Transcript of Sarah Paine EP 1: The War For India (Lecture & Interview)

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.

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, 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.”

Because 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 US relations with India for the duration of the Cold War and set up things in ways the United States ultimately wasn’t happy with.

Pivotal Situation: The Sino-Soviet Split

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 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 account of this list. Under the Tsars, the Russians took from the Chinese sphere of influence territory exceeding US 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 II 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 then 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. You need to take a little breather here” because he wants a divided China, like the 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 destalinization 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 meeting of the minds, and then all this becomes very public when it hits the propaganda press of the Sino-Soviet split in 1960.

Russian Grievances Against China

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, but that’s a different matter.

So the Russians want the Chinese to let them keep a couple of remaining Tsarist 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 provide to join a war under certain circumstances. And the Russians are going, “Woah. Woah. Woah. There could be nuclear follow-up 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. The Russians are thinking, okay. Then we’re not going to give you any of the plans for the atomic weapon, and it all devolves. So there’s no love lost on either side.

Vietnam War Tensions

And then what exacerbates these tensions is the Vietnam War, where China wants influence over a neighbor, Vietnam. That is 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 North Vietnamese.

So Russia’s aid needs to come by train over China, lest the United States sink 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.

The Sino-Soviet Border War

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 okay 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.

The Allies

So, 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.

In the report for my purposes tonight, when 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, allies. 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.

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 are 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. So, Nehru thought the Russians were the better.

India-China Relations: From Friendship to Conflict

India treated China generously in the early years of their relationship. India immediately recognized China in 1950, while countries like the United States delayed recognition for years. When the San Francisco treaty was signed in 1951 ending the war with Japan, India refused to sign because China and Russia weren’t included as signatories.

To help China break out of its diplomatic isolation after the Korean War, India signed a friendship treaty with China. As part of that treaty, India recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Under international law, when you recognize someone’s sovereignty over territory, that recognition is permanent – you cannot legally withdraw it. Meanwhile, China merely promised India things like “peaceful coexistence,” which carried no permanence under international law.

From 1960 onward, India voted to seat the People’s Republic of China, not Taiwan, at the UN. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, China was building roads between 1950 and 1957, which India wouldn’t discover until 1958 – by which time the roads were completed.

The Chinese wanted to complete their control over Tibet, sending large armies there. Since Tibetan culture is of Indian origin, not Chinese, the repression of Tibetan culture appalled the Indians.

Two days before the People’s Liberation Army was going to enter Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, the Dalai Lama fled to India, where he has remained ever since – to China’s absolute horror and anger.

The Border Dispute and 1962 War

Around this time, China proposed a territorial swap to India: China would recognize Indian sovereignty over the densely populated Arunachal Pradesh if India would recognize Chinese sovereignty over the sparsely populated Aksai Chin plateau, which was valuable for China’s western road routes. Nehru refused to consider this proposal.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet Union was preoccupied with nuclear tensions, China launched the 1962 Sino-Indian War and simply took the Aksai Chin plateau. India’s defeat was total, largely because they lacked the roads needed to deploy forces to the region, while China had built the necessary infrastructure.

Nehru later lamented: “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.”

China achieved its territorial goal, but in doing so, they transformed India from an idealistic, non-militarized neighbor into a permanent adversary. India immediately doubled the size of its army within the next ten years to 750,000 people and created ten mountain divisions specifically to counter China.

Had China and India teamed up instead of becoming adversaries, we might be living in a completely different world order today.

Regional Realignments

After the 1962 war, India began looking to the Soviet Union to counterbalance China. Meanwhile, Pakistan saw an opportunity to ally with China, as they now shared a common adversary in India.

In 1963, Pakistan inexplicably ceded territory to China – possibly in exchange for help with nuclear development or a mutual defense pact, though the exact reasons remain unclear.

The regional alignment became:

• Pakistan and China shared India as their problem

• Russia and India shared China as their problem

The United States, however, created problems by trying to befriend both India and Pakistan simultaneously, which was impossible given their mutual hostility. The U.S. wanted India and Pakistan to set aside their differences and unite against China to stop the spread of communism. But India and Pakistan each wanted to use U.S. aid against the other – a non-starter for American policy.

The 1965 Indo-Pakistani War

After India’s defeat by China in 1962 and Nehru’s death in 1964, Pakistan saw 1965 as an opportune time to settle border disputes. They first invaded through the south at Rann of Kutch, and when that seemed successful, they moved on Kashmir.

However, India responded by invading straight through to Lahore, which Pakistan hadn’t anticipated. The United States imposed a double arms embargo on both countries, but this hurt Pakistan more since they were more dependent on U.S. military aid than India, which had diversified its sources.

Neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union wanted this war to continue. The Soviets brokered the Tashkent Declaration that ended the conflict. Pakistan emerged worse off, while India restored its military reputation.

U.S.-Pakistan Relations

Pakistan found the United States to be an unreliable partner, interested only when it needed something. The U.S. primarily wanted listening bases to surveil the Soviet Union, including U-2 plane bases and a listening post at Badaber, for which they paid Pakistan handsomely.

However, when a U-2 plane was shot down over Soviet territory, Khrushchev threatened Pakistan, saying they had “circled Peshawar on the map” and would “blow it off the map” if Pakistan didn’t “wise up.”

Between these Soviet threats in 1960 and the U.S. freezing arms during the 1965 war (which Pakistan believed caused their defeat), relations deteriorated. During the 1965 war, Pakistan used U.S.-supplied tanks against India in the largest tank battles since World War II, despite U.S. guarantees that the weapons wouldn’t be used against India.

Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s leader, complained: “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 whilst 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.”

When the lease for the Badaber listening post came up in 1968, Pakistan canceled it.

U.S.-India Relations

India was equally disenchanted with the United States. During Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, Mahatma Gandhi pointed out: “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 in America.

Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi found the United States impossible to work with. They viewed capitalism as a waystation to imperialism and fascism, while Americans viewed socialism as a waystation to communism.

Understanding Alliances

The shifting primary adversaries in the region shaped alliances:

• Pakistan always viewed India as its primary enemy

• For India, after the 1962 war, it was unclear whether Pakistan or China was the primary adversary

• After the 1971 war that created Bangladesh, China likely became India’s primary adversary

• The 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict reshuffled nuclear powers, with Russia and China becoming each other’s primary enemies

This framework of identifying primary adversaries can be applied to understand alliances globally. The World War II Allied powers (Britain, U.S., and USSR) had mutually exclusive long-term goals but united against the common existential threat of Hitler. In contrast, the Axis powers (Italy, Germany, and Japan) had compatible goals but different primary enemies, leading them to fight parallel wars that allowed the Allies to defeat them separately.

When analyzing modern alliances, it’s crucial to identify each country’s primary enemy and whether that enemy poses an existential threat. Countries that share the same primary existential threat will cooperate, even if they seem unlikely partners.

The Great Game in South Asia

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 it 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 possible cards for them to play and zero for the United States to play. It’s just the way it is.

So the name of the game in 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 bear 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 pocket 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 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? So this is what the next section is all about.

Pakistan’s Strategic Location

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 of Eurasia, the center of the Soviet’s 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 intermarginal 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 for before satellite imagery is available to put listening posts on Russia. Russia’s huge. You gotta have a bunch of listening posts to track their missiles and things. And then 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 because we don’t align on a primary enemy. So presatellite imagery, we really wanted to cozy up to the Pakistanis so we have U-2 bases. But then technology changes.

And before we get facilities in Iran, we want this listening post in Badabah, 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’s 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 Pakistanis in their territory about Abbottabad, and then relations are really not so great.

And so it’s a very bumpy ride. And 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.

The Bangladesh War and US-Pakistan Relations

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 gotta go through the short term.

So after the U-2 crash in Russia gets shot down and the Pakistanis are having a heart attack about that, that’s when the Pakistanis look to cultivating better relations with China because the US relationship is just too potentially costly and the Americans cut off the military aid. And then, when 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 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 Bhutto family, I think they’re Sindhi. 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. The United States is saying nothing about this massive humanitarian crisis.

The United States has nothing 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, and this is integral to this. But everyone else is looking going, what on earth is going on? So you have Nixon 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 is literally getting millions of refugees trying to flee this mass, 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. And so the United States had wished that India would cease being in the nonaligned and aligned with the West. Oh, well, they cease being nonaligned alright. They sign 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 India. They won’t give scholars any visas to come to India to study India, so you wonder why US universities didn’t have any Indian studies programs. It’s all about this. So that explains what’s going on with all of that.

The Afghan War and Pakistan’s Importance

Total mess. Meanwhile, for Pakistan, the Shah of Iran falls in February 1979, and then the Russians invade Afghanistan in December 1979. And suddenly Pakistan is totally essential once again. And the Pakistanis are really getting sick of being kicked around.

So outgoing president Jimmy Carter offers them, I don’t know, four hundred million dollars 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 ISI, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. It’s like 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 name 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 Pakistani 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, the Pakistanis are getting closer and closer to building the bomb.

So when the Russians go piling into Afghanistan, here’s Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, telling him, “Our security policy cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.” Really? I thought that was our security policy. And the problem with nuclear 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 Carter, 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.

Pakistan’s War Costs

So, the United States isn’t the only country to have trouble navigating this cutthroat billiards. The Pakistanis have their share of boomerangs. Just look how the wars were.

So wars create incredible costs. So the 1965 war, the Pakistanis get exactly nothing. And Pakistan had been the largest 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 Pakistan is no longer the most populous Muslim country. Indonesia is. And if you look at the Kargil War in 1999, this one 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 had 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 cost, 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.

India’s Challenges

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 cannot abide by each other. So in the 1940s, when Kashmir is erupting, Indira Gandhi thinks well, no. It’s her father, 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 nonaligned instead of supporting the United States because it’s secular and democratic. And the Pakistanis are totally outraged because they’re looking at this go, okay. These Indians are nonaligned. 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 adviser, 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 or Pakistan? 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 the 1971 war, 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.

China’s Complications

So they have their own problems. 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 enmity forever as opposed to teaming up with them. If they teamed up, they would actually would have had incredible leverage for what the global order is going to look like, but that’s just not to be. And moreover, if you look at the 1971 war, after the United States won’t help with China, India’s gone, okay. I think we need nuclear weapons because then we’ll be able to protect ourselves against China. And after that war, when Pakistan’s 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.

The War For India: Episode 1 (Continued)

So it’s going to be proliferation all over the place. But as a result of the 1971 war where Pakistan tries to overturn the elections, here you have an 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 will never come again.” And what they did is they armed insurgents in East Pakistan then sent the conventional army in, and that was it for Pakistan and East Pakistan was over.

The interaction for Russia works a little better. Where 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 the Soviet Union to veto those things so there are no plebiscites. And then as India is trouncing Pakistan in the 1970 war, certainly one war, and the United States wants them to halt. India, no way. India wants to finish the job.

So it gets the Soviet Union to veto that one, and India does indeed finish the job. Meanwhile, for Russia, India is really useful. It’s a good counterbalance for China. So theirs is rather a beautiful relationship. They have very cordial relations.

The Players and Their Instruments of National Power

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. For one of the things you can do is help negotiate useful treaty, which the United States did. It brokered this Indus Water Treaty of 1960.

It’s the only time I think that I know of, maybe you all know of something, where India and Pakistan have 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, and 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.

Failed Diplomatic Efforts

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. 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 cajoled into settling their differences.

And their idea is anyone who’s so stupid as to think that is crazy. And you’re right. 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. And so Pakistan’s going to be one thing, and then India’s 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 is going to make the Indians come around and realize this nonaligned stuff’s nonsense. Not quite. Yeah. When India 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 communist.

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 stop pulling each other off the map.

And also in the Khargil conflict, when Pakistan is yet again trying to resolve Kashmir by invading and then gets itself into trouble. And this guy, Nawaz Sharif, who’s the head of Pakistan, he all of sudden gets on a plane with his family. It looked like he’s coming into exile, and he’s trying to fly into the United States. The United States go, “Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. 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 nuclear war over this. So Pakistan had the choice of, okay. Fight India by your lonesome or cross back. So they crossed back.

And there were other cases, in the interwar period, when the great powers cooperated and tamp 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.

Public Support as an Instrument of Power

Alright. 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 sent 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 when the Russians send 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.

Economic Aid and Its Complications

You can also put money where your mouth is, economic aid. And it’s interesting. 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 twenty percent of its wheat crop to India.

It was worth $1.5 billion dollars. That’s not something to be sneezed at for, I don’t know, was it 90 million people? It’s a lot of people who might have starved to death. And that didn’t work out well at all because 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. She 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 or enduring anything.

Oh, and a whole other piece of it is India 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 adviser, 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.

Dear Secretary of State John Foster Dulles saying, “Look. Concerning India and Pakistan, it’s difficult to help one without making the enemy of the other.” And, of course, the United States tried to help both and angered both of them. Amazing.

Military Aid and Unintended Consequences

So 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 what the United States wanted to happen.

And then when the United States provides aid to the ISI, the Interservices 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.

Military Power Projection

The other instrument of national power if you got one: There’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.

Sanctions and Embargoes

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: 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 is really mad because India does a test nuke, an atomic test in 1974, and Pakistan doesn’t do anything till much later. And it’s looking at, 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 sanctioning, 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.

Territory and Insurgency as Power Tools

Alright. 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 could 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 GoFundMe Insurgency. So you can and this is done by the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan.

Cutthroat Billiards: The Strategy of Proxy Conflicts

Think of it. You 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 1957 and 1961, but look at the dates. We did the road system. The road system in Tibet’s 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 after the ’62 war all the way until 1979 when Deng Xiaoping calls it off, the Chinese are funding insurgencies of the Mizos, the Manipuri, and the Naga people who 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 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 deaths, lack of economic growth, who’s carrying warfare where you live. What a total disaster. So that’s how it works.

Another to complain at this game. So the Indians, according to the Pakistanis, have funded the Baloch people. They straddle Iran and Pakistan. They don’t particularly like being told what to do. So, apparently, India’s 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, 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 China. And 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 works, 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 going to happen.

Strategic Lessons

So 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 hunches 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, 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 certain problems it’s not feasible to solve. And then we all have scarce resources.

You can’t 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.

Q&A with Professor Sarah Paine

DWARKESH PATEL: So things 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?

SARAH PAINE: Oh, 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. And 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, after the end of the Cold War, instead of being the big friend, it was a big nuisance, not so much for India, but for everybody else. And 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.

DWARKESH PATEL: It sounds like at the time, it was right to choose Pakistan as the main ally for the United States.

SARAH PAINE: Well, we tried to choose India, too, but, yeah, we tried to do them simultaneously. But India’s further south. 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.

DWARKESH PATEL: I want to better understand why the Soviet Union was such a charismatic example for countries that were decolonizing, like India.

SARAH PAINE: I think go back and put yourself as a generation of what your life experience was. If your life experience was World War I, the total betrayal butchery of it, so you’re telling young men your age to 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. Right?

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 has 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 out to be accurate.

It’s not just labor that produces value. Silicon Valley, you understand it’s what comes up here produces a tremendous amount of value. And Marxist theory doesn’t recognize that, and so there are 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 can have equality, you’re not going to have any liberty. Right?

Because in order to make it equal, you just expropriate, and then you divvy it 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 seemy sides of some democracies that aren’t doing that well and then to 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 socialism, he’s not for killing lots of people to impose socialism. He has a much lighter touch than Stalin.

DWARKESH PATEL: One thing I was thinking about while you were mentioning that Gandhi and Nehru had a big problem with American segregation is at the same time in the fifties, by that point, over ten percent 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 in the gulags. Maybe people just didn’t know about the gulags back then.

SARAH PAINE: I don’t think communists let you know those things. Right? This is one, for a lot of Russians because we were, 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.

DWARKESH PATEL: One of the reasons that socialism was appealing to these decolonizing countries was because in the preceding decades, from the twenties to forties, the Soviet Union actually had pretty good growth rates. In those twenty years, their GDP went from eight percent to eighteen percent of world production. Was that just catch up growth? What was going on that time in Russia?

SARAH PAINE: Well, there was tremendous rebuilding after World War II. There’s another piece is 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 “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.

And I thought, oh, this means that anything from somewhere else is better than what we got. That’s a really bad sign. And, they had, like, what I would call a doughnut 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. That it was an inverted empire.

Russia is the doughnut. The rich places are places like Czechoslovakia, and Poland had been much richer places. And so the Russians are, like, serf 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 in-serf Eastern Europe, why it was such a mess for Russia. They did not realize, 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.

DWARKESH PATEL: Who was the last Soviet leader who, like, truly believed in communism?

SARAH PAINE: 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.

Soviet Studies and Research Methods

SARAH PAINE: When I started my career in Soviet studies, I approached my doctoral dissertation by writing a history of the Russo-Chinese border between 1858 and 1924. This was when all this territory changed hands.

What I did was visit multiple archives. Most of this period isn’t Soviet – only 1917 to 1924 is the Soviet part. I went to archives in Russia to see what they’d let me see. This was when you could still go to those archives – they’re closed now. I went to Beijing to see the archives you were allowed to see. Then in Nanjing, there were some other ones there. In Taiwan, I accessed the ones they would allow you to see, and the same in Japan.

They’re all lying about different things or covering up different things. So it’s like assembling a jigsaw puzzle – you put it together that way.

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!

So read what they have to say and read what others have to say. You need to read things in the Russian language. I read a lot of things, broadly. Read more broadly than whatever your topic is because it’s the unknown unknowns you’re after. What are the things that are truly important that you have no idea about? The only way you get to those is through archives or reading broadly where you bump into things and go, “Oh, that turns out to be important.”

The Sino-Soviet Split

DWARKESH PATEL: When you’re giving the lecture, it seemed like these primary adversaries, whoever it is, it’s very permanent, and there’s some deep reason why it has to be this way. But if you look at the Sino-Soviet split, they’re both communists, both Leninist parties, and they have this falling out. It’s not clear why somebody has to be somebody else’s primary adversary or why you can’t turn that around.

SARAH PAINE: Well, you can, but Russia and China have these territorial differences. 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 died in the Korean War, where the Russians sort of get them in there and then you’re stuck. You have to, for prestige reasons, stay there.

The really big issue I didn’t discuss in detail: Stalin was really worried about a two-front war – Nazis in the West and Japanese in the East. 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 1936. It’s called the Xi’an incident where Chiang Kai-shek was reputedly kidnapped. But really what’s going on is setting up the second united front.

Then the Japanese go ballistic. That’s when they invade all down the coast and up the Yangtze River, which means the Chinese are fighting Japanese for the Soviets. The Japanese are not going to launch into Siberia. So that works for Stalin, but the Chinese realize this, and it’s not appreciated.

DWARKESH PATEL: But then they help the communists get into power in China. Wouldn’t they be grateful for that?

SARAH PAINE: No. Stalin wanted to divide China. He’s telling Mao, “Stop at the Yangtze. Stop at the Yangtze. You need a breathing space there.” But Mao keeps on going.

U.S. Foreign Policy Expertise

DWARKESH PATEL: If you’re the president or the secretary of state and you’re looking at this web of interweaving systems of alliances, and you give some guy aid because you need something and it pisses everybody else off, how are you supposed to keep track of this?

SARAH PAINE: We have so many wonderful people working in the State Department. I’ve met a number of them because they come as students at the War College. You should be proud of all the people who work for the Department of State. They’re all different experts on different parts of the world that get sent around. Very thoughtful people.

I’ve read many CIA reports in the archives because I’ve gone to these presidential archives starting with the Truman administration all the way up to Bush Senior. As you get to the more recent stuff, less of it’s been declassified. The level of analysis is impressive. The CIA has several parts – there’s the analytical part, and then there’s the operational part which we aren’t even going to talk about. But they’re very fine analysts.

The Department of Agriculture has very fine analysts about agriculture of the whole world. We have a tremendous amount of expertise. Presidents and high-level bureaucrats get these daily reports – 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.

There are a tremendous number of smart, well-educated people trying to get information to presidents, secretaries of state, and others. Then you have all these regional desks organized by region of the world. There are wonderful experts working on this.

China-India Relations: The Counterfactual

DWARKESH PATEL: 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?

SARAH PAINE: I spent the grand total of a week in India. It was a trip on the way back from Australia. We went into the Mahatma Gandhi Museum in New Delhi, and there’s a whole section where Chiang Kai-shek is giving him things. It became really clear that Chiang Kai-shek had a really good relationship with India, deep respect for India, this shared desire of, “We want to be independent. We don’t want Japanese running around our country. We don’t want a bunch of westerners running around. We share this with India.”

I think if Chiang Kai-shek had won the Chinese Civil War, you might have had them team up and had a much more productive relationship.

DWARKESH PATEL: That’s interesting because when you hear “nationalists,” you think they’re the ones very interested in territorial disputes. But they wouldn’t have cared about Tibet or something?

SARAH PAINE: Next time you’re in New Delhi, check out the museum. When I was there about twenty years ago, I remember being impressed. When Gandhi was assassinated – this is Mahatma, not Indira who was also assassinated, no relation – the Chinese nationalists sent all sorts of condolences and different things. So yes, there could have been a different outcome.

Nuclear Proliferation and the Non-Aligned Movement

DWARKESH PATEL: 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 a great power that had nukes. To keep up deterrence, they had to build nukes themselves, leading to nuclear proliferation.

SARAH PAINE: I think the 1962 war made Nehru realize that non-alignment was a non-starter, for the reasons you’re talking about. It’s like, “Okay, we just got eaten alive by the Chinese. We need a big friend, and we probably need some big missiles eventually.”

It’s not immediate. The Indians don’t come around to “we absolutely need nuclear weapons” until the Bangladesh war when China’s become more of a threat.

DWARKESH PATEL: By 1971, did they really think that the Soviet Union might still win the Cold War? Why didn’t they just choose the winner in retrospect?

SARAH PAINE: Nehru was dead in ’64, so it’s his daughter Indira Gandhi who signed the official alliance – a security pact – in 1971.

I remember the Cold War vividly. We felt we were losing it most of the way through. Why? Well, partly because of propaganda. The Soviets were very good at propaganda. The United States had massive racial problems – think about the 1960s. Martin Luther King was pointing out hideous problems with this country. Civil rights demonstrations everywhere, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations everywhere, the women’s movement, the environmental movement. There were 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.

Whereas in Russia, no one could travel, so you couldn’t see how unbelievably poor they were. If you went to Moscow, you might think, “Well, this is a plausible city.” But there was only one or maybe two plausible cities in the place – Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). People didn’t realize.

We felt we were losing the Cold War. In fact, at the very end of the Cold War, I saw in the Bush archives that when Gorbachev came in, Bush and Reagan were thinking, “Well, he just looks like another one of these people. We’re not going to take the propaganda seriously.” And then they sort of went, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” By ’88, Bush was thinking, “Maybe it is going to end.” Then the United States teamed up with Helmut Kohl of Germany to get the Russians out of Eastern Europe as fast as possible.

The 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.

Lessons for Today’s China Competition

DWARKESH PATEL: I wonder if there’s a lesson in here for what people call the cold war with China today where people think it’s really competitive. China might have a bigger economy than us soon. But if you actually got to see what’s happening day to day in China, maybe you might decide, like with the Soviet Union, there’s a bunch of things broken with it. They’re not really competitive in the long run economically.

SARAH PAINE: I don’t know about win or lose, but they have a very low per capita standard of living. Do the math. Yes, they’ve got a big economy because they have a huge population. But divide by 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 – what does your family income look like? So they’ve got a long way to go on that one.

Bangladesh and U.S. Foreign Policy

DWARKESH PATEL: I want to go back to Kissinger in 1971. Because they wanted somebody to send a message to China to open up, they shut up about Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh where somewhere between 300,000 to 3 million people died. It’s awful. Hundreds of thousands of people were raped. I know they didn’t have email back then, but was there no other way to get the message across? Did they have to abet a genocide?

SARAH PAINE: 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 – they’re not great stats, but the numbers are obscene. I think Congo had a civil war where literally over ten million people died, and that’s just one example.

The United States cannot deal with all of these conflicts. Think about the Iraq War – the U.S. went in with idealistic intentions to create democracy, but it resulted in a massive civil war, and then we were blamed for it. So be careful about where you intervene because you may not be able to stop the violence, and then you’ll get blamed for what’s going on.

Bangladesh was horrible, but you will get overextended if you intervene in everything. Also, there’s a question of why the United States or anyone should be doing all of it. Shouldn’t it be through the UN and other organizations?

The Cold War Strategy

The really key thing was winning the Cold War. So Nixon absolutely did prioritize getting the mail through to Mao. He did. So in 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? And 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.

Strategic Priorities

DWARKESH PATEL: When I saw our house president and he built these bases in Pakistan to have the U2 planes 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 pissing off India?

SARAH PAINE: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sorry, India.

DWARKESH PATEL: Mhmm.

SARAH PAINE: 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, but 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.

Historical Research

DWARKESH PATEL: New books about the Cold War are coming out all the time. New books about World War Two are coming out all the time. People are writing thousands of papers about this stuff all the time. How much new stuff are you learning every year? What kinds of new things do we keep unearthing?

SARAH PAINE: Well, I’m personally sick of writing about World War Two. I’ve done enough of it, and so I’m personally not going in that direction. It’s endless.

I think for a lot of the books of these narrative feel-good histories, like, I’ll tell you 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, but that’s just me.

DWARKESH PATEL: How do you decide which are the good history books and which aren’t? Just on Amazon, you can’t read it yet. You’re just looking at it on Amazon. It’s hard.

SARAH PAINE: What I would say is give it a book, the thirty-second test.

DWARKESH PATEL: And what’s that?

SARAH PAINE: If the book’s about another part of the world, flip to the bibliography, which you can do on Amazon, and zing through there for about thirty 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 mean, how many of you would be interested in reading a book that says that 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 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.

I mean, that would be true expertise 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. Doesn’t mean you have to agree with them, but it means you are making the effort to see where they’re coming from.

Cold War Proxy Wars

DWARKESH PATEL: During the Cold War, all these proxy wars, was it good that we were just letting off steam in these smaller ways and that, therefore, we could avoid the bigger great war?

SARAH PAINE: 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 will 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 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 inter-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 got civil war all over the place. And 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.

Cold War Miscalculations

DWARKESH PATEL: 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 bases? What were they missing?

SARAH PAINE: 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. And then afterwards, when pundits 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 Two who knows all about hot wars, doesn’t want to do that. When the United States deposes Mosaddegh in 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, etcetera. And he thinks that’s a better trade off. Well, the Iranians have never forgotten that. They’re furious to this day. Wouldn’t you be if you’re Iranian? Mosaddegh 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 know 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.

Democracy and Foreign Policy

DWARKESH PATEL: What you just mentioned about the fact that we would curtail all 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, “Alright. Well, that’s what you guys voted for. They’re in charge now.” Why is the principle different than Vietnam? Because the South Vietnamese would have voted for him as well.

SARAH PAINE: We’ve just been fighting a massive war with Japan and Germany. There’s no way we’re going to let the Germans and Japanese decide anything initially.

But what we did do for both Germany, our part, 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. And it was a very generous peace. It was realizing in World War One, ostracizing Germans, ostracizing Russians—it probably doesn’t work. 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.

Communist Influence

DWARKESH PATEL: 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—

SARAH PAINE: I don’t know about that.

DWARKESH PATEL: Well, 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?

SARAH PAINE: 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. And then he’s turning these people into cadres and eventually to 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. Right? And you’ll get 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 across 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.

After the Dictator

DWARKESH PATEL: Mao dies and immediately things improve. China experiences its growth trajectory. Stalin dies and, you know, Khrushchev is not a teddy bear, but at least you 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, you know, if you got rid of Kim Jong Un or the Ayatollah or something, the next guy probably won’t be as bad.

SARAH PAINE: 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 Two, the Russians revered him for doing that, and they had experienced, every Russian experienced World War Two. 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’re 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.

DWARKESH PATEL: I guess I’m not sure what 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?

SARAH PAINE: 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, well, no.

The End of Putin’s Regime and Its Implications

SARAH PAINE: Perfect. So that’s how he dies. So you’re going to be guaranteed a free for all. If there’s a free for all for something like Ukraine, they will probably have to call that off because they’ve got to focus on Moscow. That’s what happened with the Korean War.

Why is the Korean War ended? Stalin dies. Russians wanted it over because they had all kinds of unrest in their various prisons, in their own gulags. They were having riots. They were having issues in Bulgaria, maybe East Germany as well. They had problems, so they didn’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.

Nuclear Close Calls During the Cold War

DWARKESH PATEL: While you’re starting this Cold War history, how close did we get to a nuclear bomb? Some people argue that there were all these close incidents – it’s like it basically should have happened almost in the sense of odds.

SARAH PAINE: Oh, let me say, I wasn’t “we made it 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 Missiles Crisis, it came down to a Soviet submarine. They had 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 had to get him to come along. 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 Able Archer missile test, where 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. 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 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 Senior were all veterans of World War II. In one way or another, they’d served. Some of them on the battle line, like Bush Senior had, and others near enough so that they understood how dangerous it was. And all the Soviet leaders, Boris Nemtsov, 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.

International Relations and Alliances

DWARKESH PATEL: 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 with the other one – I mean, the world is full of people who are enemies with each other. Does that mean that America can only be friends with half the world, and it’s got to be enemies with the half that this half hates?

SARAH PAINE: With India and Pakistan, it was so intense because of partition, so many people died, and it was recent. Right? 1947. And so you wouldn’t expect those animosities to die down. Also, there are 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 historically. 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 World War I. World War I was not a generous peace. 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.

Lend-Lease Aid to Stalin

DWARKESH PATEL: Should we have cut off Lend-Lease aid to Stalin after 1943 when it’s obvious that they’re winning against the Germans?

SARAH PAINE: Bad idea. When it’s obvious that they’re winning against the Germans? No.

DWARKESH PATEL: No. But more of Europe could have been free earlier on.

SARAH PAINE: 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 one 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.

Let me give you a concept. 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 Pearl Harbor, you all think that the Normandy invasion was a big deal. No. That is a peripheral operation. It is peripheral to the main theater. And if the Russians hadn’t been doing Operation Bagration, this big operation that coincides with Normandy, no way would we ever have gotten onto the continent, and that’s in 1944. So cutting Lend-Lease aid? Insane.

DWARKESH PATEL: But you’re eliminating the problem of fascism until people have forgotten what fascism meant, but you’re left with the problem of communism.

SARAH PAINE: By that same logic, look. The main theater in the Pacific War was in China where most of the fighting was happening. Our Lend-Lease to Chiang Kai-shek was one to two percent of what we’re sending to Stalin.

DWARKESH PATEL: Yes. In today’s dollars, we sent Stalin one trillion dollars worth of aid. Just tremendous amounts of supplies they used to then instill a communist totalitarianism on Eastern Europe. If we had sent a fraction of that aid to Chiang Kai-shek and helped him with the Japanese, maybe he would still be in power. We wouldn’t have to fight as much.

SARAH PAINE: Couldn’t get it in. If you want to deliver Lend-Lease aid – this is a problem in World War I. 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. It doesn’t do those things until Murmansk is early in 1917 and the Trans-Siberian is in 1916. That’s right before the czar falls. And so 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 we’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 nonstarter.

And I think the best argument you can make is that rather than getting Chiang Kai-shek to do the Burma campaign in ’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, as it turns out, in this war. Let him keep everything because when the Japanese try to do Operation Ichigo, it’s 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, Chiang Kai-shek 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. Also, not look to the Chinese people as a serial loser. And it’s not his fault. It’s because he’s in an industrialized country trying to deal with the Japanese, whom we found very difficult to fight. So why wouldn’t he find them difficult?

DWARKESH PATEL: But we kept Lend-Lease going even after Berlin had fallen, and Stalin used that aid – even after the first atomic bomb is dropped, that’s only when Stalin breaks the non-aggression pact with Japan and invades Manchuria. So he basically had no moral right to Manchuria. It was the Chinese who had been doing all the fighting.

SARAH PAINE: Yeah. And he gets Manchuria.

DWARKESH PATEL: Should’ve stopped the Lend-Lease by then, right?

SARAH PAINE: I think we stopped it very rapidly at the end of the war. The British were appalled how rapidly the Lend-Lease aid stopped because they desperately needed it, having been wrecked by the war. So yeah, we did cut it off. But you definitely want Nazi Germany gone, and you want to keep supporting Russia until that happens.

Modern International Law and Territorial Disputes

DWARKESH PATEL: Can I try another idea on you?

SARAH PAINE: Yeah.

DWARKESH PATEL: 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, if you hear people talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on both sides, they’ll go back two, three thousand years about who has rights. In the Tucker Carlson interview, Putin was talking about things that happened in 500 BC. And then so the big achievement is just like, “Look. The past is the past. Whatever the borders are right now, we’re going to enforce those. We don’t care who claims to have rights to it because of what happened in the 1700s or something.”

SARAH PAINE: That is modern international law. And I don’t know – you’d have to be a lawyer who actually knows when modern international law begins. But certainly, by the time you’re getting through the world wars, we’re in modern international law, and that’s the problem with the magic Putin’s working on Ukraine. 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 in reverse on Siberia, and we’ll see how happily that one ends. But I think there’s 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 or 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. And the Europeans are a great example to us all of just calling it a day. Let everybody travel. Go get a rental property somewhere. And run your businesses. You really don’t need to own Luxembourg or whatever it is. What a 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 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. That’s when they prospered. Now Xi Jinping is going to do a U-turn on that. Have fun. We will not be enriching.

The CCP’s Motivations and International Order

DWARKESH PATEL: You mentioned in the lecture that the real motivation for the CCP is to keep itself in power versus some 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 what’s the pitch to Xi? Like, why should he abide by the international order? Because we want him to abide by the international order, right? And if the idea is, “Well, it’s not going to work out for you” – like, maybe it will work out for him or for the Chinese people. That’s not a great sales pitch.

SARAH PAINE: But there are things that you just cannot convince other people of. 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 in the 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.” 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.

Russia, China, and Geopolitical Shifts

SARAH PAINE: It’s interesting. So Putin has lost the Soviet Union’s empire precisely at the time that China’s rising. During the Cold War, China was really weak and Russia was in the dominant position. Well, I guess that’s reversed. So Putin is dumping all his ordinance on Ukraine, his whole Cold War stockpile.

And he is leaving Siberia wide open to Chinese predations. I believe Siberia has precisely the resources that China covets on lands the czar stole. And I think there’s a big body of water out there called Lake Baikal. It’s twenty percent of the world’s fresh surface freshwater. China is chronically short of freshwater in North China.

Baikal 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 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.

DWARKESH PATEL: You think they’d actually go to war about it, or would they just negotiate the plan?

SARAH PAINE: Oh, it’s going to be negotiation. I’m just saying you get them in a corner and say, okay, buddy. This is what we want. This, this, this, this. And then he’ll want some things from them.

DWARKESH PATEL: So it sounds like what Zhou Enlai tried to do to Nehru. That didn’t work out well.

SARAH PAINE: What do you mean? Zhou Enlai absolutely got the Aksai Chin plateau. He offered the deal to Nehru. Nehru wouldn’t take it. I don’t think, since they both have nuclear weapons, that kind of play is probably the play to make. But as long as Putin’s desperate for ordinance and other things, Putin’s getting himself into a grand old corner.

Why Europe Had the Industrial Revolution

DWARKESH PATEL: 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 a much higher fraction of population, much higher fraction of world output. During this period, why didn’t they have higher growth rates and come up with all these technologies?

SARAH PAINE: 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.

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. The Europeans have quite a very good river system, the Danube and the Rhine and the Ruhr, all these different rivers. So they have always had a lot of trade going on.

And then 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 – having a focus on commerce, and a lot of competing places. You don’t have one big empire that can just sit there, be fat, dumb, and happy. You have to innovate in order to survive against all these other little states.

DWARKESH PATEL: Earlier you were talking about how in North Africa or other regions, there’s been a bunch of chaos because people are constantly dealing with insurgencies, civil wars, and smaller wars happening all the time, and that causes chaos. But if you look at Europe throughout this period, 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 it seems to imply that we should see a bunch of growth in North Africa or something.

SARAH PAINE: It’s a tremendous innovation, and you look at things long prior, like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. It’s just a lot of these really bright people. I think it’s related to all of this. The industrial revolution begins in England. And the industrial revolution isn’t strictly industry.

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 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 rules so you can’t just rip off everybody’s cash. 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 be able to trade in peace. So they want people to just follow laws. It’s not surprising the founding father of international law is a member of the Dutch Republic, Hugo Grotius.

So it’s this gravitation toward law and institutions and then these competing places so no one controls. I think the question is what’s special about Europe rather than why it should have been somewhere else.

China’s Slow Development

DWARKESH PATEL: What’s mysterious about China is not only that it doesn’t have the industrial revolution first, but its development starts so slow. Japan copies Western institutions during the Meiji Reformation and industrializes almost a century before China is able to do the same thing. During the Mao period or during the civil war, that would impede development. But even during the Qing dynasty, it takes till 1980 for them to start development. That just seems awfully slow.

SARAH PAINE: Well, communism is a really lousy system, so they did that. In the nineteenth 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 nineteenth century is a lost century with all of that going on.

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.

They also fed themselves the Kool-Aid that the Chinese never absorbed foreign ideas. It was always foreigners who absorbed their ideas. And, of course, that’s nonsense because they were conquered by Manchus and actually absorbed a lot of Manchu institutions, but that’s not the story they’re telling. Whereas the Japanese are well aware they’re absorbing Chinese institutions originally, Western institutions later. And so that isn’t antithetical to who the Japanese are.

DWARKESH PATEL: That’s interesting. The past civilizational greatness may be an impediment to development.

SARAH PAINE: Yeah. That’s hard. Also because the way they define civilization, there’s only one. Everybody else are barbarians. People come and kowtow to China. Great. But this doesn’t set you up to learn from others.

Limited vs. Unlimited Objectives

DWARKESH PATEL: One of the big dichotomies you talk about is the difference between limited and total objectives. How does Bismarck illustrate the value of having limited objectives?

SARAH PAINE: Bismarck does illustrate that. An unlimited objective is the simplest way to look at it is regime change. If I have an unlimited objective against you, I win the war, you’re going to be out of power. Versus I win the war, and yeah, you lose a province, but you’ll be in power.

What Bismarck does, he’s very clever. He’s operating in an age of kings, and his achievements illustrate why you truly don’t need royal families running the show. They’re breathtakingly incompetent.

Initially, he fights the Danish War. That’s way up north, and it’s over these two provinces. 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 problems later. So war number one’s a Danish war. No one thinks too much about it. Prussia gets an extra province that was part of Denmark. No big deal.

But then he fights the Austro-Prussian War. What he’s after is all these little Germanic states, and Austria had dominated a bunch of them. As a result of that war, he collects a whole bunch of these other states.

No one is really paying attention that he’s actually upending the balance of power in Europe. They’re just looking at it as limited. He’s not toppling the Austrian government. He’s not toppling the Danish government.

And then he fights the Franco-Prussian War where he takes Alsace-Lorraine, which are these provinces that form 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. All of a sudden, Prussia, which was the weakest of five great powers, suddenly has a central position in the Germanic states, and it owns the whole thing.

Britain and others who’d been asleep at the switch could have weighed in on the scale at any point to alter outcomes, and they didn’t. The people who are losing out here are 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.

DWARKESH PATEL: World War I, I’m not sure how you explain World War I using limited and unlimited objectives?

SARAH PAINE: It’s useful in warfare to think about limited versus unlimited objectives. 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 eliminate 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. Kyiv, on the other hand, does not have an unlimited objective. As much as they’d like Putin to go, they just want Russia to get out of Ukraine. 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.

DWARKESH PATEL: In World War I, maybe other than the Austro-Hungarian empire, Germany doesn’t have a limited objective with respect to France or Russia.

SARAH PAINE: No, it doesn’t. But it still devolves into this war where ten million people die. 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. Whereas, originally, it was just get back into German territory. After a while, it’s “no, we want to overthrow your government for doing this.”

Personal Background

DWARKESH PATEL: On a different topic. Your name is Sarah Paine. When I go on Amazon and find your books, they’re not listed as Sarah Paine. They’re listed under the author S.C.M. Paine. Why is that?

SARAH PAINE: Well, when I first started out, I just wanted my books to be read by the content of the book. I didn’t want it to be read based on 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.” And it’s Americans doing this. And I thought, wow. I guess because I wasn’t doing women’s history, and this was a serious topic, the idea was that women don’t do serious topics. So I guess I’m glad I did it.

So it looks like I’m a Briton. Because Britons love all the initials. And then why do I have all the initials? It’s because my dad named all my three older brothers from his side of the family, and my mom felt that some names from her family ought to be dumped on me. Since there were three older brothers, she had a lot of extra names going around, so she gave them to me. And I had no say in this.

DWARKESH PATEL: When you’re training these officers in the US Naval War College, you’ve done it over many decades. Has the quality of the people you’re training improved or decreased over time?

SARAH PAINE: No. They’re wonderful. They’re wonderful people. And I don’t look at people like that. 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.

The War College and Historical Analysis

SARAH PAINE: 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 going through the archives, trying to figure out insights for current leaders?

Not all my colleagues publish much of anything. It varies. The Naval War College has always had a few very A-list people, and the most famous person by far ever to work there is Alfred Thayer Mahan.

He’s nineteenth century. Well, he dies early twentieth century. But he’s the guy who, when the United States had been doing Manifest Destiny, a continental paradigm because we’re expanding, taking territory all the way to the Pacific. And he’s the guy who says, “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, 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. I mean, I’ve talked to the occasional flag officer, but I’m just a minion.

Soviet Studies and Academic Journey

DWARKESH PATEL: So you started in Soviet studies, and you found yourself in the Soviet Union during its fall in ’88, ’89. Why was that the field you started in?

SARAH PAINE: I grew up during the height of the Cold War and listened to family dinnertime conversations all about it. And then 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 in a class by themselves. I don’t make it up. So then the question is why, and learning more about it.

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, just curious. And then learning about China, I realized that Russia and China have relations, but then Japan always weighs in. So then I had to learn more about Japan.

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. 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 because 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. I’m just curious.

Russian Cruelty Through History

DWARKESH PATEL: What is the answer to that? You said you’re 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 this?

SARAH PAINE: I don’t know the answer, but I know I was just recently reading “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.

Then I was reading a lot of Russian stuff last winter and 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. But in Russian, it also means coercion.

Or “detente,” it comes from the French, which means a relaxation of pressure. The Russian word means 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.

They just do scorched earth. You mess with them. They kill everybody, and they just don’t care. And, okay. 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. Right? 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.

DWARKESH PATEL: There’s some talk in that part about how this wasn’t the direct result of the communist regime’s policy where if there’s somebody who’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 must also be sent to the gulags. And so you have these orphans running around.

SARAH PAINE: 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 probably became 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, seventeenth century. So it goes back a long time about the level of cruelty.

Peter the Great back in the day, he tortured his son to death. Who does that? He didn’t have a replacement son either.

The Cold War Project

DWARKESH PATEL: 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?

SARAH PAINE: Slowly. I’ve been working on it for years.

It’ll be a culmination of previous research. Starts in 1917. It will end in 1990. 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 immediately. This is in the teens and then certainly in the twenties. Just because they weren’t remotely powerful enough to do it. But they were like, what is it? A Maoist phase one insurgency where people aren’t paying attention. They’re like below the radar. They’re doing stuff.

And it’s going to be looking at all the strategies that the Russians played, that we played, what medium powers played, and what worked and what didn’t. And it’s going to be organized around concepts to understand these things.

So on 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. 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.

I’m of a certain age, so it’s passing the baton to the next generation. 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.

DWARKESH PATEL: I hope you’ll come back on the podcast once the book is ready.

SARAH PAINE: Thank you.

DWARKESH PATEL: 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’ll 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 dwarkeshpatel.com/advertise. Alright.

Until the next one. See you guys.

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