David E. Sanger

David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, and one of the news organization’s senior writers. In a 44-year reporting career 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 and foreign policy, most recently "New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion and the Struggle to Defend the West." His 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 examines the emergence of cyberconflict and its role in changing the nature of global power.  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. He wrote many of the first articles about North Korea’s emerging nuclear weapons program.

A 1982 graduate of Harvard College, Mr. Sanger is a senior fellow  at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard and an adjunct lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. 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. He is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and serves on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations.