NY Times's David Sanger addresses Hopkins

By: Rebecca Fishbein

Posted: 3/5/09

David Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, painted a chilling picture of our country's future at a Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS)-hosted speech on Tuesday.

Sanger discussed issues dealt with in his recently published book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, which enumerates the various obstacles Obama will face in the world left behind by the Bush Administration and the War in Iraq.

"[The Inheritance]s' central argument is that . . . the real cost of Iraq was an opportunity cost," Sanger said. "It was a cost to being able to pay attention to larger threats while we were occupying. We lost out on a chance to pursue greater opportunities, opportunities that couldn't be addressed by the top leadership in the United States, who were heavily wrapped up in trying to figure out how to manage the war. Most governments cannot pursue multiple endeavors at one time."

Sanger posited that the Bush Administration's involvement in Iraq may have made the United States less nationally secure, rather than more so.

"If in fact the objective in Iraq was to make us safer by finding weapons of mass destruction after 9/11, and if it was to spread democracy and America's influence all over the world, then it significantly failed," Sanger said. "But more importantly, we lost the opportunity to take on bigger challenges, and so now President Obama is left with a numbered list."

Sanger expressed concern that the financial crisis seems more prevalent on the minds of the American people than issues of national security.

He blamed Obama for the universal focus on the economy. In the struggle to fix and refigure the international community's dying financial system, the Obama administration could accidentally ignore rising tensions in Iran, Pakistan and North Korea.

"Afghanistan is perhaps the most vivid failure of [the Bush administration]," Sanger said. "Needless to say, the amount spent on reconstructing Afghanistan was a tiny fraction of capital that we spent on the Marshall Plan. In fact, it was a tiny fraction of the capital that we spent on the war in Iraq."

Iran was also a key part of Sanger's speech.

He enumerated the various steps the Obama administration may have to take in order to prevent the Iranians from developing illegal nuclear weapons.

"[Iran] is going to be the real test of the Obama administration," Sanger said. "He's going to have to decide whether to keep undermining the Iran nuclear program even while negotiating with the Iranians . . . our room for error at this point is very limited."

Sanger recounted trips by members of the Mossad, an Israeli intelligence agency, and Israeli government officials to Washington in April and May to confront the President about his failure to solve the problem of growing preponderance and unrest in Iran.

"The result is that the Israelis backed down," Sanger said. "But some time this year, they're going to come back."

Sanger predicted that rising conflicts between Hamas in Gaza, Fatah in the West Bank and the Israeli government may prove to be problematic for the United States.

"We have a new Israeli Prime Minister who says that the Iranian problem is far greater than the Palestinian problem," Sanger said. "I think you're going to see Washington and Jerusalem split significantly on this issue."

After the speech, Sanger had some words of wisdom for both President Obama and members of the Hopkins community.

"We have to restore the balance," Sanger said, directed towards the U.S. government. "The price of distraction when you are so overwhelmingly focused on one goal is that you lose sight of everything else. The hardest thing to do is to stay on an even keel. If you're not strong at home, you can't be strong abroad, and you can't deal with national security."

When asked what the world might be like for Hopkins undergraduate students who will soon be inheriting the problems caused by previous generations, Sanger struck both a negative and a positive note.

"The silver lining of coming out of Hopkins in a time of great downturn is that you're likely to be part of the solution," Sanger said.

"It would be worse to have this happen early in careers, but you have the benefit of seeing what got messed up and why. This is all a reflection of the fact that we made a lot of mistakes along the way here."

Sanger has won various awards for his work in journalism and has been a member of two news teams that received Pulitzer prizes.

The FAS Symposium will host various speakers over the spring semester, including Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment and author of Dangerous Nation Robert Kagan, who will come to Hopkins on March 11.