David E. Sanger

“Yet as one senior administration official noted to me, 'People who blithely say that we'd win a trade war because China obviously couldn't sustain the damage caused by cutting off their goods are just naive and silly.' Any significant trade restrictions the United States imposed on China would swiftly lead to an equally harmful retaliation on the United States. That is why the most effective lobbyists against tariffs on Chinese goods are American companies that buy from China, do business in China, or have ventures with Chinese firms. So as Obama's outburst [of 'I need leverage!' to staff on a visit to Asia in 2011] underscored, the form of leverage threatened most often by Washington politicians looking for an easy applause line actually offers little leverage at all.”

“China's internal divisions have made it far harder to strike the kind of deals that made it possible for the two countries to open up diplomatic relations decades ago or get China entry into the World Trade Organization. If Nixon were going to open China today, the Interior Ministry would probably get into an argument with the Chinese president's office about whether to let Air Force One land, and then demand the plane's antimissile technology as the price for refueling”

“We are in a strange world,' one senior Israeli official said to me, 'where the defense minister and to a lesser degree the prime minister are focused intently on the military option, and the intelligence services and the military, with some exceptions, are deeply doubtful.”