Sarah Paine Episode 1: The War For India (Lecture & Interview)

I need to start with a disclaimer because I work for the U.S. government and they require you to do a disclaimer. So the ideas that you're about to hear are my ideas. They don't necessarily represent those of the U.S. government, the U.S. Navy Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, let alone the Naval War College where I work. Are we all good on this? All right. So today I'm going to tell you a story of three protagonists.

Russia, the United States, and China that all wanted to work their magic on India and Pakistan, which didn't exactly appreciate it. Two big topics. One is intervening in someone else's problems, a cottage industry for the United States. And also, before you do that, you really ought to check out the alignments. Who's the primary? Adversary of whom? How long has it been that way? And also ask these questions about all the neighbors and anyone who might want to crash the party along with you.

It's also a story of a series of limited wars. What's a limited war? It means it's for something less than regime change. So however it turns out, the governments that started that war are still in place. And two of them... resulted in quick victories, the ideal in warfare. The first one was the... Sino-Indian War of 1962, and the other one was the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971. And these wars change things in many short-term expected ways, and then in many long-term...

highly unexpected ways. So here's my game plan, and it's literally a game plan. I'm going to start out with the pivotal decisions made by different players that then once they're made... Certain things are foreclosed and certain things are possible. And this is the playing field that's still limited by these pivotal decisions. And then I'm going to look at the teams. Some allies were prime allies. Others were subprime. And they mixed and matched.

over time. So then I'll do teams and then I'll do the game, the interaction. And then at the end, I'm going to do the plays, some of the techniques and things that you can do to play this game. Pivotal decision number one. When Mao won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, it didn't end. He also spent the next two years not only eliminating nationalist remnants, but also conquering Xinjiang and Tibet.

Tibet had been autonomous since 1911 when the last dynasty had collapsed. And Mao decides that he is going to reconquer Tibet. Tibet's an interesting place. It contains, I think, about... 40% of China's mineral resources. So there's a lot of money being made in Tibet for those with the capital to invest in big mines. If you look at this map, the Han Chinese, the preponderant group of China, they inhabit, they dominate. as far west as the Chongqing Basin in Sichuan.

China has put large armies into Tibet exactly twice, once under the Qianlong Emperor in the late 18th century, and they didn't stay for very long, and then under Mao in 1950, and they have stayed forever and built roads so they can... keep on sending more in. Between 1950 and 1957, China built a series of road systems through Tibet. And the Western route there is the only one that provides year-round traffic. The problem with...

The other two is, well, check it out. They go through 14 or 15 mountain ranges. It means you go vertical up, vertical down, do that 14, 15 times. And then between monsoon rains and snow and mudslides, they're very difficult to maintain. And then the eastern one crosses. the major roads river systems of South Asia. So that's difficult. So only the Western route is the really good one. And it's really important for the Chinese. If you want to conquer Tibet, you truly want that one.

All right, so if you look at this, that Western route provides not only the ability to control Tibet, but it also provides a pincer onto Xinjiang. If China wants to come in one way and the other way, it's a good way to get in. If you look on those two... circles there, those are the disputed areas between China and India. The northern one is the Aksai Chin Plateau, which China has taken from India, and India still claims. And in the south is...

the Arunachal Pradesh, which India still owns, but China claims. So these are the areas that they're fighting over. But once China took Tibet... Before, there had been a big buffer zone between China and India, right? There's all this Tibet, and no one could really get in there. Now China's built roads, so it can get into places where India cannot deploy troops until it gets into the road races with the Chinese.

And so it reduces the buffer zone between China and India to these small Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. So it changes things. So that's pivotal decision number one, deciding to conquer Tibet. Pivotal decision number two is the United States, in order to deal with the Soviet unions under Eisenhower, did what the wits back in the day called pactomania. What is that? It's forming all sorts of bilateral relations and also regional grouping.

in order to counter the Soviets institutionally and wall them in that way. And part of this was what was called the Northern Tier Strategy, as seen in the Baghdad Pact, where you get Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. to form this thing and is to wall off the Soviet Union from the oil fields of the Middle East.

And the other thing you should look at this map before it goes away, look where Pakistan's located, where you think it is, and then go to the east, and that's East Pakistan. In the 1971 war... There's going to be a civil war, and Pakistan's going to lose East Pakistan, which is Bangladesh today. So just keep that in mind. So as part of the sweetener for Pakistan to join the Baghdad Pact, the United States allied with Pakistan and gave them a big...

military aid treaty. And here's Nehru, the prime minister of India, and he is horrified. A military pact between Pakistan and the United States changes the whole balance of power in this part of the world. It affects us most, especially the United States, must realize that the reaction of India is going to be, you're arming the Pakistanis. Whom do you think they're going to shoot?

It'll be us. And the Indians were just appalled that we did this. And afterwards, Eisenhower admitted it was perhaps the worst kind of plan and decision we could ever have made. It was a terrible error, but now we're stuck with it. What the United States is slowly discovering is that if you arm either India or Pakistan in this period, it's going to aim it at the other one. And so that pact...

poisoned U.S. relations with India for the duration of the Cold War and set up things in ways the United States ultimately wasn't happy with. Okay, those are two pivotal decisions. Now for a pivotal situation. It's really the devolving situation between... Russia and China. Until Mao got atomic weapons in 1964, he really had to shut up.

Because he needed Russian technological aid, he's been totally cut off from the West after the Korean War. He's being isolated. So he truly needs Soviet aid. And he also, if he wants nuclear weapons, he needs some of their aid to do that as well. So he has to keep his...

mouth shut. But once he detonates an atomic weapon, here's what he tells the Russians, and they just about lose it. There are too many places occupied by the Soviet Union. The Russians took everything they could. We have not yet presented a count. of this list. Under the czars, the Russians took from the Chinese sphere of influence territory exceeding U.S. east of the Mississippi. Think the Chinese didn't notice? Yes, they noticed. So Mao all of a sudden is calling that

And the Russians are appalled. But Mao has other gripes against the Russians. Stalin in the lead-up to World War... too, had made sure to set up the Chinese to fight Japan so that he wouldn't have to. So that leaves him just fighting Nazis, not Nazis and Japanese. And then Stalin takes Mongolia, which had formerly been a part of the Chinese.

sphere of influence. And in the Korean War, he's more than happy to fight to the last Chinese. And then during the Chinese Civil War, the Russians tell Mao, oh, stop, Yangtze, you need to take a little breather here, because he wants a divided China.

divided Germany he has, and then the divided Korea he's going to get. You want to be surrounded by these little broken states around you if you're a continental power. And then when Stalin dies and Mao wants to be senior statesman of communism, Khrushchev is...

appalled by that. Then Mao is appalled when Khrushchev does de-Stalinization because Mao has his own cult of personality. And then Khrushchev wants to do peaceful coexistence with the West while Mao is ramping it up in the Cultural Revolution. So there's no mean... of the minds, and then all this becomes very public when it hits the propaganda press of the communists of the Sino-Soviet split in 1960. All right, the Russians have their own gripes about the Chinese, and here's how they go.

The Russians look around at the West and particularly the United States and go, wow, they got bases everywhere. The British have got bases everywhere. How come our allies won't give us bases? I mean, well, if you occupy Eastern Europe, the whole place is a base. That's a different matter. So the Russians want the Chinese to let them keep a couple of...

remaining czarist treaty ports, essentially, and wants to expand them. And the Chinese say, forget it. And in fact, after the Korean War, when the Chinese have troops all up in Manchuria, which is where these bases were located, And there's a succession struggle going on because Stalin's just died. The Russians have to return the bases because there's just too much bad stuff happening where they live. And then what Mao does in 54 and 58.

which just appalls the Russians, are these two Taiwanese strait crises. What's going on? Mao is lobbying all kinds of ordinance on... these islands that are owned by Taiwan that are very close to the People's Republic's shores. And the Russians are appalled. They are not consulted, and yet they have a friendship treaty that obligates them to join a war under certain circumstances.

are going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, there could be nuclear fallout from this stuff. So the Russians then asked the Chinese if it's okay if they have a combined naval base on China's shores, and China says, forget it. And the Russians are thinking, okay, well, then we're not going to give you any of the plans for the atomic weapon.

And it all devolved. So there's no love lost on either side. And then what exacerbates these tensions is the Vietnam War, where China wants influence over neighbor Vietnam. It's pretty typical. But Russia wants influence over Vietnam to do a pincer on China, which China doesn't like at all. Meanwhile, both of them want to prove their revolutionary credentials by aiding the Vietnamese, North Vietnamese.

So Russia's aid needs to come by train over China, lest the United States sink at the good stuff if it goes by sea. So the Chinese... feel obliged to let it go through, but they're just hassling the Russians the whole time through. They take it apart, tear it apart, say that it was from China, and the Russians are just apoplectic. So their relations are getting worse and worse and worse, and the squabbling is just...

incessant. So it's not surprising that the Sino-Soviet border war of 1969 breaks out during the Vietnam War. And while all this is going on, this is one of the river islands. The Amur River forms much of their border. And this is one of the islands there. And there's much fighting over it. And the Russians come to us, the Americans, and say, is it OK if we nuke these people?

And the United States says, no, there's no way it's okay to nuke these people. And Mao figures it out. The one that wants to nuke you, that's the primary adversary. So prior to that moment... The United States is the primary adversary of both Russia and China. Now with this, they're primary adversaries of each other. It causes a reshuffling of the allies, and I'll get to that later.

Okay, I've done the playing field of these decisions that delimited it. But now I'm going to get to the allies. And some allies are better than others. And here we got Mao and Khrushchev. Look at these lovebirds. Boy, when that divorce took... place, boy did it mess up the extended family. Never mind. For my purposes tonight, I'm going to use the word alliance really loosely. If you sign a mutual defense pact, for my purposes tonight, that makes you an alliance.

And if you're a political scientist, you've got something that's much more complicated, but forget it. I just can't handle it. So we're going to do it this way. All right. So... Stalin didn't think much of Nehru at all. He thought he was a lackey of British colonialism. But Khrushchev thought India was really important to counterbalance.

China. And here's Nehru thinking about it. We have to be on friendly terms with both Russia and America, but actually he felt much more in common with Russia. Why? Because he favored Fabian socialist economic. policies that were much more akin to what's going on in Russia than it was in the United States. Moreover, the United States was segregated, which appalled Nehru. And in addition, the United States was cozying up to all the colonial powers.

Nehru thought the Russians were the better. But while all this is going on, the Indians were non-aligned, and they treated the Chinese really generously. And I've got a whole list of generosity. So India immediately recognizes China in 1950. Countries like the United States didn't forever. And when the San Francisco Treaty, I think it's signed in 1951 in the United States, ending the war with Japan.

India refuses to sign because China and Russia aren't there to sign as well. And then to help China break out of its diplomatic isolation at the end of the Korean War, India signs a friendship treaty with China. And as part of that friendship treaty, it recognizes Chinese sovereignty over Tibet under international law.

Contrary to what Vladimir Putin is doing lately, under international law, if you recognize someone's sovereignty over territory, that is permanent. You cannot back out of it legally. under international law. So the Chinese promise, I don't know, there's something like peaceful coexistence or whatever. They're promising the Indians, but that has no permanence under international law, whereas this thing does.

And then from 1960 on, the Indians are voting to seat the People's Republic of China, not Taiwan on the UN. Meanwhile, in the background, all this road building is going on. Those roads are being built between 1950 and 1957. And the Indians aren't going to figure out until 1958 that the roads are there. Meanwhile, roads completed. The Chinese want to complete their control over Tibet.

And so they're going to send big armies up there. And Tibetan culture is much more, it's of Indian origin. It's not Chinese origin. So this repression of Tibetan culture just appalls the Indians. And then two days... before the People's Liberation of Army is going to make it into Lhasa, which is the capital of Tibet. The Dalai Lama flees. He's the spiritual leader of Tibet. He flees to India, where he's remained ever since, to the absolute horror and anger of China.

So at about this time, the Chinese come to the Indians and say, look, why don't we do a swap on sovereignty? You recognize our... sovereignty over that Aksai Chin Plateau, where nobody lives, but it's really good for the roads, for China's western route. And then we'll recognize your sovereignty over this much more densely populated Arunachal Pradesh. And Nehru doesn't want to hear anything about it. So.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Russia is much too busy worrying about who's going to be lobbing nukes at home, this is when China launches. And in the 1960s Sino-Indian War, and China just plain takes the oxygen. The Indians are appalled because they don't have any roads to be able to deploy up there, whereas the Chinese do. Their defeat is just total, and they can't believe the Chinese did this to them. Here's Nehru afterwards.

There are not many instances in history where one country, that is India, has gone out of her way to be friendly and cooperative with the Chinese government and people and plead their cause in the councils of the world. And then for the Chinese government to return evil for good and even to go.

to the extent of committing aggression and invade our sacred land. Who does this? So I get it. The Chinese get the territory they want. That was the goal of that war. But what they have done is... taken a country, India, which had its leadership terribly idealistic, not interested in becoming militarized at all. and making them angry forever. India immediately doubles the size of its army within the next 10 years to up to 750,000 people, creates 10 mountain divisions useful against China.

They've never ceased being so angry. And then if you think about this, what if instead of playing this game this way, China and India had teamed up? I would suspect we would be in a completely very different world order now if that is what they'd done instead. But this is China's decision, not India's fault on this one. All right.

That wasn't great. So let's check out other possibilities. Once that happens to India, India is all of a sudden looking for Russia to counterbalance China. And you also have... Pakistan wondering what to do. And what the Pakistani notice after all this, well, the Chinese are not going to be teaming up with India, right? They've just invaded the place. And so this is when Pakistan sees that China might have real possibilities as an...

ally. And Butoh is going to play the China card for the nuclear chip, trying to get... Chinese help for all of that. And here's what happened. So you have the 62 war. And then in 1963, Pakistan really inexplicably is ceding territory to China. Who does that?

And there are various possibilities, but I'm surmising it's because it's going to be help on nuclear development. That would explain why you would give a lot of territory. But we don't know. There was supposed to be some mutual defense pact, maybe, and there's some other things going on. Anyway, you can imagine what it...

may or may not have been. Okay. In the case of Pakistan and China and India and Russia, they had quite a good relationship because the Pakistanis and the Chinese shared India as a... as their problem, and the Russians and the Indians shared China as their problem, and that worked pretty well. But the United States was just a disaster from both Indian and...

Pakistani point of view and vice versa, because the United States wanted to befriend both of them. But if you befriend one, the other is appalled. And so the United States wound up appalling everybody. And so what the United States wanted to have happen is... For India and Pakistan to put aside their differences and then combine against China and stop communism from spreading, India and Pakistan want to use the United States for maximum aid to use against the other, which is a nonstop.

for the United States. And then Pakistan really would like it if the United States would be nice with China as well, because Pakistan wants to have good relations with the United States and China. And that's a non-starter for the United States until 19... when there are secret visits and things going. It's later on. Okay, so in 1962, India gets trounced in this war with China. They look like they're militarily feckless.

And then in 1964, Nehru dies. He'd been the head of India since independence in 1947. He'd been there a long time, so he's dead. So 1965, if you're Pakistani, it looks like a good year to settle border problems.

And so what they do is first they invade through the south. If you look way down at the bottom there, the Rana Kooch, and that seems to go pretty well. And then they decide they want to go for the thing they really care about, which is Kashmir. And they do that. Well, the enemy gets the vote. And the Indians invaded straight through Lahore, which isn't remotely what the Pakistanis had in mind. And then the United States...

does a double arms embargo on both of them for doing this. And the problem is the Pakistanis are much more dependent on U.S. military aid. The Indians were more diversified, so they just didn't have enough. spare parts to continue this thing. So it's a very unhappy event for them. They lose it. What happens, neither the United States nor Russia wants either one of them fighting that war. The Russians are thinking, we want the military aid to go...

to India in order to counterbalance China, not to decimate the Pakistanis. And the United States doesn't want it either. So the United States is very happy that the Soviets... broker the Tashkent declaration that ends this war. But Pakistan is worse off after this thing. And India has restored its reputation for knowing what it's doing on the battlefield. So, for Pakistan...

The United States is really problematic because we're interested in being nice to them when we want something out of them, and then we're not so interested when we don't want something out of them because we don't share a primary enemy. So what we really wanted were listening bases. The technology of the day.

was such that if you want to surveil the Soviet Union, you want to send these big U-2 planes over, and given their ranges, and you're not supposed to be doing it, and so we had U-2 bases, I think Norway, West Germany, Turkey. Pakistan, and then Japan. And in addition, we had a listening base at Badabur. And these were really important things for us during this period. So we're paying the Pakistanis a lot of money to get it. Except there was one of these UPU...

planes get shot down over the Soviet Union. They finally get so they can, because they fly at really high altitudes, they shoot it down. And Khrushchev is furious. He hauls in the Pakistani ambassador in Moscow and he goes, Where is this place, Peshawar? We've circled it on the map. And we're going to blow it off the map if you all don't wise up. And the Pakistanis are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And so between these sort of...

threats in 1960 about the U-2 and then the United States freezing arms in the 1965 war, which the Pakistanis believe that they lost it over that. Oh, yeah. And by the way, in that 1965 war, the United States... states had, when we provided arms to everybody, we said, oh, we will guarantee that no one uses it, that Pakistanis and Indians don't use it against each other. And of course, we could do nothing about that.

And the 1965 war, the Pakistanis are using U.S. tanks to go after Indians in the largest tank battle since World War II. So there are a lot of upset people in South Asia. But here is Ayub Khan. leader of Pakistan, telling the United States that the United States forgets that our security hazards and political liabilities have increased to a dangerous level due to this U-2 stuff. And we kept our part of the contract.

The Americans betrayed us at every turn. They built up India against us. They failed to help us in the 65 war and finally stopped military aid. They think that we exist for their convenience and that our freedom is negotiable. Dream. So when the lease came up for the listening post at Badabar in 1968, the Pakistanis canceled it. They're sick of it.

Meanwhile, the Indians weren't too thrilled about the United States either. This is earlier when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. Here's Mahatma Gandhi telling him, Allied support for freedom and democracy seems hollow so long as America... has the Negro problem in her own home. Indians were appalled by segregation. They knew exactly which end of the bus they'd be sitting on.

So there are issues both ways. And in fact, Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi found the United States really impossible to work with. capitalism as the way stationed imperialism and fascism, whereas Americans looked as... at socialism as the waystation to communism. So there's no meeting of minds on all of this. And so if you look at the alignments of primary adversaries, India and Pakistan Most of the time, our primary adversaries.

And while India is always Pakistan's primary enemy, but you could argue that with the 62 war, is it Pakistan or is it China who's the primary adversary of India? And then when you get to the 1971 war, which I'll discuss a little more in a second. where Bangladesh is broken off and then Pakistan has less than half the population, then you could argue that for India, China is the primary adversary. And then if you look at that...

reshuffling. If you also look at the 1969 war that reshuffles the nuclear powers, so formally... Russia and China had shared the United States as their primary enemy. But after the 69 war, they're each other's primary enemy. And this gives the United States a swing position of team up with A or team up with B. And the United States teamed up with China to over... extend Russia and the Cold War, because I had always felt that the...

Soviets were the bigger threat in those days. So anyway, as you're looking at alignments, you can apply this kind of framework to any country on the planet to try to figure out what's going on. And think about how alliances work. If I look at the World War II allies, probably one of the most effective alliances in world history. If you think about what people ultimately want, the British want an empire in which the sun never sets. The United States wants to decolonize everybody.

And Joe Stalin wants a communist wonderland. Those are mutually exclusive. But to get there, you have to go through the common way station of getting rid of Hitler. The common existential threat can be a superglue of the most unlikely partners. But let's look at the Axis. What they want at the end of the war are...

spheres of influence in different parts of the world. So for Italy, it's empire in the Mediterranean, Japan in the Pacific, and then Hitler, it's all over Eurasia. That's not mutually exclusive, but if you look who they're... The primary enemy who stands in the way of those plans, it's Britain for Italy. It's Russia for the Germans. And for the Japanese, it's first China and then the United States. None of it aligns, so they fight parallel wars and allow the Allies.

to take them out in detail. So when you're thinking about alliances in the world today, when you're wondering what's going on with Iran or whatever, figure out who's their real primary enemy. Get it straight. Does that primary enemy, is that an existential threat for them? So if you've got countries that line up on same primary enemy, existential threat for all around, the most unlikely people will cooperate.

on the other hand people who are very likely to cooperate maybe like the fascists they all shared this basic ideology but if they don't have the same primary enemy and the same theater of interest, geographically the same theater, they may not cooperate very well at all. So you can apply this to anything you want to apply to. So back to my game here. If you're looking at the cards people have to play, the United States...

has lousy cards because we don't share primary enemies with anybody. So it's a stalemate. You help India, the Pakistanis hate you. You help Pakistanis, the Indians hate you. It's no win. But if you look at India, India and Russia.

share a China problem. That's good. They can cooperate on that. And then you have Pakistan and China. They share an India problem. They can make things happen over that. So there are pasta cards for them to play and zero for the United States to play. It's just the way it is. The name of the game and strategy is to get the outcome that you want to have happen.

And it's like, how do you play this game of five-person, five-country cutthroat billiards to get remotely what you want out of it? So for the English majors among you, I have a metaphor. For the rest of you, you can just... with us. Imagine a game in which every ball can be a cue ball and players can take turns, come, leave. do whatever at will. Sometimes they'll cooperate some of the time, but they don't necessarily want to put the same ball in the same pocket.

And so if that's the case, there's going to be no enduring cooperation and understand that you want to have your goal is going to be the ultimate shot you want to take. But as you're taking the intervening shots, people are going to try to disrupt it. How on earth do you get through this, Gabe? So this is what the next section is all about. So if you look at this map and where Pakistan's located, it's this very strategic location in the center of...

not quite center, but Eurasia, the center of the Soviets' boundary there. And I'm going to give you a map. This is from Halford McKinder. He's one of the most famous people to publish on geopolitics. This is his 1904 map. It's actually quite famous. And he talked about how...

Russia occupies the heartland. In his day, it was all these railway systems. He thought that was the prime piece of real estate in the world. And then it's surrounded by this inner marginal crescent. You look where Pakistan's located. It's right in the center there, right up by... Russia, and it's a really crucial location before satellite imagery is available to put listening posts on Russia. Russia's huge, so you've got to have a bunch of listening posts to track their missiles and things.

If you want access to Afghanistan, which when the Russians go there, we want access. And of course, when we go there, we really want access. So it's a strategic location. For the Pakistanis, the United States was so frustrating to deal with because we'd be on and off interested in them. We don't align on a primary enemy.

Pre-satellite imagery, we really wanted to cozy up the Pakistanis so we could have U-2 bases. But then there are different technology changes. And before we get facilities in Iran, we want this listening post in Badabar. But technology will eventually change. And then for a while, we truly want the Pakistanis to get the mail through to China when we're trying to break China out of diplomatic isolation and then cooperate against the Soviet Union. And Pakistan delivers the mail.

But then we set up an alternate setup in Paris to go through our embassies that way. And Pakistan is, again, irrelevant. And then when Russia's in... Afghanistan, Pakistan is essential to get aid to insurgents to cause the Russians trouble. And then, of course, when we're in Afghanistan, we really want to...

cooperate with the Pakistanis. And that works until we cap Osama bin Laden without telling the Pakistanis in their territory, Abbottabad, and then relations are really not so great. And so it's a very bumpy ride. In these periods when we really need the Pakistanis, we don't pay attention to human rights or the really big one, nuclear proliferation. And so the proliferation is pretty steady. So if you look at...

After the United States having trouble negotiating all this so that whatever you do in the short term doesn't wreck you in the long term. But in order to get to the long term, of course, you've got to go through the short term. So after the U2...

crash in Russia where it gets shot down and the Pakistanis are having a heart attack about that, that's when the Pakistanis look... to cultivating more better relations with China because the U.S. relationship is just too potentially costly and the Americans cut off the military aid. The Pakistanis are being very nice about delivering the mail. for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to line up invitations in Beijing, the United States is ignoring a humanitarian nightmare because all of this...

That coincides with the 1971 Bangladeshi War for Independence. So let me explain what that is to you. So Pakistan was holding presidential elections. The dominant ethnic group... in Pakistan are Punjabis. Sometimes the Sindhis, like the Butoh family, I think they're Sindhis. But anyway, generally speaking, particularly the army, the Punjabis dominate. Bengalis live in Bangladesh. They won the election.

And the Punjabis are furious. So they send the army to start butchering people in East Pakistan to overturn the election. So there are refugees pouring into India. So this is the backdrop of what is going on. there. And for anyone who wasn't in the know, the United States is saying nothing about this. There's this massive humanitarian crisis. The United States has got nothing to say. The United States has something to say about everything. But it had to do with this is the moment that...

Nixon is trying to get himself invited to Beijing so that he can talk to Mao about cooperating with the Chinese to overextend the Soviets in the Cold War, which is ultimately what we do. And it's very important to win the Cold War. This is integral to this. But everyone else is looking and going, what on earth is going on? So you have Nixon's doing the mediation in the background. We got refugees flying all over the place. India comes to the United States.

and says, look, you need to tell the Chinese not to intervene in this thing. And the Indians also say, you need to bring this up at the UN, the human rights stuff, because India's literally getting millions of refugees trying to flee this. And the United States won't do any of it. It gets even better. The United States has the gall to blame the Indians for the war. Dream on. So Indira Gandhi is just furious at this one.

The United States had wished that India would cease being non-aligned and aligned with the West. Oh, well, they ceased being non-aligned, all right. They signed a military pact with Russia. over this. And then they upgrade their relationship with Vietnam, which totally upsets the United States. And it gets even better.

They shut down Indians. They won't give scholars any visas to come to India to study India. So you wonder why U.S. universities didn't have any Indian studies programs. It's all about this. So that explains what's going on with all of that. total mess. Meanwhile, but for Pakistan, as all this is going on, The Shah of Rand falls in, I think it's like February 1979, and then the Russians invade and raid.

Afghanistan in December 1979, and suddenly Pakistan is totally essential once again. And the Pakistanis are really getting sick of being kicked around. So an outgoing... President Jimmy Carter offers them, I don't know, $400 million or something. This is Zia here going peanuts to the peanut farmer. And the incoming... Reagan administration then ups it to $3.2 billion. And that money gets funneled through the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. It's like the...

I don't know, the CIA plus plus plus in Pakistan. And when you put that kind of money into that kind of bureaucracy, you're going to make them... incredibly powerful. And then they're the ones who decide how they're going to allocate money to insurgents in Afghanistan. And I got it. There weren't any great choices, but they're...

arming some really anti-Western folks in there. Probably some guy named Osama, last named bin Laden. But anyway, I'm not sure of the details on that one. But it is going to have 9-11 follow-on effects. And also, the Pakistan... the ISI is also taking some of that money and putting it into Kashmir, which is going to have real problems for India later on. So there are real ramifications for all of this, of needing Pakistan, but actually what...

is happening anyway. And then throughout, there is the Pakistanis are getting closer and closer to building the bomb. So when the Russians go piling into Afghanistan, here's Spigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security advisor. They're telling him, our security policy cannot be dictated by our non-proliferation policy. Really? I thought that was our security policy. And the problem with proliferation is it tends to be a one-way street.

whereas Afghanistan has been anything but. And then here, Deng Xiaoping was in town, and he told Cardi, we applaud your decision to basically toss all these proliferation human rights considerations for Pakistan and just arming them. No kidding, because the Chinese are providing the nuclear spare parts. So the United States isn't the only country to have trouble navigating this. cutthroat billiards. The Pakistanis had their share of boomerangs. Just look how the wars work. So wars create...

Incredible costs. So the 1965 war, the Pakistanis get exactly nothing. And the United States, Pakistan had been the largest aid recipient of the... I'm not sure if I got that right. But anyway, they're a huge aid recipient from the United States. Well, after this war, we're not so interested. So that's a lot of money down the tubes. And then in the 1971 war, great guys.

You lose Bangladesh, which, by the way, has over half your population, so that Pakistan is no longer the most populous Muslim country. Indonesia is. And if you look at the Cargill War in 1999, this is when Pakistan tries to again go below the line of control in Kashmir to try to take some more of Kashmir back.

Pakistan has to cross right back, and then it gets sanctioned for all of this. So none of these wars have actually worked out very well for Pakistan. And then if you think about it, India and Pakistan are natural trade partners. So if you take all these wars and just add up all the costs, and then think of the opportunity costs if Pakistan had been able to take this money and spend it on road systems, on education.

And then all the lost trade. It gives you a sense of the real cost of all of this. Okay, well. Those are Pakistan's problems. India has its own problems. Here you've got Indira Gandhi and Richard Nixon. They really didn't like each other. I mean, look at her. She looks as if she's just been fed bad fish, and he looks like he served it up.

And they just they cannot abide by each other. So in the 1940s, when Kashmir is erupting, Indira Gandhi thinks, well, no, it's Nehru, her dad, thinks that the United States should. be supporting India because it's secular and it's democracy.

And the United States is appalled during the Korean War when India remains non-aligned instead of supporting the United States because it's secular and democratic. And the Pakistanis are totally outraged because they're looking at this and going, Okay, these Indians are not aligned.

We're aligned. We're taking these risks for Peshawar and stuff with the U-2s. And you're helping these people who are about to ally with the Soviet Union? Who are you kidding? So it's a total mess. So the Indians have their own self. inflicted blows. Nehru and his very controversial, but his devoted advisor, Krishna Menon, and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, were really good at making these totally insulting remarks to American VIPs.

Okay, it hits the target without a doubt, but the ego that has just been hit is huge. And like an elephant is not about to forget. And meanwhile... Pakistan, in contrast, is just being this welcoming host. So the United States is going, India and Pakistan is better. And it makes really bad trend lines for India because in the 1962 war, the United States supported India. In the 1965 war, it's neutral.

in 1971, or it supports Pakistan. That's not great. And then India's own very heavy-handed treatment of solutions to the insurgency of Kashmir doesn't make that thing go away. It just gets worse. So they have their own problem. China also has its problems with the interaction. It's complicated. So on the one hand, on the Sino-Indian war, absolutely, China gets the territory.

But at what cost? You've got this permanent enemy forever, as opposed to teaming up with them. If they teamed up, they actually would have had incredible leverage for what the global order is going to look like. But that's just not to be. if you look at the 1971 war, after the United States won't help with China, India's going, okay, I think we need nuclear weapons.

Because then we'll be able to protect ourselves against China. And after that war, when Pakistan has lost over half its population and has to deal with Indian population and territorial just overwhelming superiority, the Pakistanis go, I think we need nuclear weapons. in order to solve this problem. So it's going to be proliferation all over the place. But as a result of the 1971 war, where the Pakistan tries to overturn the elections, here you have a...

Indian defense analyst, Suramaniam, saying, the Pakistani decision to overturn its elections by deploying the army to East Pakistan gave India an opportunity, the like of which... We'll never come again. And what they did is they armed insurgents in East Pakistan and then sent the conventional army in. And that was it for Pakistan in East Pakistan over. The interaction for Russia works a little better.

For Russia and India, it's really quite a good relationship. What Russia offers to India, not only military and economic aid, but also very useful vetoes on the UN Security Council. India does not want plebiscites in Kashmir that it might... lose so it gets uh the soviet union to veto those things so there are no plebiscites and then as india

is trouncing Pakistan in the 1971 war. And the United States wants them to halt. India, no way. India wants to finish the job. So he gets the Soviet Union to veto that one. And India does indeed finish the job. And meanwhile, for... Russia, India's really useful. It's a good counterbalance for China. So theirs is rather a beautiful relationship. They have very cordial relations. Okay. So I think I've now covered the playing field. Right?

And I've covered the players and teams and their problems with interacting. That's very difficult. Now for some of the plays and the instruments of national power. And here's the menu of choices. You can start. with the light items, diplomacy, public support, and denial of public support. You can move into more expensive things down the menu.

Okay, one of the things you can do is help negotiate a really useful treaty, which the United States did. It brokered this Indus Water Treaty of 1960. It's the only time that I know of, maybe you all know of something, where Indian Pakistan is... signed an agreement to the massive benefit of both of them. What does this agreement do? You can see it's a really dense river system. Both India and Pakistan need to irrigate to do that.

efficiently, you need dams. And both of them were poor and didn't have the dams. They were going to cost a billion dollars. The United States was willing to kick in half that money if they would both sign the treaty. And no terrorist event or anything derailed it. So they signed it. This treaty has been operating some of these dams ever since to enormous benefit of both countries. Does the United States get any enduring gratitude from either one for doing this? No. Zip.

Okay. Next one is the United States tried to exercise diplomacy to convince the Pakistanis and Indians to settle their differences. And it was a total flop. And because if you're going to try to befriend both India and Pakistan, you wind up becoming the enemy of one or the other. And the United States diplomacy was based on certain false assumptions, which are, one, that India and Pakistan could be...

jolt into settling their differences. And their idea is anyone who's so stupid is to think that. It's crazy. And if you're going, well, what are the origins of these differences? Partition was brutal. So the British colonized the Indian subcontinent, and then they left in 1947, and they left really rapidly. so that there was no time to set up any institutional framework. And also, you're talking millions of people.

So Pakistan is going to be one thing and then India is going to be the other. And so Hindus are just fleeing and Sikhs are fleeing out of Pakistan and Muslims are fleeing out of.

India going back and forth, and millions are killed while this is going on. So this is the origin, at least the modern origin, of why Pakistanis and Indians are so bitter. In addition, the United States thought, well, surely the China... threat it's going to make the indians come around and realize this non-aligned stuff's nonsense uh not not quite yeah when india What is it? Aligns. It aligns with Russia, not the United States. So that doesn't remotely work out the way the United States wanted.

And then the United States thought, well, hey, we in the West were rich. We give Indians and Pakistanis all this aid. This will force them to be nice to us and be less nice to the communists. Wrong. India and Pakistan are really astute and they get lots of... aid from everybody. So when the great powers do align, Russia, China, us, or at least two of those align.

then you can actually get stuff done. So that's when you get the Tashkent agreement for the 1965 war. This is the United States and Russia both want India and Pakistan to cease and desist and stuff. blowing each other off the map, and also in the Kargil conflict, when Pakistan is yet again trying to resolve Kashmir by invading and then gets itself into trouble.

And this guy, Nawaz Sharif, who was the head of Pakistan, he all of a sudden gets on a plane with his family. It looks like he's coming into exile. And he's trying to fly into the United States. The United States go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you think you're doing? And says, you're not coming in here until you admit that you crossed the line of control and then you need to get right back.

And so he agrees to sign the Washington agreement to go right back. But it's absolutely humiliating. for the Pakistanis to go, oh, yeah, we went south of the line of control. And then, well, that didn't work out, so now we have to go right back. He had gone to China.

already and pleaded his case to the Chinese. And they told him to get right back because there was a lot of nuclear saber rattling going on and the Chinese were not interested in a nuclear war over this. So Pakistan had the choice of, okay, if I didn't get by your loan... or crossed back, so they crossed back. And there were other cases in the inter-Cold War period.

when the great powers cooperated and tamped things down like terrorist incidents in New Delhi and in Mumbai that didn't go anywhere because the great powers told the Indians and Pakistanis to just dial it back. All right. Another thing you can do is to publicly support someone. And this is what goes on with Goa, which is a Portuguese colony.

The Indians wanted it back. The Portuguese said, no way, you cannot have it back. And the Indians took it back, and the United States supported Portugal. Why? It's a NATO ally, and we have very important bases in Portugal. So we kept the bases, but we made the Indians really... angry. And there are other areas of public support or not criticizing people publicly. For instance, in the 1971 Bangladesh war, when the United States refuses to support India by telling China,

don't enter this place. But of course, it was December, so the road system would have been a little rough to even try that. But it made the Indians mad. Or if you think during the Cold War, so with Nehru, it's the 1956 Hungarian crisis.

where the Russians send tanks into Hungary. The Indians don't say anything about that. There's a Berlin crisis in 1961 where the Russians are pretty rough, and the Indians don't say anything about that. And Indira Gandhi comes in, and one of the Russians sent tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968.

the Indians say nothing. And then when the Russians invade Afghanistan in 79, again, the Indians say nothing. So this is one way that you make your allies feel better about things. Another thing is, if you're one of the five... veto holders at the UN Security Council. You can do your public support that way. And I've already mentioned these Russian vetoes on...

Kashmiri plebiscites that the Indians truly didn't want to have happen, or short-circuiting the Indian offensive in Bangladesh. So this is what Russia did for India, and it was a very valuable thing for them. You can also put money where your mouth is, economic aid. And it's interesting, the United States provided far more economic aid than either the Russians or the Chinese, but still...

Both Pakistanis and Indians preferred China and Russia, respectively. And some of this aid was really important. During the Bihar famine in 1967, the United States sent 20% of its wheat crop. to India, it was worth $1.5 billion. That's not something to be sneezed at.

for, I don't know, was it 90 million people? It was a lot of people who might have starved to death. And that didn't work out well at all because Johnson at that point, President Johnson at that point, was so mad at the Indians because they, from his point of view, they were cuddling up.

to the North Vietnamese, and the Vietnam War wasn't going well for Johnson. So he was furious. So he provided the aid, but he did it always at the last minute, ship to mouth. And Indira Gandhi was furious. He said, I don't ever want us... ever to have to beg for food again. And she never did. So the United States got no gratitude for or enduring anything. Oh, and a whole other piece of it is India's...

is not subject to famines anymore. And part of it's from the Green Revolution. And who does that? It's the Ford and Rockefeller foundations who figure out the different strains of grains that you want to grow. And does the United States get any credit for that? No. Zip. And here is Krishna Menon, who is Nehru's controversial advisor, saying, look, we want to encourage a little competition between the donors. And they did. And India just...

Even Indira Gandhi, who hates Nixon, she's racking up the aid. Your Secretary of State John Foster Dallis saying, well, concerning India and Pakistan, it's difficult to help one. without making the any of the other. And of course, the United States tried to help both and angered both of them. Amazing. Another instrument of national power is military aid. It is even more difficult to calibrate than the economic aid. So you can see with the pactomania event where... Eisenhower is building these

bilateral relations and treaty organizations to contain the Russians. Formerly, there'd been no Cold War in South Asia, but once Eisenhower allies with Pakistan, all of a sudden the Russians are in there too. So that's a bit of a boomerang. Another one. So when the United States provides military aid to Pakistan, that just drives India to seeking an alliance with Russia, which isn't exactly what the United States wanted.

And then when the United States helps India right after the 1962 war with China, that alienates the Pakistanis. And then they try to... Buddy-buddy with China, not remotely with the United States, wanted to happen. And then when the United States provides aid to the ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which is the Pakistanis and are funding things to get the Russians. out of Afghanistan, they're also diverting it into...

Kashmir. So in 1989, this insurgency heats up and it's remained heated ever since. And then you wind up with China providing nuclear help to the Pakistanis. So it's difficult.

with these things. You get a short-term thing, but then the long-term thing that winds up may not be what you want at all. The other instrument of national power, if you got one, it's a carrier battle group. You can send one of those around, which is what the United States did. Here's Enterprise. It was the United States' first nuclear...

propelled aircraft carrier. And so during the 71 war, the United States sent this into the Bay of Bengal. The Russians sent some naval assets. Had no effect on that war. Pakistan lost, right? The Indians were furious. They just regarded this as an absolute threat, and how dare we do this anyway?

And maybe it would have been better to have left Enterprise in their home port rather than doing this. And then, of course, there's sanctions and embargoes. The United States does this all the time. And if you look at... the list of the times we're embargoing stuff. So at partition, we're embargoing everybody. And then during the 65 war, we're embargoing everybody. And then as various people are making nuclear...

progress and different things, there are these embargoes that come and go. And Pakistan's really mad because India does a test. an atomic test in 1974. And Pakistan doesn't do anything until much later. And it's like, why are you sanctioning us on this nuclear stuff? The Indians have actually done this. We haven't. And so if you look at this chart, you can see where the ups and downs of these sanctions go. And clearly they didn't stop.

proliferation because in 1998, you have these tit-for-tat nuclear atomic tests by both. And when the United States tries... But then it's just too late. They've already tested the stuff. And so the United States basically gives up. And then after 9-11, of course, we desperately need Pakistan again to deal with Afghanistan. So it's a complicated world out there. All right. So another...

instrument of national power is you can trade off your territory if you really want to. Most people don't. But the Pakistanis clearly did that in 1963. And we can all speculate on what they got. I mean, my hunch would be something. to do with nuclear things. But hey, it's not as if this information is out there in the public. It isn't. Oh, another thing you can do is go fund me insurgency. So you can...

And this is done by the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan. Think if you've got a country that you don't like, that has some minority people that want to secede, and so they're... fighting there? Well, you can go fund that insurgency, and then the one you don't like is pinned because they're going to be paying attention to that insurgency. And while they're pinned there, they can't probably do things elsewhere that you might care about. So this is the logic of what's going on.

So the United States belatedly decided, ah, let's help the Tibetans. And so the CIA is helping them between 57 and 61. But look at the dates. We did the road system. The road system in Tibet is completed by 1957. It's too late. So all you do is get these people killed because the Chinese have got the road system all set up in there. So that doesn't exactly work. But what for after the 62 war all the way until 1979.

When Deng Xiaoping calls it off, the Chinese are funding insurgencies of, let's see, the misos, the Manapuri, and the Naga. People all don't like different aspects of Indian rule, and the Chinese are more than happy to stir that pot. And the really big pot to stir are the naxalites. It's huge. And while... As long as the Pakistanis have got East Pakistan, they can stir some of that up.

And by the way, these Naxalites are still there in India. They have not gone away. It's a serious part of India where they are. And then, of course, Pakistan's location right next to Kashmir means they can stir that forever. And the tragedy of these, what they become are frozen conflicts, is the outside power.

if they are playing their cards right, their immoral cards right, they're not bearing any of the costs. They're pinning someone they don't particularly like. All the costs are borne by the local population who are suffering horrendous debt. lack of economic growth, warfare where you live, what a total disaster. So that's how it works. to complain at this game. So the Indians, according to the Pakistanis, have funded the Balakh.

Balak people, they straddle Iran and Pakistan. They don't particularly like being told what to do. So apparently India is supposed to have put its finger on that scale. The other thing the Pakistanis accuse Indians of doing is encouraging a... Pashtun insurgency up north, and that would be a way of diverting Pakistani attentions from Kashmir. If they're totally busy with Pashtuns, they can do less in Kashmir. But the result of these things... is people are becoming more and more bitter.

The hatreds just spike. The economic growth isn't happening. Poverty everywhere. And it makes these problems more intractable, not less. So when I think about these frozen conflicts, there are a number of ones that you know about besides Kashmir. there's Korea, there's Palestine. So if you look at Kashmir, if I've got it right, so you fund that thing and then... What's great from China's point of view, if Pakistan is doing that, India is frozen.

that it can't do other things because it's constantly paying attention to what's going on in Kashmir, as opposed to go, hmm, China, I don't know about this. Or in the Korean War back in the day, if things are all stirred up in Korea. China has to really pay attention to that, and it delays the rise of China. And in those days, that benefited Russia. But these things can change over time as to who the beneficiary is. And then you can play this game and think about how it works in Palestine.

And I'm no expert in that part of the world. But I think this frozen conflict veto player. that there are these veto players who are vetoing peace very easily. All you have to do is send a certain number of package bombs and peace is not gonna happen. Cutthroat billiards. What can you take away from all this? Well, common enemies cannot be conjured. So check out the alignments of who these common enemies are before you leave the parking lot.

And figure it out for all possible players who might want to crash the party. Like, what's their primary objective? Who's their primary adversary? What primary theater are they truly interested in? And then you've got your hunch. on how you think this is, and then you should reassess early and often to see if your assumptions are correct. And don't worry about changing your mind. Some people get really hung up about being wrong. Don't worry.

Reassessing is a sign of strength. It's like, I got more information, I've changed my mind. Good thing. Don't double down on bad information. And then if you're looking into areas of the world that are ethnically diverse, where people have been at odds for a long time. expect veto players and real difficulty in settling that matter out. And part of good strategy is recognizing some problems it's not feasible to solve. And then we all have scarce resources.

do everything. Focus on those things where you think you can solve. But if the great powers align... things can happen, and the story's even better than that, that sure, there are a few big powers, but the small and medium powers, if you add them all up. They are far, the aggregate, their aggregate wealth exceeds any one great power. So if the smaller powers agree on what they're up to, then the big powers have to pay attention.

And that's a positive thing. Before we move on to the interview, I just want to say a quick thank you to today's sponsor, Scale AI. The AI race is the Manhattan Project for the modern age. Whoever wins reshapes the balance of global power. I'll see you next time. all trust Scale to equip their teams with AI-ready data and the technology to build powerful applications. Scale recently introduced Defense Llama, Scale's latest solution available for military personnel.

With Defense Lama, military personnel can harness the power of AI to plan military or intelligence operations and understand adversary vulnerabilities. Whether through its work with the government or with businesses like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or Meta. Scale is at the forefront of U.S. AI innovation. If you're interested in learning more about how Scale powers frontier AI capabilities, go to scale.com slash dhwarkesh. All right, back to Sarah.

So it seems like the lesson from this lecture, the big lesson, is we couldn't be allies with both Pakistan and India at the same time. We had to choose one. So which one should we have chosen? Well, our primary enemy was pretty much the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. I mean, China was a problem, but the Soviets were the big problem. And so...

India and Pakistan never fit that bill. And so it had to do with whatever the problem of the day was. And Pakistan had a very critical location. And so we needed it for a whole bunch of things. you can see how that works. So while you need them, you pay a lot of money to them, and presumably the money's worth it for them for the hassles of dealing with a difficult tenant. So that's how... It worked, but nowadays the relationship with India is changing.

In fact, it has changed because their big buddy, Russia, is, well, after the end of the Cold War, instead of being the big friend, it was the big nuisance, not so much for India, but for everybody else. Now for India, its primary adversary is China, without a doubt. And the United States, I think, is looking that China poses the primary threat. And to the extent that both of them see it that way, that will make them align.

And Pakistan less so. It sounds like at the time it was right to choose Pakistan as the main ally for the United States. Well, we tried to choose India too, but yeah, we tried to do them simultaneously. But India's further... South, right? And so for a long time before we got satellite imagery, you want to have listening posts and things up in Pakistan. So India just simply doesn't have the location for that. So that was the original reason.

for interest in Pakistan. I want to better understand why the Soviet Union was such a charismatic example for countries that were decolonizing, like India. Go back and put yourself as a generation of what your life experience was. If your life experience was World War I, the total butchery of it, so you're telling young men your age, go, ah. You're in a trench. I want you to go up and over the edge into oncoming machine gun fire. We know what's going to happen when that happens.

And they're literally, in battles like the Somme, they're losing hundreds of thousands of people. I don't mean casualties. I mean dead, dead. And then you have the Great Depression afterwards. And then add to it, India's been colonized by a bunch of really opinionated white people, right? And transferring a lot of wealth out of India to England. And so you look at Marxism and boy, it sounds plausible.

Right? It sounds like these evil capitalists, they're just wasting lives. And surely this is the explanation. Now, the technicalities of Marx's labor theory of value don't actually turn to be. turn out to be accurate it's not just labor that produces value like silicon valley you understand it's what comes up here produces a tremendous amount of value and the marxist theory doesn't recognize that and so they're massive

flaws in theory. And then when you put communism into practice, if you want to have equality, which is what they wanted, if you're going to have equality, you're not going to have any liberty, right? Because in order to make it equal, you just expropriate and then you... divvied out to everybody and there's no liberty in that, right? And another piece about democracies.

And even flawed ones, even if they have a semi-free press, a lot of the icky news bubbles up. But in dictatorships, it doesn't, right? So you compare the seamy sides of some... democracies that aren't doing that well, and then to the public, the PR thing that the dictatorships are presenting. So you can picture Nehru of his generation. He's sick of British, right? And so Fabian's socialism, he's not for killing lots of people to impose socialism. He has a much lighter touch than Stalin.

One thing I was thinking about while you were mentioning the Gandhi and Nehru had a big problem with American segregation is at the same time in the 50s, by that point... over 10% of the Soviet population had at some point been in the gulags or are currently in the gulags. And segregation is very bad.

gulags are even worse and it's the same proportion of the population that's been in the gulags. Maybe people just didn't know about the gulags back then. I don't think communists let you know those things, right? This is one for a lot of Russians because... My husband and I were in the Soviet Union in the 1988-89 academic year, and that's early Gorbachev, before everything totally falls apart and there's no food. So there wasn't much food, but there was some food.

And it was just as the Russians were suddenly being able to read in a fairly free press. about the things that had happened, and they were appalled about what had gone on under Stalin, and they just hadn't realized all of it. One of the reasons that socialism was appealing to these decolonizing countries was because in the preceding decades, from the 20s to 40s, the Soviet Union actually had pretty good growth rates. In those 20 years, their GDP went from 8% to 18% of world production.

that just catch-up growth what was going on oh russia well uh there was tremendous rebuilding after world war There's another piece. It was so weird. When we were in Russia in 88, 89, anything that was sold at the markets... that came from somewhere else, they would mark it importnaya, means imported. So the idea, and I remember thinking, this is really weird, because normally you would say it's, I don't know, Hungarian this and that or whatever.

This means that anything from somewhere else is better than what we got. that it's a really bad sign. They had what I would call a donut empire. Normally, when you think of an empire, Mother Central is the most developed part, and then there's the periphery where all the natural resources are taken away. It was an inverted empire. Russia is the donut. The rich places are places like Czechoslovakia and Poland had been much richer places. And so the Russians are like surf owners are.

sucking in all the wealth from these places. And I think that's another reason why the shattering of the Soviet Union when they lost all of their insurfed Eastern Europe, why it was such a mess for Russia. They did not realize, and they still don't realize, the degree to which... They were living off the wealth produced in the European portions of Russia that since became independent. Who was the last Soviet leader who truly believed in communism? Gorbachev was a true believer.

He did not believe it was possible to take a U-turn on the road to communism so that when he was doing his reforms, it was to... improve communism, make it better. So he absolutely believed in it. When you started your career in Soviet studies,

And you're trying to figure out what's going on in the criminal all the time. What is the key to figuring out criminology? What is the key to figuring out what's happening in the Politburo? Well, what I did for my doctoral dissertation, so I wrote a history... of the Sino-so, well, the Russo-Chinese border when it was figured out, which is between 1858 and 1924. This is when all this territory went. And what I did is, so most of this isn't Soviet.

Right. It's 17 to 24 is the Soviet part. But you go to archives in Russia. You see what they'll let you see. This is when you could go to those archives. They're closed now. And I went to Beijing, saw the archives you were allowed to see. And then in Nanjing, there were some other.

ones there. And then in Taiwan, the ones they would allow you to see. And then Japan, the ones they would allow you to see. And they're all lying about different things or covering up different things. So it's a jigsaw puzzle. You put it together that way. That was how I did it. And also for the whole Kremlinology is pay attention to what dictators say.

Because they've got to communicate at some level to their own populations. They quite often tell you exactly what they want to do, and you think, that's insane. Who would do that? Well, hello, hello, right? So read what they have to say and read what others have to say. Then you need to read things in the Russian language. So I just...

I read a lot of things. You just read broadly, read more broadly than whatever your topic is because it's the unknown unknowns is what you're after. What are the things that are truly important and you have no idea about? And the only way you get to those is archives or... reading broadly where you bump into things and, ooh, that turns out to be important.

When you were giving the lecture, it seemed like these primary adversaries, whoever it is, it's like very permanent. And there's some deep reason why it has to be this way. But if you look at the Sino-Soviet split, it's just like they're both communist.

They're both Leninist parties, and they have this falling out over... There were a couple of things you mentioned, but it's not clear why somebody has to be somebody else's primary adversary, why you can't turn that around. Well, you can, but Russia and China...

have these territorial differences. And the issues I listed there of fighting to the last Chinese in the Korean War, Mao didn't really like that. There are a lot of Chinese who die in the Korean War where the Russians sort of get them in there. You're stuck. You have to, for prestige reasons, stay there. And the really big one I didn't discuss in any detail. So Stalin's really worried about a...

Two-front war, Nazis in the West and Japanese in the East. And so he brokers the second united front between the Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese communists under Mao. at a place called Xi'an in late 1930. Wait, it's at 36. And so it's called the Xi'an incident where Chiang Kai-shek was reputedly kidnapped and up there. But really what's going on is it's setting up the second united front and then the Japanese go.

ballistic. And that's when they invade all the down the coast and up the Yangtze River. And that means the Chinese are fighting Japanese for you. The Japanese are not going to launch into Siberia. So that works for Stalin. But the Chinese realize this, and it's not appreciated.

But then they helped the communists get into power in China, right? You think they'd be grateful for that? No, he wanted to divide China. He's telling Mao, oh, stop at the Yangtze, stop at the Yangtze. You need breathing space there in Mao's. And keeps on going. If you're the president, if you're the secretary of state, and you're looking at this where there's these interweaving systems of alliances and you give some guy aid because you need something and pisses everybody else off.

How the hell are you supposed to keep track of this? Do they have these matrices that you got up there? We have so many wonderful people. working in the State Department. I've met a number of them because they are students at the War College. You should be proud of all the people who work for the Department of State. There are all of these different experts, different parts of the world that get sent around hither and yon.

Very thoughtful people. Also, I've read in the archives many CIA reports, because I've gone to these presidential archives, starting with the Truman administration all the way up to Bush Sr. As you get to the more recent stuff. uh less of it's been declassified so the

I've read most of the CIA reports I've read are for earlier periods where they've been declassified. It's impressive, the level of analysis. And I know that the CIA has several people. There's the analytical part of it, and then there's the send people out to do.

We aren't even going to talk about what they're, which is completely different. But they're very fine analysts. And then we have like the Department of Agriculture has very fine analysts about agriculture, the whole world. So we have a tremendous amount of experts. And the other thing that presidents get, and also the high level...

bureaucrats get are these daily reports, where they're very short, because they have to be, about what's going on everywhere in the world that people think is important for them to know. So there are a tremendous number of smart, well...

educated people trying to get information to presidents, secretaries of states and things. And then you have all these regional desks where there's, I can't remember exactly, I don't know the organization chart of the State Department, but you can look at it by region. of the world. People work there and provide this. So there are wonderful experts that are working on this. You mentioned in the lecture that...

If China and India had figured out a way to work together, the world order could have looked completely different. Spell out the counterfactual for us. How would it have been different? I spent the grand total of a week in India. It was a trip on the way back from Australia, and that was the amount of time we had. went into the Mahatma Gandhi Museum in New Delhi, and there's a whole piece of it where Shank I-Shek is giving him things.

And it became really clear that Chiang Kai-shek had a really good relationship with India. Deep respect for India. The shared desire of, we want to be independent. We don't want Japanese running around our country. We don't want Westerners running around. We share this with India. And so I think if you get Chiang Kai-shek winning the Chinese Civil War and things, you might have had them team up and had a much more productive relationship.

That's interesting because often you think of, like when you're a nationalist, you think they're the ones that are really interested in territorial disputes. But in fact, you know, they wouldn't have cared about Tibet or something. Well, next time you're in New Delhi, go check out the museum. But when I was there, it was like 20 years ago.

But I remember being impressed and going, wow, there's all. And then when Gandhi was assassinated, this is Mahatma, not Indira, who's also assassinated. No relation. that the Chinese nationalists sense all sorts of condolences and different things. So, yeah, there could have been a different outcome. I wonder if the worst thing about the non-aligned movement was that because they wouldn't fall under anyone else's nuclear umbrella.

They wouldn't ally with the great power that had nukes. In order to keep up deterrence, they had to build nukes themselves. And so then you have this nuclear proliferation. And it's really important to get... people allied with one great power, even if it's not you, just to prevent the new extreme going wide? I think the 1962 war made Nehru realize that non-alignment was a non-starter. And that's...

for the reasons you're talking about, is like, okay, we just got eaten alive by the Chinese. Okay, we need big friend, and we probably need some big missiles eventually. And it's not immediately. The Indians... don't come around that we absolutely need nuclear weapons until the Bangladesh war when China's become more of a threat. By 1971...

Like, did Nehru really think that the Soviet Union might still win the Cold War? Wait, Nehru's dead in like 64, so it's his daughter. But when did they become allies with the Soviet Union? Well, the official alliance—I'm just defining what an alliance—I made up what an alliance is. So I would say it is the security pact that Indira Gandhi signs in 1971. Right. So at that point, they really thought the Soviet Union could—

won the Cold War? Why didn't they just choose the winner in retrospect? Oh, well, I remember the Cold War vividly. We felt we were losing it most of the way through. And why is that? Well, we always felt A, because the propaganda, right? Because they're all living beautifully. And then they're quite good. They're very good at propaganda. The United States had massive racial problems. Think about 1960s. Martin Luther King are pointing out.

hideous problems with this country. Civil rights demonstrations everywhere, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations everywhere, the women's movement, the environmental movement. There are loads of unhappy people pointing out all of these problems. Which is a good thing because then the United States starts working on fixing some of these problems. Of course, they're not fixed, but there's improvement on them. Whereas in Russia, no one can travel.

So you can't see how unbelievably poor they are. And so you go to Moscow and you think, well, this is a plausible city. Well, there is only one plausible city in the place, or maybe it's to St. Petersburg. Well, it's with Leningrad in those days. So people didn't realize. But yeah, we felt we were losing the Cold War. In fact, at the very end of the Cold War, because I was in the Bush archives. So Gorbachev's in and...

And Reagan and then Bush are thinking, well, he just looks like another one of these people. And we're not going to take the propaganda seriously. And then they sort of go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then it's in... 88, where Bush is going, whoa, maybe it is going to end. And then the United States teams up with Helmut Kohl of Germany to do the fastest get the Russians out of Eastern Europe ever.

Gorbachev is the one who wants to cooperate with the West. One thing you should know about warfare, you think the winners win it? No, actually, it's when the losers decide they've had enough. That's when a war ends. Otherwise, it doesn't end. The Russians got sick of it and they quit. I wonder if there's a lesson in here for...

what people call the Cold War with China today, where people think, you know, it's really competitive. China might have a bigger economy than us too. And really, if you actually got to see what's happening day to day in China, maybe you might decide, like the Soviet Union, there's a bunch of things broken with it. They're not really competitive in the long run.

economically, and so we're going to win. Well, I don't know win-lose, but they have a very low per capita standard of living. Do the math. You go, yeah, they've got a big economy because they're not a third of the world's population now, but it's huge. And divide the 1.3 billion, whatever it is, you come up with a low number for per capita standard of living. And I think for human beings, that's the number that matters, right?

of what is your family income look like. So they got a long way to go on that one. I want to go back to Kissinger in 1971. So because they want... And somebody to send the message along to China to open up. They shut up about Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh, where numbers vary, but somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million people died. It's awful. Hundreds of thousands of people were raped.

I know they didn't have email back when there was no other way to get the message across. You have to abet a genocide in order to get a message across the mouth. Well, first of all. The Cold War is a misnomer because the bloodshed in the Third World was horrendous. I will eventually compile the stats on this. Not that they're great stats, but it's obscene numbers. I think Congo had a civil war where literally over 10 million people died. And that's only just one of these things.

States cannot deal with all of these. And if you think about it, the time when the United States was really quite idealistic, the Iraq War goes in, they create democracy in this place. It's a massive civil war and then we're blamed for it. So be careful about where you intervene because you may not be able to stop a thing and then you'll get blamed for what's going on.

Bangladesh is horrible, but it is not our... You will get overextended if you intervene in everything under the planet. Also, there's a question of why the United States or anyone should be doing... all of it shouldn't be through the UN and other things. The really key thing was winning the Cold War. So Nixon absolutely did prioritize getting the mail through to Mao. He did. So 1971, good old Henry Hack, as he's known in the archives, Henry...

Kissinger. He gets his secret trip in there, lines up Nixon's trip in 72, and then it's going to overextend Russia in the Cold War. Why? Because with this Sino-Soviet split and all the rest of it... Russia has to militarize its entire border with China. It's already militarized its entire border with Europe.

Think about this. And you're talking about mechanized nuclear armed forces with all the tanks and everything else that goes with them. It is not cheap. Imagine if the United States had to do this on our Canadian and Mexican borders. Bankrupting, right? We're a lot richer than they are. So we team up with China. We provide them all kinds of naval technology, which is not going to bother us. They give us listening posts. Again, we love listening posts, you know, right up on the...

Russian border and the Russians are scared stiff of the Chinese. The Chinese with good military equipment, that wouldn't be a good thing for them. When I was president and he built these bases in Pakistan to have the YouTube plans and go to Russia. We had bases in Turkey. We had bases in Japan. We had bases in a lot of other places in Europe. This marginal increase in coverage, was it really worth breaking off the alliance with India? Or like pissing off India? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry, India. I think at the time, people felt we absolutely have to be able to cover everything. And I don't know the details of where they had their nuclear this and that stored and things and all their testing areas. I'm sure you needed to have the entire place covered. And so, yeah, it was very serious on these nuclear weapons. They can reach the United States. So we had better know what's going on.

So new books about the Cold War are coming out all the time. New books about World War II are coming out all the time. People are writing like thousands of papers about this stuff all the time. How much new stuff are we learning every year? All these scholars are still studying this. What kinds of new things do we keep unearthing? Well...

I'm personally sick of writing about World War II. I've done enough of it. And so I'm personally not going in that direction. Yeah, it's endless. I think for a lot of the books of these narrative feel-good histories, like I'll tell you about some regiment.

and all the heroic stuff they did. And it's nice, light airplane read. And a lot of people like that stuff. I personally like things where I learn things that are conceptual that I can then apply to other problems, which those books wouldn't help me. just me. How do you decide which are the good history books and which aren't?

You're just on Amazon. You can't read it yet. You're just looking at it on Amazon. Well, it's hard. What I would say is give it a book, The 32nd Test. And what's that? If the book's about another part of the world, flip to the bibliography, which you can do on Amazon. Amazon, and zing through there for about 30 seconds and see is there anything in the language of the country in question in the bibliography, like how much? And if there is zip, I would toss it.

I'm curious, how many of you would be interested in reading a book that says it knows everything about the United States and there's not a single English source cited? I think you'd regard the book as garbage, and that Americans do this routinely, and it's a problem with political science degrees.

where it would be very easy to require anyone who's going to do a specialty in comparative politics or IR, international relations, that, hey, you need to pass a language test and don't try Spanish if you think you're going to talk about the Middle East. Right? If it's going to be Middle East, it better be something like Arabic, Farsi, Turkic, Hebrew, and better yet, if you're really going to be a serious Middle Eastern expert, try all four. Right?

I mean, that would be true expertise. And where you can read books in the language and get what other people are thinking about things. So that would be my basic is find people who aren't playing half-court tennis all about Team America. Get to the other side of the net and try and figure out what other people are thinking. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them, but it means you are making the effort to see where they're coming from.

During the Cold War, all these proxy wars, was it good that we were just like letting off steam in these smaller ways and therefore we could avoid the bigger Great War? It wasn't letting off steam. It was horrendous. I don't know the answer. In fact...

My current project is a history of the Cold War, and I've read a lot of things, and I'm going to compile a lot of tables on things like this, just putting the data together. It'll take a long time, but then when you get the table, it'll be a really quick switch. really quick skim. So if you've got...

a civil war turning somewhere in Latin America or somewhere in Africa. So no one's aiding it, fine. Then if you have Russia puts its finger on the scale, then of course we're going to put our finger on the scale. So that means the Russians are providing industrial age weapons. We're providing industrial age weapons. What happens? Casualties just go through the roof. And that's what went on through the Cold War. And then there's this magical...

inner Cold War period when all that stopped. And that's when you get this tremendous growth across the third world because... There aren't these insurgencies just tearing up wealth. And then you could see recently, look at North Africa. It's a mess.

Right now, right? It's both ISIS or whatever it is in there is doing its stuff. And then you have Wagner Group or whatever they are in there. And then you have the Chinese further south. And everybody's feeling everything. You've got civil war all over the place. then that means military-age males want to get out.

Because people kill you, right? Or they'll either dragoon you into fighting where you don't want to fight, or they'll just kill you outright. So they're all trying to get into boats to Europe, which is destabilizing. It's a mess. We're in the Second Cold War, and this is part of it. What was the biggest, when you're doing this project in the Cold War, what were the biggest miscalculations?

that people were making? Were they too suspicious of the other side? Were they not suspicious enough? Were they too concerned about basis? I don't know. What were they missing? I need to think more about that because I think there are probably all sorts of things. And also, it's impossible to know the right thing to do.

Afterwards, when a pansy go, well, that was a mess. It's hard to know. But I think it was probably a terrible mistake when Eisenhower thought, here's the... supreme command allied commander of world war ii who knows all about hot wars, doesn't want to do that. When the United States deposes Mosaddegh and Iran in 1954, I can see Eisenhower's view is, hey, we're just deposing one guy and we're going to avoid the Russians taking oil fields.

here, et cetera. And he thinks that's a better trade-off. Well, the Iranians have never forgotten that. They're furious to this day. And wouldn't you be if you're Iranian? Mossadegh was democratically elected. Or another time, actually in Vietnam, we didn't want to hold, we didn't push the South Vietnamese to hold elections because we knew Ho Chi Minh would win.

He was the only national figure in Vietnam. So the United States is all about free elections. The Vietnamese could have run a free election and Ho Chi Minh would have won. That was our assessment that he would win. Okay. Well, if you're for free elections, it means you don't get the outcome you want.

And I wonder if that wasn't a terrible mistake, because the Vietnamese actually can't stand the Chinese, so they were always going to be a counterbalance to the Chinese. But due to the McCarthy era... We purged all of our China experts, all these children of missionaries who knew a great deal about China, less so about Vietnam, but at least it's a related cultural group. So we had gotten rid of all that expertise.

in the McCarthy era. So we're running blind in Asia. What you just mentioned about the fact that we would curtail what kinds of elections you can hold in these countries. After Germany and Japan surrendered, if they tried to elect another fascist party, we wouldn't have been like, all right, well, that's what you guys voted for. They're in charge now. And so why is the principle different in Vietnam?

Because the South Vietnamese would have voted for them as well. We've just been fighting a massive war with Japan and Germany. There's no way we're going to let the Germans and the Japanese decide anything initially. But what we did do for both Germany... our path, West Germany and Japan, is we did our best to set up democratic institutions that within a cycle or two, they're making their decisions whom they're electing. We are not choosing their leaders.

generous piece. It was realizing in World War I, ostracizing Germans, ostracizing Russians, it probably doesn't... You need to bring them back into the family of nations because they're on the planet. They're not leaving the planet. And the generous peace with Germany, look at them. They're the most wonderful allies, as are the Japanese. They're terrific.

During the Cold War, the USSR is constantly funding these communist parties around the world. And these parties are doing exactly their bidding, whatever Stalin says they'll do. I don't know about that. Yeah, feel free to clarify. But it doesn't feel like any other country managed to pull this off. There's not like an American party in the French parliament that does exactly what.

the president would tell them to do. How did they pull this off? I don't think it's that they did exactly what anyone wanted. What the communists have is a really powerful... doctrine for how you go from nothing to something in a failing state, how you...

start out with a bunch of people on some campus. Mao literally starts out as a junior librarian in Beijing University. So I don't know. He's there with the librarians. I don't know the ladies. Who knows what it is? It's probably guys in those days. Then he's turning these people into cadres and eventually the guerrillas and eventually conventional army. But they have a really good program that...

works the world over, and it's very effective for taking power within a broken state. It's lousy at producing prosperity thereafter. And you look at the Communist Party today. They're really good at staying in power. For a while there, under Deng Xiaoping, it ran in parallel what the economic reforms needed to be. to produce wealth and what the party needed in order to be more powerful. But now that's running at cross purposes because for the party to maintain its monopoly, well...

All these much more educated Chinese aren't going to be interested in that anymore. And so it's time to lock those people up and then you're going to have trouble with keeping your economic growth rate going. Mao dies and immediately things improve. China experiences its growth trajectory.

Stalin dies and, you know, Khrushchev's not a teddy bear, but at least you like cut down the gulag system. And so it does seem like if you have an especially bad dictator, you do have this sort of regression to the mean where the next guy is probably not as bad as the worst guy who's ever been in charge. of the country. And I wonder if that implies that if we got rid of Kim Jong-un or the Ayatollah or something, the next guy probably won't be as bad.

I don't know, but I think iconic leaders like Mao and Stalin, they were canonized by winning their wars. Stalin, by winning World War II, the Russians revered him. that and they had experienced. Every Russian experienced World War II. It was central to their lives to win that thing. So Stalin is canonized for doing that. And Mao, the man who puts Humpty Dumpty back together again when no one else could and then fights the great...

powers, capitalist powers to a stalemate in Korea, he's again been canonized. Whoever comes after them is not going to have that level of prestige. It's just going to devolve. That's period. And then for the successors of Stalin. they were sick of being terrified about whether they were getting purged. He kept putting bullets in people's heads, like Vladimir Putin. You do this long enough that people are horrified and don't want to have it. They don't want to live that way.

anymore so there's that piece of it as well i guess i'm not sure the answer is like if today if you found out tomorrow that putin is dead is your estimation that things are going to improve or get worse um

My estimation in that kind of system is there's going to be a leadership struggle. That's the problem with dictatorships. They're absolutely brittle. And that's what's wonderful about having elections. You just every four years or whatever it is, you have an election. Whoever it is, it's going to. be, whatever it is. But in these dictatorships, no one knows. And so everyone, so Stalin literally, I think he...

didn't show up at breakfast. No one wanted to open the door. And then probably they decided, let's not open the door. Let's just let that door stay shut for a few days. And then when it starts stinking, we'll know. Perfect. So that's how he dies. So you're going to be guaranteed a free-for-all. So if there's a free-for-all for something like Ukraine, they will probably have to call that off.

Because they got to focus on Moscow. That's what happened with the Korean War. Why is the Korean War and Stalin dies? Russians want it over because they got all kinds of unrest. It's various prisons in their own. gulags. They're having riots. They're having, I think, some Bulgaria, maybe East Germany as well. They got problems. So they don't want to deal with the Korean War anymore. It's like, who cares? Forget about it.

So you would be guaranteed that, which might be highly beneficial for Ukraine. But knowing Putin, he's an evil man. He'll probably stick around forever. While you're sharing this Cold War history... How close did we get to a nuclear bomb? Some people argue that, like, you know, there were all these close-end incidents. It, like, basically should have happened almost in the sense of, like, the odds. And some people say, like, I wasn't mad at work. It wasn't going to happen. Why would...

They risk it for a strike. Oh, it's a miracle we're all here. I think in the Cuban Missile Crisis, it came down to... Soviet sub-captain. They had like the political commissar, the military commissar. I have to reread this, but I don't know whether he needed a vote of two out of three to launch a nuclear weapon or whether one guy was senior and you have to get him to come along. I have to...

read the data. But basically, someone put their foot down in the Soviet sub not to launch a nuke. Okay, we lucked out of that one. And then I think under Reagan, there was an Abel Archer missile test. Or we were doing a war game or something. And the Russians looked at it and thought it was the real thing for a while.

And that just scared the bejesus out of them. And I think it was after that that Ronald Reagan started moderating his rhetoric. He's like, oh, you don't want to have them on the edge like this. This is not going to be beneficial. So it was quite close. The advantage. in the Cold War, is all our leaders all the way through Bush Sr. were all veterans of World War II. And one way or another, they'd serve. Some of them on the battle line, like... Bush Sr. had and others

near enough so that they understood how dangerous it was. And like all the Soviet leaders, Brezhnev and all those people had seen all sorts of people be butchered. So they were cautious in a way I don't think Vladimir Putin is.

Going back to the lecture, if it's true that you can't get primary adversaries to be friends with each other, and if you want to be friends with one of them, you're going to make enemies of the other one. I mean, the world is full of people who are enemies with each other. Does that mean that... At once, America can only be friends with half the world, and it's got to be anyways with the half that this half hates.

With India and Pakistan, it was so intense because of partition of so many people who died. And it was recent, right? 47. And so you wouldn't expect that. those animosities to die down, and also their new states trying to establish their legitimacy. So that was particularly difficult. I don't know that most countries in the world necessarily want to kill all of their neighbors. And then you can look at things. Forever, Britain and France were going at it. And then...

Germany became the primary problem between World War I and World War II. So then Britain is teaming up with France, its former primary enemy, and that whole problem goes away. And then you have the generous peace after World War II, not I. World War I was not a generous piece. And also we have the mismanaged Great Depression that allows fascists to rise all over the place. But after World War II, generosity to the Germans, it's over.

Look at Europe. If you study European history, they're all trying to butcher each other for centuries, and then they realize, what a waste. Let's just trade, play by the rules. Should we have cut off Lendless Aid?

to Stalin after 1943 when it's obvious that... Bad idea. When it's obvious that they're winning against the Germans. If you'd done that, then they would have stopped advancing as fast in Eastern Europe. Oh, is that what you're thinking? No, no. More of Europe could have been free earlier on. No, because you're assuming that World War II was not a closely run thing. I think it's a much more closely run thing than you think. And there's no...

No one's sure of how it's going to turn out. Everyone knows if it goes longer, it's more of my kids who are dying. So there's no way you are going to cut aid to the army that's fighting World War II. All right, here's a concept for you. There's a main theater in the war. How do I know what the main theater is? That's where most of the people fighting are. That's the main front main theater. Russians fought between two-thirds and three-quarters of the Nazi army.

Always. That makes the Eastern Front the main theater. So you all think that the Normandy invasion was a big deal. No, that is a peripheral operation. It is peripheral to the main theater. The Russians hadn't been doing, by Gratia, this big operation that coincides with Normandy. No way would we ever have gotten on to the continent. And that's in 1944. So cutting of Lend-Lease Aid.

insane. But you're eliminating the problem of fascism until people have forgotten what fascism meant, but you're left for the problem of communism. By that same logic, look, the main theater in the Pacific War... was in China, where most of the fighting was happening. Our lonely state to Chiang Kai-shek was 1% to 2% of what we were sending to Stalin. In today's dollars, we send Stalin $1 trillion worth of aid.

just tremendous amounts of supplies he used to then instill a communist totalitarianism on Eastern Europe. If he had sent a fraction of that aid to Chiang Kai-shek... and help us with the Japanese, maybe we would still be in power. We wouldn't have to fight as much. We couldn't get it in. It's because if you want to deliver Lend-Lease A, this is a problem in World War I.

is why did Russia fall in World War I? Why would you ever let that happen? There's no way to get the aid in because Russia hadn't built its Murmansk Railway, which goes way up north. And it hasn't completed the Trans-Siberian Railway, doesn't do those things until Murmansk is early in 1917 and the Trans-Siberians in 1916. That's like right before the Tsar Falls.

couldn't aid Russia in World War I. It falls for lack of arms. And then the blockade that the Japanese did was really effective. So to get aid in, you need railways and you need ports. The Japanese had covered all that and they owned all the railway systems. So the only way we could get stuff in is they're flying over the hump, the Himalayas. Okay, so you're going to fly in aviation fuel.

plus the airplanes, and then you're going to try to bomb Japan from China. Imagine flying in aviation fuel. It's like a non-starter. And I think the best argument you can make is... on that is that rather than getting Chiang Kai-shek to do the Burma campaign,

43, 44, and he was dead against it, is let him keep all that equipment, whatever you got over the hump, instead of sending it over to Burma, which is strategically irrelevant, turns out, in this war. Let him keep everything, because when the Japanese try to do Ichigo...

their biggest offense of the war. They're going right down through central China because the United States is cutting off so much of their maritime stuff. They want to be able to have railways all the way through central China. Anyway, Shanghai Shack. gets wrecked in that, maybe if more of the equipment had been available to him, maybe he would have been in better shape to then put on a better showing in the Civil War.

not look to the Chinese people as like a serial loser. And it's not his fault. It's because he's an unindustrialized country trying to deal with the Japanese, whom we found very difficult to fight. So why wouldn't he find them difficult? uh but we kept lend-lease going even after berlin had fallen and stalin used that aid in order to even after the first atomic bomb is dropped that only then does stalin

break the non-aggression pact with Japan and invade Manchuria. So he basically had no moral right to Manchuria. It was the Chinese who had been doing all the fighting. And he gets Manchuria. Should have stopped the Lend-Lease by then, right? I think we stopped it. very rapidly at the end of the war. So yeah, the British were appalled how rapidly the Lend-Lease aid stopped because they desperately needed it because they'd been wrecked by the war. So yeah, we did.

We did cut it off, but you definitely want Nazi Germany gone, and you want to keep supporting Russia until that happens. Can I try another idea on you? So it seems like one of the big achievements of modernity is that we get countries to stop caring about history. The idea is like, look, if you hear...

people talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on both sides. They'll go back like 2,000, 3,000 years about who has rights. On the Tucker Carlson interview, Putin was talking about things that happened in like 500 BC. And then so the big achievement is just like, look, the past is the past. Whatever the borders are, right? Right now, we're going to enforce those. We don't care who claims to have rights to it because of what happened in 1700s or something. That is modern international law.

And I don't know when, you'd have to be a lawyer, it's probably a lawyer who actually knows of when you decide modern international law begins. But certainly by the time you're getting through world wars, we're in modern international law. And that's the problem with what...

Putin's, his magic, he's working on Ukraine, is they signed multiple times at the breakup of the Soviet Union and then afterwards what Ukraine's borders were, and they're violating all that. Well, have fun with it because the Chinese can play that game. reverse on Siberia, and we'll see how happily that one ends. But I think there is a realization that...

These disputes go back forever. And it's like musical chairs. We're now freezing. Whatever chair you're in, that's it. And that's modern international law. And it turns out that those... Countries that focus on territory are ripping it off from someone else. It's negative sum. You're going to fight over it. You're going to destroy it in the process. Whatever. And the Europeans...

Our great example to us all of just call it a day. Let everybody travel. Go get a rental property somewhere, right? And run your businesses. You really don't need to own Luxembourg or whatever it is. hassle. You want to offload their crazy domestic problems anyway and just run your transactions. This is the miracle of the rules-based order. It is the only way to have... a compounded, rapid compounded growth. You go, well...

How's it possible that China had this rapid growth for a while and they're a dictatorship? How'd that work? It's because they had the growth when they cooperated with the international order. When they rejoined the family of nations, yeah, that's when they prospered. Well, now Xi Jinping is going to do a U-turn on that. Have fun. We will not be enriching. You mentioned in the lecture that the real motivation for the CCP is to keep itself in power. It's not a democratic system.

And if keeping yourself in power doesn't align with making your country rich and therefore staying in the international order, if that is a correct mental model, then like... What's the pitch to Xi? Why should he abide by the international order? Because we want him to abide by the international order, right? And if the idea is like, well, it's not going to work out for you, maybe... I don't think it will work out for him or for the Chinese people. That's not a graceful pitch. Yeah, but...

There are things that you just cannot convince other people. Another key thing in strategy is you can have a very worthy goal, but you need to look at it carefully and go, is it feasible? I don't think it's feasible to make Xi Jinping change his mind because he's of a particular background and this is what he believes. And he has a whole bunch of other Chinese people around him who believe the same thing.

And we're going to second Cold War. It's going to be a long wait till they change their mind. If you think about Gorbachev's generation. They decided, Gorbachev said over and over again, we cannot live like this anymore. That the realization is that their standard of living was lousy compared to the West. So clearly they needed to reform and do things. But that was... his decision and his generation's decision to reassess and do something else. It's going to be a long wait.

until the Chinese reassess or the Russians reassess. So then you have to think about protecting yourself and working with allies, your friends. In the first Cold War, the Sino-Soviet split, getting China... to oppose the Soviet Union was a big deal in terms of winning that war. Who plays the role that China played in the first Cold War against China? Oh, they still played. It's interesting. So Putin... Uh...

has Russia lost, the Soviet Union's fractured at precisely the time that China's rising. So during the Cold War, China's really weak and Russia's in the dominant position. Well, I guess that's reversed. So Putin is dumping all... his ordinance on Ukraine, his Cold War stockpile. And he is leaving Siberia open, wide open, to...

Chinese predations. And I believe Siberia has precisely the resources that China covets on lands the czars stole. And I think there's a big body of water out there called Lake Baikal. It's 20% of the world's... surface freshwater. China is chronically short of freshwater in North China. Becal is the only fix, and I think it's flat enough that you could pipe it around. So I don't think the question is... It's not the question of whether the Xi-Putin bromance is going to end. It's when.

And I assure you the Chinese will pick the moment that is least convenient for Putin. You think they'd actually go to war about it? Or would they just negotiate the land? Oh, I bet it'll be negotiation. You get them in a corner and say, OK, buddy. This is what we want. This, this, this, this. And then he'll want some things from them. Sounds like what Joe and Lai tried to do to Nehru didn't work out. Well, what do you mean? Joe and...

Lai absolutely got the oxide chin plateau. Yeah, he offered the deal to Nehru. Nehru wouldn't take it. It's like, okay. I don't think, since they both have nuclear weapons, I don't think that kind of play is probably the play to make. But as long as Putin's desperate for whatever... for ordinance and other things. Putin's getting himself into a grand old corner. You wrote a textbook about Chinese history from 1644 onwards.

In Silicon Valley, there's this community called Progress Studies, and they're very interested in why the Industrial Revolution happened, how to increase growth, what has the history of progress been like? And one big question is, why didn't China have the Industrial Revolution first? In 1750, they had much higher fraction of the population, much higher fraction of the world output.

During this period, why didn't they have higher growth rates and come up with all these technologies? Well, there are whole books on the subject that I haven't read that look into this, but I would flip it around and go, well, the Industrial Revolution starts in Europe. That's the unusual thing. So the question isn't why China didn't, but why Europe did. And I have some guesses, but there are very thoughtful books on this subject. You can go find them.

and have fun reading them. But if you look at Europe, it's a peninsula. And then it's got the Mediterranean there. And so the Europeans, and they've got quite a very good river system, the Danube and the Rhine and the Ruhr, all these different rivers. And so they have always been... a lot of trade going on. And then it was, no one's ever been able to make a big empire in Europe stick. The Romans did quite well for quite a bit of time. Napoleon tries, not so good. Nazis, not so good at all.

And I guess the French tried on and off and it didn't succeed. So you have all of these competing countries. And I think a lot of that was essential to the Industrial Revolution of having... You're focusing on commerce and you've got a lot of competing places. You don't have one big empire that can just sit there, be fat, dumb, and happy. That you have to innovate in order to survive against all these other little states.

Earlier, talking about how in North Africa or other regions, there's been a bunch of chaos because people are constantly, there's these insurgencies, there's these civil wars, there's these smaller wars happening all the time, and that causes chaos. But if you look at Europe throughout this period, You know, these countries are constantly at war with each other. And the fact that...

because of that no one big empire forms, apparently helps explain the Industrial Revolution. So, you know, it seems to imply that we should see like a bunch of growth in North Africa or something. It's a tremendous innovation. And you look at things long prior, like... Michelangelo and things, Leonardo da Vinci. It's just a lot of these really bright people.

Yeah, it's my guess. It's related to all of this. And I think the Industrial Revolution doesn't begin in England. And the Industrial Revolution isn't strictly industry. Yeah, it's about textiles and steam engines and railroads and things, but it's also about institutions. One of the big things for the British was insurance, so that when you do your trading vessel and the whole thing sinks.

You don't bankrupt all your investors because you've got that boat insured. And then banking, banking rules, so you can't just rip off everybody's cash. And so Britain, because it's surrounded with the moat, becomes a banking center. Because it's unlikely in a war to have some alien army come and just open all the vaults and take everyone's money. So there are these institutional things. And then the British trading countries, like the Dutch Empire.

want to have, to be able to trade in peace. So they want people just follow laws. So it's not surprising the founding father of international law is a member of the Dutch Republic, Hugo Grotius. It's this gravitation. The Romans are gravitating towards law and institutions and then these competing places so no one controls. I think the question is, why do these...

What's special about Europe rather than why it should have been somewhere else? What's mysterious about China is not only that it doesn't have the Industrial Revolution first, but its development starts... So slow. So Japan copies Western institutions during the Meiji Reformation and industrializes almost a century.

before China is able to do the same thing. And look, they're communists for a while, so it makes sense that during the Mao period or during the Civil War, that would impede development. But even during the Qing Dynasty or something, it takes until 1980 for them to start development. That just seems... Awfully slow. Well, communism is a really lousy system, so they did that.

In the 19th century, they have all these peasant rebellions where they're literally losing tens of millions of people that are just devastating the country. So that's why the 19th century is a lost century of all of that. going on so it's um It's hard. And then there's another piece that's hard for the Chinese. If you've been such a successful civilization in Asia the way they had been, they were the center of everything, culturally, science, governmental institutions.

You name the area of human achievement and the Chinese were at the top of it all in Asia. With that kind of success, it's pretty hard to reform yourself. And so they... also fed themselves the Kool-Aid that the Chinese never absorbed foreign ideas. It was always foreigners absorbed their ideas. And of course, that's nonsense because they were conquered by Manchus and actually absorbed a lot of Manchuans.

but that's not the story they're telling, whereas the Japanese are well aware they're absorbing Chinese institutions originally, Western institutions. And so that isn't antithetical to who the Japanese are. That's interesting. The past civilizational greatness may be an impediment to development.

Yeah, that's hard. Well, also because the way they define civilization, there's only one, everybody else are barbarians. People come and kowtow to China. Okay, great. But this doesn't set you up to learn from others? One of the big economies you talked about is the difference between limited and total objectives.

How does Bismarck illustrate the value of having limited objectives? Oh, limited and unlimited objectives. Yeah, Bismarck does illustrate that. An unlimited objective is, the simplest way to look at it is regime change. I have an unlimited objective against you. I win the war. You're going to be out of power. And as versus I win the war and yeah, you lose a province, but you'll be in power. So what Bismarck does, he's very clever.

Well, he's operating in an age of kings, and actually his achievements illustrates why you truly don't need royal families running the show. It's breathtakingly incompetent. So initially... He fights the Danish war. So that's way up north. And it's over these two provinces. And he wants to set his fingers on the scale of the more northerly province, because then that'll give him the rights to march troops.

through the more southerly one to cause up problems later. So war number one is the Danish war. No one thinks too much about it. Prussia gets an extra province as part of Denmark, was part of Denmark, no big deal. But then he fights the Austro-Prussian. War. And then what he's after is there are all these little Germanic states and Austria had dominated a bunch of them. And in that war, a whole bunch of them...

As a result of that war, he collects a whole bunch of these other states. And no one is really paying attention that he's actually... upending the balance of power in europe they're just looking at it it's limited he's not toppling the austrian He's not toppling the Danish government. And then he fights the Franco-Prussian War, where he takes Alsace-Lorraine, which are these...

If you look at it, it's like a salient into one country or the other. He takes that, and the French never forgive him, and that leads into World War I later. But by the time it's over, he's overthrown the balance of power in Europe. that all of a sudden Germany, Prussia, which was the weakest of five great powers, suddenly has a central position, the Germanic states, and it owns the whole thing.

And Britain and others who'd been asleep at the switch, like, ooh, because they could have weighed in on the scale at any point in these things to altered outcomes, and they didn't. There's a real reason why. And the people who are losing out here are all... They're all... Monarchies. There's a reason why you don't want to have people inherit offices. They don't tend to be very good at it. Actually, so World War I, I'm not sure how you explain World War I using limited and ultimate objectives.

Well, it's useful in warfare to think about limited versus unlimited objectives. So if you look at Ukraine today... Putin has one of the most unlimited kinds of objectives from Ukraine. He not only wants to topple the Ukrainian government, but he wants to Ukrainian culture. And if you look up genocide in the dictionary, genocide can mean kill everybody, but it can also mean destroy their culture. That also applies to genocide. So Putin has a very unlimited objective.

Kiev, on the other hand, does not have an unlimited objective. I mean, as much as they'd like Putin to go, they want Russia to get... out of Ukraine, right? Just get out of Ukrainian territory, stay in Russia. That's their objective. So the Ukrainians have a limited objective. Putin has an unlimited objective.

Yeah, in World War I, I mean, maybe other than like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there's like, like Germany doesn't have a limited objective with respect to France or Russia. No, it doesn't. But it still devolves into this, you know, 10 million people die. It doesn't, although the effect on Russia is...

to overthrow the government. In fact, it winds up overthrowing one government after another. I think as that war goes on and as you lose a lot of people, then the objectives become more unlimited. Originally, it was just get back into German territory. After a while, it's no, we want to overthrow your government for doing this. On a different topic. So your name is Sarah Payne. Yeah. When I go on Amazon.

And I find your books, they're not listed as Sarah Payne. They're listed under the author SCM Payne. That's correct. Why is that? Well, it's interesting. When I first started out, I just wanted my books to be read by... what the content of the book was. I didn't want it to be read whether I was male or female. Just read it for being a book. And then when the first reviews came out, It was he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he. And this is by Americans doing this. And I thought, wow.

I guess the idea because I wasn't doing women's history and this was a serious topic that, you know, women don't do serious topics. So I guess I'm glad I did it. So it looks like I'm. I'm a Briton, right? Because Britons love all the initials. And then why do I have all the initials? It's because my dad named from his side of the family are my three older brothers. And there's me and my mom felt that some names from her family ought to be.

dumped on me. And so since she, there were three older brothers, anyway, she had a lot of extra names going around. So she gave them to me and I had no say in this. When you're training these officers in the U.S. No War College. You've done it over many decades. Has the quality of the people you're training, has it improved, decreased over time? What's your class been like? They're wonderful people. Also, I don't... I don't look at people linear.

I just, it's a classroom. It has wonderful people in there. They're the next generation. And I will do everything I can for every single one of them to catapult them as far forward as I possibly can. So that's what it is. Do other countries have some equivalent of the Naval War College where they have this...

professional cadre of historians and strategists who are, you know, going through the archives, trying to figure out insights for current leaders? Oh, not all my colleagues publish much of anything. So it varies. The Naval War College has always had a few very A-list people and the most famous person. By far, every work there is Alfred Thiermahan. And he's 19th century. Well, he dies early 20th century. But he's the guy.

who, when the United States had been doing Manifest Destiny, a continental... a continental paradigm because we're expanding, taking territory all the way to the Pacific. And he's the guy who says, hmm, you know, power and position in the world really is about trade. And he... writes these enduring books that have lasted to the present. So there are these occasional people like Alfred Thayer, Mahan, who are very special. And as for some cadre of anybody's...

We're just professors. We teach mid-level and senior officers. And then most of them never become flag rank with the kind of leaders you're thinking about. So, I mean. I've talked to the occasional flag officer, but I'm just a minion. So you started in Soviet studies and you found yourself in... in the Soviet Union during its fall in 88, 89. Why was that the field you started in? Oh, so... I grew up during the height of the Cold War and listened to family dinnertime conversations all about it.

You listened to people describing the Russians as being totally evil. And I thought, well, I'll learn more about this. I'm curious. And then I realized, whoa. It's just unbelievable how cruel the Russians have been to each other and others. It's like they're a class by themselves. I don't make it up. And then the question is why and learning more.

And then in history, you do a minor field as well. And I think the typical minor field for Russian history would be French or German. I thought, no, I want to learn about China. and just curious, and then learn about China. And then I realized that Russia and China have relations, but then Japan always weighs in. So then I had to learn more about Japan. So that's where all of that led. And then I also thought I don't want to be...

studying the United States. That's where I'm from. And I want to learn about other countries. Also, my presumption is my bias would be pretty bad about the United States or things I wouldn't see. I thought I'm going to study other places. I don't have any family ties. I mean, I'm not a descendant of Russian immigrants or Chinese or Japanese immigrants, obviously. So these are places that I'm not related to and just curious.

What is the answer to that? You said you were trying to figure out why the Russians have been so cruel to each other through history, and then especially, I guess, after the communist revolution. Why is it? I don't know the answer, but I know I was... I've just recently read The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I should have read it years ago when it came out, but I didn't, so I finally read it. And if you read that, look at the level of cruelty.

It's mind-blowing. It isn't simply that the prisoners are mean to each other or that the prison guards are mean to the prisoners or the guards are mean to each other. All that's true. And it's not simply that the civilians outside of the... Gulag are mean to everybody. It's family members who are mean to people who are in the Gulag. The neighbors are mean to the family members who have anyone who's in the Gulag. And you start looking and going, who's not being mean in this place?

They're all being mean. And then you look at, oh, then I haven't got the list of all the words, but then I was reading a lot of Russian stuff last winter. And then maintaining a list of words in Russian. Sila, it means strength or... coercion in Russia. In English, strength doesn't mean coercion. It just means having power, right? But in Russian, it also means coercion. Or detente, it comes from the French, which means a relaxation of pressure. The Russian word, what it means is unloading a gun.

So if you look at their language, it's so coercive. And I think probably if you're living in a really dangerous piece of real estate, which they are, no defensible boundaries. So you're always fighting people and their answer. to surviving that is to be meaner than anybody else. And they just do scorched earth. You mess with them, they kill everybody and they just don't care. And okay, you want to, we have the modern world now.

where we can deal with each other with international law. So none of that stuff is necessary. But the Russians have not pulled from that tradition. And you can read in the newspaper how absolutely cruel they are to their men in service. They don't allow any of them to retreat. They've got the execution battalions behind them. So any kid who turns around, they're immediately murdered by their compatriots. Who treats their own people like this?

Russians do, but other people don't. I mean, Sgt. Wilson talks in that part about this wasn't, this is the direct result of... the communist uh regime's policy where if there's somebody's an orphan because their parents went to the gulags if you try to help the orphan you must be a sympathizer for the criminals and therefore you you must also be sent to the gulags and so like you have these orphans running around

Well, actually, the orphans, a lot of them were put into orphanages, and then they wound up being set up to join the KGB and other places. So they were probably some of the execution battalion people. I don't know the details, but there's some of that going on. And the cruelty in Russia was remarked by Europeans who were traveling there in the, I don't know, 17th century. So it goes back a long time.

Peter the Great, back in the day, he tortured his son to death. Who does that? He didn't have a replacement son either. Unlike Stalin. A final question. This new project you're doing on the Cold War, is it going to be a book? How will it come out? Slowly. Oh, I've been working on it for years. It'll be a... This culmination of previous research starts in 1917. It will end in 1991-ish. Why 1917 is we may not have noticed that these crazy communists in Russia...

were serious, but they did declare war on the capitalist order. It is really clear. The documentation is just there. And they were trying to fund people to overthrow governments in Europe, all around the world. This is in the teens and then certainly in the 20s. So just because they weren't remotely powerful enough to do it. uh but they were like uh what is it a maoist phase one insurgency where people aren't paying attention they're like below the radar what they're doing stuff um

And it's going to be looking at all the strategies that the Russians played, that we played, what medium plowers played, and what worked and what didn't. And it's going to be organized around concepts. uh could to understand these things so on the one level if i can do it right it'll be

a history of the Cold War from one year to another year. So there's that. And then there's another one about strategy. Okay, people are trying to achieve objectives and they're trying different things and integrating different elements of national power. So it'll be that. And then what I found...

helpful in my own career are these concepts like limited and unlimited war, or primary adversary, primary theater, or frozen conflict, or veto player. I find these things helpful. And so I'm going to put as many of those things in there as possible. And I'm of a certain age, so it's passing the baton to the next generation to say, this is what I've managed to figure out as I go putt, putt, putt reading in archives. And then others can skim it and see if there's anything worthwhile, if not.

I tried, right? I hope you'll come back on the podcast once the book is ready. Thank you. Hey, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Sarah. This is the first in a three-part series I did with her, where she distilled the lessons from a lifetime of deep scholarship. The other two are about Mao and Bushido, and I hope you will tune into those as well.

Until then, if you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with your friends. It really helps out a ton. And if you're interested in sponsoring a future episode, please reach out at dhwarkeshpatel.com slash advertise. All right, until the next one. See you guys.