David E. Sanger

What the Russians did in the election in 2016 was clearly short of war, yet it was a pretty aggressive act to go into another country's voting system.

We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted.

American officials sometimes dig into corporations because they are suspected to be witting or unwitting suppliers of technology to the North Koreans or the Iranians.

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal.

In the old nuclear age, you could sit under a big screen under a mountain in Colorado, and you could see where the missiles were coming from.

Even China's leaders routinely let the news media pool in, though they do their best to ignore them.

There is no single 'China model' to running a mega-economy. Instead, it is a blend. From the Europeans and the Japanese, the Chinese have borrowed the concept of protecting essential industries.

We had a great chance in the mid-2000s to reach an accord with the Chinese on both energy and environmental issues. That deal would have essentially been that the U.S. could provide the equipment and expertise, and the Chinese would help close the trade gap. It was a huge opportunity that we failed to exploit.