David E. Sanger is White Hand National Security Correspondent at The New York Times. For more than four decades at the Times, he has played central roles on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. He is the author of numerous Times best-sellers on national security, most recently New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West. He is also the author of The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age (2018) and an HBO documentary by the same title (2020), which examine the emergence of cyberconflict between states. His previous books include The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, published in 2009, and Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, published in 2012.
For the Times, Mr. Sanger has served as Tokyo Bureau Chief, Washington Economic Correspondent, White House Correspondent during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and Chief Washington Correspondent. Mr. Sanger spent six years in Tokyo, writing about the emergence of Japan as a major American competitor and then the country’s humbling recession.
A 1982 graduate of Harvard College, Mr. Sanger is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. With Graham T. Allison Jr., he co-teaches “Central Challenges in American National Security, Strategy, and the Press” at the Kennedy School of Government. He is also a national security contributor to CNN.