Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview)

I need to start with a disclaimer,  because I work for the US Government,  

and they require you to do a disclaimer. So:  the ideas that you're about to hear are my  

ideas. They don't necessarily represent those  of the US Government, the US Navy Department,  

the US Department of Defense, let alone the Naval  War College where I work. Are we all good on this? 

All right, so today I'm going to tell you  a story of three protagonists, Russia,  

the United States and China, that all wanted  to work their magic on India and Pakistan,  

which didn't exactly appreciate it. So two big topics. One is intervening in  

someone else's problems, a cottage industry for  the United States. And also before you do that,  

you really ought to check out the alignments.  Who's the primary adversary of whom? How long has  

it been that way? And also ask these questions  about all the neighbors and anyone who might  

want to crash the party along with you. It's also a story of a series of limited  

wars. What's a limited war? It means it's for  something less than regime change. So however  

it turns out the governments that started that  war are still in place. And two of them resulted  

in quick victories, the ideal in warfare.  The first one was the Sino-Indian War of  

1962. And the other one was the Bangladesh War  of Independence in 1971. And these wars change  

things in many short term expected ways and  then in many long term, highly unexpected ways. 

So I'm going to go into all of this with you all.  So here's my game plan, and it's literally a game  

plan. I'm going to start out with the pivotal  decisions made by different players. Then,  

once they're made, certain things are foreclosed  and certain things are possible. And this is the  

playing field delimited by these pivotal  decisions. And then I'm going to look at  

the teams. Some allies were prime allies, others  were subprime, and they mixed and matched over  

time. So I'll do teams, and then I'll do the  game, the interaction, and then at the end,  

I'm going to do the plays, some of the techniques,  things that you can do to play this game. 

Pivotal decision number one. When Mao  won the Chinese Civil War in 1949,  

it didn't end. He also spent the next two years  not only eliminating Nationalist remnants,  

but also conquering Xinjiang and Tibet. Tibet had  been autonomous since 1911, when the last dynasty  

had collapsed. And Mao decides that he is going  to reconquer Tibet. Tibet's an interesting place  

it contains, I think, about 40% of China's mineral  resources. So there's a lot of money being made in  

Tibet for those with the capital to invest in big  mines. If you look at this map, the Han Chinese,  

the preponderant group of China, they inhabit,  they dominate as far west as the Chongqing Basin  

and Sichuan. And then you go further west,  in-towards Tibet. China has put large armies  

into Tibet exactly twice. Once under the Qianlong  emperor in the late 18th century, they didn't stay  

for very long. And then under Mao in 1950. And  they have stayed forever and built roads so they  

could keep on sending more in. Between 1950 and  1957, China built a series of road systems through  

Tibet. And the western route there is the only one  that provides year round traffic. The problem with  

the other two is, well, check it out. They go  through 14 or 15 mountain ranges. It means you  

go vertical up, vertical down – do that 14, 15  times. And then between monsoon rains and snow  

and mudslides, they're very difficult to maintain.  And then the eastern one crosses the major river  

systems of South Asia. So that's difficult. So  only the western route is the really good one.  

And it's really important for the Chinese if you  want to conquer Tibet, you truly want that one. 

All right, so if you look at this, that western  route provides not only the ability to control  

Tibet, but it also provides a pincer onto  Xinjiang. If China wants to come in one  

way and the other way, it's a good way to get  in. If you look at those two circles there,  

those are the disputed areas between China and  India. The northern one is the Aksai Chin Plateau,  

which China has taken from India and India still  claims. And in the south is Arunachal Pradesh,  

which India still owns, but China claims. And  so these are the areas that they're fighting  

over. But once China took Tibet…Before, there had  been a big buffer zone between China and India,  

right? There's all this Tibet, and no one could  really get in there. Now China's built roads so  

it can get into places where India cannot  deploy troops until it gets into the road  

races with the Chinese. And so it reduces the  buffer zone between China and India to these  

small Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan and  Sikkim. So it changes things. So that's pivotal  

decision number one, deciding to conquer Tibet. Pivotal decision number two is the United States,  

in order to deal with the Soviet Unions under  Eisenhower, did what the wits back in the day  

called pactomania. What is that? It's forming all  sorts of bilateral relations and also regional  

groupings in order to counter the Soviets  institutionally and wall them in that way. And  

part of this was what was called the Northern  tier strategy, as seen in the Baghdad Pact,  

where you get Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan  to form this thing, and it's to wall off the  

Soviet Union from the oil fields of the Middle  East. East. And the other thing, you should look  

at this map before it goes away. Look where  Pakistan's located, where you think it is,  

and then go to the east, and that's East Pakistan.  In the 1971 war, there's going to be a civil war,  

and Pakistan's going to lose East Pakistan, which  is Bangladesh today. So just keep that in mind. 

So as part of the sweetener for Pakistan to join  the Baghdad Pact, the United States allied with  

Pakistan and gave them a big military aid treaty.  And here's Nehru, the Prime Minister of India,  

and he is horrified. A military pact between  Pakistan and the United States changes the  

whole balance of power in this part of the world,  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 era,  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. 

Okay, those are two pivotal decisions. Now for  a pivotal situation, it's really the devolving  

situation between Russia and China. Until Mao got  atomic weapons in 1964, he really had to shut up.  

And because he needed Russian technological aid,  he's been totally cut off from the West. After  

the Korean War, he's being isolated. So he truly  needs Soviet aid. And he also, if he wants nuclear  

weapons, he needs some of their aid to do that  as well. So he has to keep his mouth shut. But  

once he detonates an atomic weapon, here's what he  tells the Russians, and they just about lose it.  

There are too many places occupied by the Soviet  Union. The Russians took everything they could.  

We have not yet presented an account of this  list. Under the czars, 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 in the Korean War, he's more than happy to  

fight to the last Chinese. And then during the  Chinese Civil War, the Russians tell Mao, oh,  

stop, Yangtze, you need to take a little breather  here. Because he wants a divided China 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 de-Stalinization,  because Mao has his own cult of personality. And  

then Khrushchev wants to do peaceful coexistence  with the west, while Mao is ramping it up in the  

Cultural Revolution, so there's no meeting  of the minds. And then all this becomes very  

public when it hits the propaganda press of the  Communists, of the Sino-Soviet split in 1960. 

All right, the Russians have their own gripes  about the Chinese, and here's how they go. The  

Russians look around at the west and particularly  the United States and go, wow, they got bases  

everywhere. The British have got bases everywhere.  How come our allies won't give us bases? I mean,  

well, if you occupy Eastern Europe, the whole  place is a base, but that's a different matter.  

So the Russians want the Chinese to let them  keep a couple of remaining czarist treaty ports,  

essentially, and want 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, 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 lobbing all kinds of ordnance  

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,  

whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, there could be nuclear  follow-on 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,  well 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. And then  

what exacerbates these tensions is the Vietnam  War where China wants influence over 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 Vietnamese, North  Vietnamese. So Russia's aid needs to come by train  

over China, lest the United States sink at the  good stuff if it goes by sea. So the Chinese feel  

obliged to let it go through, but they're just  hassling Russians the whole time through. They  

take it apart, tear it apart, say it was from  China. And the Russians are just apoplectic.  

So their relations are getting worse and worse  and worse and the squabbling is just incessant. 

So it's not surprising that the Sino-Soviet border  conflict 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. 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. Nevermind.  

And the point, for my purposes tonight, I'm going  to use the word "alliance" really loosely. If you  

sign a mutual defense pact - for my purposes  tonight that makes you an alliance - 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. All right? 

So Stalin didn't think much of Nehru at all. He  thought he was a lackey of British colonialism.  

But Khrushchev thought India was really important  to counterbalance China. And here's Nehru thinking  

about it. Well, look, we have to be on friendly  terms with both Russia and America. But actually  

he felt much more in common with Russia.  Why? Because he favored Fabian socialist  

economic policies that were much more akin  to what's going on in Russia than it was in  

the United States. Moreover, the United States was  segregated, which appalled Nehru. And in addition,  

the United States was cozying up to all the  colonial powers. So Nehru thought the Russians  

were the better bet. While all this is going on,  the Indians were non-aligned and they treated  

the Chinese really generously. And I've got a  whole list of generosity. So India immediately  

recognizes China in 1950. Countries like the  United States didn't, for forever. And when the  

San Francisco Treaty, I think, is signed in 1951  in the United States, ending the war with Japan,  

India refuses to sign because China and Russia  aren't there to sign as well. And then to help  

China break out of its diplomatic isolation  at the end of the Korean War, India signs a  

friendship treaty with China. And as part of  that friendship treaty, it recognizes Chinese  

sovereignty over Tibet. Under international law,  contrary to what Vladimir Putin is doing lately,  

under international law, if you recognize  someone's sovereignty over territory that is  

permanent, you cannot back out of it legally under  international law. So the Chinese promise, I don't  

know, there's some like, peaceful coexistence  or whatever they're promising the Indians, but  

that has no permanence under international law,  whereas this thing does. And then from 1960 on,  

the Indians are voting to seat the People's  Republic of China, not Taiwan, on the UN. 

Meanwhile, in the background, all this  road-building is going on. Those roads  

are being built between 1950 and 1957.  And the Indians aren't going to figure  

out until 1958 that the roads are  there. Meanwhile, road's completed.  

The Chinese want to complete their control over  Tibet, and so they're going to send big armies up  

there. And Tibetan culture is much more…It's of  Indian origin, it's not Chinese origin. So this  

repression of Tibetan culture just appalls  the Indians. And then two days before the  

People's Liberation of Army is going to make  it into Lhasa, which is the capital of Tibet,  

the Dalai Lama flees-he's the spiritual leader  of Tibet-he flees to India where he's remained  

ever since to the absolute horror and anger of  China. So at about this time, the Chinese come  

to the Indians and say, “look, why don't we  do a swap on sovereignty?” You recognize our  

sovereignty over that Aksai Chin Plateau where  nobody lives, but it's really good for the roads,  

China's western route. And then we'll recognize  your sovereignty over this much more densely  

populated Arunachal Pradesh. And Nehru  doesn't want to hear anything about it. 

So during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Russia  is much too busy worrying about who's going to  

be lobbying nukes at home, this is when China  launches in the 1960s Sino-Indian War and China  

just takes the Aksai Chin Plateau. The Indians are  appalled because they don't have any roads to be  

able to deploy up there, whereas the Chinese do.  Their defeat is just total. And they can't believe  

the Chinese did this to them. Here's Nehru  afterwards. There are not many instances in  

history where one country, that is India, has gone  out of her way to be friendly and cooperative with  

the Chinese government and people and plead their  cause in the councils of the world. And then for  

the Chinese government to return evil for good and  even to go to the extent of committing aggression  

and invade our sacred land. Who does this? So  I get it. The Chinese get the territory they  

want. That was the goal of that war. But what they  have done is taken a country, India, which had its  

leadership terribly idealistic, not interested in  becoming militarized at all and making them angry  

forever. India immediately doubles the size of  its army within the next 10 years to up to 750,000  

people. Creates 10 mountain divisions useful  against China. And they've never ceased being  

so angry. And then if you think about this, what  if instead of playing this game this way, China  

and India had teamed up? I would suspect we would  be in a completely very different world order now,  

if that is what they'd done instead. But this is  China's decision, not India's fault on this one. 

All right, so that wasn't great. So let's check  out other possibilities once that happens to  

India. India is all of a sudden looking for  Russia to counterbalance China. And you also  

have Pakistan wondering what to do and what  the Pakistani notice after all this: well,  

the Chinese are not going to be teaming up with  India, right? They've just invaded the place. And  

so this is when Pakistan sees that China might  have real possibilities as an ally. And Bhutto  

is going to play the China card for the nuclear  chip, trying to get Chinese help for all of that.  

And here's what happens. So you have the '62 war,  and then in 1963, Pakistan really inexplicably is  

ceding territory to China. Who does that? And  there are various possibilities down here, but  

I'm surmising it's because it's going to help on  nuclear development. That would explain why you  

would give a lot of territory. But we don't know.  There was supposed to be some mutual defense pact  

maybe, and there's some other things going on.  Anyway, you can imagine what it may or may not  

have been. Okay, in the case of Pakistan and  China and India and Russia, they had quite a  

good relationship because the Pakistanis and the  Chinese shared India as their problem, and the  

Russians and the Indians shared China as their  problem. And that worked pretty well. But the  

United States was just a disaster from both Indian  and Pakistani point of view, and vice versa,  

because the United States wanted to befriend  both of them. But if you befriend one, the other  

is appalled. And so the United States wound up  appalling everybody. And so what the United States  

wanted to have happen is for India and Pakistan  to put aside their differences and then combine  

against China and stop communism from spreading.  India and Pakistan want to use the United States  

for maximum aid to use against the other, which  is a non-starter for the United States. And then  

Pakistan really would like it if the United States  would be nice with China as well, because Pakistan  

wants to have good relations with the United  States and China. And that's a non-starter  

for the United States until 1971, when there are  secret visits and things going on. It's later on.  

Okay, so in 1962, India gets trounced in this  war with China. They look like they're militarily  

feckless. And then in 1964, Nehru dies, right?  He'd been the head of India since independence in  

1947. He'd been there a long time, so he's dead.  So 1965, if you're Pakistani, it looks like a good  

year to settle border problems. And so what they  do is first they invade through the south, if you  

look way down at the bottom there, the Rana Kuch,  and that seems to go pretty well. And then they  

decide they want to go for the thing they really  care about, which is Kashmir, and they do that  

well, the enemy gets the vote. And the Indians  invaded straight through Lahore, which isn't  

remotely what the Pakistanis had in mind. And then  the United States does a double arms embargo on  

both of them for doing this. And the problem is  the Pakistanis are much more dependent on U.S.  

military aid. The Indians were more diversified,  so they just didn't have enough spare parts to  

continue this thing. So it's a very unhappy event  for them. They lose it, and what happens, neither  

the United States nor Russia wants either one of  them fighting that war. The Russians are thinking,  

we want the military aid to go to India in order  to counterbalance China, not to decimate the  

Pakistanis. And the United States doesn't want it  either. So the United States is very happy that  

the Soviets broker the Tashkent Declaration that  ends this war. But Pakistan is worse off after  

this thing. And India has restored its reputation  for knowing what it's doing on the battlefield. 

So for Pakistan, the United States is really  problematic because we're interested in being  

nice to them when we want something out of  them, and then we're not so interested when  

we don't want something out of them because we  don't share a primary enemy. So what we really  

wanted were listening bases. The technology of  the day was such that if you want to surveil  

the Soviet Union, you want to send these  big U2 planes over and given their ranges,  

and you're not supposed to be doing it. And so  we had U2 bases, I think Norway, West Germany,  

Turkey, Pakistan, and then Japan. And in addition,  we had a listening base at Badaber. And these are  

really important things for us during this period.  So we're paying the Pakistanis a lot of money to  

get it. And except there was one of these U2  planes, gets shot down over the Soviet Union.  

They finally get it so they can. Because they  fly at really high altitudes, [but] they shoot  

it down. And Khrushchev is furious. He hauls in  the Pakistani ambassador in Moscow and he goes,  

where is this place Peshawar? We've circled  it on the map, and we're going to blow it  

off the map if you all don't wise up. And the  Pakistani is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 

And so between these sort of threats in 1960 about  the U2 and then the United States freezing arms in  

the 1965 war, which the Pakistanis believe they  lost it over that. Oh, yeah, and by the way,  

in that 1965 war the United States had, when we  provided arms to everybody, we said, oh, we will  

guarantee that no one uses it, that Pakistanis  and Indians don't use it against each other. And  

of course, we could do nothing about that. And in  the 1965 war, the Pakistanis are using US tanks to  

go after Indians in the largest tank war battle  since World War II. So there are a lot of upset  

people in South Asia. But here is Ayub Khan,  leader of Pakistan, telling the United States  

that the United States forgets that our security  hazards and political liabilities have increased  

to a dangerous level due to this U2 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. Dream on. So when the lease  came up for the listening post at Badaber in 1968,  

the Pakistanis canceled it. They're sick of it. Meanwhile, the Indians weren't too thrilled  

about the United States either. This is earlier  when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president:  

here's Mahatma Gandhi telling him allied support  for freedom and democracy seems hollow so long as  

America has the Negro problem in her own home.  Indians were appalled by segregation. They knew  

exactly which end of the bus they'd be sitting  on. So there are issues both ways. And in fact,  

Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi found the  United States really impossible to work with. And  

they looked at capitalism as the way station to  imperialism and fascism, whereas Americans looked  

at socialism as the way station to communism.  So there's no meeting of minds on all of this.  

And so if you look at the alignments of  primary adversaries India and Pakistan,  

from most of the time our primary adversaries:  India is always Pakistan's primary enemy. But you  

could argue that with the ‘62 war, is it Pakistan  or is it China who is the primary adversary of  

India? And then when you get to the 1971 war,  which I'll discuss a little more in a second,  

where Bangladesh is broken off and then Pakistan  is left, has less than half the population,  

then you could argue that for India, China is the  primary adversary. And then if you look at that  

reshuffling, if you also look at the 1969 war,  that reshuffles the nuclear powers. So formerly  

Russia and China had shared the United States  as their primary enemy. But after the ‘69 war,  

they're each other's primary enemy. And this  gives the United States the swing position of  

team up with A or team up with B. And the United  States teamed up with China to overextend Russia  

in the Cold War, because I had always felt that  the Soviets were the bigger threat in those days. 

So anyway, as you're looking at alignments, you  can apply this kind of framework to any country on  

the planet to try to figure out what's going on.  And think about how alliances work. If I look at  

The World War II Allies, probably one of the most  effective alliances in world history, if you think  

about what people ultimately want, the British  want an empire in which the sun never sets,  

the United States wants to decolonize everybody,  and Joe Stalin wants a communist wonderland. Those  

are mutually exclusive. But to get there you have  to go through the common way station of getting  

rid of Hitler. So the common existential threat  can be a superglue of the most unlikely partners. 

But let's look at the Axis. What they want at  the end of the war are series of influence in  

different parts of the world. So for Italy, it's  empire in the Mediterranean, Japan in the Pacific,  

and then Hitler, it's all over Eurasia. That's not  mutually exclusive. But if you look who they're  

the primary enemy, who stands in the way of those  plans, it's Britain for Italy, it's Russia, for  

the Germans and for the Japanese, it's first China  and then the United States. None of it aligns. So  

they fight parallel wars and allow the allies  to, to take them out in detail. So when you're  

thinking about alliances in the world today, when  you're wondering what's going on with Iran or  

whatever, figure out who's their real primary  enemy, get it straight. Does that primary enemy,  

is that an existential threat for them? So if  you've got countries that line up on same primary  

enemy, existential threat for all around, the most  unlikely people will cooperate. On the other hand,  

people who are very likely to cooperate,  maybe like the fascists, they all shared this  

basic ideology. But if they don't have the same  primary enemy and the same theater of interest,  

geographically the same theater, they may  not cooperate very well at all. So you  

can apply this to anything you want to apply to. So back to my game here. If you're looking at the  

cards people have to play. The United States has  lousy cards because we don't share primary enemies  

with anybody. So it's a stalemate. You help India,  the Pakistanis hate you. You help Pakistanis,  

the Indians hate you, it's no win. But if you look  at India, India and Russia share a China problem.  

That's good, they can cooperate on that. And then  you have Pakistan and China, they share an India  

problem. They can make things happen over that.  So there are cards for them to play and 0 for the  

United States to play. It's just the way it is.  So the name of the game and strategy is to get  

the outcome that you want to have happen. And it's  like, how do you play this game of five person,  

five country cutthroat billiards to get remotely  what you want out of it? So for the English majors  

among you, I have a metaphor. For the rest of  you, you can just 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 put the same ball  

in the same pocket. And so if that's the case,  there's going to be no enduring cooperation. And  

understand that you want to have your goal is  going to be the ultimate shot you want to take.  

But as you're taking the intervening shots, people  are going to try to disrupt it. How on earth do  

you get through this game? So this is what the  next section is all about. So if you look at  

this map and where Pakistan's located, it's this  very strategic location right in the center of,  

not quite center, but of Eurasia, the  center of the Soviet boundary there. 

And I'm going to give you a map. This is from  Halford Mackinder. He's one of the finest, most  

famous people to publish on geopolitics. This is  his 1904 map. It's actually quite famous. And he  

talked about how Russia occupies the heartland.  In his day it was all these railway systems. He  

thought that was the prime piece of real estate in  the world. And then it's surrounded by this inner  

marginal crescent. You look where Pakistan's  located, it's right in the center there,  

right up by Russia. And it's a really crucial  location before satellite imagery is available,  

to put listening posts on Russia. Russia's  huge. 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 pre-satellite-imagery, we really wanted to  cozy up to the Pakistanis. So we have U2 bases  

but then there are technology changes. And before  we get facilities in Iran, we want this listening  

post in Badaber. 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 the Pakistanis in their territory,  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. So if you look at after the United States  

having trouble negotiating all this so that  whatever you do in the short term doesn't  

wreck you in the long term. But in order to get  to the long term, of course, you've got to go  

through the short term. So after the U2 crash in  Russia, where it gets shot down and the Pakistanis  

are having a heart attack about that, that's  when the Pakistanis look to cultivating more,  

better relations with China because the 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 that coincides  

with the 1971 Bangladeshi War for independence. So let me explain what that is to you. So Pakistan  

was holding presidential elections. The dominant  ethnic group in Pakistan are Punjabis, sometimes  

the Sindhis, like the 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,  there's this massive humanitarian crisis in the  

United States. Got nothing to say. The United  States has Something to say about everything. But  

it had to do with,this is the moment that Nixon is  trying to get himself invited to Beijing so that  

he can talk to Mao about cooperating. With the  Soviets. No, 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 and going, what on earth is going  

on? So you have Nixon's doing the mediation in  the background. We got refugees flying all over  

the place. India comes to the United States  and says, look, you need to tell the Chinese  

not to intervene in this thing. And not only  did we not do that. Oh, 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, this  mess. 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 non-aligned and align with the West.  Well, they cease being non-aligned, all right.  

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 Indians.  

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. Total mess. Meanwhile. But for Pakistan, as all this is  

going on, the Shah of Iran falls in, I think  it's like 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 when outgoing  

President Jimmy Carter offers them, I don't  know, $400 million or something, this is Zia  

here going peanuts to the peanut farmer. And the  incoming Reagan administration then ups it to $3.2  

billion and that money gets funneled through the  Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. That's  

like, I don't know – the CIA+++ of 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 get 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, the ISI is also taking some of that  

money and putting it into Kashmir which is going  to have real problems for India later on. So there  

are real ramifications for all of this of needing  Pakistan. But actually what is happening anyway.  

And then, throughout, there is the Pakistanis  are getting closer and closer to building  

the bomb. So when the Russians go piling into  Afghanistan, here's Zbigniew Brzezinski Carter  

national security advisor telling him our security  policy cannot be dictated by our non proliferation  

policy. Really? I thought that was our security  policy. And the problem with proliferation is it  

tends to be a one way street whereas Afghanistan  has been anything but. And then here Deng Xiaoping  

was in town and he told Carter, we applaud your  decision to basically toss all these proliferation  

human rights considerations for Pakistan and  just arm them. No kidding. Because the Chinese  

are providing the nuclear spare parts. So the  United States isn't the only country to have  

trouble navigating this cutthroat billiards.  The Pakistanis have their share of boomerangs. 

Just look how the wars work. So wars create  incredible costs. So the 1965 war, the Pakistanis  

get exactly nothing. And the United States,  Pakistan had been the largest aid recipient  

of the. I'm not sure if I got that right. But  anyway they're a huge aid recipient from the  

United States. Well after this war were not so  interested. So that's a lot of money down the  

tubes. And then in 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 is  when Pakistan tries to again go below the line  

of control in Kashmir to try to take some more of  Kashmir back. Pakistan has to cross right back and  

then it gets sanctioned for all of this. So none  of these wars have actually worked out very well  

for Pakistan. And then if you think about it,  India and Pakistan are natural trade partners. 

So if you take all these wars and just add up all  the costs and then think of the opportunity costs  

if Pakistan had been able to take this money  and spend it on road systems, on education,  

and then all the lost trade, it gives you a  sense of the real cost of all of this. Okay,  

well those are Pakistan's Problems. India has  its own problems. Here you've got Indira Gandhi  

and Richard Nixon, they really didn't like  each other. I mean look at her, she looks as  

if she's just been fed bad fish and he looks like  he served it up. And they just, they cannot abide  

by each other. So in the 1940s when Kashmir  is erupting, Indira Gandhi thinks – well no,  

it's Nehru – her dad thinks that the United States  should be supporting India because it's secular  

and it's a democracy. And the United States is  appalled during the Korean War when India remains  

non-aligned instead of supporting the United  States because it's secular and democratic.  

And the Pakistanis are totally outraged  because they're looking at this go, okay,  

these Indians are non-aligned. We're aligned.  We're taking these risks for Peshawar and stuff  

with the U2s 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 devoted  advisor Krishna Menon and his daughter Indira  

Gandhi were really good at making these totally  insulting remarks to American VIPs. Okay, it hits  

the target without a doubt, but the ego that  has just been hit is huge and like an elephant  

is not about to forget. And meanwhile Pakistan  in contrast is just being this welcoming host. 

So the United States is going “ugh India and  Pakistan”. 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. 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 enemy forever. And as opposed  

to teaming up with them, if they teamed up, they  actually would have had incredible leverage for  

what the global order is going to look like.  But that's just not to be. And moreover,  

if you look at the 1971 war, after the United  States won't help with China, India's going,  

okay, I think we need nuclear weapons because then  we'll be able to protect ourselves against China.  

And after that war, when Pakistan'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”.  So there's 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, Subrahmanyam, 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: in East Pakistan  over. The interaction for Russia works a little  

better. For Russia and India, it's really quite  a good relationship. What Russia offers to India,  

not only military and economic aid, but also very  useful vetoes on the UN Security Council. India  

does not want plebiscites in Kashmir that it might  lose, so it gets the Soviet Union to veto those  

things. So there are no plebiscites. And then  as India is trouncing Pakistan in the 1970 war,  

starting 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. And 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. 

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. One of the things you can do is  help negotiate a really useful treaty, which the  

United States did. It brokered this Indus Waters  Treaty of 1960. It's the only time 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. And 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, it's been operating some  

of these dams ever since to the enormous benefit  of both countries. Does the United States get  

any enduring gratitude from either one for doing  this? No. Zip. Okay, next one is the United States  

tried to exercise diplomacy and to convince the  Pakistanis and Indians to settle their differences  

and it was a total flop. And because if you're  going to try to befriend both India and Pakistan,  

you wind up becoming the enemy of one or the  other. And the United States diplomacy was based  

on certain false assumptions, which are one, that  India and Pakistan could be cajoled into settling  

their differences. And their idea is, anyone  who's so stupid as to think that is crazy. And  

if you're going, well, what are the origins of  these differences? Partition was brutal. So the  

British colonized the Indian subcontinent and then  they left in 1947 and they left really rapidly so  

that there was no time to set up any institutional  framework. And also, you're talking millions of  

people. 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 non-aligned 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 communists.  

Wrong. India and Pakistan are really astute and  they get lots of aid from everybody. So when the  

great powers do align, Russia, China, us, or at  least two of those align, then you can actually  

get stuff done. So that's when you get the  Tashkent Agreement for the 1965 war. This is: the  

United States and Russia both want India and  Pakistan to cease and desist and stop blowing  

each other off the map. And also in the Kargil  conflict, when Pakistan is yet again trying to  

resolve Kashmir by invading and then gets itself  into trouble. And this guy Nawaz Sharif, who is  

the head of Pakistan, he all of a sudden ups and  gets on a plane with his family. It looks like  

he's coming into exile and he's trying to fly into  the United States. And the United States goes,  

whoa, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you think  you're doing? And says, you're not coming in here  

until you admit that you crossed the line of  control. And then you need to get right back.  

And so he agrees to sign the Washington agreement  to go right back. But it's absolutely humiliating  

for the Pakistanis to go, oh, yeah, we went  south of the line of control. And then, well,  

that didn't work out. So now we have to go right  back. He had gone to China already and pleaded his  

case to the Chinese, and they told him to get  right back because there was a lot of nuclear  

saber-rattling going on, and the Chinese were  not interested in a nuclear war over this. So  

Pakistan had the choice of, okay, fight India by  your lonesome or cross back. So they crossed back. 

And there were other cases in the inter-Cold-War  period when the great powers cooperated and tamped  

things down, like terrorist incidents in New  Delhi and in Mumbai that didn't go anywhere  

because the great powers told the Indians  and the Pakistanis to just dial it back.  

All right? Another thing you can do is to publicly  support someone. And this is what goes on with  

Goa, which is a Portuguese colony. The Indians  wanted it back. The Portuguese said, no way, you  

cannot have it back. And the Indians took it back.  And the United States supported Portugal. Why?  

It's a NATO ally and we have very important bases  in Portugal. So we kept the bases, but we made the  

Indians really angry. And there are other areas of  public support or not criticizing people publicly.  

For instance, when the. In the. 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 then 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. You can also  

put money where your mouth is. Economic aid. And  it's interesting, the United States provided far  

more economic aid than either the Russians or the  Chinese, but still, both Pakistanis and Indians  

preferred China and Russia respectively. And some  of this aid was really important. During the Bihar  

famine in 1967, the United States sent 20% of its  wheat crop to India. It was worth $1.5 billion.  

That's not something to be sneezed at for, I  don't know, was it 90 million people? It's a  

lot of people who might have starved to death. And that didn't work out well at all because  

Johnson, at that point, President Johnson at  that point was so mad at the Indians because  

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 that 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 advisor, saying, look, we  want to encourage a little competition between the  

donors. And they did. And India just. Even Indira  Gandhi, who hates Nixon, she's racking up the aid. 

And back in the Eisenhower administration, the  United States had noticed. Secretary of State  

John Foster Dulles is 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. 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 Inter Services Intelligence Directorate,  which is the Pakistanis then are funding things  

to get the Russians out of Afghanistan, they're  also diverting it into Kashmir. So in 1989 this  

insurgency heats up and it's remained heated ever  since. And then you wind up with China providing  

nuclear help to the Pakistanis. So it's difficult  with these things. You get a short term thing,  

but then the long term thing that winds  up may not be what you want at all. 

The other instrument of national power, if you  got one, is the carrier battle group. You can  

send one of those around, which is what the United  States did. Here's Enterprise. It was the United  

States’ first nuclear propelled aircraft carrier.  And so during the ‘71 war, the United States sent  

this into the Bay of Bengal, the Russians sent  some naval assets, had no effect on that war:  

Pakistan lost. Right. The Indians were furious.  They just regarded this as an absolute threat.  

And how dare we do this anyway? And maybe it  would have been better to have left Enterprise  

in their home port rather than doing this. And then of course there's sanctions and  

embargoes. The United States does this all the  time. And if you look at the list of the times  

we're embargoing stuff. So at partition we're  embargoing everybody. And then during the ‘65  

war we're embargoing everybody. And then as  various people are making nuclear progress and  

different things, there are these embargoes that  come and go. And Pakistan's really mad because  

India does a test, an atomic test in 1974 and  Pakistan doesn't do anything until much later.  

And it's looking 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 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. So another instrument of national power  

is you can trade off your territory if  you really want to. Most people don't,  

but the Pakistanis clearly did that in 1963. And  we can all speculate on what they got. I mean,  

my hunch would be something to do with nuclear  things, but hey, it's not as if this information  

is out there in the public. It isn't. Oh, another thing you can do is go  

fund the insurgency. So you can. And this is  done by the United States, Russia, China, India,  

Pakistan. Think if you've got a country that you  don't like that has some minority people that  

want to secede and so they're fighting there,  well, you can go fund that insurgency and then  

the one you don't like is pinned, because they're  going to be paying attention to that insurgency.  

And while they're pinned there, they can't  probably do things elsewhere that you might  

care about. So this is the logic of what's going  on. So the United States belatedly decided, ah,  

let's help the Tibetans. And so the CIA is helping  them between ‘57 and ‘61. But look at the dates we  

did the road system. The road system in Tibet'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, let's see, the Mizos, the Manapuri and the  

Naga people all don't like different aspects of  Indian rule. And the Chinese are more than happy  

to stir that pot. And the really big pot to  stir are the Naxalites. It's huge. And while  

as long as the Pakistanis have got East Pakistan,  they can stir some of that up. And by the way,  

these Naxalites are still there in India.  They have not gone away. It's a serious  

part of India where they are. And then, of  course, Pakistan's location right next to  

Kashmir means they can stir that forever. And the tragedy of these, what they  

become are frozen conflicts. Is the outside  power. if they are playing their cards right,  

their amoral 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.  You're just having warfare where you live.  

What a total disaster. So that's how it works. … two can play at this game. So the Indians,  

according to the Pakistanis, have funded the  Baloch people. They straddle Iran and Pakistan,  

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,  

so you fund that thing. And then what's great from  China's point of view, if Pakistan is doing that  

India is frozen, that it can't do other things  because it's constantly paying attention to what's  

going on in Kashmir as opposed to going “hmmm  China, I don't know about this”. Or in the Korean  

War back in the day, if things are all stirred  up in Korea, China has to really pay attention  

to that. And it delays the rise of China. And in  those days that benefited Russia. But these things  

can change over time as to who the beneficiary  is. And then you can play this game and think  

about how it works in Palestine. And I'm no expert  in that part of the world, but I think this frozen  

conflict veto player 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. 

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,  

I got more information, I've changed my mind.  Good thing, don't double down on bad information.  

And then if you're looking into areas of the world  that are ethnically diverse where people have been  

at odds for a long time, expect veto players and  real difficulty in settling that matter out. And  

part of good strategy is recognizing some problems  it's not feasible to solve. And then we all have  

scarce resources. 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 is even better than that. That,  

sure there are a few big powers, but the small  and medium powers, if you add them all up,  

are by 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. So that is what I had to say  to you this evening and thank you for listening. 

Q&A So it seems like the lesson from this lecture,  

the big lesson, is we couldn't be allies with both  Pakistan and India at the same time. We had to  

choose one. So which one should we have chosen? 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. While you need them, you pay a lot of money  

to them, and presumably the money's worth it for  them for the hassles of dealing with a difficult  

tenant. So that's how it worked. But nowadays,  the relationship with India is changing. In fact,  

it has changed because their big buddy Russia is.  Well, after the end of the Cold War, instead of  

being the big friend, it was the big nuisance,  not so much for India, but for everybody else.  

And now for India, its primary adversary is China,  without a doubt. And the United States, I think,  

is looking at China poses the primary threat. And  to the extent that both of them see it that way,  

that will make them align and Pakistan less so. It sounds like at the time it was right to choose  

Pakistan as the main ally for the United States. Well, we tried to choose India too, but yeah,  

we tried to do them simultaneously, but  India's further south, right. And so for  

a long time before we got satellite imagery,  you want to have listening posts and things  

up in Pakistan. So India just simply doesn't  have the location for that. So that was the  

original reason for interest in Pakistan. I want to better understand why the Soviet  

Union was such a charismatic example for  countries that were decolonizing like India. 

Well, 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 butchery of it. So you're telling young men  

your age “go” – 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 so, and then you have the  Great Depression afterwards and then add to it,  

India's been colonized by a bunch of really  opinionated white people, right? And transferring  

a lot of wealth out of India to England. And so you look at Marxism and boy,  

it sounds plausible, right? It sounds like  these evil capitalists, they're just wasting  

lives. And surely this is the explanation. Now  the technicalities of Marx's labor theory of  

value don't actually turn out to be accurate.  It's not just labor that produces value like  

Silicon Valley, you understand, it's what comes up  here that 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 seamy sides of some democracies  that aren't doing that well. And then to the  

public, the PR thing that the dictatorships  are presenting. So you can picture Nehru  

of his generation, he's sick of the 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. 

One thing I was thinking about while you were  mentioning the Gandhi and Nehru had a big problem  

with American segregation is at the same time in  the ‘50s, by that point over 10% of the Soviet  

population had at some point been in the gulags  or are currently in the gulags. And segregation  

is very bad, Gulags are even worse. And it's  the same proportion of the population that's  

been in the gulags. Maybe people just  didn't know about the gulags back then. 

I don't think communists let you know those  things. Right. This is one for a lot of  

Russians because my husband and I were in the  Soviet Union in the 1988/89 academic year and  

that's early Gorbachev before everything totally  falls apart and there's no food. So there was,  

there wasn't much food, but there was some  food. And it was just as the Russians were  

suddenly being able to read in fairly free press  about the things that had happened. And they were  

appalled about what had gone on under Stalin  and they just hadn't realized all of it. 

One of the reasons that socialism was appealing  to these decolonizing countries was because in  

the preceding decades, from the ‘20s to ‘40s,  the Soviet Union actually had pretty good growth  

rates. In those 20 years, their GDP went from 8%  to 18% of world production. Was that just catch-up  

growth? What was going on by the time Russia did? Well, there was tremendous rebuilding after World  

War II. There's another piece. It was so weird  when we were in Russia in 88, 89, anything that  

was sold at the markets that came from somewhere  else, they would market means imported. So the  

idea, and I remember thinking this is really weird  because normally you would say it's, I don't know,  

Hungarian this and that or whatever. I thought,  ooh, this means that anything from somewhere else  

is better than what we got, that it's a really bad  sign. And they had 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 donut. The rich places  are places like Czechoslovakia and Poland had  

been much richer places. And so the Russians  – 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 enserfed Eastern  Europe, why it was such a mess for Russia,  

they did not realize, and they still don't realize  the degree to which they were living off the  

wealth, product produced in the west, the European  portions of Russia that since became independent. 

Who was the last Soviet leader  who truly believed in communism? 

Gorbachev was a true believer. He did not  believe it was possible to take a U turn  

on the road to communism, so that when he was  doing his reforms, it was to improve communism,  

make it better. So he absolutely believed in it. When you started your career in Soviet studies and  

you're trying to figure out like what's  going on in the Kremlin all the time,  

what is it? What is the key to figuring  out Kremlinology? What is the key to  

figuring out what's happening in the Politburo? Well, what I did for my doctoral dissertation,  

so I wrote a history of the Sino. Well, the  Russo-Chinese border, when it was figured out,  

which is between 1858 and 1924, this is when all  this territory went. And what I did is. So most of  

this isn't Soviet, right? It's 17 to 24 is the  Soviet part. But you go to archives in Russia,  

you see what they'll let you see. This is when  you could go to those archives. They're closed  

now. And I went to Beijing, saw the archives  you were allowed to see. And then in Nanjing,  

there were some other ones there. And then in  Taiwan, the ones they would allow you to see,  

and then Japan, the ones they would allow you to  see. And they're all lying about different things  

or covering up different things. So it's a jigsaw  puzzle. You put it together that way. So that was  

how I did it. And also for the whole Kremlinology  is pay attention to what dictators say because  

they've got to communicate at some level to their  own populations. They quite often tell you exactly  

what they want to do and you think that's insane.  Who would do that? Well, hello. Hello. Right,  

so read what they have to say and read what others  have to say. Then you need to read things in the  

Russian language. So I just, I read a lot of  things. Just read broadly, read more broadly,  

than whatever your topic is, because it's the  unknown unknowns is what you're after. What are  

the things that are truly important and you have  no idea about? And the only way you get to those  

is archives or reading broadly where you bump  into things. Ooh, that turns out to be important. 

When you were giving the lecture, it seemed like  these primary adversaries, whoever it is, is  

like very permanent. And there's some, like, deep  reason why it has to be this way. But if you look  

at the Sino Soviet split, it's just like they're  both Communist, they're both Leninist parties,  

and they have this falling out over. There were a  couple of things you mentioned, but it's not clear  

why somebody has to be somebody else's primary  adversary or why you can't turn that around. 

Well, you can, but Russia and China have these  territorial differences and the issues I listed  

there of fighting to the last Chinese in the  Korean War, Mao didn't really like that. There are  

a lot of Chinese who die in the Korean War where  the Russians sort of get them in there and then  

you're stuck. You have to, for prestige reasons,  stay there. And the really big one I didn't  

discuss in any detail. So Stalin's really worried  about a two front war. Nazis in the west and  

Japanese in the east. And so he brokers the second  United Front between the Chinese Nationalist under  

Chiang Kai Shek and the Chinese Communists under  Mao at a place called Xi'an in late 1930. Wait,  

is it 36? And so it's called the Xi'an Incident  where Chiang Kai Shek was reputedly kidnapped  

and up there. But really what's going on is it's  setting up the second United Front. And then the  

Japanese go ballistic and that's when they invade  all the way down the coast and up the Yangtze  

River. And that means the Chinese are fighting the  Japanese for you. The Japanese are not going to  

launch into Siberia. So that works for Stalin. But  the Chinese realize this and it's not appreciated. 

Yeah, but then they helped the  Communists get into power in China,  

right? You think they'd be grateful for that? No, no, he wanted to divide China. He's telling  

Mao, oh, stop at the Yangzi stock  at the Yang. You need a breathing  

space there. And Mao's and keeps on going. If you're the president, if you're the Secretary  

of State and you're looking at this, where there's  these interweaving systems of alliances and you  

give some guy aid because you need something  and pisses everybody else off, how the Hell are  

you supposed to keep track of this? Do they have  these matrices that you got up there? And they're… 

We have so many wonderful people working  in the State Department. I've met a number  

of them because they come, they're students  at the War College. You should be proud of  

all the people who work for the Department of  State. They're all of these different experts,  

different parts of the world. They get sent around  hither and yon, very thoughtful people. Also I've  

read in the archives many CIA reports because  I've gone to these presidential archives starting  

with the Truman administration all the way up to  Bush Senior. As you get to the more recent stuff,  

less of it's been declassified. So the…I've read  most of the CIA reports I've read are for earlier  

periods where they've been declassified. It's  impressive the level of analysis. And I know that  

the CIA has several…there's the analytical part  of it and then there's the send people out to do,  

we aren't even going to talk about what  they're, which is completely different.  

But they're very fine analysts. And then we have  like the Department of Agriculture has very fine  

analysts about agriculture, the whole world. So  we have a tremendous amount of expertise. And  

the other thing that presidents get and  also the high level bureaucrats get are  

these daily reports where they're very short  because they have to be about what's going on  

everywhere in the world that people think  is important for them to know. So there  

are a tremendous number of smart, well educated  people trying to get information to presidents,  

secretaries of states and things. And then you  have all these regional desks where there's I  

don't know, I can't remember exactly. I don't know  the organization chart of the State Department.  

But you can look at it by region of the world.  People work there and, and provide this. So there  

are wonderful experts that are working on this. You mentioned in the lecture that if China and  

India had figured out a way to work together,  the world order could have looked completely  

different. Spell out the counterfactual  for us. How would it have been different? 

So I spent the grand total of a week in India. It  was a trip on the way back from Australia and that  

was the amount of time we had. But we went into  the Mahatma Gandhi Museum in New Delhi and there's  

a whole piece of it where Chiang Kai-shek  is giving him things. And it became really  

clear that Chiang Kai-shek had a really good  relationship with India. Deep respect for India.  

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. And so I think  

if you get Chiang Kai-shek winning the Chinese  civil war and things, you might have had them team  

up and had a much more productive relationship. That's interesting because often you think of like  

when you hear Nationalists, you think they're the  ones that are interested in territorial disputes,  

but in fact, you know, they wouldn't  have cared about Tibet or something. 

Well, next time you're in New Delhi, go check out  the museum. But when I was there it was like 20  

years ago, but I remember being impressed,  wow, there's all. And then when Gandhi was  

assassinated, this is Mahatma, not the Indira  who's also assassinated. No relations. That  

the Chinese, the nationalists sense all sorts  of condolences and different things. So yeah,  

there could have been a different outcome. I wonder if the worst thing about the Non-Aligned  

Movement was that because they wouldn't  fall under anyone else's nuclear umbrella,  

they wouldn't align with the great power that  had nukes. In order to keep up deterrence,  

they had to build nukes themselves. And so  then you have this nuclear proliferation and  

that was like it's really important to get people  allied with one great power, even if it's not you,  

just to prevent the nukes from going wide. I think the 1962 war made Nehru realize that  

non-alignment was a non-starter. And that's for  the reasons you're talking about. It's like, okay,  

we just got eaten alive by the Chinese. Okay, we  need a big friend, and we probably need some big  

missiles eventually. And it's not immediately.  The Indians don't come around that “we absolutely  

need nuclear weapons” until the Bangladesh  war when China's become more of a threat. 

By 1971 like did Nehru really think that the  Soviet Union might still win the Cold War? 

Nehru's dead in like ‘64, so it's his daughter. When did they become allies with the Soviet Union? 

Well, the official alliance, I'm just  defining, I made up what an alliance  

is. So I would say it is the security  pact that Indira Gandhi signs in 1971. 

Right. So at that point, did they really  thought the Soviet Union could have won  

the Cold War? Like, why didn't they  just choose the winner in retrospect? 

Oh, well, I remember the Cold War vividly. We  felt we were losing it most of the way through. 

And why is that? Well, we always felt –  

because of the propaganda, right? – that “they're  all living beautifully”. And then they're quite  

good, they're very good at propaganda. So the  United States had massive racial problems. Think  

about the 1960s. Martin Luther King are pointing  out hideous problems with this country. Civil  

rights demonstrations everywhere, anti Vietnam War  demonstrations everywhere. The women's movement,  

the environmental movement. There are loads of  unhappy people pointing out all of these problems,  

which is a good thing because then the United  States starts working on fixing some of these  

problems. Of course they're not fixed, but there's  improvement on them. Whereas in Russia, no one can  

travel, so you can't see how unbelievably poor  they are. And so you go to Moscow and you think,  

well, this is a plausible city. Well, there is  only one plausible city in the place. Or maybe  

it's two. Saying Petersburg. Well, it's Leningrad  in those days. So people didn't realize. But yeah,  

we felt we were losing the Cold War. In fact, at  the very end of the Cold War, because I was in the  

Bush archives. So Gorbachev's in and Bush, Reagan,  and then Bush are thinking, well, he just looks  

like another one of these people and we're not  going to take the propaganda seriously. And then  

they sort of go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then  it's in 88 where Bush is going, whoa, maybe it is  

going to end. And then the United States teams  up with Helmut Kohl of Germany to do the fastest  

get the Russians out of Eastern Europe ever. But  Gorbachev is the one who wants to cooperate with  

the West. One thing you should know about warfare,  you think the winners win it. No, actually,  

it's when the losers decide they've had enough.  That's when a war ends. Otherwise it doesn't end.  

So the Russians got sick of it and they quit. I wonder if there's a lesson in here for what  

people call the “Cold War with China” today, where  people think it's really competitive, China might  

have a bigger economy than us soon. And really,  if you actually got to see what's happening day  

to day in China, maybe you might decide, like the  Soviet Union, there's a bunch of things broken  

with it. They're not really competitive in the  long run economically. And so we're going to win. 

Well, I don't know, win, lose. But they have a  very low per capita standard of living. Do the  

math. You go, yeah, they've got a big economy  because they're, they're not a third of the  

world's population now, but it's, it's huge.  And divide the 1.3 billion, whatever it is,  

you come up with a low number for per capita  standard of living. And I think for human beings,  

that's the number that matters, right.  Of what is your family income look like?  

So they got a long way to go on that one. I want to go back to Kissinger in 1971. So  

because they want somebody to like, send the  message along to China to open up, they shut  

up about Pakistan's genocide. In Bangladesh, where  numbers vary, but somewhere between 300,000 and 3  

million people died. It's awful. 

Hundreds of thousands of people were  raped. I know they didn't have email  

back when there was no other way to get the  message across. You have to abet a genocide  

in order to get a message across to Mao. Well, first of all, the Cold War is a  

misnomer because the bloodshed in the third world  was horrendous. And I will eventually compile the  

stats on this. Not that they're great stats, but  it's obscene numbers. I think Congo had a civil  

war where literally over 10 million people died.  And that's only just one of these things. So the  

United States cannot deal with all of these.  And if you think about it, the time when the  

United States was really quite idealistic,  the Iraq war, goes in, they create democracy  

in this place. It's a massive civil war, and then  we're blamed for it. So be careful about where you  

intervene because you may not be able to stop a  thing and then you'll get blamed for what's going  

on. So Bangladesh is horrible, but it is not our  fault. You will get overextended if you intervene  

in everything under the planet. Also, there's a  question of why the United States or anyone should  

be doing all of it. Shouldn't it be through the UN  and other things? The really key thing was winning  

the Cold War. So Nixon absolutely did prioritize  getting the mail through to Mao. He did. So 1971,  

good old Henry, “Hack”, as he's known in the  archives, Henry A. 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.  

Right. 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 right up on the Russian  

border. And the Russians are scared stiff of the  Chinese. The Chinese with good military equipment,  

that wouldn't be a good thing for them. When I asked how was President and he  

built these bases in Pakistan to have the U2  planes go to Russia. We had bases in Turkey,  

we had bases in Japan, we had bases in a lot of  other places in Europe. This marginal increase in  

coverage, was it really worth breaking off the  alliance with India or like pissing off India? 

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, India. I think at the  time people felt we absolutely have to be able to  

cover everything. And I don't know the details  of where they had their nuclear this and that  

stored and things and all their testing areas.  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. So new books about the Cold War are coming out  

all the time. New books about World War II are  coming out all the time. People are writing like  

thousands of papers about this stuff all the time.  How much new stuff are we learning every year?  

All these scholars are still setting this up.  What kinds of new things do we keep unearthing? 

Well, I'm personally sick of writing about  World War II. I've done enough of it and so I'm  

personally not going in that direction. Yeah, it's  endless. I think for a lot of the books of these  

narrative feel good histories. Like I'll tell you  about some Regimen 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. How do you decide which are the good history  

books and which aren't? You're just  on Amazon. You can't like, read it  

yet. You're just like, looking out on Amazon. It's hard. What I would say is give it a book.  

The 30 second test. And what's that? If the book's  about another part of the world, flip through  

the bibliography, which you can do on Amazon, and  zing through there for about 30 seconds and see is  

there anything in the language of the country in  question in the bibliography, like, how much? And  

if there is zip, I would toss it. I'm curious how  many of you would be interested in reading a book  

that says it knows everything about the United  States and there's not a single English source  

cited? I think you'd regard the book as garbage,  and that Americans do this routinely. And it's a  

problem with political science degrees where it  would be very easy to require anyone who's going  

to do a specialty in comparative politics or IR  international relations that, hey, you need to  

pass a language test. And don't try Spanish if  you think you're going to talk about the Middle  

east. Right? If it's going to be Middle east, it  better be something like Arabic, Farsi, Turkic,  

Hebrew. And better yet, if you're really going to  be a serious Middle Eastern expert, try all four.  

Right? I mean, that would be true expertise and  where you can read books in the language and get  

what other people are thinking about things.  So that would be my basic is find people who  

aren't playing half court tennis all about  Team America. Get to the other side of the  

net and try and figure out what other people  are thinking. Doesn't mean you have to agree  

with them, but it means you are making the  effort to see where they’re coming from. 

During the Cold War, all these proxy  wars, was it good that we were just  

like letting off steam in these smaller ways and  therefore we could avoid the bigger great War? 

It wasn't letting off steam. It was horrendous.  I don't know the answer. In fact, my current  

project is a history of the Cold War and I've  read a lot of things and I will, I'm going to  

compile a lot of tables on things like this. Just  putting the data together, it'll take a long time,  

but then when you get the table, it'll be a  really quick, 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 put 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 was this magical inner  

Cold War period when all that stopped. And  that's when you get this tremendous growth  

across the third World because there aren't  these insurgencies just tearing up wealth. 

And then you could see recently, look  at North Africa – it's a mess right now,  

right? It's both ISIS or whatever it is in there  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. 

What was the biggest, when you're doing this  project on 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 or what were they missing? 

I need to think more about that because I think  there are probably all sorts of things. And  

also it's impossible to know the right thing to  do. And then afterwards, when it pans, you go,  

well, that was a mess. It's hard to know, but  I think it was probably a terrible mistake when  

Eisenhower thought, here's the Supreme Command  allied commander of World War II, who knows all  

about hot wars, doesn't want to do that. When the  United States deposes Mosaddegh in Iran in 1954,  

I could see Eisenhower's view as, hey, we're  just deposing one guy and we're going to avoid  

the Russians taking oil fields here, etc. 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 knew a  

great deal about China, less so about Vietnam,  but at least it's a related cultural group. So  

we had gotten rid of all that expertise in the  McCarthy era. So we're running blind in Asia. 

What you just mentioned about the fact that we  would curtail what kinds of elections you can  

hold in these countries after Germany and  Japan surrendered, if they tried to elect  

another fascist party, we wouldn't have been like,  all right, well, that's what you guys voted for.  

They're in charge now. We would have, you know.  And so why is the principle different in Vietnam? 

Because the South Vietnamese would have voted  for them as well. We've just been fighting a  

massive war with Japan and Germany. There's no  way we're going to let the Germans and Japanese  

decide anything initially. But what we did  do for both Germany, our half, 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  I, ostracizing Germans, ostracizing Russians,  

it probably doesn't. You need to bring  them back into the family of nations,  

because they're on the planet. They're not leaving  the planet. And the generous peace with Germany,  

look at them. They're the most wonderful  allies, as are the Japanese. They're terrific. 

During the Cold War, the USSR is constantly  funding these communist parties around the world,  

and these parties are doing, like, exactly  their bidding. Whatever Stalin says they'll do. 

I don't know about that. Yeah, Feel free to clarify, but it doesn't feel  

like any other country managed to pull this off.  There's not like an American party in the French  

parliament that does exactly what the president  would tell them to do. How did they pull this off? 

I don't think it's that they did exactly what  anyone wanted. What the Communists have is  

a really powerful doctrine for how you go from  nothing to something in a failing state. How you  

start out with a bunch of people on some campus.  Mao literally starts out as a junior librarian in  

Beijing University. So I don't know, he's there  with the librarians, I don't know the ladies. Who  

knows what it is? It's probably guys in those  days. 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 look at the Communist Party today,  

they're really good at staying in power. For  a while there, under Deng Xiaoping, it ran in  

parallel what the economic reforms needed to be to  produce wealth and what the Party needed in order  

to be more powerful. But now that's running  at cross purposes, because for the party to  

maintain its monopoly, well, all these much more  educated Chinese aren't going to be interested  

in that anymore. And so it's time to lock those  people up. And then you're going to have trouble  

with keeping your economic growth rate going. Mao dies, and immediately things improve. China  

experiences its growth trajectory. Stalin dies,  and you know Khrushchev 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's 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 we got rid of Kim Jong  Un or the Ayatollah or something,  

the next guy probably won't be as bad. I don't know. But I think iconic leaders  

like Mao and Stalin, they were canonized by  winning their wars, Stalin by winning World War  

II. The Russians revered him for doing that. And  they had experienced. Every Russian experienced  

World War II. It was central to their lives to  win that thing. So Stalin is canonized for doing  

that. And now the man who puts Humpty Dumpty back  together again when no one else could and then  

fights the great powers, capitalist powers, to  a stalemate in Korea, he's again been canonized.  

Whoever comes after them is not going to have that  level of prestige. It's just going to devolve.  

That's period. And then for the successors  of Stalin, they were sick of being terrified  

about whether they were going to be purged.  He kept putting bullets in people's heads,  

like Vladimir Putin. You do this long enough  that people are horrified and don't want to  

have it. They don't want to live that way  anymore. So there's that piece of it as well. 

I guess I'm not sure what the answer is today.  If you found out tomorrow that Putin is dead,  

is your estimation that things  are going to improve or get worse? 

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,  perfect. So that's how he dies. So you're going to  

be guaranteed a free for all. So if there's  a free for all for something like Ukraine,  

they will probably have to call that off because  they got to focus on Moscow. That's what happened  

with the Korean War. Why is the Korean War and  Stalin dies? Russians want it over because they  

got all kinds of unrest. Various prisons in their  own gulags,they're having riots. They're having,  

I think, some Bulgaria, maybe East Germany as  well. They got problems. So they don't want  

to deal with the Korean War anymore. It’s  like, who cares? Forget about it. So you  

would be guaranteed that, which might be highly  beneficial for Ukraine. But knowing Putin, he's  

an evil man. He'll probably stick around forever. While you're starting this Cold War history. How  

close did we get to a nuclear bomb? Some people  argue that, like, you know, there were all these  

“close miss incidents’. It like, basically  should have happened almost in the sense of  

like, the odds. And some people say, like, it  wasn't going…, MAD had worked, it wasn't going  

to happen, why would they risk a first strike? Oh, it's miracle world here. I think in the Cuban  

Missile Crisis, it came down to a Soviet sub  Captain. They had like the political commissar,  

the military commissar, I have to reread this,  but I don't know whether you needed a vote of  

2 out of 3 to launch a nuclear weapon or whether  one guy was senior and you have to get him to come  

along. I have to read the data. But basically,  someone put their foot down in the Soviet sub  

not to launch a nuke. Okay, we lucked out of that  one. And then I think under Reagan there was an  

able Archer missile test, or we were doing a war  game or something, and the Russians looked at it  

and thought it was the real thing for a while.  And that just scared the bejesus out of them.  

And I think it was after that that Ronald Reagan  started moderating his rhetoric. It's like, whoa,  

you don't want to have them on the edge like  this. This is not going to be beneficial. So  

it was quite close. The advantage in the  Cold War is all our leaders all the way  

through Bush Sr. were all veterans of World War  I. 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 like all the Soviet  leaders, Brezhnev and all those people had seen  

all sorts of people be butchered. So they were  cautious in a way I don't think Vladimir Putin is. 

Going back to the lecture if it's true  that you can't get primary adversaries  

to be friends with each other. And if  you want to be friends with one of them,  

you're going to make enemies of the other one. The  world is full of people who are enemies with each  

other. Does that mean that at once America can  only be friends with half the world? And it's got  

to be anyways with the half that this half hates. With India and Pakistan, it was so intense because  

of partition, of so many people who died. And it  was recent. Right. ‘47. And so you wouldn't expect  

those animosities to die down. And 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:  

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  

one, 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. 

Should we have cut off Lend-Lease aid to  Stalin after 1943, when it's obvious that– 

–Bad idea– …when it's obvious that they're winning against  

the Germans? If you'd done that, then they would  have stopped advancing as fast in Eastern Europe. 

Is that what you're thinking? No, no. More of Europe could have been free earlier on. 

No, because you're assuming that World War II was  not a closely run thing. I think it's a much more  

closely run thing than you think. And there's  no. No one's sure of how it's going to turn  

out. Everyone knows if it goes longer, it's more  of my kids who are dying. So there's no way you  

are going to cut aid to the army that's fighting  World War II. All right, here's a concept for you.  

There's a main theater in the war. How do I know  what the main theater is? That's where most of  

the people fighting are. That's the main front.  Main theater. Russians fought between 2/3 and 3/4  

of the Nazi army, always. That makes the eastern  front the main theater. So you all think, Pearl,  

that 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 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.  But you're eliminating the problem of fascism  

until people have forgotten what fascism meant.  But you're left with the problem of communism. 

By that same logic, look, the main theater  in the Pacific War was in China, where most  

of the fighting was happening. Our Lend Lease  aid to Chiang kai Shek was 1 to 2% of what we  

were sending to Stalin. In today's dollars we send  Stalin $1 trillion worth of aid. Just tremendous  

amounts of supplies he used to then instil  “install” meantl a communist totalitarianism  

on Eastern Europe. If he had sent a fraction  of that aid to Chiang Kai Shek, and help us  

with the Japanese, maybe we somewhat unclear if  Dwarkesh says “we” or “he” here would still be  

in power. We wouldn't have to fight as much. We couldn't get it in. It's because if you  

want to deliver Lend-Lease, this is a problem  in World War I. It's 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’s in 1916. That's like right  before the Tsar 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 non-starter. And I  think the best argument you can make is, on that,  

is that rather than getting Chiang Kai Shek to  do the Burma campaign, ‘43–44, and he was dead  

against it, is let him keep all that equipment,  whatever you got over the hump, instead of  

sending it over to Burma, which is strategically  irrelevant, turns out in this war, let him keep  

everything. Because when the Japanese try to do  Ichigo, 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, 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 like a  serial loser. And it's not his fault. It's because  

he's an unindustrialized country trying to deal  with the Japanese. Whom we found very difficult  

to fight. So why wouldn't he find them difficult. But we kept Lend-Lease going even after Berlin had  

fallen and Stalin used that aid in order to.  Even after the first atomic bomb is dropped,  

only then does Stalin break the non aggression  pact with Japan and invade Manchuria. So he  

basically had no moral right to Manchuria.  It was the Chinese who had been doing all  

the fighting. And he gets Manchuria. Should  have stopped the Lend Lease by then. Right?  

Just to make sure like Chiang Kai Shek… I think we stopped it very rapidly at the  

end of the war. So, yeah, the British were  appalled how rapidly the Lend Lease aid  

stopped because they desperately needed it  because they'd been wrecked by the war. So yeah,  

we did cut it off, but I don't, you definitely  want Nazi Germany gone and you want to keep  

support Russia until that happens. Can I try another idea on you? 

Yeah. So it seems like one of the big achievements  

of modernity is that we get countries to stop  caring about history. The idea is like, look, if  

you hear people talk about the Israeli-Palestinian  conflict on both sides, they'll go back like two,  

three thousand years about who has rights. On  the Tucker Carlson interview, Putin was talking  

about things that happened in like 500 BC. And  then so the big achievement is just like, look,  

the past is the past. Whatever the borders  are right now, we're going to enforce those.  

We don't care who claims to have rights to it  because of what happened in 1700s or something. 

That is modern international law. And I don't know  what. You'd have to be a lawyer. That's probably  

a lawyer who actually knows of when you decide  modern international law begins. But certainly  

by the time you're getting through World Wars,  we're in modern international law. And that's the  

problem with what Putin's, his magic he's working  on Ukraine, is they signed multiple times at the  

breakup of the Soviet Union and then afterwards  what Ukraine's borders were and they're violating  

all of 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 is a realization that these  

disputes go back forever. And it's like musical  chairs. We're now freezing whatever chair you're  

in. That's it. And that's modern international  law. And it turns out that those countries that  

focus on territory of ripping it off from someone  else or… it's negative sum, you're going to fight  

over it, you're going to destroy it in the  process, whatever. And the Europeans are a  

great example to us all of just call it a day.  Let everybody travel, go get a rental property  

somewhere. Right. And run your businesses.  You really don't need to own Luxembourg or  

whatever it is. 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  

a compounded, rapid, compounded growth. And you  go, well, how's it possible that China had this  

rapid growth for a while? And their dictatorship,  how'd that work? It's because they had the growth  

when they cooperated with the international order.  When they rejoined the family of nations. Yeah.  

That's when they, they prospered. When now Xi  Jinping is going to do a U turn on that. Have fun. 

The real motivation for the CCP is to keep itself  in power. It's not a democratic system. And if  

keeping yourself in power doesn't align with  making your country rich and therefore staying  

in the international order, if that is a correct  mental model, then like what's the pitch to Xi?  

Why should he abide by the international  order? Because we want him to abide by the  

international order, right?. And if the idea is  like, well, it's not going to work out for you… 

I don’t think it will work out  for him or for the Chinese people. 

That's not a great sales pitch. Yeah, but there are things that you just  

cannot convince other people. Another key thing  in strategy is you can have a very worthy goal,  

but you need to look at it carefully and go,  is it feasible? I don't think it's feasible to  

make Xi Jinping change his mind. Because he's  of a particular background and this is what  

he believes. And he has a whole bunch of other  Chinese people around him who believe the same  

thing. And we're going to second Cold War. It's  going to be a long wait ‘til 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. It's interesting. So Putin  has Russia lost. The Soviet Union fractured at  

precisely the time that China's rising. So during  the Cold War, China's really weak and Russia's  

in the dominant position. Well, I guess that's  reversed. So Putin is dumping all his ordnance  

on Ukraine, his Cold War stockpile, and  he is leaving Siberia open, wide open to  

Chinese predations. And I believe Siberia has  precisely the resources that China covets on  

lands the Tsars stole. And I think there's a big  body of water out there called Lake Baikal. It's  

20% of the world's surface fresh water. China is  chronically short of fresh water 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 when. It's not a question  of whether the Xi-Putin bromance is going to end,  

it's when. And I assure you, the Chinese will pick  the moment that is least convenient for Putin. 

You think they'd actually go to war  about it, or would they just negotiate? 

Oh, I bet it'll be negotiation of just 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 and… 

Sounds like what Zhou Enlai tried  to do to Nehru, it didn't work out. 

What do you mean? Zhou Enlai absolutely got the  Aksai Chin Plateau. Yeah, he offered the deal to  

Nehru. Nehru wouldn't take it. It's like, okay. I  don't think, since they both have nuclear weapons,  

I don't think that kind of play is probably the  play to make. But as long as Putin's desperate  

for whatever, for ordnance and other things,  Putin's getting himself into a grand old corner. 

You wrote a textbook about Chinese history.  From 1644 onwards. In Silicon Valley,  

there's this community called Progress Studies,  and they're very interested in why the Industrial  

Revolution happened, how to increase growth,  what has the history of progress been like.  

And one big question is, why didn't China have  the Industrial revolution first in 1750? That  

much higher fraction of the 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? 

Well, there are whole books on the subject that  I haven't read that look into this. But I would  

flip it around and go, well, the Industrial  Revolution starts in Europe. That's the  

unusual thing. So the question isn't why China  didn't, but why Europe did. And I have some,  

some guesses, but they're really…There are very  thoughtful books on this subject and you can go  

find them and have fun reading them. But if you  look at Europe, it's a peninsula and then it's  

got the Mediterranean there. And so the Europeans,  and they've got quite a very good river system,  

the Danube and the Rhine and the Ruhr, all these  different rivers. And so they have…have always  

been a lot of trade going on. And then it was…  No one's ever been able to make a big empire in  

Europe stick. The Romans did quite well for quite  a bit of time. Napoleon tries not so good. Nazis,  

not so good at all. And I guess the French tried  on and off and it didn't succeed. So you have all  

of these competing countries. And I think a lot of  that was essential to the Industrial Revolution of  

having, you're focusing on commerce, and you've  got a lot of competing places. So you don't have  

one big empire that can just sit there, be fat,  dumb and happy that you have to innovate in order  

to survive against all these other little states. Earlier, talking about how in North Africa or  

other regions there's been a bunch of chaos  because people are constantly... There's these  

insurgencies, there's these civil wars, there's  these smaller wars happening all the time and that  

causes chaos. But if you look at Europe throughout  this period, 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. It's a tremendous innovation. And look at things  

long prior, like Michelangelo and things Leonardo  da Vinci. It's just a lot of these really bright  

people. Oh, yeah, it's my guess it's related to  all of this. And I think the Industrial Revolution  

doesn't begin in England. And the Industrial  Revolution isn't strictly industry. Yeah, it's  

about textiles and steam engines and railroads  and things, but it's also about institutions. One  

of the big things for the British was insurance.  So that when you do your trading vessel and the  

whole thing sinks, you don't bankrupt all your  investors, because you've got that boat insured.  

And then banking, banking rules. So you can't  just rip off everybody's cash. And so Britain,  

because it's surrounded with the moat, becomes a  banking center. Because it's unlikely in a war to  

have some alien army come and just open all the  vaults and take everyone's money. So there are  

these institutional things. And then the British  trading countries like the Dutch Empire want to  

have to be able to trade in peace. So they want  people just follow laws. So it's not surprising  

the founding father of international law is a  member of the Dutch Republic, Hugo Grotius. And  

so it's all a piece. It's this gravitation. the  Romans are gravitating towards law and institution  

and then these competing places so no one  controls. I think the question is why do these.  

What's special about Europe rather than  why it should have been somewhere else? 

What's mysterious about China is not only that  it doesn't have the Industrial Revolution first,  

but its development starts so slow. So Japan  copies Western institutions during the Meiji  

Reformation and industrializes almost a century  before China is able to do the same thing. And  

look, they're communists for a while. So it makes  sense that during the Mao period or during the  

civil war that would impede development. But  even during the Qing dynasty or something,  

it takes till 1980 for them to start  development. That just seems awfully slow. 

Well, communism is a really lousy system. So  they did that. In the 19th century they have all  

these peasant rebellions where they're literally  losing tens of millions of people that are just  

devastating the country. So that's why the 19th  century is a lost century of all of that going  

on. So it's hard. And then there's another piece  that's hard for the Chinese. If you've been such  

a successful civilization in Asia the way they  had been, they were the center of everything  

culturally, science, governmental institutions,  you name the area of human achievement and the  

Chinese were at the top of it all in Asia. With  that kind of success, it's pretty hard to reform  

yourself. And so they also fed themselves the  Kool-aid that the Chinese never absorbed foreign  

ideas. It was always foreigners absorbed their  ideas. And of course that's nonsense because they  

were conquered by Manchus and actually absorbed a  lot of Manchuans’ 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. 

That's interesting. The past civilizational  greatness may be an impediment to development. 

Yeah, it's hard. Well, also because  the way they define civilization,  

there's only one everybody else are barbarians.  People come and kowtow to China. Okay, great. But  

this doesn't set you up to learn from others. One of the big dichotomies you talk about is  

the difference between limited and total  objectives. How does Bismarck illustrate  

the value of having limited objectives? Limited and unlimited objectives? Yeah,  

Bismarck does illustrate that an  unlimited objective is. The simplest  

way to look at it is regime change. So 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. So what Bismarck does,  he's very clever. Well, he's operating in an age  

of kings. And actually his achievements illustrate  why you truly don't need royal families running  

the show. It's breathtakingly incompetent. So  initially he fights the Danish War, so that's way  

up north and it's over these two provinces. And  he wants to set his fingers on the scale of the  

more northerly province because then that'll give  him the rights to march troops, I think through  

the more southerly one to cause problems later.  So war number one's the Danish war. No one thinks  

too much about it. Prussia gets an extra province  as part of Denmark. Was part of Denmark, no big  

deal. But then he fights the Austro-Prussian War  and then what he's after is there are all these  

little Germanic states and Austria had dominated  a bunch of them and in that war, a whole bunch of  

them as a result of that war, he collects a whole  bunch of these other states and no one is really  

paying attention that he's actually upending  the balance of power in Europe. They're just  

looking at it. It's limited. He's not toppling the  Austrian 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, if you look at it's like  a salient into one country or the other. He  

takes that and the French never forgive him,  and that leads into World War I later. But by  

the time it's over, he's overthrown the balance  of power in Europe that all of a sudden Germany,  

Prussia, which was the weakest of five great  powers, suddenly has a central position,  

the Germanic states, and it owns the whole thing.  And Britain and others who'd been asleep at the  

switch like ooh. Cause they could have weighed  in on the scale at any point in these things to  

altered outcomes, and they didn't. There's a real  reason why. And the people who are losing out here  

are all. They're all monarchies. There's a reason  why you don't want to have people inherit offices.  

They don't tend to be very good at it. Actually, so World War I. I'm not sure  

how you explain World War I using limited  and sorry, was it ultimate objectives? 

It's limited or. Well, they're different. There  are. It's useful in warfare to think about limited  

versus unlimited objectives. So if you look  at Ukraine today, Putin has one of the most  

unlimited kinds of objectives from Ukraine. He  not only wants to topple the Ukrainian government,  

but he wants to 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. I mean, as much as they'd  like Putin to go, they just, they want Russia to  

get out of Ukraine. Right. Just get out of  Ukrainian territory, stay in Russia. That's  

their objective. So the Ukrainians are a limited  objective. Putin has an unlimited objective. 

Yeah. In World War I, I mean, maybe other  than like the Austro Hungarian Empire,  

there's like. Germany doesn't have a unlimited  objective with respect to France or Russia. 

No, it doesn't. But it still  

devolves into this. 10 million people die. It doesn't. Although the effect on Russia  

is to overthrow the government. In fact,  it winds up overthrowing one government  

after another. I think as that war goes on and as  you lose a lot of people, then you start think,  

then the objectives become more unlimited.  Whereas, like originally it was just get back  

into German territory. After a while it's no, we  want to overthrow your government for doing this. 

On a different topic. So your name is Sarah Paine? Yeah. 

When I go on Amazon and I find your books, they're  not listed as Sarah Payne, they're listed under  

the author SCM Payne. That's correct. 

Why is that? Well, it's interesting. When I first started out,  

I just wanted my books to be read by what the  content of the book was. I didn't want it to be  

read whether I was male or female. Just read it  for being a book. And then when the first reviews  

came out, it was he, he, he, he, he, he, he. And  this is by Americans doing this. And I thought,  

wow. I guess the idea, because I wasn't doing  women's history and this was a serious topic that,  

you know, women don't do serious topics. So  I guess I'm glad I did it. So it looks like  

I'm a Briton, right? Because Britons love all  the initials. And then why do I have all the  

initials? It's because my dad named all – from  his side of the family — my three older brothers,  

and there's me. And my mom felt that some names  from her family ought to be dumped on me. And so  

since there were three older brothers anyway,  she had a lot of extra names going around. So  

she gave them to me and I had no say in this. When you're training these Officers in the  

U.S. Naval War College, you've done it over  many decades. Has the quality of the people  

you're training, has it improved, decreased  over time? What's your class been like? 

They're wonderful people. And also I don't look  at people like linear, I just. It's a classroom,  

it has wonderful people in there. They're the  next generation and I will do everything I can for  

every single one of them to catapult them as far  forward as I possibly can. So that's what it is. 

Do other countries have some equivalent of  the Naval War College where they have this  

professional cadre of historians and strategists  who are going through the archives trying to  

figure out insights for current leaders? Oh, not all my colleagues publish much of  

anything. So it varies. The Naval War College has  always had a few very A-list people. And the most  

famous person by far ever to work there is Alfred  Thayer Mahan, and he's 19th century (well, he dies  

early 20th century). But he's the guy who, when  the United States had been doing Manifest Destiny,  

a continental, continental paradigm because we're  expanding, taking territory all the way to the  

Pacific. And he's the guy who says, hmm, you know,  power and position in the world really is about  

trade. And he writes these enduring books that  have lasted to the present. So there are these  

occasional people like Alfred Thayer Mahan who are  very special. And as for some cadre of anybody's:  

we're just professors, we teach mid level and  senior officers. And then most of them never  

become flag-rank with the kind of leaders you're  thinking about. So I mean, I've talked to the  

occasional flag officer, but I'm just a minion. So you started in Soviet studies and you found  

yourself in the Soviet Union during its fall in  ‘88, ‘89. Why was that the field you started in? 

Oh. So I grew up during the height of the Cold War  and listened to family dinnertime conversations  

all about it. And then you listened people  describing the Russians as being totally evil.  

And I thought, well, I'll learn more about this.  I'm curious. And then I realized, whoa, it's just  

unbelievable how cruel the Russians have been to  each other and others. It's like they're a class  

by themselves. I don't make it up. So. And then  the question is, why? And learning more about it. 

And then in history, you do a minor field as  well. And I think the typical minor field for  

Russian history would be French or German. And  I thought, “no, I want to learn about China”  

and – just curious. And then learn about China and  then realize that Russia and China have relations.  

But then Japan always weighs in. So then I had  to learn more about Japan. So that's where all  

of that led. And then I also thought, I don't want  to be studying the United States. That's where I'm  

from. And I want to learn about other countries.  Also, my presumption is my bias would be pretty  

bad about the United States or things I wouldn't  see. I thought, I'm going to study other places  

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. And just curious. 

What is the answer to that? You said you  were trying to figure out why the Russians  

have been so cruel to each other through  history and then especially, I guess,  

after the communist revolution, why is it? I don't know the answer, but I know…I was,  

I've just recently read Aleksandr 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, going, who's not  

being mean in this place? They're all being mean. And then you look at, oh, then I haven't got the  

list of all the words. But then I was reading  a lot of Russian stuff last winter and then  

maintaining a list of words in Russian: “sila”, it  means strength or coercion in Russia. In English,  

strength doesn't mean coercion, it just  means having power. Right? But in Russian,  

it also means coercion. Or detente. It comes  from the French, which means a relaxation  

of pressure. The Russian word, what it means is  unloading a gun. So if you look at their language,  

it's so coercive. And I think probably if you're  living in a really dangerous piece of real estate,  

which they are, no defensible boundaries. So  you're always fighting people. And their answer to  

surviving that is to be meaner than anybody else.  And they just do scorched-earth. You mess with  

them, they kill everybody, and they just don't  care. And okay, you want to. We have the modern  

world now where we can deal with each other,  with international law, so none of that stuff is  

necessary. But the Russians have not pulled from  that tradition. And you can read in the newspaper  

how absolutely cruel they are to their men in  service, 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. I mean, Solzhenitsyn talks in that  

part about that this is the direct result  of the communist regime's policy where if  

somebody's an orphan because their parents went  to the gulags, if you try to help the orphan,  

you must be a sympathizer for the criminals, and  therefore you must also be sent to the Gulags.  

And so, like, you have these orphans running  around who's like parents have been sent away. 

The orphans – a lot of them were put into  orphanages, and then they wound up being set  

up to join the KGB in other places. So they were  probably some of the execution battalion people,  

I don't know the details, but there's some  of that going on. And the cruelty in Russia  

was remarked by Europeans who were traveling  there in the, I don't know, 17th century. So  

it goes back a long time, 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. 

Unlike Stalin. Final question. This new  project you're doing on the Cold War,  

is it going to be a book? How will it come out? Slowly. Oh, I've been working on it for years.  

It'll be a culmination of previous research.  Starts in 1917. It will end in 1991ish. Why 1917?:  

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 20s. So 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 the one  level, if I can do it right, it'll be a history of  

the Cold War from one year to another year. So  there's that, and then there's another one about  

strategy. Okay. People are trying to achieve  objectives, and they're trying different things  

and integrating different elements of national  power. So it'll be that. And then what I found  

helpful in my own career are these concepts like  limited and unlimited war or primary adversary,  

primary theater or frozen conflict, or veto  player. I find these things helpful. And so  

I'm going to put as many of those things in  there as possible. And I'm of a certain age,  

so it's passing the baton to the next generation.  Say this is what I've managed to figure out as I  

go putt-putt-putt reading in archives, and  then others can skim it and see if there's  

anything worthwhile. If not – I tried, right? I hope you'll come back on the podcast once  

the book is ready. Thank you.