David E. Sanger, White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, will be out April 16 with his fourth book, "New Cold Wars" — reported from around the world, with interviews with leaders, combatants and former government officials.

• "The first hundred pages or so are a reported, sometimes anecdotal account of how the U.S. deceived itself into thinking it would bring China and Russia into the West's economies and into its embrace," Sanger tells me. "And then what happened when the inevitable collision occurred — with Russia over Ukraine and a new hostility to the West that will change our lives for decades, and with China in a technology competition that seems increasingly likely to veer into something worse."

Why it matters: The book "explores the question of whether this hostility was avoidable, and how this set of Cold Wars will be infinitely more complex than the past," Sanger tells me from a reporting assignment in Berlin.

What they're saying: Sanger tells me he started "New Cold Wars" 'in 2020 during the Biden-Trump campaign, since it was clear "that no matter who won, we were headed back to an era of superpower conflict."

• "What I didn't know," Sanger added, "was that we would be two years and more than $100 billion into a shooting war with Russia over Ukraine, or that we would be cutting off chips and semiconductor equipment to China in a last-ditch effort to stop them from using the most advanced Western technology to build out their militaries. Or that nuclear competition — and the frequent threat of nuclear use — would be back on the table.

Behind the scenes: Sanger's travels for the book include Poland, Finland, India, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany and the U.K.

• The book began with Sanger's role narrating an HBO documentary about President Biden, "Year One."
• Mary Brooks was Sanger's researcher for the past six years.

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