Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

People are worried about whether there's going to  be an enduring relationship with China and Russia. 

If you look at this picture, the relations  look more glacial than cordial and the little  

one's hauling on the arm of the big one.  One wonders about that. It turns out my  

expertise is on Russo-Chinese relations. That's what I studied in graduate school. 

My dissertation was a history of their border  from the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century  

until Outer Mongolia was snatched  from the Chinese sphere of influence  

and parked in the Russian sphere in the 1920s. So it's fun to talk about this particular topic. 

Before I get going, I'm  going to do some terminology. 

I'm going to use the word Russia to refer  to the czarist, Soviet, and modern periods,  

the same way that you use France to describe  its many monarchies and many republics. 

The Bolsheviks thought they were special,  so they came up with special words for  

special people: Soviet, Soviet Union. But it turns out they were temporary  

and Russia is the enduring thing. So that's it  on terminology. Before I speculate on what the  

future is going to look like, our only database  that we have is whatever happened from this  

second backwards, what people call history. It's just whatever is in the past. That's it,  

that's our database. So I'm going to look at  when Russia was strong and China was weak,  

from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th  century, then the reversal of the power balance,  

and then in the recent period when  China has been strong and Russia weak. 

China and Russia discovered each  other late in their histories. 

It was the early part of their last  dynasties when the Russians were after  

fur, very lucrative in those days. That brings them out to the Pacific. 

But their relations are only episodic until we  get to the mid-19th century, which is where my  

story's going to begin. So in the 18th century,  

China was strong, Russia was weak. But that doesn't last very long. 

Both empires followed the  rules for continental empire. 

If you want to survive in a continental  world— that's what both of them historically  

have been—you don't want to have two-front  wars because you have multiple neighbors. 

Any one of them can come in at any time. If they gang up on you, that's trouble. 

So you take on one at a time. Also you don't want any great  

powers on the borders. This is the fundamental  

problem with their relationship. Today's friend can be tomorrow's  

foe. That is truly problematic. So  what do you do to solve that problem? 

Well, you take on your neighbors sequentially. You set them up to fail. 

You destabilize the rising, ingest the failing,  and you set up buffer zones in between. 

You wait for the opportune moment to pounce  and absorb. That is Vladimir Putin's game.  

But if you play this game, you're surrounding  yourself with failing states, because you're  

either busy destabilizing them or ingesting them. So the curious might ask, are Russia and China  

unlucky with all the very dysfunctional places  that surround them, or are they complicit? 

Also, there are no enduring alliances in  this world because the neighbors figure  

it out that the hegemonic power offers  nothing but trouble in the long term. 

There's also no counsel on when to stop expanding. 

So both Russia and China are known  for overextending, overdoing it. 

That may help explain some of their periodic  implosions over their long and bloody histories.  

Very high mortality rates. Before you dismiss  this paradigm, you've seen it operating in  

real time in Syria and Ukraine. There are people who do this. 

It also explains why all  those ancient ruins are ruins. 

This sort of warfare is ruinous. But anyway, it lies at the basis of many  

of the great civilizations of Eurasia. This is how they did things. 

I'm going to start my story in the mid-19th  century, when the Chinese were beset by a whole  

series of rebellions that just about wrecked them. The Russians take advantage of all of this. 

Remember the second rule of continental  empires? No great power neighbors. The  

Russians repeatedly derail the rise of  China by scripting the Chinese to do  

things that are remarkably detrimental to Chinese  interests, but pretty good for Russian interests. 

It takes the Chinese a long time to figure it out. They have governments coming and  

going in this period. It's a difficult period,  

but they eventually figure it out by  the time Mao reunifies China in 1949. 

So I'm going to go through each of those  examples in turn, starting with a really  

big one, which is the Opium Wars. This is when Britain and France are  

coming at China in order to force  China to trade on their terms. 

This corresponds with the two biggest  rebellions of China's period of rebellions,  

the Taiping and the Nian Rebellion. Here's a big  chart. That's a simplified chart. The rebellions  

start in the late 18th century. Rebellion is a  misnomer. These are civil wars. Either people  

are minority peoples who want out of the empire,  they want to secede, or other people who want to  

overthrow the government in Beijing. The peak period is in red. 

The really big ones are in white. So China has got the two-front war problem. 

It's got Europeans coming  at them, plus all of this. 

In fact, the Chinese have so many fronts,  they don't know how to deal with it. 

The Russians come to the Chinese  and say, "Hey, we can deal with the  

British and French for you and solve that problem. You can deal with all the internal stuff. 

However, we need to have you sign a couple pieces  of paper for us, the Treaty of Aigun of 1858 and  

the Treaty of Peking of 1860." What do they do?  They cede to Russia large swaths of territory  

in Central Asia and the Pacific coastline. The Qing Dynasty was vague on geography. 

They're beset by these other things. They don't understand that Europeans  

think these pieces of paper are permanent things. They figure that once they put their house back  

in order, they're going to come  back and get the territory later. 

Okay, the second example of ruinous Russian  mediation that is going to keep China in turmoil. 

So in the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan trounces  China, boots them from their tributary in Korea. 

Then the Japanese also want some  territory on the Liaodong Peninsula. 

The Chinese go to the Russians to help them  counterbalance Japan so that Japan doesn't take  

this Chinese territory in the Asian mainland. Russia gets its buddies, France and Germany,  

the so-called Triple  Intervention, to gang up on Japan. 

Japan looks at three great powers and says,  "I don't think so." So they bail. From the  

Chinese point of view, so far so good. Except what the Russians promptly do is  

take for themselves the very territory  that had just been denied to Japan. The  

story gets worse. All the European powers, or  many of them plus Japan, come in and they carve  

out big concession areas throughout China. So China's not going to have full sovereignty  

over its territory for several generations. So instead of one relatively small Japanese  

concession area, they get foreigners everywhere. Think about the second rule of continental  

empire, no great power neighbors. That’s not happening while this is going on. 

The Bolsheviks come to power and then  they're going to apply these rules as well. 

When they do come to power, they're very weak  because Russia's been devastated by World War I. 

The Bolsheviks don't win their  own bitter Civil War until 1922. 

So then as now, they relied on a really  cheap but incredibly effective strategy  

of strategic communication. The Russians really understand  

other people's emotional life and what  sets them at odds with each other. 

They know just how to serve out the propaganda  that sets people at each other's throats. 

Their propaganda is going to help the Chinese  really despise the Japanese and the Europeans,  

while Russia's even greater predations, the ones  you've already seen, go unnoticed. Here's Lev  

Karakhan. He was a deputy foreign minister. In 1919, he sends a missive, his Karakhan  

Manifesto, to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. He says, "Hey, we're not imperialists,  

we're Bolsheviks. We're gonna return all the  

lands from those unequal treaties and be your  friend forevermore, unlike all the other evil  

imperialist powers. We're not like that anymore."  The Chinese are looking at this and thinking,  

"Wow, here are the Bolsheviks who've gotten  rid of their imperialistic government. 

They're putting together their shattered land." So this offers hope to the Chinese  

that they can do likewise. It's a model potentially to  

follow and a mentor who might help them. Except  here's the detail. When the Bolsheviks started  

doing better in their civil war, they  really dialed back what their offer was. 

The original offer was, "tear up treaties, China  gets all territory back, no payments necessary." 

Under the new version of the Karakhan Manifesto,  which the Russian Foreign Ministry goes and  

telegraphs to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. I've seen the document, or at least a copy of  

it in the archives in Taiwan. They send it back and say,  

"We're willing to talk about these things. We're going to hold some negotiations." 

The facts are they didn't return these  concessionaries until the mid-20th century,  

1950s, after the Westerners had returned  almost all of their concession areas.  

This is not trivial. When we think of concession  areas in the age of imperialism in China,  

you think of British ones: Hong Kong. Well, Hong Kong isn't actually very big. 

The reason you know about Hong Kong is it  makes lots of money, or at least it used  

to. The Russian concessionaries were huge.  They didn't make money but what else is new? 

But the Russians had by far the largest  concession area of any other country. 

But from the Karakhan Manifesto is the origin  of the myth of Sino-Soviet friendship, that the  

Russians somehow treated the Chinese nicely. And the Chinese Foreign Ministry officials,  

who would've known better, their  government is overthrown within the decade. 

And presumably these documents  just gather dust in the archives. 

My fourth example of derailing China's rise  concerns the First United Front between the  

Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communist Party. Here's the leader of the Nationalist Party  

and also leader of its armies,  Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. 

He led the Northern Expedition, reunifying  China at least nominally by either defeating  

or co-opting all those warlords. There you can see different  

colors of where the major warlords were. Previous South China attempts to do this or to  

secede from China, one or the other, had failed  for lack of a proficient military. But Russia  

changes that. It provides aid, arms, and expertise  and structures and things to fund the Whampoa  

Military Academy, which is in Canton/Guangzhou. That institution is going to educate the officers,  

both Communist and Nationalists,  who would lead not only this,  

but some of their civil war-era officers that  make this reunification of China possible. 

But the Russians had a price. Give the Nationalists the aid,  

but the Nationalists then have to let the  Communists into the Nationalist Party. 

That's what the United Front is. This all coincides with a bitter  

succession struggle in Russia. This is the problem with dictatorships. 

They really don't do succession well. It's why elections are so convenient. 

Instead you have Stalin and Trotsky going at it  over which one was going to be the big cheese. 

Stalin is all about socialism in one country. He thinks that Russia ought to focus  

on its own internal development. Whereas Trotsky says, "Nonsense, we need  

to focus on world revolution because only if there  are sister revolutions abroad can ours survive." 

While this is all going on, the Chinese Communists  really want to get out of that United Front. Why?  

Because it puts them in close proximity to the  army, which is controlled by the Nationalists. 

They're getting worried whether  they're about to get killed. 

The Russians say "No, no, no, no, it's good. You stay in that United Front." So they  

do. Chiang Kai-shek goes roaring up China. I've  shown you the map. He reaches his home base in  

Shanghai, pauses, and he turns his guns on the  Communists and just massacres them in droves. 

This is when Mao has to think of a  rural strategy to power because the  

urban strategy is no longer feasible. Once this happens, Stalin can use it to just  

trounce Trotsky in the internal power struggle  because he can say, "Look, see, revolution  

in one country. It doesn't work abroad." A  lot of Chinese died proving Stalin's point. 

Another example where Russia  literally derails the rise of China. 

There's a railway system in  Manchuria. We're going to talk rails.  

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905, Japan  wins it and gets from Russia, which built all  

these things in Chinese territory, the southern  half of that railway net in lieu of an indemnity. 

Japan invests massively in railways,  infrastructure, and apparently local politicians. 

But the ruling warlord apparently wasn't  sufficiently attentive to Japanese needs,  

so they assassinated him in 1928. His son, Zhang Xueliang, the following  

year in 1929 decides he wants his railways  back from Russia. What does Russia do? It's  

not either version of the Karakhan Manifesto. The Russians deploy over 100,000 troops, tanks,  

airplanes, the works, and just pound this  man. The Russians keep their railways. So  

if you want to delay the rise of China,  that sort of thing delays the rise of China. 

But now for the first rule of  continental empire: no two-front wars. 

You move fast-forward to the 1930s and Stalin  thinks he may very well face a two-front war with  

Germans in the west and Japanese in the east. Why would he think such thoughts? The  

Anti-Comintern Pact. Comintern is  short for Communist International. 

It is the Soviet outreach program. It's signed in 1936 between  

the Japanese and the Germans. Stalin goes, "Uh-oh, they're after me." 

He plays every one of his China  cards and he holds lots of them. 

If you want to disintegrate the neighbors in  order to delay their rise, well then you fund  

all sides of their civil wars and any side in  between because you just want them to go at it. 

So he plays every card he's got. What he wants are the Nationalists  

to stop fighting the Communists, vice  versa, and unite to fight the Japanese. 

They're willing to do this provided Stalin  provides conventional aid, which he does,  

but they think he's also going to provide  soldiers. They don't get it. Once they're in,  

Russia is out of this thing. Stalin's plan, his script for  

the Chinese and Japanese, works beautifully. Because when the Nationalists unite in the Second  

United Front with the Communists, going back  to the dark side, the Japanese are apoplectic. 

This is when they do the massive  escalation in 1937 and they are  

off to overextension into  parts due south of Russia. 

So this two-front Japanese-German  war never materialized. 

Stalin was very successful, the Chinese  less so because the Chinese are fighting  

the Japanese so the Russians don't have to. That comes at the price of millions of deaths,  

millions of refugees, that does indeed derail  China's rise yet again. Next example. Per the  

Yalta agreement, Russia finally gets  into the war in Asia. About time.  

In the very final weeks, in this August Storm  the Russians deploy 1.5 million soldiers. 

It's one of the largest military  operations of World War II. They  

rapidly take Manchuria. That would be the  normal thing, but here's the abnormal thing. 

They also take away Manchuria's industrial base. That would not normally be what you do to someone. 

They take 83% of the electrical power equipment,  take it home to Russia, not turning lights on in  

Manchuria. 86% of mining, 82% of cement  making, 80% of metalworking equipment. 

Plus they take 640,000 Japanese POWs to be slave  labor for decades, if they ever get home at all. 

And they also take the northern islands,  which are still under dispute today. 

But if you think about it, if you're going to do  indemnities or reparations or whatever this is,  

China had been fighting Japan in one  form or another for 15 long years. 

Russia comes in for the cameo  performance at the very end. 

So if there are indemnities to be paid for  whatever Japan did in this war, surely China,  

not Russia, should have been the recipient for all  this stuff. In addition, there’s another example.  

Not only does Stalin walk away with the  industrial base, but he walks away with  

Mongolia as well. How does that work? The Yalta  agreement also stipulates that the status quo  

shall be maintained in Mongolia. So then you have to look at,  

well, what was the status quo? It was the Russian sphere of influence in the  

north, Chinese continuing control in the south. Mongolia, which had always been both those places,  

had been part of the Qing Empire,  never been part of the Russian Empire. 

Moreover, Stalin had already  taken Tannu Tuva in 1944. 

It looks small on this map,  but it's bigger than England. 

It had lots of gold, which the  Soviets had monetized long ago. 

So if you add up all the territory that the  Russians took from the Chinese sphere of  

influence from the 1858 Treaty of Aigun and 1860  Treaty of Peking, fast-forward to detaching Outer  

Mongolia from the Chinese sphere of influence.  Here's what it really is. It's greater than all  

US territory east of the Mississippi. This is not your normal land grab. 

So talk about derailing  somebody, that would do it. 

To be fair to the Russians, they did, albeit  slowly, turn over all this Japanese-stockpiled  

military equipment in Manchuria to the Communists. They also, albeit belatedly, trained them on how  

to use the equipment and also how to  run the Manchurian railway system. 

The Chinese Communists, as  a rural peasant movement,  

how would they know how to do these things? They  wouldn't. It allows this conventional aid and  

logistics of being able to move people around. It transforms the Communists from a lightly  

armed guerrilla movement to a very heavily  armed conventional force capable for the  

showdown phase of the Chinese Civil War. So like the Whampoa Military Academy,  

this is essential aid for the Communist victory. So neither the Communists or the  

Nationalists complain about the  deindustrialization of Manchuria. 

The Communists probably traded that industry  for all the conventional aid that they got. 

The Nationalists traded it and also Outer  Mongolian independence for a promise from  

Stalin not to aid the Communists,  a promise that he promptly breaks. 

So Mao starts to figure out  that something is up here. 

So when he's on a roll in his offensives in  the civil war, there's really bitter fighting. 

The real movement in the last phase, the post-1940  phase of the Chinese Civil War, is in 1948. 

That year Mao just moves and  he is roaring down south. 

He's about to get to the Yangtze  River and Stalin's like, "Hey buddy,  

take a break at the Yangtze, don't exhaust  yourself." Mao ignores it. Whereas Stalin  

might have wanted to keep a Nationalist  rump state south of the Yangtze River,  

yielding a divided China in keeping  with weakening your neighbor,  

Mao is not remotely interested in that. Here's my 10th example, which is the Korean War. 

If you look at the Korean War, the  first year is a war of movement. 

It’s up and down, up and down the peninsula. It's unbelievable how much movement there is. 

But then it stalemates for the last two  years and you think, "Well, what's going on? 

Why don't they settle the war sooner?" Both sides are taking incredible losses. Well,  

here's how it goes. Once China intervenes in the  Korean War and once they halt various offensives  

to start peace talks, the Chinese do incredible  tunnel work, probably the North Koreans as well,  

and build an incredible tunnel system. It means the South Koreans and the UN  

forces are never going to get anywhere  near the Soviet border ever again. 

From that moment on, Stalin  thinks he's got a low-risk,  

high-reward strategy where he's going to weaken  the United States and delay the rise of China. 

So what's not to love about fighting  to the last Chinese in Korea? 

Stalin thinks this is great and it's  going to retard Chinese development. 

Also because China is so isolated by this war,  it has no international friends but Russia,  

it's going to tie China to Russia ever  more firmly and give Russia breathing  

space to rebuild after World War II while its  Western enemies are wasting time in Korea. 

If you put it all together—Chinese Civil War,  Korean War, Russia's on-and-off again aid to  

different sides in the civil war, his  double-dealing with both of them and  

what happened with Outer Mongolia  and the Manchurian industrial base,  

Stalin's advice to Mao to halt at the Yangtze,  and then he's fighting to the last Chinese in  

Korea—this is all consistent with the second rule  of continental empire: no great power neighbors. 

Once Stalin dies, finest day of his life,  there's never as strong a leader in Russia again. 

By this time, Mao has figured out that  the Russians don't want a strong China. 

He has to bide his time for a while,  but he understands what is going on. 

Mao has a growing list of gripes. It's not only that he didn't like  

Stalin's tributary treatment, but also Mao  thinks, with his resume, that he should become  

the leader of international communism. Stalin's successor,  

Nikita Khrushchev, is like, "No way." Khrushchev does not remotely have Mao's resume. 

Mao has just put together a  continent by reunifying China. 

That's not remotely what  Khrushchev's ever been able to do. 

Mao also can't stand either  Khrushchev's domestic or foreign policy. 

Domestically, Khrushchev is  all about de-Stalinization. 

Mao doesn't like that, he's  got a cult of personality. 

He doesn't want to do things like that. Khrushchev is also interested in peaceful  

coexistence with the West, or at least  nominally, whereas Mao is in the midst  

of the Cultural Revolution, which is based  on a virulently anti-Western foreign policy. 

They're also forever squabbling about who's aiding  North Vietnam in the Vietnam War and who's going  

to get credit for it. So all that's going on. Now,  Khrushchev has his own gripes about the Chinese. 

He looks around at the United States. The United States has got  

basing all over the world. Its allies allow the United States to have bases. 

China has hardly any Russian bases, these  leftover concession areas, and China wants  

them back. Khrushchev can't understand this.  What he really can't understand are the two  

Taiwan Strait crises of 1954 and 1958, where Mao  started lobbing ordnance on Nationalist islands  

that are very close to mainland shores. Khrushchev is apoplectic because Mao  

hasn't given him any advance warning. By the way, this sort of thing could trigger  

some of the security clauses of the Sino-Soviet  Friendship Treaty with nuclear follow-on effects. 

Then while this is going on, Khrushchev  wants to have a combined sub fleet base. 

If we're going to take all these risks, we need  to have subs in different places. Mao says,  

"No way." Then Khrushchev has had enough  and says, "Well, you're not going to get  

the plans for the atomic bomb." The whole thing becomes public in  

1960 with anger all around. The two, Russia and China,  

squabbled incessantly over the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese were interested in  

getting maximum aid from both, which it did. They begged the Chinese to allow the Russians  

to ship things overland through China. The Chinese felt obliged to do it,  

but the terms of that overland trade were  just food for all kinds of squabbling. It  

just didn't end. So the story of the reversal  in the balance of power between Russia and  

China arose from multiple factors. It doesn't happen all at once. 

It is both a story of China's  rise and of Russia's decline. 

Step one for China is getting its own  atomic weapon, which it does in 1964,  

so that it can get itself free of Soviet bondage. In 1964, after they detonated that bomb,  

Mao goes, "Okay, there are too many  places occupied by the Soviet Union. 

The Russians took everything they could. We have not yet presented an account  

for this list of stolen territory." All the territory I've shown you,  

"We want it back." Russians' jaws drop, panic. The  Chinese then are much more aggressive about what  

they consider to be their territorial rights. There is a border war over territories,  

and in particular this one island, Zhenbao,  or Damansky Island in the Amur River. 

Here's how riverine borders  work, international ones. 

Under international law, the border is the  thalweg, which is the center of the main  

channel of whatever the river is. Russia had followed that with its  

European borders, not with China. It claimed both banks of the Amur. 

The Chinese are fed up with that and they  take Zhenbao Island and the Russians are  

furious and they come to the United States. They say, "Would it be okay if we nuke these  

people?" We're like, "No." The Russians scratch  their heads and they come back and they go, "Okay,  

would it be okay if we use conventional  weapons to blow up their nuclear stuff?" 

We go, "No, still not okay." Mao gets it. The one  that wants to nuke you is your primary adversary. 

So there's a reshuffling  of the primary adversaries. 

Formerly the United States was the primary  adversary of both China and Russia. 

That would be a reason for them to cooperate. Now they're primary adversaries for each other. 

The United States can play the  swing thing with all of this. 

For Russia it's really devastating having  China as an enemy because it's going to  

have to deploy mechanized nuclear-armed  troops all along its really long Chinese  

border, Central Asia, the works. It's already doing this with its  

European borders and occupying Eastern Europe  where the garrisoning costs are significant. 

Imagine if this country had to put those  kinds of forces on our long Canadian and  

Mexican borders. It'd be bankrupting. Their  economy was and remains a fraction of ours. 

But this breaking up of the earlier version of  the bromance allows the United States to play the  

swing role. Then we cooperate. Both Nixon and Mao  think ganging up on Russia would be a good thing,  

overextending Russia financially by overextending  it militarily with all these armaments and things. 

In addition, what's going on as part  of China's rise are internal reforms  

under Deng Xiaoping when he abandons  certain communist principles of economic  

management and gets a much more productive  agricultural sector and industry and commerce. 

So China's running double-digit  growth rates for about 20 years  

with significant compounding effects. That's the story of China's rise. 

Now for this dystopian alternate  universe of Russian decline. 

Here on the left is Leonid Brezhnev,  who apparently had a stroke in 1976  

that permanently impaired his thinking  and whose death in 1982 finished him off. 

He was replaced by Yuri Andropov, whose own health  was pretty parlous and he dies within two years. 

Then Konstantin Chernenko barely  makes it a year before he's dead. 

It sort of sounds like us, but  anyway it doesn't work well. 

If you look at Soviet growth statistics, they're  really good right after the end of World War II.  

They're busy rebuilding. But when you get to the  mid-'70s, they're going into terminal decline. 

When Gorbachev comes to power in 1985, Soviet  growth rates have been 1–2% less than U.S. growth  

rates for the preceding decade. The compounding effects  

of that are pretty horrendous. In addition, there are other problems. 

Leonid Brezhnev was in power for 18 long  years and not only did he collect cars,  

that was apparently the go-to gift for him,  but in addition he was collecting a bunch of  

non-performing piles across the Third World  because this is manifesting Russian power. 

But it's expensive and he doesn't  have much of an economy to pay for it. 

If you look at oil prices, they're  very much associated with the decline  

of the Soviet Union, rise of Vladimir Putin. It's because in the Soviet era, government budgets  

relied as much as 55% on oil or energy revenues. So piggy banks are going to shrink if oil prices  

aren't doing very well. Gorbachev repeatedly said,  

"You know, we can't live this way anymore." He wanted, and he did initiate political and  

economic reforms to try to save communism,  except he really ruined the sclerotic patient  

doing what he did. There are massive  

territorial implications for what he did. It's the loss of empire in Eastern Europe  

and also the loss of the ethnically-based  constituent republics of the Soviet Union. 

I'm going to show you Russia's  territorial odyssey in maps. 

So this is 1938, before the Molotov-Ribbentrop  Pact, the Nazi-Soviet Pact where they're dividing  

up Poland and parts of Eastern Europe –  Nazis’ and Soviets – of what they want. 

This is before then, but by the time you  get to the end of the war, Russia's got  

the Baltic states, it's got Kaliningrad,  it's got all of Belarus, all of Ukraine. 

Then of course it gets Eastern Europe. Gorbachev works his magic and you're  

down to Kaliningrad. That's where Russians  

stage a lot of weapons nowadays, apparently dump  a lot of toxic waste. That's what Kaliningrad's  

all about. So it was significant. At the  end of 1991, when Russia's lost everything,  

they're down to a much diminished rump state. That’s followed by years of instability in Russia. 

Russians agree that their country always has been,  always should be, always will be a great power,  

but they don't measure it in wealth. Their wealth has always been much less  

than their Western neighbors, although they  often confiscate the wealth of other people. 

What they measure their strength, their  greatness, is in vast territorial extent  

and the ability to run roughshod over others  and make them do whatever it is Russia wants. 

Also when they look at their security, they  also look at it this way. "We need this vast  

territorial extent to be secure." But they never turn it around. 

They're always worried about other  people invading them. "Do you suppose  

we pose a threat to anybody else?" They never turn it around that way. 

Except Russia has posed existential  threat to its neighbors forever. 

There are so many neighbors you have never  heard of because they've disappeared from the  

pages of history, courtesy of the Russians. Let's go to the medieval period where Russia  

starts out as the princely  state of Muscovy, Moscow. 

Well, it wipes out the other princely  states. There was Novgorod the Great.  

It was a more progressive place. They wiped that place out, Rostov,  

there are a lot of other places. Later they're eliminating the Khanates  

of Central Asia. These are states. It's  a different way of organizing yourself. 

The Khanate of Crimea, Kazan, Astrakhan, Kokand,  Khiva, Bukhara, they get rid of all of it. 

Then there's been this repeated vivisecting  of European neighbors—Ukraine, Poland,  

Lithuania, Sweden and Finland—taking  their territory one bite at a time. 

You can see it going on today. The Russians just don't see that if you do  

this to other people… This is why at the end of  the Cold War, everyone is stampeding into NATO. 

It's not some conspiracy, it's just  what the Russians have done to them. 

Now I'm going to illustrate Poland's  fate to show what happens when you're  

surrounded by rapacious continental empires. Three partitions of Poland in the 18th century. 

This is when Prussia, Austria  and Russia are taking things. 

The Russians say, "But we didn't take Polish  territory." They're taking the Polish Empire.  

It's a technicality. If you wonder why Poles  cannot stand Russians, it would be this. 

It would also be the genocide-laced  occupation of Poland that went on for  

several generations after World War II. Part of that, it’s Yalta again. 

The Russians insisted on moving  Poland 200 kilometers to the west. 

That is not the normal thing to do to a country. It's deep into German territory, so Russia can  

go eat a big part of Poland. Then Russia decides it's going  

to cleanse the whole place, ethnically cleanse. So Germans are going to live in Germany, Poles in  

Poland, Ukrainians going to live in Ukraine. Millions of people—this is a war-devastated  

Europe where there's no way to take  care of refugees—are being sent hither  

and yon, and lots of them are dying. For the first time in their histories,  

Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine,  they become ethnically homogeneous states. 

Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia  require Russian troops to hang onto  

some of their current gains. So a lot of things go on here. 

If you compare it to what the West is  doing in the United States, the United  

States has a Marshall Plan, you've heard of it. The United States is pouring aid into our Western  

allies to restore them after the war. Well, this is what Russia's doing. 

They've won the war, so their troops are  there, but they never take their troops  

home. Then they're busy running  coups. Then they're busy shooting  

anyone who disagrees with them or they send them  to labor camps, whatever they're going to do. 

Then they redistribute every  form of wealth there is, either  

through nationalization or collectivization. They're imposing this really non-functioning  

economic model on these people. It's called  communism. It doesn't work. You wonder why Eastern  

Europeans aren't thrilled about a repeat of this.  Well, come on. Moreover, the story gets better.  

The people who made all this  happen include this charmer, some  

of the most toxic people from the Soviet Union. Andrey Vyshinsky goes to Romania, lucky Romanians. 

He was running the show trials  that were sending the original  

Bolshevik leaders to summary execution. What does he do when he gets to Romania? 

He appoints the Ministers of  Justice, War and Interior. 

If you do that, you control  the courts, army and police. 

You can start expropriating  everything and nationalizing things. 

You can start eliminating other parties. You make Romania trade only with the Soviet Union. 

Another toxic personality,  Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. 

He's another part of the A-list purge  team. What had he done? He signed loads  

of execution warrants to his military colleagues,  officers, during the Great Purges. What a great  

guy. He's in Hungary, lucky people. He's  not quite as competent as the other one. 

In the elections of 1945 in Hungary,  the Smallholders Party wins. Oops,  

they aren't Communists. He doesn't  ever make that mistake again. 

Then he's busily appointing Communist ministers  to different ministries, the land reform, taking  

over the civil service, getting the propaganda up  and running, taking over youth and women's groups  

to infiltrate that way, and arresting all sorts of  non-Communist politicians before he holds the 1947  

elections, which of course the Communists win. Afterwards there's a really big purge where  

10% of the population faces tribunals. Think  of that. Of this room, 10% of you are going  

to tribunals because Russians are in town. Russia had a template for bloc building. 

I'm giving the details because you get a sense  of how a continental empire runs business. 

The Russians looked at how when Italy  surrendered to the Western Allies,  

they basically just ran the show in Italy. So the Russians are going, "Well, we're going to,  

when we accept surrenders, run  the show in Eastern Europe." 

But the Russians want to take advantage  of the absolute turmoil that wars cause. 

Wars also often lead to war economies  where you've got a lot of centralized  

government control to run the war effort. So the Russians want to leverage that one. 

Then they've got this big Red Army presence. They want to use all of those things, which they  

do. Here's their template. They're controlling  the power ministries. What are they? Defense  

and Interior. If you do that, you're going to  monopolize coercion and eliminate your opposition. 

If you control the Justice and Information  ministries, you can arrest or kill at will. 

Then you control all the stories  that are never told about this. 

If you control Agriculture, particularly in those  days, you're going to buy a lot of allegiance  

by redistributing other people's lands. That's going to wipe out class enemies,  

collaborators, all sorts of  people you don't like, and the  

original elite that have been running rural areas. They also had a story that they told about this.  

It's the big lie. Remember communism? What are  the really bad people in the communist story of  

how we all live? It's the imperialists,  right? Imperialism is really bad. Well,  

I've just shown you. Russians were the greatest  practitioners of imperialism of the 20th century. 

They're doing this right as Western  imperialists are giving up their colonies. 

Yet there’s this big lie, the big fiction that  the Russians are somehow nice guys. They're  

using democratic forms. They don't eliminate  Poland as a state, as the czars had done. 

It’s still called Poland, but it's a fiction  that it's independent. It's not. There's a  

fiction that they hold elections, but they're not  democratic. We already know the outcome. It's a  

dictatorship in reality. They're just purging the  place. They're killing lots of Eastern Europeans. 

If you think Eastern Europeans don't  remember this, they most certainly do. 

Then there is a more regional  template for how you do this. 

I've already talked about ethnic cleansing.  They did that. Then they tried moving countries,  

Poland to the west, Mongolia, I haven't talked  about it, it was to the east in Chinese territory. 

Then they want to take some  stepping stones for later expansion. 

That's what Kaliningrad is all about. Another one  is Moldova. That is territory between Romania and  

Russia on very important river systems. Moldova's got problems with a place  

called Transnistria, which the Russians have  poached. That story's still ongoing. Also,  

places like Azerbaijan. It’s split between  Iran and…well now its independent Azerbaijan,  

but it was split with the Soviet Union. Then there are the divided states  

of Germany, Korea, Mongolia, and China. You want all your neighbors quarreling over their  

borders so that Russia can then set the terms and  that it can nibble them away a bite at a time,  

or if it can take a whole thing, good for them. So Russian national identity is not  

only about empire, territorial extent. It also has some big ideas attached to it, an  

ideology that somehow this territorial expansion  is either progressive, beneficial or positive.  

It's a myth. Under the czars, the ideology was  this Third Rome, of the Russian Orthodox Church. 

The Third Rome was in Moscow. I know this is news to you. I'll  

explain how it works. There's the Rome we  all know about, the "Rome" Rome. That was  

Rome number one. The one where the Pope is. Rome number two, according to the Russians,  

has to do with the Byzantine Empire. That was  Constantinople, or Istanbul. When that falls,  

the Russians go, "Ta-da, it's Moscow." Not really, but they used this Russian  

Orthodoxy and spread the Russian Orthodox  Church back in the day deep into Eastern Europe. 

When the Communists get in, they're not spreading  Russian Orthodoxy, they're spreading communism. 

The problem for Putin is that  today neither communism nor  

Russian Orthodoxy are marketable ideologies. He's just stuck with being a really big place. 

That's where his little focus is. Russia has a  nightmare scenario. They don't always win these  

wars. They lose quite often. The Mongol yoke or  the Yellow Peril, their terminology, not mine,  

is the 13th century when the Mongols just swept in  and the Russian elites became tax collectors for  

the Mongols, an extractive role that has endured. You think about Russians, they extract resources,  

their own, other peoples, but they're  not known for producing wealth. It's  

just resource extraction. This is  some of the legacy of all of that. 

The Russians have also suffered devastating  defeats, to Napoleon, in World War I and World  

War II, that just devastated Western Russia.  So they've had bad times. In our own time,  

Putin is dumping all of his ordnance on Ukraine,  leaving Siberia wide open to China's ambitions. 

So if he keeps the game up, he may  well wind up with a Chinese yoke,  

and his nightmare will be there for him. The Chinese also have their own big ideas,  

not religious ideas or empire,  but about civilization itself. 

Traditionally, the Chinese believe  there's only one civilization,  

that would be theirs. It's based on Confucianism.  That would be a world order unto itself. 

That worked for them for a couple thousand years. There are certain pillars of legitimacy that have  

endured, probably originating from this, but  enduring ones. One is ethical rule. Well,  

that's gone for the Communist Party. Let's  try the next one. Economic prosperity. Whoops,  

going fast. That leaves the Communists  today with territorial expansion. 

That's ongoing with territory incursions  into India, South China Sea island building,  

and then all these gathering threats to Taiwan. In part, what's going on is that the Communist  

Party wants to play the nationalism  card the same way Putin is. 

If you haven't got anything else for you, play  jingoistic nationalism, because we human beings  

seem to be particularly attentive to that one. So if you focus on that, maybe the Chinese  

people won't look at the ethical lapses of the  Communist Party or the fact that their paychecks  

aren't going anywhere anymore. Good old Xi, he doesn't  

have a marketable ideology anymore. What's really scary is that Confucianism had  

just been this enduring feature of China—dynasties  came and went, but Confucianism stayed—until  

China was unable to fend off Japan in the First  Sino-Japanese War that I told you about and the  

Europeans in the Opium Wars, when all of a sudden  Confucianism just seemed totally inadequate. 

When enough Chinese cease believing  in Confucianism, that's when you get  

the 1911 Revolution and it just vanishes as an  organizing principle for running your government.  

This is the total nightmare. One of the  frightening things for the Communist Party is  

when people cease believing in communism. China's nightmare scenario is  

these horrible periods of chaos. They're afraid that if the Communists go,  

that China's going to devolve into these  civil wars, these periods of Luàn (乱). 

A second one is that maybe the Soviet Union when  it's shattered, that may well be their fate, that  

maybe these communist regimes can't last forever. So Russia's nightmare scenario is other  

people invading Russia. China's nightmare scenario  

is the collapse of China. It's two different ways,  

two different things to worry about. The Chinese  face a conundrum. If you no longer believe the  

economic theories on which communism is  based, how do you justify one-party rule? 

The Communist Party has tried to  soldier on without solving that problem. 

The Chinese have learned a great  deal from watching Russians as  

they play around with big ideas. They learned a great deal from Mikhail  

Gorbachev when he tries to fix communism,  but he winds up killing the patient. 

The Chinese, I think, their  takeaways from what Gorbachev did  

is don't hesitate to deploy the tanks. If you've got unrest in the streets,  

you just send tanks, tanks against civilians.  It's a really quick fix. You want to focus  

on economic reforms to the extent you  can, certainly not political reforms. 

You also really want to sinify your minorities.  Why? In the Soviet Union, the Russians had had  

this fiction that all these occupied minority  people wanted to be there and had equal rights. 

So they would sponsor all the nice folk dances  and the language classes, and they'd have a  

bunch of token minorities in traditional  dress and various political institutions. 

But basically they had no power. It meant when the Soviet Union shattered,  

there were plausible divisions  already set up on an ethnic basis. 

That is how you get places like Uzbekistan,  Tajikistan, et cetera. China's like,  

"No way." This helps explain the genocide  of the Uyghurs that's ongoing now. 

This is their rationale for doing it. Then what you want to do, you can  

see Xi Jinping doing it, is prioritize  maintaining the monopoly of the Chinese  

Communist Party over economic efficiency  when those two things run at cross purposes. 

That helps explain some of Xi Jinping's  growth-depressing choices that he's making. 

Gorbachev discovered when he tried  to reform communism that democracy  

and communism just don't mix. If you give people elections,  

they're going to support multiple parties. When the communist track record  

becomes known—their incompetent economic  management, summary executions, famines,  

just all the things that they've been up  to—it's very hard for them to remain in power. 

Also, as Gorbachev discovered,  democracy and empire don't mix. 

When you give different minorities  a choice, or occupied places a  

choice to leave or stay, they bolt. There's a consensus among the Han,  

the preponderant ethnic group in China,  that they want to maintain the empire. 

So they don't care how many  Tibetans immolate themselves. 

That's no longer going on now because  the mortar has descended into Tibet. 

They don't care how many Mongols  complain about lost lands. 

The Han want to keep it. Also for the generation that  

survived the Cultural Revolution, which would be  Xi Jinping, he's precisely that age group, they  

do not ever want to go back to the chaos of the  Cultural Revolution. It was horrendous. So expect  

them to prioritize stability over liberty. This  brings a third problem. Democracy and communism  

don't mix and democracy and empire don't mix. In an Internet cell phone age, where people  

are much more interconnected, how does a  government maintain legitimacy to rule? 

Because elections are an incredibly powerful  way to give authority to a government. 

This is where nationalism comes in. The Chinese Communist Party and the  

Russians likewise are trying to use jingoistic  nationalism to stoke up popular loyalties,  

to deflect people from domestic problems  and go, "Look at the hated outsiders." 

They aren't the only country to do  this sort of thing, blaming outsiders. 

It's all the immigrants' fault or whatever. The problem with all of this,  

when the Chinese did it in 1980, right after the  Tiananmen massacre, the Chinese Communist Party  

decided to rewrite all the textbooks. So they're no longer going to focus  

on class enemies, but they're going to be  focused on using jingoistic nationalism. 

They're going to focus on the evil Japanese,  evil Americans, and focus things that way. 

Well, the problem with nationalism  is it's a very heady drink. 

If you imbibe too much, it clouds the judgment. Moreover, it repels minority people within China's  

empire who are not interested in Han nationalism. It frightens neighbors to coordinate with each  

other and find big powers  to counterbalance this mess. 

It also impedes the de-escalation of  unforeseen international dust-ups or crises. 

With Putin's latest adventures, one  would assume that the Chinese have  

some real thoughts about what's going on now. In Putin's case, he has thrown away the Soviet  

addendum to the rules for continental empire.  What was that one? No hot wars. If you think  

about Soviet rulers, they were all veterans  of World War II through Leonid Brezhnev. 

They understood that war is easy to get  into, hard to get out of, very unpredictable. 

For them it was proxy wars. They loved it when the  

United States got into hot wars. What is not to like about the Korean War and  

the Vietnam War with the United States just tied  down and Americans tearing each other's eyes out  

about these things? Great, great, great. Russians  stayed out of it until after Brezhnev's stroke. 

That's when they make the  big boo-boo in Afghanistan. 

They go into Afghanistan and then all of a sudden  we have loads of fun giving Stinger missiles to  

the other side, inflicting costs on the Russians. The person who wanted to get into Afghanistan is  

Yuri Andropov, who was not a veteran. The uniformed military of Russia said,  

"Don't go into Afghanistan." Andropov and friends ignored  

it and did their thing. If you look at Putin,  

he has risen to power on a diet of hot wars. He comes to power in the early phase of the  

Second Chechen War, where he levels the Chechen  capital of Grozny and leaves most of the rest of  

Chechnya an environmental waste zone. But he sorts that one out. 

Then he gets quite popular for his war with  Georgia in 2008, where he detaches South  

Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia. Now he wants to build a naval base  

in Abkhazia because he's having  trouble with his base in Crimea. 

Then when he eliminates term limits for himself  in 2012, which isn't very popular in Russia,  

he solves that by going into Ukraine in 2014 and  walks off with about 7% of Ukrainian territory at  

very little cost. And Russians think that's great!  If you look at these little stepping stones,  

this is the way continentalists look at it. You’ve got all these little places lined up. 

You want to color it in. That's where Ukraine comes in, in 2022. 

Putin wants to reverse all  these territorial losses. 

He wants the green things and the purple things. I don't know if he wants to do the Napoleonic  

Wars and go all the way to Paris.  Who knows? Here's how he looks at  

NATO or doesn't look at it. You look at when people join. 

There are two great big  periods of accession to NATO. 

One is in the early Cold War with all the smaller  countries of Europe, which is everybody. We're all  

smaller than Russia. The Europeans join to  protect themselves from Soviet imperialism. 

Then at the end of the Cold War, when these Soviet  satellites can finally slip the leash, I've given  

you all the reasons why, they stampede into NATO. It is not NATO tricking them to join. 

They're stampeding in for excellent  reasons. They've been proven right.  

Putin, when he works his magic the second time  around in Ukraine in 2022, this is when the  

Finns and the Swedes decide neutrality's not  going to cut it and they’ve got to join NATO. 

But when Putin looks at this, he goes,  "Oh, they're coming at us in arcs." Well,  

this is ludicrous. Russia has posed an  existential threat to these places forever. 

No one today wants to invade  Russia. Who'd want it? It's full  

of Russians. We want them to stay home. There's no one there who wants Russia. 

The Russians like to gaslight everybody else,  like, "You're the problem." It's been very  

effective. Lots of Americans will talk about NATO  expansion and say, "Oh, this is why Putin went to  

Ukraine. You did NATO expansion." He's gaslighting  everybody. Russians are the problem. Also it  

is their totally dysfunctional domestic system  that offers everybody else nothing but problems. 

Instead of focusing on that and fixing  it so they can be a productive member  

of the rest of the world, they're not  doing that. They're just invading other  

people. Back to the real problem, what are  the prospects of a bromance with these two? 

Barring World War III, which would be the great  powers going at it… If the great powers go at it,  

you might well superglue these two. If that happens, whatever side is losing  

might well use a nuclear weapon, and then  we're going to have toxic plumes everywhere. 

So we had better get our diplomacy right  because there are really serious consequences  

for getting it wrong in this particular era. We're at the beginning of a second Cold War  

with a leadership that has not been  chastened by surviving World War I,  

the Great Depression, and World War II. Which were the grownups who did a very effective  

job dealing with the early first Cold War. We haven't got those people anymore. 

So if you look at primary adversaries, primary  theaters, you don't want them to align for your  

enemies, because if they do, they'll coordinate. Currently, Vlad the Bad has a Ukraine fixation. 

Xi Jinping has got a Taiwan  fixation, opposite ends of Eurasia. 

Xi Jinping is also causing India problems  and doing South China Sea island building. 

But they're on opposite ends of their two empires. So far, nothing aligns with these two. 

Even in a world war, their primary theaters  probably would not align in the same way that  

the Axis primary theaters did not align. They might well disperse their resources  

in different directions. But the problem is we have  

a lot of people with nuclear weapons now. You really don't want to do the hot war. 

If the West and others manage things  correctly, I've given you a huge  

historical legacy of fraught relations. Play your cards appropriately and these  

two will take care of each other. The rest of us can, if we do it right,  

not launch trade wars on each other, but  rather try to maximize our prosperity  

so that we get stronger and stronger while  they're busy in these wealth-destroying wars. 

Putin is just blowing through all of  his assets in Ukraine to no purpose. 

That's how we fought and won the last Cold War. Putin, he's trying to do empire in the age of  

nationalism. It's a non-starter. He's  dumping all of his ordnance on Ukraine,  

leaving Siberia wide open. Xi Jinping has moved right  

in even before the Ukraine war. The Belt and Road Initiative  

is peeling away the former Russian  sphere of influence in Central Asia. 

Putin is doing this hot war gambit  when Russia's weak and China is strong,  

making it particularly damaging. Why would it  matter? Siberia has precisely the resources that  

China now needs and covets and wants to have them  contiguous so other people can't mess with them. 

In particular they want water because they've  blown through their water table in North China. 

Lake Baikal has over 20% of the  world's surface fresh water. 

So if you want a quick fix, it's the best one. China is known for big water projects. 

They've been damming the Mekong and the  Yangtze. They've done massive water projects. So  

that may be in Russia's future. Who knows?  Xi Jinping now holds all of the cards. 

China has nine times the population, nine times  the GNP of Russia, and their per capita GNPs are  

converging. Not good news for Putin. The question  isn't whether this bromance is going to last  

forever, but rather when it's going to end. When is Xi Jinping going to decide he's  

got the right amount of leverage  to get whatever it is he wants? 

What's going on now illustrates the perils  of getting your primary adversary wrong. 

Nicholas II fought a recreational war against  Japan, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. 

He is pouring resources into really  an irrelevant theater in those days,  

instead of taking those resources and putting  it into a railway system that European Russia  

desperately needed to face off Germany,  which it does within the decade and loses. 

He is overthrown in part  because of bread riots in St. 

Petersburg, because no foreign aid can get  in, because he has inadequate railway system. 

They'll be built later and  it'll be good for Lend-Lease. 

So he and his family wind up  shot in a Siberian basement. 

It takes a decade to play out. I don't know how it's going to go  

for Vladimir Putin on all of this. If we play our cards right,  

maybe he'll go down as lonesome. We may have to wait a long time. 

On the other hand, if we get into a hot  war, nuclear war, and in the meantime,  

if the United States kills off its alliance system  which is one of its greatest strengths, by doing a  

gratuitous trade war on our allies, then we have a  dust-up with China… Well, let's think about this. 

Japan tried this go-it-alone,  my-way-or-the-highway strategy  

with China back in World War II, when China  was a failed state, and it wrecked Japan. 

China now has a population that's a  multiple of ours, an industrial base  

that's a multiple of ours. Why on earth would you  

ever want to take them on alone? So I'm going to quote Pericles, who was  

the leader of Athens at its height when it was  building all these ancient ruins that weren't  

ruins when they were being built. They're  gone. This warning came on the eve of the  

succession of Athenian blunders and ancient  Athens never recovered: "I am more afraid  

of our own blunders than of the enemy's devices." Our leaders truly need to ponder this before they  

wreck all of us, themselves included. So thank you for your attention. 

That's what I have to say  about Sino-Soviet things. 

First question, I want to understand the  role of ideology in the Sino-Soviet split. 

These are the two major  communist countries in the world. 

They have this big ideological,  world-changing mission. 

We're going to spread communism around the world. That isn't enough to prevent war over,  

in the case of 1969, literally just  some islands in the middle of a river. 

There's nothing super consequential at stake here. Why didn't the fact that they were both these  

communist countries do more  to cement the relationship? 

I gave you all these bad things that Russia  had done to China, which are not small things. 

Then isn't the problem with communism that  the economics of it don't actually work? 

Fundamentally these two countries are continental  powers, they're continental empires. Sure they  

change out ideologies. The ideology of the tsars  changes out to communism and China is changing  

out Confucianism for communism. But the principle that each one  

should be king of the roost hasn't changed. That would be a mutually exclusive proposition of  

who's going to run Asia and then Eurasia, because  they have a shared address, this long border. 

Also with communism, it's supposed  to take over the whole world. 

We're supposed to have a classless society. That's why we don't even worry about governments  

and things because they're eventually going to  melt away. Well, that's all nonsense. As things  

go on further and further, you have dictators more  and more entrenched and they're using communism. 

There's another piece where it's  just amazing, about the big lie. 

I don't know whether it was Stalin who  said it, that if the lie is big enough,  

people will believe you. It's just so out there,  

it's so preposterous, they go with it. Which is this notion that it's the  

West through these imperial powers, right? And we buy this, that they're not the ones. 

But if you look at it, I've given you the data. Then this other one in our own time,  

this lie about, "Oh, it's the West, it's  NATO expansion, this explains Putin." 

I’ve given you the data, it's nonsense. Now why the Russians feel obliged to take  

other people's territory, part of it  is feeling good while other people  

squirm. There's that aspect. They're not the  only people who do those sorts of things. 

But it's also from being on the plains  of Eurasia where, throughout history,  

people have invaded you. So you have an established  

paradigm of how you deal with other people  that is deep-seated over thousands of years. 

I can't totally answer the question  because there are a lot of Russians  

and a lot of Chinese whose decisions  together aggregate to what they do. 

I want to understand Stalin's decisions  in particular in the case of telling the  

Communists during the Chinese Civil War that they  can't go below the Yangtze River, so that he can  

split up the Chinese, the Communists and the  Nationalists in China, and leave China weak. 

We know from all the actions in Stalin's  life that he was a devoted communist. 

He does collectivization and almost destroys  his regime because he's a devoted communist. 

At the same time, communism says that there has  to be this worldwide revolution at some point. 

If there is a worldwide revolution, there  will be other powerful communist countries. 

That's implied in the nature of what  a worldwide communist revolution is. 

But at the same time he doesn't seem communist  enough to want China to become fully communist. 

He cares more about real geopolitik. Tell me about how this works. 

His version of communism,  the Russians invented it. 

Actually they didn't, Marx invented it. But they are the guys who think, "Well, we  

operationalized it so we should run it forever." So of course Russia is going to be  

the big communist country. A bunch of Chinese upstarts,  

from their point of view, are claiming,  "No, no, no, we're going to run the show." 

But did Stalin as a communist think, "Okay at some  point the whole world is going to be communist." 

He thought that he personally  would be managing the whole world? 

Unclear. It's a long horizon. In his lifetime  he's initially about communism in one country,  

then communism on your borders,  which is what he's working on. 

As for the rest of the world, it takes  Brezhnev to start going all deep into Africa. 

Stalin wasn't interested in, say, India because he  thought they're a bunch of lackeys of the British. 

How do they let themselves be colonized by  the British? There's something wrong with  

them. You have to also think about  where history is at a given moment. 

He dies in '53, not that long after World War II. How is it all going to turn out? 

His relationship with China, as far as he's  concerned, is going swimmingly when he's in power. 

Mao goes there and kowtows in Moscow  and does what Stalin wants him to do. 

That's Stalin's experience until he,  I don't know, chokes on his Cheerios  

or whatever happened to him that morning. If Stalin hadn't died, do you think a Sino-Soviet  

split was still inevitable? Yes, there wouldn't have  

been Khrushchev's secret speech. Obviously Stalin wouldn't have condemned  

the cult of personality. But the grievances  

you mentioned would still exist. I think the grievances would still exist. 

Dictators' deaths profoundly weaken their  systems because they've got no good succession. 

It means you're guaranteed  a cat-fight royale going on. 

That's what one waits for with Putin. Eventually the man will die one way or  

another, and there will be a cat-fight  royale for what happens after him. 

Stalin was pretty old when he died and  Russians in those days had a lousy diet. 

I can't remember if he smoked. His generation  mostly did. So I don't know how the future would  

have run with good old Uncle Joe there for longer. The Korean War would have still gone on longer. 

It's really his death, why that war ends then. With the Korean War going on and on, I don't  

know what the implications are for us or for Mao. This is a really interesting thing to consider  

from this lecture. In retrospect,  

maybe one of the most important things, if not  the most important thing that happened in the  

20th century, is the Chinese Civil War. At the time, you wouldn't think of this  

as a major event, especially since  World War II had just happened. 

If you were living in 1948 or 1949,  you wouldn't think of this as the  

main thing happening in the world. But given that we know in retrospect  

this is a really big country with a huge  population, we should be paying a lot of  

attention to its internal political development. I wonder if we should apply the same logic today  

where there are other countries with huge  populations where we don't think a lot about  

what's happening. India or Nigeria.  I really couldn't tell you the first  

thing about Nigeria even though I know that  it's a big country with a huge population. 

Let's not try because I don't  know anything about it either. 

On China and the Chinese Civil War, there was  an understanding that it was a really big deal. 

That's why Roosevelt—and the British  are just thinking he's laughable—keeps  

trying to treat China like a great power. The British are saying, "They're not a  

great power, Franklin, not remotely." But he wants to bring them into the  

Cairo Conference. He also wants them to be a  

veto-wielding member of the United Nations, which  by China's military status there's just no way. 

But Roosevelt is looking, there's  no Japan out there, we want to have  

something in Asia to counterbalance. But then when you get to the Chinese  

Civil War, Americans who've fought some  big wars, they're looking at it saying,  

"It is not feasible for us to alter this outcome." The thinking was — I think it was the Eisenhower  

archives — that if they lived together long  enough, they would go at each other eventually. 

I want to zoom in on one particular episode  during this period that I think is fascinating. 

In 1936, the Communists in China kidnapped Chiang  Kai-shek, who's the leader of the Nationalists,  

and they're about to kill him. Stalin radios in over the Comintern. 

He says, "No, you can't kill Chiang  Kai-shek even though he's your enemy,  

he's been massacring you. You gotta let him go."  In exchange, Chiang Kai-shek has to promise to  

create a united front against the Japanese. There are 30,000 communist guerrillas  

when they're fighting the Japanese at this period  and there are 1.5–2 million nationalist troops. 

The communists get to claim  the prestige of fighting the  

Japanese with a fraction of the effort. This just seems like a brilliant move on  

Stalin's part in retrospect, because if they  had killed Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist  

forces might have dissolved. There would be a puppet  

government installed by Japan. It would be a terrible thing for Stalin. 

It just seems like Stalin makes a lot of right  calls in the theater in Asia at this time. 

What is the understanding,  big picture, that lets him? 

There are dictators all over the world  who stay in power for a long time. 

Do not dismiss their ability to stay in power. They're surfing quite a wave wherever they live,  

of people who butcher each  other with great regularity. 

I would suspect—suspect, because how would I  have the evidence—that many of these long-term  

dictators have EQs that are off the charts. When you come in the room, they just gut-feeling  

know whether they're going to cap you or not. If they get a few extra people, so what? 

Just so they get rid of all the people who  are going to cause them problems. Incredible  

abilities. Also what Stalin does—I think Saddam  Hussein imitated him, but I could be wrong  

about that one—is have multiple security  agencies with overlapping jurisdictions. 

No one quite knows who's running  the show and who's in power,  

but they're all funneling information to Stalin. So he has better information than anybody else. 

You can use one one day, another another  day, which explains how all the heads of  

the equivalent of the KGB come and go. Most of the early heads of that wind  

up getting shot by their successors. You'd think they'd notice a pattern. 

They're very good at staying in power. They're really good at managing that  

problem. It does not bring prosperity.  That comes from the world of maritime  

trade, of following international law  instead of capping your trade partner. 

You're not going to get a second  trade deal if you do that. 

It's just so much more wealth-creating, this  alternate universe, but that's not where  

these continentalists are. There's still something  

a little under-explained about… Probably lots of things are under-explained. 

Hitler's another dictator. Forget  about having these moves like deciding,  

"Don't kill this kidnapped person because  it'll be a bad idea in the long run." 

On the opposite end, he's declaring war  against America even when he doesn't have to. 

He's just making these crazy moves. Stalin is a special thing to explain.  

It's not just communism. It's something else  that's making him a deft geopolitical actor. 

You can do this in retrospect and go, "crazy  move," because no one realized that the US  

productive base could do what it did. Americans  didn't even know. You tell me right now how  

the future's going to turn out. This is where if you flip it… 

When you look at history, you think  it had to turn out that way because  

you can reverse-engineer something, at least a  plausible story of why you wind up where you did. 

It may not even be the right story,  but it yields the correct answer. 

So you think you got it. But if you look at the future,  

how's this thing going to end with Xi Jinping  and Putin? We don't know. Afterwards, you'll go,  

"Oh, something is profoundly stupid based on  subsequent events." But we don't know now.  

There's a Russian proverb which is: Чужа́я душа́  – потёмки (chuzhaya uma potyomki). Someone else's  

mind, potyomki, darkness. You ultimately  don't know what other people are thinking. 

You make your guesses, but then they do things. When you showed the maps of China in 1850,  

Russia also in 1850, especially 1900, Russia  and China are still big countries today. 

But if you just look at Qing dynasty  China, it's overwhelmingly big. 

It’s the same with Tsarist Russia  before the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. 

It makes you think that at various points  through history, at most points through history,  

China was technologically dominant over  the West, except during this one crucial  

period in the 18th and 19th century with  the Industrial Revolution in high gear. 

Which changes the whole world. Right. It reinforces the idea of  

how important it is to be at the technological  frontier, especially at historically crux-y times. 

Of course we're in San Francisco. Many of us here believe that this is especially  

a crux-y time in the development of technology. Maybe we should continue investing in it instead  

of canceling all the science research projects. What will be the long term effects of doing this? 

You're thinking of America's great  strengths, its alliance systems. 

Our great strength also used to be  being at the head of innovation. 

We're going to eliminate those things  and think it's going to go well for us? 

I want to ask about your, I don’t know if you  call it a prediction but, your hypothesis that  

at some point China and Russia will finish  each other off or have some sort of conflict  

which will be bad for both of them. They won't finish each other off. 

They're too big to be finished off. Unless we do a nuclear war, then we  

might finish all of ourselves off. But the idea that there will be some  

sort of conflict between these two  countries… I agree with the idea that  

China has a lot of people and a lot of wealth. Russia has a lot of water, and it has a lot of  

resources. These are complementary resources.  They both have things that the other party has. 

The question is, will they attain these  things through war or through trade? 

It seems very improbable to me  that… China's got a lot of money. 

It can just pay for Russian  oil, it can just pay for water. 

Why would it invade a nuclear-armed nation? I never said it would do that. 

It's a question of if Putin feels that his  back is up against the wall. What price? We  

don't really know the terms of their trade. What are the real energy prices that China's  

paying for all of this? I don’t know. Maybe  some people do know. I suspect that whatever  

the terms of trade are going to be, the  Chinese are going to get a really good deal. 

If you look at what happened to Gorbachev  at the very end of the Cold War. 

He's not going to war with anyone, but his  internal situation is devolving so rapidly  

because their economy collapses. He's already got lousy oil prices. 

In addition, he has so upset the centralized  planning system such that revenues are just  

collapsing around him, and he's  about to be thrown out of power. 

He is desperate for the kind of loans that  the Germans in particular are willing to  

give him in order to get, not only Germany  reunited, but West Germany staying in NATO. 

The next thing is East Germany is going to be  in NATO too, and then NATO can have whomever. 

Those things are trades he never would  have made ever, but he's so desperate. 

In that case, the West likes to pay people,  so instead of paying him a low price,  

the West is paying him a high price to back off. In China, I suspect it'll be the opposite. 

They pay him less and less for whatever it is he  

wants if he really continues  to corner himself in Ukraine. 

These terms of trade will get  more and more in China's favor. 

Does that look like the bromance ending? North Korea has for decades been in a  

very desperate position. That’s quite a bromance. 

But there's no risk of North  Korea and China going to war. 

North Korea relies heavily on China. It's not draining China in any way. 

It's the other way around. That's  what Russia's future may be. 

Apparently certain Russians, when Putin had  invaded the big way in Ukraine, said, "Oh my God,  

that's our future. It's North Korea. That's where  we're headed." That could well be their future. 

It'll just keep going as they pour out  wealth and the Chinese will try to get  

very good terms of trade for resources and be  niggardly, meaning giving very few things back. 

In 1931, when Japan attacks Manchuria, Japan  commandeers the Chinese Eastern Railway,  

which the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 said  was supposed to be under Russia's purview. 

People in the Politburo are telling Stalin,  "Look, we’ve got to be aggressive against this." 

Stalin says, "Look, I don't want to raise  tensions against another great power. 

Let's just let this slide,  let's keep tensions low." 

This is quite similar to what happened with  splitting up Poland in 1939 and then Barbarossa,  

where in both theaters he makes this  calculation, "I'm going to let certain  

things slide so that I don't have to face  off against these great powers on my border. 

I don't want to go to war with them." In the case of Japan, it works because Japan  

decides to attack China and not Russia. In the case of Germany, it doesn't. 

Yeah, in Germany, he's trying  to run the same script. 

He thinks it's going to work for him. That's what the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is about.  

Not remotely. He needed to read Mein Kampf to  understand, "No, you're a menu item for Hitler. 

He's eventually going to come around." In our own day we don't really  

want to absorb the bad news. I could be wrong, but I believe that  

Putin wants not only all of Ukraine, which he says  he wants, but also he wants the Baltic states and  

he wants to keep on going. This is profoundly  bad news. If that's the case, then it means  

for Europeans at least, they're going to have to  divert all kinds of resources to this problem,  

which is something they don't want to do. Because like us, they're indebted too,  

and there are other things they  would prefer to spend their money on. 

We don't like the bad news  that this is where we're at. 

You have to make nasty trade-offs. Stalin tries to work the same magic and thinks  

it's going to work for him and he doesn't get it. He becomes the menu item for Hitler  

and it just about wrecks him. But it works beautifully against Japan. 

It's just interesting to see. It makes  sense why he thought it would work. 

When he's getting information that the Germans are  lining up millions of men along this huge border,  

he says, "This is British disinformation." He uses the exact same logic when  

Japan is invading Manchuria, that the idea that  he had to fight Japan was British disinformation. 

Even though it was a mistake, it helps  us understand why he thought this way. 

There's another concept that's useful:  cooperative adversary. I've introduced  

this before. It doesn't mean the adversary  wants to cooperate with you, but they just  

don't play their cards particularly well. We're talking about China that has had all  

of those rebellions I told you about  and civil wars and regional wars. 

It doesn't have these strong  government institutions. 

It is much easier to script-write a place  like that, to have them do things that are  

antithetical to their interests. You’ve got  a cooperative adversary. The Chinese aren't  

trying to cooperate, but from a Russian point  of view they might be a cooperative adversary. 

Whereas with Hitler, Germany has  all kinds of institutions and  

all kinds of well-educated people. Hoodwinking Hitler is going to be  

much more difficult than whoever he's  dealing with in China in this period. 

An interesting connection to make between World  War II and this Russo-Chinese relationship is  

that the way that we used Russia—as this reservoir  of military men that we can just ship armaments  

to and they can do the dying for us—that’s similar  to how Russia uses China in the war against Japan. 

Well, they're not actually during  that war shipping that much to China,  

but at least during the Korean War. Korean War, yes. 

Interestingly, Russia is doing to  them the kind of alliance that we  

had with Russia during World War II. Think about today. It's like the Korean  

War in reverse because China's dribbling out aid  to Russia. Russia's getting wrecked by Ukraine.  

Russia's got three times the population or  something of Ukraine, but the death rate that  

it's suffering is really high. These are only  children. This is no longer the 10 children,  

six children, peasant families in Russia. Look at it from Xi Jinping’s perspective, the  

longer this goes on, the better. Just let Putin keep on working his  

magic and I get to sell him stuff. I'll get him to lower the prices of  

resources because the man's desperate. Putin will find himself under a  

Chinese yoke that he does not like. Then at some point the Russians will  

reassess and I don't think they'll like that. The Russians fancy themselves being Europeans  

and have a whole, I believe, racist  package that goes with the Chinese so  

that they won't like that whole situation. I don't know how long it takes them to  

do whatever they're going to do. A lot of things in foreign policy,  

you're not going to solve it. They're huge countries,  

there's no way you're going to solve it. But you need to figure out how to manage it,  

to have a blast shield so that whatever fallout  comes from their toxic, whatever they're doing, it  

minimizes how it hits your friends and partners. This is why you should be focusing on maximizing  

the economic growth of your friends  and partners, because that is the  

only effective way to deal with them. If you go it alone, who deals with a  

bully alone? Always gang up on them. Why would  you ever want to go alone against a bully? 

You'd want to go in with lots of friends. This is what the World War II generation did. 

The Marshall Plan, you could never get  something through like Congress now. 

Yet it's passed overwhelmingly in Congress  because people get it that you have to spend  

real money so the European economies recover. How are they gonna do it? Buying our stuff. It's  

a tremendous win-win. In strategy, you wanna  figure out win-win things instead of these  

zero-sum things where, "Oh, I invite you over,  I humiliate you, I feel good," and then you're  

mad forever. It's pointless. Great note to close on. 

Don't humiliate people. Be  kind to each other, yes. 

It's a good callback because I've been asking  you all these naive questions and you've  

been very kind to not humiliate me. Thank you all very much for coming. 

It is so fun to be able to do  these things with a live audience  

and not trapped inside a dark studio room. I hope we see you guys again on Friday  

when we're doing the lecture on the  proper way to do war termination. 

And next Tuesday is about why Russia lost the  Cold War. See you on Friday. Thank you, Sarah.