David E. Sanger

speaker

2,183 appearances 17 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 2d ago

David E. Sanger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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The Daily · Two Superpowers Across the Table · 13 May 2026 podcast

Well, Rachel, it's no secret that for the past 10 years, the U.S.

and China have been engaged in what sometimes looks like a bit of a debt struggle, right?

Xi Jinping has made no secret of the fact that by 2049—

He wants China to be the number one military, economic, political, and perhaps even cultural power in the world.

And the question of how the United States is going to deal with the rise of essentially a peer competitor, the only country that can deal with us across the board in those areas, is the fundamental question.

And you're seeing in summits like this that this plays out in arguments about all kinds of specific issues.

But the overall question is, how do you deal with a country that's trying to displace you as the world's number one power?

We'll start with nuclear weapons.

China had, under Mao and for many decades after, a minimum nuclear deterrent.

It kept 100, 200 nuclear weapons just enough to deter others from striking it.

But when Xi came in, he almost immediately began a huge buildup that the United States didn't really become fully aware of until years later.

And today it has about 600 nuclear weapons.

But the Pentagon estimates that China will have about a thousand nuclear weapons by 2030 and will match the U.S.

and Russia by about 2035.

And why is this critical?

Because just a few months ago, as we've discussed on The Daily before, the last remaining arms control treaty between Russia and the United States expired.

And President Trump, I think, rightly said it doesn't make sense to negotiate a new one unless China's part of that agreement.

And the Chinese so far have said outright they have no interest in arms control or even discussing it until they have an arsenal the size of ours, that they wouldn't put themselves in that kind of disadvantageous negotiating position.

So President Trump said to us in January in our lengthy interview with him that he plans to bring up nuclear arms control issues with President Xi.

I don't think it's going to get very far.

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