're decoupling. We're trying to—you know, the thing that we always hear, so I do a lot in the defense industry—we hear we're trying to bring manufacturing back home. They're really trying to amp up the arsenal of freedom is the latest sort of term that they're throwing around. So the less coupling there is, maybe the less hesitation there will be to open the kinetic front, because everything else you've described—
I think it plays a role, for sure. I don't want to dismiss it entirely, but it's not sufficient certainly. History shows us from the conflict—and look, even in this last Iran war, as we were bombing Iran, we were also allowing them to export oil and removed all restrictions in March on the sale of their oil. So, yes, economics are important, but geopolitical, national security priorities always take precedence.
So the world that I operate in, the front that's most top of mind for me is in the cyber domain, which I know is a background that we share. Obviously China has been the adversary. I mean, we obviously have many APT-level adversaries, but China's been the preeminent one, the one that is constantly in the news, constantly making waves, and is the one that's Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, the critical infrastructure impact. We've had a number of guests on the podcast we've talked to about those two in particular, and we've talked about what is the motivation, what is the Chinese APT trying to do by getting into our critical infrastructure. The thesis I've heard the most and that I find most compelling is that it's prepositioning themselves to create pressure on us that when they do move on Taiwan, they want to really apply pressure domestically to eliminate support we might have for Taiwan. Is that your view of it?
So you have to look at all of the different activities because they're all done for different purposes. When I started investigating Chinese espionage circa 2009, 2010, it was virtually all focused on two things. Economic espionage, the vast majority of it: stealing intellectual property, trying to benefit their own industries, making themselves more competitive on the world stage, which by the way worked incredibly well. Right now you have some leading Chinese companies being dominant players in the world in the way that was not the case back in 2010, 15 years ago. And focused on national security, which is something that everyone does, right? Stealing each other's secrets—we do it, they do it. So that's totally understandable.
And Salt Typhoon, by the way, falls into that category. Salt Typhoon, I think, is a perfect example of a campaign where it's sort of good on them, shame on us for allowing them. But if you're a signals intelligence agency and you are not breaking into telecommunications firms, you sort of have to ask yourself, what are you doing, right? You look at some of the Snowden revelations and what we may or may not have done in terms of telecommunications compromises; you expect China to do the same, right? And it's not surprising that they have. And by the way, you look at some of the targets that have been publicly announced. It was the then candidate for vice president, JD Vance. It was people around Kamala Harris during the campaign. It's sort of like, well, of course you'd expect foreign intelligence services to be spying on those people, right?
That's obvious. Typhoon, very, very different, right?
And the emergence of Volt Typhoon about four or five years ago actually is another example I cite in the book of things changing with regards to Taiwan, because Volt Typhoon is not about theft.
It is not about breaking into anything that's valuable from an information perspective. They're breaking into small water utilities, small electric utilities, pipelines, and they're not stealing anything. They're just implanting themselves and maintaining persistence. If we kick them out, they come back in, and putting a lot of effort into maintaining that persistence. And the intelligence community believes it is done as preparation of the battlefield to disrupt or destroy that infrastructure in the event of conflict, or maybe in the lead-up to that conflict to try to deter us from intervening on behalf of Taiwan, as you said. And again, another indication that this is not just rhetoric, that there's real preparations going on. There's a lot of things happening on the military side as well. There's a lot of stuff happening on the economic front to de-risk themselves from our supply chains, and the cyber element is another example.
This is not signaling. They're not trying to be discovered. They're not trying to be obvious about it. They're trying to be stealthy. They're not extremely good at it, so they keep getting discovered. But a lot of effort being put in clearly for a strategic purpose of trying to either influence our decision-making or impact our ability to defend Taiwan. And despite the fact that this has been raised with Xi at the highest levels during the Biden administration—the president had raised it with him—this still goes on. So that tells you this is not some small campaign by some rogue elements or entrepreneurial elements within the Chinese system. This is driven from the very top. They're willing to take sort of the diplomatic pain and cost of doing so because this is strategic. And that tells you that they're not just thinking about this, but they're preparing for confrontation with the United States. And what is the one place that we have a potential to confront them with? It's not the South China Sea. We're never going to fight China for some random artificial reefs in the South China Sea. It's Taiwan.
Is Volt Typhoon accurately described as an escalation?
I wouldn't say escalate. It's preparation of the battlefield, right? So they're doing a lot of things to prepare themselves to do—
Do you think the shift from moving from theft and moving toward potential to create human life impact, do you see that shift in priority or—
Well, they're not doing it, right? They're preparing to do it. They're not turning anything off.
Don't you see that as an escalation in maybe, like, it's not recklessness, but the willingness to—cybercrime and whatnot used to be ransomware attacks, businesses, that kind of thing, and you wouldn't see things hitting like hospital systems and things that support human life. And it seems like it's now no holds barred.
Well, on the ransomware front, absolutely right. You had Colonial Pipeline, you had hospital systems left and right, because they realized that if you actually put human lives at risk, people are much more likely to pay ransom, right? So there has been absolutely an escalation in the cyber domain more broadly, not necessarily from China in that regard. From China's perspective, I don't know if I'd call it an escalation. I would just call it moving up on the ladder of their plan to ultimately unify with Taiwan, right? And this is part of that plan, and it's just another step in that milestone.
What I find disturbing or challenging, one of the big things about being in this second cold war, is you don't seem to know when do we flip into war, right? Like, when is there an act of war? If, say, China conducts a cyber attack that has a real-life impact, how many human beings have to die before it's considered an act of war?
