David E. Sanger

David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, specializing in the intersection of national security, technology, and politics. In a 43-year reporting career at The Times, Sanger has played central roles on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book, “New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion and America's Struggle to Defend the West" (2024), a New York Times best-seller, is a deeply reported account of how the United States found itself back in daily confrontation with its two biggest and most powerful superpower rivals, and how that competition may shape the decades ahead. Prior to that he published "Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age" (2018) and an HBO documentary by the same title (2020), which examined the emergence of cyberconflict and its role in changing the nature of global power.  

He is also the author of two previous Times best sellers on foreign policy and national security: “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, Sanger has served as Tokyo bureau chief, Washington economic correspondent, White House correspondent during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and chief Washington correspondent. Over the last three decades he has reported at the heart of critical diplomatic and national security issues, from nuclear proliferation to the rise of cyberconflict among nations. He revealed the story of Olympic Games, the code name for the most sophisticated cyberattack in history, the American-Israeli effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program with the Stuxnet worm. His journalistic pursuit of the origins of Stuxnet became the subject of the documentary “Zero Days,” which made the short list of Academy Award documentaries in 2016. He was also executive producer of the HBO documentary "Year One,'' an account of President Biden's first term.  

A 1982 graduate of Harvard College, Mr. Sanger was the first senior fellow in The Press and National Security 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 political and national security contributor to CNN.