CNN national security analyst Jim Sciutto showed up at Salon's New York studio by himself, fresh off the train from Washington. He's a genial, athletic fellow in a nicely tailored gray suit, virtually indistinguishable from the thousands of other powerful white men walking the streets of Manhattan on a given morning.

But Sciutto is in a class of his own as a well-connected reporter on foreign policy and military affairs, and his deliberately terrifying new book, “The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China and the Next World War,” contains a number of headline-worthy revelations, from former White House chief of staff John Kelly's scathing comments about Donald Trump to a detailed discussion of the period in 2022 when it seemed distinctly possible — at least according to Sciutto's sources — that Vladimir Putin might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

This isn't the time and place for a book review. Let's acknowledge that Sciutto has "done the work," as he puts it, with 20-odd years of reporting experience and deep connections with officials on both sides of the Atlantic. He was in Kyiv when Russian tanks rolled across the border two years ago, and he's spent considerable time in Taiwan talking to those who face the possibility of Chinese invasion. Let's also acknowledge that Sciutto's views strike me as "hawkish," in the sense that he believes future war between the U.S. and either Russia or China is somewhat more likely than not, and also that Sciutto appears to have no answer for the threat to the Biden administration's vaunted "rules-based order" posed, on the one hand, by unflinching U.S. support for Israel and on the other by Donald Trump's potential return to the White House. This transcript of our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Your new book is called “The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China and the Next World War,” a title that may scare the crap out of people. The term "great powers" is one that we associate not just with the last century, but the early part of that century, like World War I. You're deliberately doing a callback here.

Because I believe that this relative period of peace that we've enjoyed, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, that 30-year period is over and we were back to open competition, and in some places conflict, with great power tactics. The gloves are off, and the signs of this have been there for some time. Putin already was slicing off pieces of European countries, in Georgia and Ukraine in 2014 and elsewhere. China was making a big land grab in the South China Sea. When I was in Ukraine in February 2022, as the tanks rolled across the border and the first cruise missiles started falling on Kyiv, it struck me that he had just started the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. All bets were off. That period is done.

We are back to this period of bald-faced competition on multiple fronts, not just in terms of land grabs like Ukraine or the threat to Taiwan, but also open cyber-warfare, the weaponization of space, extrajudicial killings around the world. Again, things that seem from another time are now very present, with the ingredients of an open great-power conflict. We're not there, and I spend a good deal of the book talking about ways to avoid getting there, but this is meant as a warning that we have the ingredients for that. We have to be aware of it, and we have to find ways to avoid the worst outcomes.

I think that people on all sides would probably agree that one of the ways to interpret what you just said is that the era of a unipolar world, where the United States was the dominant superpower, is over. We have to deal with that. So the big questions are, what changed that caused that era to end? And was that a good thing or a bad thing?

"It's a new Cold War, but a more dangerous one because you have more players and more adversaries."

Well, one of the danger points is that it's not just a bipolar world, with the U.S. and the old Soviet Union, it is now a tripolar world where you have the U.S., Russia and China, and then a whole host of middle powers that are playing the game in different ways. You see increasingly Iran and North Korea allied with Russia, supplying arms to them in Ukraine. You see Russia supplying weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. So you have those other layers, but big picture, there are three powers competing, with two of them, Russia and China, aligned in many ways, with this "no-limits partnership" that they've advertised. It's a new Cold War, but a more dangerous one because you have more players and more adversaries.

In addition to the loss of that brief period where the U.S. was the world's lone superpower, there's a longer period going back to the last Cold War where we became used to a rules-based international order. I know that becomes a wonky term that has taken on partisan overtones in this country. because it's called globalist by people on the right. But the fact is it largely helped to keep the world from going to war, going back to World War II, with a general recognition of the sovereignty of nations, a general recognition of borders. You can't just invade Poland and say, “What are you going to do about it?” That's why I feel, and I felt this as I was sitting in Ukraine two years ago, that it really is a 1939 moment. It's a big change. You have, in Putin and Xi Jinping, two leaders who want to change the status quo. They see the status quo is not in their interest, and it's a test for us. How do we respond? Do we accommodate, do we appease? What are the dangers of appeasement?

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Isn't there a danger in citing a direct parallel with 1939? Because every situation is different. I'm not going to say anything in defense of Vladimir Putin bu,t I don't see the evidence that he has Hitler-style ambitions to conquer the entirety of Europe. That's not realistic, among other things.

So it's interesting. I had a chat about this last night with a friend of mine, Ryan Lizza at Politico, because he was making the point that Hitler comparisons can become overdone. It's not the first time folks have said, "Oh, this guy is like Hitler." You go back to Saddam Hussein, Kuwait.

Let me make the case. I'm not saying he's equivalent. There has been no Holocaust, right? He has been guilty of enormous crimes against civilians. We've seen it in his own........

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