Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake

1. 0:00 – 11:59

   Grand strategy

   1. SPSarah C. M. Paine0:00

      ... and this notion that Stalin personally is responsible for these millions of deaths? There were millions of people pulling millions of triggers for all these deaths. (air whooshing) Initially, Hitler did incredibly well. I mean, his blitzkrieg, incredible. If he had quit right there, he would have gotten away with it and probably be considered a brilliant leader by Germans. (air whooshing) Putin, he's made a pivotal error. He has no back-down plan. He only has a double-down plan. (air whooshing) For the People's Republic to take Taiwan, I presume it's gonna begin with an artillery barrage. I presume that's gonna be leveling Taiwanese cities. Right? We should watch how it goes in Ukraine. I can't imagine the Chinese being less brutal. You're gonna say that's okay?

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel0:41

      Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Sarah Payne. She is a professor of strategy and policy at the Naval War College, and she has written some of the best military history I've ever read. And we're gonna get into history, strategy, all kinds of interesting topics today. My first question, does grand strategy as a concept make sense? So you have these countries, but the people making these decisions are individuals and they have so many individual ambitions and desires and constraints from internal politics to, you know, factions they have to appease. Does it make sense to talk about countries having strategies?

   3. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:20

      Before I get going, I have to make an obligatory disclaimer, which is, what I'm about to say are my views. They do not necessarily represent those of the US government-

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:29

      (laughs)

   5. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:30

      ... let alone the US Navy Department, and much less the place where I work, which is the US Naval War College. Okay, so now that that's over, on to grand strategy. Yeah, it is useful. I'm gonna define grand strategy as the integration of all relevant instruments of national power in the pursuit of national objectives. If you think about modern governments in the West, they have cabinets, right? And they sit before the president. Those cabinet portfolios represent the different, uh, instruments of national power. And can you imagine trying to run foreign policy without having those people at your table and coordinating? And if you look at countries that have not coordinated all instruments, for instance, Japan in World War II versus Japan during the prior period of the Meiji Restoration, by the time the Japanese got into World War II, they're really prioritizing the army and the navy too, but the, the military as their main instrument of national power. They are not coordinating with civilians, right? They assassinate those people. And they got into deep, dark trouble. They didn't listen to their finance minister who told them it was unaffordable. So yes, grand strategy is absolutely necessary. And eh, the idea is you have national objectives. You wanna increase security somewhere, you wanna improve your own security, that would be your big objective. You wanna improve trade, whatever. And then you need to think about all of these different instruments of national power and how you're gonna coordinate. Those who don't coordinate get into deep, dark trouble.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel3:01

      Right. So then maybe having a coherent grand strategy is the ideal.

   7. SPSarah C. M. Paine3:05

      Yes.

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel3:06

      But if we want to understand history, uh, you just mentioned the case of Japan. A previous guest, Richard Rhodes, who wrote The Making of the, The Atomic Bomb, talked about how after the war, the different branches of the military were competing with each other to see, um, who would get more funding and who had access to nuclear weapons was a big part of that, and how many. So if in, if throughout history we look and we see lots of competition between the different parts of the government in ways that explain their choices, for example, in the case of Japan, why they invaded China instead of pursuing a maritime strategy, then isn't it more useful to, um, just talk about the factions and the individuals rather than the strategy of the country?

   9. SPSarah C. M. Paine3:46

      I think the, it's, it's the individuals making their arguments for what they think the strategy should be. And I'll give you an excellent example of how the sausage is made. So I was using the Eisenhower archives a number of years ago and so here's the, uh, Allied commander from World War II, then president of the United States. And what he would do is bring in all the relevant parties to whatever the decision is. He would have them recommend various courses of action and they would differ arguments and counterarguments, and then they would hash it out and come up, uh, with some kind of combination of all or choosing one of them. But yeah, there's gonna be a big debate. People are gonna have all kinds of different ideas. In fact, this is one of the great strengths of democracy is you have to listen to the counterargument. Or the counterargument is called you lose the election. (laughs)

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel4:35

       Right.

   11. SPSarah C. M. Paine4:35

       And the next, the other party is in. But the notion that you're gonna streamline it and not have disagreements, that's what, um, dict- dictators do and they have problems. They double down on bad decisions.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel4:48

       Yeah, that, that's actually one of the questions I eventually wanted to ask you is that in World War II, we see that many of the countries had really coordinated, um, and also really well-apportioned budgets and you know, spread between their different branches. And in the case of Japan, they didn't. Uh, I guess, is democracy the answer for why the US and Britain better coordinated their...

   13. SPSarah C. M. Paine5:08

       Part of it, and I think part of it's a different issue. If you think about who are the strategic leaders of World War II, they're the conscripts of World War I. When, think about people slightly younger than you, maybe your age as well. If they survive to come off that front, then they come back and they wanna start families. It's the Great Depression. It's terribly difficult. And then they, when they get to the a- the age where they're gonna be strategic leaders, they have the horror of sending their own children in. And so they thought deeply about what had gone wrong in World War I. This is in the West, par- particularly Britain and the United States. And their answer was institution building on a massive scale and integrating, uh, it is all, uh, elements of national power. This is when you have the National Security Act passed in the United States setting up, uh, all kinds of organizations, et cetera, the National Security Council among other things. And then you're setting up the United Nations-... uh, NATO, all manner of things that, that's a lot of it is coming off of World War I, the horrific war, and then doing a better job in World War II.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel6:14

       What I'm curious about is why... You know, you would think that the victors of a war would be the ones whose, uh, perception of reality is the most, um, uh, inflated, whereas the losers are the one who have to come to terms with why they lost. Whereas we see the opposite. The US had such good leadership, you know, Patton, uh, Curtis LeMay, there- there's so many great generals that came out of that time. Whereas in Germany, the... Hitler himself fought in World War I, so he... it's hard to explain why he made so many mistakes.

   15. SPSarah C. M. Paine6:41

       Initially, Hitler did incredibly well. I mean, his Blitzkrieg, incredible and think about Hitler. If he had stopped with the Anschluss where he gets, uh, Austria and then he's gonna take Czechoslovakia and then he says, "I'm uniting the German people." If he had quit right there, he would have gotten away with it and probably be considered a brilliant leader by Germans. Uh, but then, uh, hubris, right? He... Uh, the Blitzkrieg worked so well. His generals told him he couldn't do it, but, of course, it- it- it worked and then he goes further and, uh, overextends, et cetera. When you look at what you think are great generals on the Western side, they are great generals, but their success has to do with a whole lot of other people. Think about it. If we hadn't broken the codes, which is the British helped us do that and the Poles who brought out various Enigma machines and other things, would it have turned out the same? If you don't have Henry Ford, who's turning his cars into tanks and the people who built Liberty Ships, would it have been the same? If you do not have scientists doing the Manhattan Project, would it have been the same? And think about the enormous mobilization with the United States where Americans are all on board and in Britain and all over. So when you go, "Ah, Patton." Patton has a whole civilian architecture behind him and so we tend to personify it as the general. It ain't so. It's everybody.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel8:03

       Mm. Now, uh, you mentioned that if Hitler had stopped, I guess, in thir- 1939 before, uh, after he had, um, gotten, you know, that, uh, expanded the borders of Germany beyond where they had ever been in history, I want your opinions on what is the latest at which he could have stopped and maybe not avoided war, but at least solidified and consolidated the biggest possible empire. So what, various options could be, one is just after thirteen- uh, 1939.

   17. SPSarah C. M. Paine8:31

       Yeah. There, quit.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel8:32

       What if, um, he invades Poland with the Soviet Union, but he doesn't invade Russia after or declare war on the United States and maybe at some point negotiates a peace with Britain. Would that have been possible? And af- or what ab- what about after the fall of France? 'Cause then he could have just controlled all of Europe.

   19. SPSarah C. M. Paine8:49

       All right. A, I don't know, but B, I think he could make the ploy of, "I'm just a continuation of Bismarck. I'm fighting this limited war. I'm uniting the Germ- German people." That one he could maybe be able to sell. That's why quit after Anschluss. The moment he's going into, um, genocide against the Poles, because Poland's why Britain gets in the war. But once he's into Poland, we're off to a different race.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel9:14

       Right. But is that a race he could have won or at least settled? And that maybe, uh, if- i- if it wasn't for Churchill and at some point, let's say he gets out of the government and then they're just like, "You know what? We'll just have, let Hitler have Europe." He doesn't go to war with America. Could- could he have just have... Uh, is it- is it possible there's a world in which Hitler just controls Europe?

   21. SPSarah C. M. Paine9:31

       Well, I think the problem with your question is that's not who Hitler was, right? He wrote, in Mein Kampf exactly what he wanted to do and that, what you're describing is not what he's about. If he were about, um, combining with the West and taking parts of the Soviet Union, maybe, but that's not what he's about. He's about... Uh, has this whole genocidal program that goes with him. There's another issue is if you take too much, like if you're gonna go kill off the Poles, the Poles never give, uh, give up. They've went through three partitions over their history. The Polish identity never disappeared. That if you do that, it never goes away. You will never have stable borders and then it's easy for others to fund insurgencies because you have this dominated population that hates being dominated. It's not stable.

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel10:15

       Then you think after Blitzkrieg, suppose that before Stalingrad he had, uh, he had stopped and at that point, didn't he control like 30% of the Soviet Union?

   23. SPSarah C. M. Paine10:23

       He'll never hold it. He'll choke on his- his acquisitions.

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel10:26

       Ah. Did Germany have the power under another leader to just hold that s- whole section of Eurasia?

   25. SPSarah C. M. Paine10:32

       All right. I'm gonna flip this whole argument. So you're talking about people doing territorial conquests, right? And taking things and butchering enormous numbers of people to get it. You can watch this in real time in Ukraine. This is how it goes. You're butchering a lot of people. You're destroying wealth at an incredibly rapid clip. You can do that. But it's really wealth-destroying. Since the Industrial Revolution, in the West, uh, there has been a growing consensus that that's probably not the way to do things. We are far better, uh, uh, crafting international institutions, international laws, treaties that we sign on to, the parts that we want to and then we adhere to them and then that allows us to go all over the world running our little credit card transactions. No one kills us and, uh, you can make a lot of wealth-

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel11:19

       Right.

   27. SPSarah C. M. Paine11:19

       ... right, doing that. And that was the conclu- that if you look at, uh, since the Industrial Revolution, who's making all the money? People who buy into that system.

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel11:28

       Right.

   29. SPSarah C. M. Paine11:29

       And, uh, the Hitler, uh, territorial expansion is in a way it's a real throwback to a pre-Industrial Revolution way of managing your national security. This is how traditional continental empires always did it. The Industrial Revolution with economic growth, compounding economic growth offers a completely different alternative which says, "We're gonna do compounding wealth by having rules that we can all adhere to and then we'll run our commercial transactions that way."

2. 11:59 – 23:19

   Death ground

   1. SPSarah C. M. Paine11:59

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel11:59

      Now, why was Russia so robust against... Not initially, but eventually, so robust against pushing back against the Germans despite losing tens of millions of soldiers? The government doesn't collapse like the tsars did in World War I.... and n- not only that, but a communist country is able to produce these really advanced tanks in large and reliable numbers. There's so many mysteries there like why central planning worked, why the government didn't collapse despite the fact that Stalin, you know, k- killed off so many of his people. He would've been hated, right? So...

   3. SPSarah C. M. Paine12:31

      Ah, but Hitler killed more and was more hated. Uh, what you're thinking about is, "What did the Russians do?" I'm gonna flip it. It's, what did the Germans do?

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel12:39

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SPSarah C. M. Paine12:39

      A useful concept comes from the Samuel Griffiths translation of Sun Tzu which talks about death ground. What's death ground? It's when your enemy puts you on death ground, which means they're gonna kill you. And therefore you have no choice but to fight because if you don't fight, you're dead. And even if you fight, your odds are poor, but at least that's the only way you're gonna get out. The Ukrainians initially welcomed the, the Germans. Why? Because Stalin and friends had imposed the, uh, terrible famine of the early 1930s on them. And they couldn't imagine that anything could be worse than that until they met Nazis who then had them dig their own mass graves. The Ukrainians rethought that whole thing. And if you do this to people, you will conjure a formidable enemy. So, that's what happened to Russia. You can see it happening to Ukraine now before your eyes. Go back, uh, before the invasion of Crimea in 2014, you've got Ukraine which has a very corrupt government and people were, uh, uh, at sixes and sevens about whether they wanted to do Ukrainian things or Russian things. Okay. Fast-forward to now where you have Russians blowing away the people who were most loyal to them in the eastern part of the country who didn't leave. Their apartment buildings are being leveled by Russians. Ukrainians think, "Aha, you know this idea that we can co-exist with these people is over." And, and the irony is Putin's forging Ukrainian national identity.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel14:09

      Mm-hmm.

   7. SPSarah C. M. Paine14:09

      And wars often do this. In the United States, uh, we start out with our 13 colonies and they're all very different, and after the Revolutionary War, that starts forging a national identity, and by the time you get to the end of the Civil War where you have Northern armies, at least those people have been all over the country. They have a real sense of nation by the end of that one.

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel14:30

      It's interesting because the strategy you pursued with Germany and Japan was unconditional surrender.

   9. SPSarah C. M. Paine14:35

      Mm-hmm.

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel14:36

       Now, do you think of that as different than... Obviously, we didn't (laughs) commit genocide or anything, but do you think of that as different than the sort of, um, total unlimited policy objectives that, for example, Germany had in, uh, Ukraine or Japan had in China? Uh, or and they, and they... We also pursued unconditional surrender against the South in the Civil War, right? So, how, how do you think about... Because that's also something where your back is up against the wall. Why did that not result in the same kind of morale?

   11. SPSarah C. M. Paine14:58

       Because the United States did not put the people of these countries on death ground. The leadership had self- put themselves on death ground by where the... Basically, uh, the problem for Tojo Hideki is if he backs down on anything, he's out of office and then he doesn't know what happens after that. So he personally is on career death ground and possibly he thinks, uh, well, we w- we w- we were planning to, that he would get executed at the end of the war. But the Japanese people, uh, eventually figured out that they weren't on de- death ground and in fact, the Japanese people were so exhausted by the whole thing that they, the society shattered. Um, but the United States was never, uh, going to put the German people, start massacring them in the way that the Russians massacred the Poles when they moved in. The Germans massacred the Poles. How do you wind up with eight or nine million Polish deaths in World War II? Think about that. It's a large number. It's 'cause they're massacring. They're being massacred.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel15:57

       Uh, th- there was the firebombing of, you know, Tokyo and Dresden and Berlin.

   13. SPSarah C. M. Paine16:01

       Yes.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel16:01

       Uh, I think it w- it was in your book that 84,000 people died in that one-night-

   15. SPSarah C. M. Paine16:04

       Yes.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel16:04

       ... uh, firebombing in Tokyo.

   17. SPSarah C. M. Paine16:05

       Yes. It's terrible.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel16:06

       Why did that not make them, uh, put them in the mind frame of a sort of total, uh, death ground?

   19. SPSarah C. M. Paine16:12

       Well, A, I don't know, but B, Japan had been at war since 1931 in China. Uh, they'd been sending large armies. This isn't like recent US wars, the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel16:26

       Mm-hmm.

   21. SPSarah C. M. Paine16:27

       This is, they're sending hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Manchuria. The Chinese don't give up. It goes on and on and on. So by the time you're getting to 1945, it's a long time. Also, they had committed atrocities in China and they knew all about it, and the atrocities got even better. When there were wounded Japanese soldiers, their commanders ordered their com- fellow soldiers to execute them because they didn't want cripples going home. They couldn't deal with them there and so rather than have the allies pick them up, they executed them in place. Y- can you imagine how Japanese soldiers felt about this?

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel17:06

       How do we explain the high morale, th- the, the famously high morale of the Japanese, uh, military where they would refuse to surrender even after giving orders by their superiors-

   23. SPSarah C. M. Paine17:14

       Oh.

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel17:14

       ... d- uh, despite knowing about, um, these things that you were talking about?

   25. SPSarah C. M. Paine17:17

       Uh, it's true. Um, it's because it's a different culture. So in Japanese culture, you belong to in-groups or out-groups. So the biggest in-group the Japanese belong to was Japanese people and everybody else. But within Japan, you come from a province, a locality, et cetera, you go school, education, various places you belong to, a job wherever you have and their various units within your job, and you owe loyalty. It's obligations. In the West, it's all about liberties and my rights. In the East, it's about obligations to other people. And so you owe obligations to all of these, uh, organizations and when they are... Uh, soldiers are thinking about war, they're not thinking about grand strategy, they're thinking about operational success. So the moment you, as a soldier, start losing a battle, instead of in the West where you can retreat, you can surrender and it's not dishonorable 'cause you're gonna live to fight another day, in Japan, you're a failure. And therefore, if you go and come home-... back, uh, as a f- failed soldier. You bring dishonor to yourself, your family, uh, your locality, anyone you are associated with. So that's why it is so difficult to- for them to surrender. However, by the time you get to the end of the war, they are so exhausted. Think about it. Their economy is... I don't know, I can't remember the statistics exactly, something like a tenth of our economy. They have something like a thirteenth of our, I can't remember if it was coal or steel production. And they don't have any, um, local oil production. Uh, they're importers of food and they're not getting that food, so by the time you get to '45, they're exhausted. And it's, um, it's a shattering that occurs. And, um, finally at the very end, you have Emperor Hirohito, who knew full well earlier if he disagreed, and he didn't disagree for a long time, that he would be assassinated or, uh, be, uh, proclaimed deranged, and he had a perfectly good underage son to be used as a figurehead. He knew, uh, that he couldn't do much about it. Uh, at the very end when he decided he was about to get nuked (laughs) , that's when he intervenes to break the deadlock and- at the cabinet meetings. And there are a, a variety of people at the very top who realizes it's over.

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel19:35

       Could Hirohito have intervened earlier? Uh...

   27. SPSarah C. M. Paine19:38

       I doubt it.

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel19:39

       Let's go back, m- more, more than five years. If he intervenes, um, when, uh, Japan is overextending in China, is there any chance that he could have succeeded?

   29. SPSarah C. M. Paine19:47

       I doubt he, uh, thought of Japan overextending in China. What expertise does he have? He liked guppies. He liked studying fish in his backyard (laughs) . He has no expertise. And then, of course, there's the hubris of it all, that we're gonna dominate this place, and they look at the Chinese as an absolutely feckless, backward place that's had all these warlord things going on. And it doesn't dawn on them that, by their extreme brutality in China, the Chinese finally get it going, "Uh, we're not the problem. The Japanese are the problem." And it is, uh, what the Japanese do that superglues China and is the great impetus to na- nation building. You can see parallels with Hitler doing the same thing in-

   30. DPDwarkesh Patel20:29

       Yeah.
3. 23:19 – 39:23

   WW1

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel23:19

      scenario in which both Hitler and Stalin could have been defeated in World War II? Is there, is there some system of alliances or counterfactual where that happens?

   2. SPSarah C. M. Paine23:27

      No. I think the problem is World War I. World War I has enormous consequences. It is the, the West, uh, in fact all sides allowed their generals to make strategy. No one is doing grand strategy in World War I. It's all about operational success. This is what we're all gonna do and then they, the generals keep sending up people, waves and waves of young men up over the trenches, and what do you think is gonna happen to them if you send them over the trenches? This is how you get these horrific death rates. Hundreds of thousands in a s- in a, in a battle, it's... In, in our own day, it's inconceivable. As a result of that war, not only does it upend Europe by getting rid of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, the Russian Empire, gets rid of all of those-... and so you have massive power vacuum. But it puts two really pers- pernicious ideologies on s- on steroids-

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel24:26

      Yeah.

   4. SPSarah C. M. Paine24:26

      ... fascists and communists. And that's how you get all that evil-

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel24:31

      Yeah.

   6. SPSarah C. M. Paine24:31

      ... is out of a gross mismanagement of World War I.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel24:34

      Yeah.

   8. SPSarah C. M. Paine24:34

      Once th-, uh, once they're off and running, you got problems on your hands and you've got a long solution. So back to your initial question, does grand strategy matter? Yes, it does. Look at World War I when they didn't practice it, and when the civilians, uh, they allowed the officers to make all decisions. Britain is a country that is maritime by geography. Britain built a continental-sized army. That is not Britain's great strength in World War I. And, uh, it was the beginning, the loss of the, uh, victory in World War I, uh, but at horrific cost was the beginning and the, of the end of the British Empire.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel25:16

      Britain is the only country that, uh, fights Hitler from, uh, all the way from 1939 to 1945.

   10. SPSarah C. M. Paine25:23

       Mm-hmm.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel25:24

       Whereas Stalin, uh, only fights Hitler after he himself is invaded, and in fact collaborates with him to dissect Poland. After the war, Stalin, you know, the Russia expands to beyond, uh, any ambition that a czar might have from Eastern Europe to Manchuria, well, I guess not Manchuria, but w- whereas the British Empire is, uh, about to collapse and, um, you know, it loses all its, uh, territories. What explains the sort of the differing outcomes of the two countries post-World War II? And y- why did the post-war objectives of Stalin succeed much more?

   12. SPSarah C. M. Paine25:59

       What do you mean? Like retaining empire-

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel26:01

       Yeah.

   14. SPSarah C. M. Paine26:01

       ... versus losing empire?

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel26:02

       Yeah.

   16. SPSarah C. M. Paine26:03

       Okay. There are two fundamentally different kinds of empires. So Russia is a classic continental empire. What it owns is contiguous.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel26:10

       Right.

   18. SPSarah C. M. Paine26:11

       Britain's empire, uh, was all about trade and having enough coaling stations around the world. That was initially what it was all about. You gotta have coaling stations everywhere, and then you wanna get the trade through. And then what the British did is they trained barristers all over the world, a lot of barristers and lawyers. And, uh, local people, right? And so it lays the basis, not on purpose, but in fact of i- of having international law where people who, um, who are eventually gonna be running these independent countries have a legal training to use international law to their own country's benefit. But anyone, so Britain has this non-contiguous event, and after the war it does not have the ability to hang on to them, particularly because nationalism, think about nationalism. Nationalism starts i- in the Napoleonic Wars. That's what Napoleon, uh, leverages, is the levée en masse o- of, uh, his armies, because French people feel nationalism and it's incredibly powerful and nationalism has been spreading its way around the world ever since. Once you have nationalism, have fun hanging on to a non-contiguous empire, because the locals are gonna fight and resist. Uh, it will make the commercial advantages, uh, well, there won't be commercial advantages. It'll be too h- uh, expensive to hang on. So Britain, in most cases, did not fight to hang on to its empire. It, uh, left and negotiated its way out. Whereas France did the fight in Vietnam, which it lost, and the fight in Algeria, which it lost. The British didn't do that. Now Russia is a different event. It's all contiguous. Wherever that Red Army is, it can hang on to it. And so yeah, it hangs on to Eastern Europe forever. Great cost but if you look over time, initially Stalin rebuilds and does quite well, but then you start looking in its '60, '70s, all of a sudden their growth rates are not like Western growth rates. And yeah, they're still growing, but the difference is growing, and the compounding effects of this are enormous. So then if you fast-forward, uh, to now, Russian standards of living aren't... I think Russia's entire economy now, I know it's lost all these territories, is less than Mexico. There's nothing wrong with Mexico, but the Russians have this (laughs) idea that they have this huge e- uh, they don't.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel28:41

       Yeah, and then the compounding is a very important point because I think Tyler Cowen has his example in one of his books that if U.S. economic growth rates had been 1% lower every year from 1890 to basically the 20th century, if they had been 1% lower each year, the U- U.S. per capita, uh, GDP would be lower than that of Mexico's.

   20. SPSarah C. M. Paine29:01

       Bingo, and this is to give a tangential comment, this is how sanctions work. People look at sanctions and go, "Oh, they don't work," because you don't make the, whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing. What they do do is they suppress growth, so that whoever's annoying you, over time, you're stronger and they're weaker. And the example of the i- impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel29:23

       Right. Yeah.

   22. SPSarah C. M. Paine29:24

       It's, it's powerful over several generations.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel29:27

       Right. Now but, but to the question about why Russia did so well-

   24. SPSarah C. M. Paine29:30

       Did so well?

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel29:31

       Uh, or in terms of after World War II ended up with so much-

   26. SPSarah C. M. Paine29:34

       But, b- but before you say they did so well, look at the tens of millions of people who died.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel29:40

       Well, that, that, that's my point. I mean-

   28. SPSarah C. M. Paine29:41

       I mean, it's horrendous, the cost.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel29:43

       So I should say, why Stalin did so well.

   30. SPSarah C. M. Paine29:45

       Well yeah, 'cause other people died-
4. 39:23 – 50:25

   Writing history

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel39:23

      of which, a b- broader question is how well do you think the insights of scholars like you have been integrated into the thinking of military leaders where you're studying y- you know, uh, p- people like you have written these extensive books about how empires overextend and how invasions can be more complicated than you think. To what extent does that actually percolate to the, uh, w- the military and civilian leadership that w- would decide to do an Iraq War and Afghanistan War?

   2. SPSarah C. M. Paine39:48

      You're asking the wrong person. You need to interview those people and ask them what influenced them. At my low level in the weeds, uh, I work at the US Naval War College. We have officers from the United States and all over the world who come on in, and then we assign them readings from the kind of scholars you're talking about, what we do in strategy and policy or case studies about wars, and have them think about... A l- a lot of the kinds of questions you're asking is what we ask students of, and so we assign all these things. How much it influences them later in their career, you'd have to ask them.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel40:22

      But surely you must be optimistic about it or th- there's a reason why you do this work, right? Uh, p- uh, presumably you think that better understanding these previous situations helps, uh, leaders now make better decisions. Uh, and then I'm curious, to what extent do you think that, uh, pipeline is functioning?

   4. SPSarah C. M. Paine40:40

      I have no idea about the pipeline, uh, but, but about me, I can answer those. I grew up during the height of the Cold War and started graduate school e- it was, as it was ending, but I didn't know it was ending. And so I have a full up Cold War education where I did study the Soviet Union when it was and they had all these huge programs which th- no longer exist. And, um, i- if you wanna make good decisions, you have to be knowledgeable. You have to be able to make an accurate assessment about yourself and the other side, and so I've devoted my career to understanding the other side. And one of the things that I think Americans are particularly prone to is what I call half-court tennis. Uh, they study the world from their point of view. So, th- I- they're always focused on Team America and it's like half-court tennis. They look only at their side of the court. Balls come from mysterious places. Some people get new rackets, who knows where they come from? And then somehow I'm gonna play this game. Well, they d... Uh, no more, uh, follow football in this way. Think about people who love football in the States. They know about all the opposing teams and who's strong and blah, blah, blah. Uh, well foreign policy, you need to understand the other side. It's not just about me and it's all about the interaction. So I spent my life, I was always wondered about... I'd heard that the Russians were really evil, right, growing up in the Cold War. I thought, "Well, I'll learn more about it." And so I studied, first learning about Russia, and then I decided I was gonna learn about China, and then I realized, "Oh, I'll learn about those two. Japan's in there, so I gotta learn about Japan." And wound up studying their relations and tried to be open-minded and understand the world from their point of view. Not that it's right or wrong, but just trying to understand it. So for your point of view, when you're picking up a book and you want to avoid half-court tennis, give the book a 30-second rule. What's that? Go flip to the bibliography, flip through it for 30 seconds, and see if at least some of the citations are in the languages of the countries being discussed.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel42:36

      (laughs) Right.

   6. SPSarah C. M. Paine42:36

      Because how much respect would you have for a book about the United States that has not a single source in English?

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel42:42

      Mm-hmm.

   8. SPSarah C. M. Paine42:42

      ... I suspect the answer would be zero.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel42:44

      Mm. And then how do you consume these? Do you, do you read the translations or how, how?

   10. SPSarah C. M. Paine42:48

       Uh, no. Uh, uh, I can make bad spelling errors in numerous languages.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel42:52

       (laughs)

   12. SPSarah C. M. Paine42:53

       (laughs) I read these things slowly, lots of large dictionaries.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel42:57

       Yeah.

   14. SPSarah C. M. Paine42:57

       And so yeah, you can look and you say you've got my book, Wars for Asia. Go take a look at the footnotes in the back. You'll see they're Russian and Japanese and Chinese and then, uh, read it slowly.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel43:08

       Yeah. And it i- it is perhaps the best military history I've ever read. An, and also I, I've really enjoyed, um, uh, go, go, r- remind me the title of your book on Japan, the, the Meiji...

   16. SPSarah C. M. Paine43:17

       The Meiji one is just, uh, Imperial Japan.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel43:19

       Right. Those, and then we, we also have these, um, other textbooks and collections of essays, which I, which I highly recommend be- because of the thorough nature and the di- the diversity of sources. Y- let, let's actually talk about your, the, the research. May- maybe tell me more about like, where, where you've done research around the world and, uh, throughout your three different projects, 'cause I, I think people might not know the extent to which you, you ha- for the years you've dug into the trenches on these.

   18. SPSarah C. M. Paine43:42

       I've co-edited with my husband, Bruce Elliman, a series of books on naval operations. United States as a maritime power. If you wanna understand the maritime underpinnings of US security, go to those, particularly, uh, a book on peripheral operations, expeditionary warfare, which is what we do. The expedition would be crossing the ocean to get there. And, uh, commerce raiding and blockades, that that is, uh, a key to US foreign policy and the problem is if you exercise a continental foreign policy, you're prone to get into all sorts of wars you don't need to get into, that because we have huge oceans that separate us from our problems, uh, it's a major point of strategy of whether to intervene or not intervene. So it's important to understand the maritime p- position in the United States. So there are these maritime books that if you're interested in learning about that, they're not fun reads, but anyway, they exist. Now you were asking me about research. Oh, back in the day, uh, what was it? It was a year in the Soviet Union when it was and then a year in PRC right after Tiananmen. It was delayed for a year, and, uh, that was quite exciting. They, the, there were armored trucks all around Beijing University, uh, not to protect the students but to, uh (laughs) -

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel45:03

       Protect themselves.

   20. SPSarah C. M. Paine45:04

       ... neutralize them if anything happened. Yeah, and then three years in Japan over the years and three years in Taiwan over the years of just reading deeply in the archives. Uh, Donald Rumsfeld has been much vilified, the former Secretary of Defense, but one of his quotations I love is, he said he wasn't worried about the known unknowns, 'cause you could go after those, but he's worried about the unknown unknowns. And that's why you do archival research is, what is it that I know nothing about that is actually terribly important? So done a bunch of archival research in Japan. That dries up about World War II, that you can get into military archives and their, their, um, foreign ministry archives but then it's much less afterwards. And, uh, in China... Well, China and Russia, they've both closed down. There's no way I'm... I wouldn't go into either country at this stage.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel45:59

       Oh, you think even more so than after Tiananmen or after, during the Soviet Union? It's more-

   22. SPSarah C. M. Paine46:04

       Oh, yeah, we-

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel46:04

       ... hostile now than then?

   24. SPSarah C. M. Paine46:05

       Um, we were in the Soviet Union while Gorbachev was in power and I actually got into the foreign ministry archives there, but only for the czarist period, and, uh, in China, uh, you could still get into various archives. I was in the Ch- using the Qing archives and then the Nationalist archives were much more closed, and then, uh, now the archives are just plain closed in the, in R- well, go to Russia now and get yourself arrested. And, uh, China likewise, they've shut down all of these archives. So to compensate, uh, for the last, I don't even know, it's not quite 10 years, spent two months every summer going to US presidential archives and so starting with, we didn't do it quite in order but Truman, Eisenhower, and then this last, uh, spring we've just did the George Bush Senior archives. And now I'm in Britain using, uh, their wonderful national, uh, archives.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel47:03

       Wow.

   26. SPSarah C. M. Paine47:03

       Looking particularly, um, from the 1917 to 1945 period and there, I'm researching the Cold War and you'd go, "Oh, but the Cold War didn't begin 'til '47." The C- I would argue the Cold War began in 1917 because we have this notion that, "Oh, I decide when wars begin," or, "My side..." Uh, not quite. If the other side declares war on you, and the Bolsheviks made it very clear that they ha- were, had declared war on the capitalist order and they were, Britain was, um, much more attuned to this, worried about communist ideas infiltrating to labor movements and all this other stuff, and so I'm reading their archives whereas the United States was much more asleep at the switch.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel47:44

       Mm. To, to what extent were, not the United States as a whole maybe, but factions within the United States, um... Th- this is a common sort of theme that, y- you know, th- where, where the educated classes, uh, are very naïve about, uh, communism and to what extent did that play into the delay of the United States and of, y- you know, recognizing the Cold War? I, y- you talk about in your books about the, um, the, the Red Star over China. Was that the name of the... And then there was another one-

   28. SPSarah C. M. Paine48:11

       Snow.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel48:12

       Yeah, there, there was another bestseller on-

   30. SPSarah C. M. Paine48:13

       Oh, right, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, uh, Edgar Snow-
5. 50:25 – 59:58

   Japan in WW2

   1. SPSarah C. M. Paine50:25

      this.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel50:25

      You talk in your book, The Wars on Asia and, uh, elsewhere about, um, uh, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and how they industrialized the region and how at the end, I think it had 50% higher GDP per capita than the rest of China and it was the most industrialized part of Asia outside of Japan. You know, Japan also colonized, uh, Taiwan and we see those are some of the wealthiest parts of Asia now and then we also see the impact of the communist counterfactual in other parts of Asia. What should we make of, in retrospect, of the impact of the Japanese occupation given, you know, the, the, the wealth of Korea, Taiwan, these other areas now and how much did the industrialization under Japan matter?

   3. SPSarah C. M. Paine51:07

      Let's go back in time. If you get before World War II, which is when the really huge atrocities that the Imperial Japanese Army commits without any doubt, and going into someone else's country and committing a, uh, atrocities, that's not a winning game plan. If you go before then and if you think about the Meiji Restoration and so they colonized Taiwan, they colonized Korea. It was brutal in Korea because the Koreans resisted and then th- then the Japanese got nasty. Taiwan, much less resistance. To this day, the Taiwanese do not have this bitterness about Japan that the Koreans do. All right, so I'm not gonna deny there wasn't, that there was no br- uh, th- uh, any brutality. There was brutality. But what the Japanese did when they moved into Korea and Taiwan is they set about creating infrastructure. They put in train lines, they set about educating people. Do they put them in the top positions? No, the top positions are for Japanese. But they, um, do things like, uh, publish all kinds of magazines so incredible numbers of, um, like technical journals about agronomy and things so that, uh, you have this incredible improvement of output because you're spreading knowledge to people, to the Taiwanese and to the Koreans. And another thing they did, unlike the United States, is they do it from the bottom up. They control the police force in the locality and from there all the way up, so they really have local control. When the United States goes in to play, went in places like Kore- uh, excuse me, the Philippines, which happens at more or less the same time, Philippine, uh, war is like, it's early 1900s, the United States wants to deal with English-speaking elites, sound familiar? Who are located in the capital and so we try to negotiate that way, but it never modernizes what goes on. These very traditional and actually not conducive to growth relationships of massive land control by landowning not particularly efficient classes remains. The Japanese do it by literally building local organizations from the bottom up. It's not remotely dem- democratic. People who disagree at the time are treated brutally, do not get me wrong, but it turns out it's a very effective means for economic development because when they're booted in 1945, uh, the Koreans and the Taiwanese actually have something to work, work with and then they're off and, off and running. And Chiang Kai-shek, who'd been horribly corrupt in the mainland, he could not do land reform in the mainland. Why? Because that's his officer corps. They will kill him. In Taiwan, he can definitely, uh, redistribute Taiwanese land, no problem there. He comes in with all the weaponry, redistributes the Tai- it's, it's bloody doing it. He offers the Taiwanese bonds. I think it's gonna be like the lousy bonds that he distributed on the mainland. Turns out those bonds were worth money that I don't know how many years on it was that people actually collected on their, um, the bonds for all of this. So, uh, the Japanese actually had many of the pieces for a really effective plan for economic development and if you look at China under Deng Xiaoping, who's he imitating? The Japanese. He's, Deng Xiaoping is la- rather like a parallel, his generation to the Meiji generation and think what came after the Meiji generation. Bad news. Well, we're into Xi Jinping.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel54:34

      Oh, that's so fascinating.

   5. SPSarah C. M. Paine54:35

      Bad news. We're into bad news. But-... um, do not deny the achievements of the Meiji generation.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel54:42

      Yes.

   7. SPSarah C. M. Paine54:42

      They're enormous and then because Japan does all the atrocities, they can no longer brag-

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel54:48

      Yeah.

   9. SPSarah C. M. Paine54:48

      ... about these previous things.

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel54:49

       There, there's so many interesting things there. It, there's a book How Asia Works by, um, this economist Joseph Studwell-

   11. SPSarah C. M. Paine54:55

       Uh-huh.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel54:56

       ... where he, um, uh, is trying to analyze why Korea, Taiwan and Japan did so well after World War II. And in the case of Korea, there, he tells a story where, uh, I think that, that they have this f- factory where they're starting to, um, export goods and um, you know, they're working like six, seven hour days and the, the floor manager tells one of his underlings, "The money that the, I think the reparations on which, um, w- we're supporting this economic growth in Japan," or maybe they're talking about just the infrastructure in general, "that came at the cost of your, like, your family being raped by Japan. So you're, this is basically blood money that we're using to grow the economy. (laughs) You better, you better work hard to, to make sure it was worth it." But okay, sorry, the broader question I wanted to ask was, so, uh, the economic development, what Japan is doing in m- Manchuria, uh, Korea, T- Taiwan, if they hadn't made this mistake of fighting a- a war with America, l- let's say something like the Japanese empire survives and isn't, isn't crazy militaristic, I don't even know if this is a question, but I'm just thinking about the kind of factual where you could have this, like, really wealthy and prosperous area of Asia.

   13. SPSarah C. M. Paine55:59

       Let's go back to our wonderful America Firsters of the '30s and the Great Depression hits and it's a mess and so what we decide is we're gonna have tariffs. This is the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in 1930. We're just gonna wall it off because we gotta keep jobs for Americans. Okay, this is half court tennis. You're not thinking, "Well, what's everybody else gonna do?" Retaliate exactly in kind. So for the Japanese who had been good citizens within the international order, they had maintained really, um, high positions in the League of Nations, which we'd been irresponsible and never joined, the Japanese... Uh, this pulls the rug on all the Japanese who'd said, "We need to cooperate with the international order." Japan's trade dependent. What are they gonna do? No one will trade with them. Their closest people won't. Okay, they look at the world, they go, "Well, we need an empire because we gotta have it big enough so that we get food and the, the basics for us." And that's where in... So '30 is Hawley-Smoot, '31's invasion of Manchuria.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel57:01

       Yeah.

   15. SPSarah C. M. Paine57:01

       So let's go back to grand strategy. This is Americans having no grand strategy of not thinking deeply about th- life is an interaction, right? I can tell you whatever I want to, but then you're gonna make your own decisions. If I don't consider what your decisions might be, I'm gonna be in deep, dark trouble. And I think about Hawley and Smoot, they didn't live to see what, uh, what they wrought. Uh, a lot of young men across the world died because of that, uh, they, uh, people like them, failure to think more broadly and think about it, the lesson of the, the Great Depression. The moment the international economy starts getting a cold, there are meetings of bankers and foreign ministers the world over to prevent it from going crazy ever again.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel57:47

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SPSarah C. M. Paine57:47

       'Cause they realize what the consequences are. You take people who are poor already and then you have a great depression, you get desperate decisions. And then once you start a war, it's very difficult to stop.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel57:57

       Right.

   19. SPSarah C. M. Paine57:57

       So it's a great, uh, lesson. So when Japan then is making an ugly decision 'cause it's stuck and so they go into Manchuria, which is where all their investments are, to protect them. China's got this crazy civil war going on. Uh, Japan, if it had just sat in Manchuria and just sat, they probably would've been just fine 'cause they do stabilize Manchuria. They are bringing, uh, some income back in. But the moment that they, uh, escalate big time in '37, they ruin their economy and it takes a number of years to play out fully.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel58:29

       Right, yeah.

   21. SPSarah C. M. Paine58:30

       Uh, it's a disaster, uh, for themselves most of all.

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel58:33

       Just broader picture of what I'm, um, learning from these military histories and especially your books is while there's these bigger forces of, like, which country has more production and so on, but then you can have these individual mistakes, a single mistake, y- y- like a single decision point by a single person that cascades and, and t- and then, you know, you overextend in China and now you need more oil and now you had to, you feel like the need to invade America and b- the, the importance of leadership in preventing these sorts of catastrophic mistakes.

   23. SPSarah C. M. Paine59:01

       Yeah, no, it's pivo- what I would call pivotal error. Uh, Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor is a pivotal error. They are already grossly overextended in China. They want to cut out foreign aid. They think, "Oh, Hawa- uh, remember that Hawaii is not a, a U.S. state. Doesn't become a state 'til 1959 or something. So and they, they probably take this racist view of Hawaiians, of whoever they think Hawaiians are and so, so their idea is we're gonna take a newspaper, thwap the dog on the, on the, the snout and the dog will quit. With and instead, you create great power allies all across the Pacific for, uh, the Chinese. So yeah, there are pivotal errors that you can make at which point, there is no return for the status quo ante. You have seen Putin make a pivotal error, right?

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel59:46

       Right.

   25. SPSarah C. M. Paine59:47

       He was getting away with hanging on to the Donbass and the Crimea. Now he made the pivotal error to try to take the whole enchilada. There is no going back on that

6. 59:58 – 1:10:50

   Ukraine

   1. SPSarah C. M. Paine59:58

      error.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel59:59

      Actually, that, that, I wanted to ask you about that. So y- you know, th- Japan invades Manchuria in 1931. Hitler invades Poland in 1939 and in retrospect, we think of them as w- part of the same great global conflict, uh, whereas they were separated by eight years. Uh, I, I wonder if you think of Ukraine today as e- eight years down the line or the, the things that could come, maybe not as a consequence but at the same time as this which could lead to another global situation. Do you think that it could cascade into something like that?

   3. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:00:31

      Of course, uh, yeah, this is the problem-

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:00:34

      Right.

   5. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:00:34

      ... uh, with all of this. Of course it could and there are many people working to prevent this from happening. You see all of these meetings-... where, uh, our leaders are meeting with each other. If you get into some global war with people with nuclear weapons, when the losers, uh, decide that ad- r- rather than losing, they're going to go for one more roll of the die, which is a nuclear weapon, then the question is whether the people below them will actually implement the order. Et cetera. Um, you know, and think about low probability but high consequence events. I, I don't know what the probability is, but I know the consequences are huge.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:01:12

      And the probability's iterated over many years and decades.

   7. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:01:15

      Right, yeah. You, you've got to always not use nuclear weapons, right?

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:01:19

      (laughs)

   9. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:01:19

      A- as, uh, that, uh, the Pandora's already, uh, the box has been opened. The nukes are there.

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:01:25

       Especially if there's no retirement plan for Putin.

   11. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:01:28

       No.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel1:01:28

       Uh, well, one, one of the things that's interesting from your book, I think you've mentioned this explicitly in the wars in Asia, there's things that are seen by one side as, "We are, we are deterring the other side." Often seen as the other side as a provocation.

   13. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:01:42

       Yes.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:01:42

       Where, you know, the, the embargoes from the US, um, are seen as Japan has a deadline to attack. Uh, uh, but I, I think you had some other examples like this. I, I think people who are, uh, you know, a little less empathetic to the Ukraine cause have said, "Well, uh, extending NATO, which we thought would be deterrence, is that was actually a provocation for Putin." But how, well, what should we just generally make of that lesson?

   15. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:02:04

       Um, first of all, I think you should look at the people living in the countries in question. So before we decide that we're the important people in the world, Americans, or we're in Britain now, or Britains, and therefore anyone in between doesn't count, I believe that's wrong. So all of the countries that joined NATO desperately wanted to join NATO, right?

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel1:02:26

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:02:26

       And they've had a whole history of Russians doing terrible things to them. I'm not making it up. It's-

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel1:02:33

       Right.

   19. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:02:33

       This is what Russia's been up to. They have been correct that Russia's gonna do more terrible things. They were correct doing everything they could to get into NATO. And also, um, be in the, uh, EU and they've... Uh, it's incredible, in my lifetime, remembering what the standards of living of people in Eastern Europe that the Soviet Union had dominated and what it is now. Since they have, uh, f- been freed of Soviet domination, there's been massive compounding of standards of living.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel1:03:07

       Right.

   21. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:03:07

       It's allowed people your age to travel the world, have a lot of aspirations in their lives, right?

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel1:03:14

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   23. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:03:14

       So-

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel1:03:14

       They're now podcasting. (laughs)

   25. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:03:16

       Yeah. Well, yeah, but if, if, when you talk about, "Oh, should we deny these things because we got some egos in Russia that want to maintain a continental empire?" Now, I cannot or you cannot change how Russians think about things, right? The Russians have to, uh, uh, how they think about th- the things, uh, that's their decision. But, um, if you look at Europe as a peninsula, uh, you're better off with more insulation fr- uh, from Russia than not.

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel1:03:46

       But isn't this another case of the, not thinking in terms of, uh, th- both courts or both halves of the court in tennis where compared to the possibility of nuclear war, j- j- just nudging that, uh, number up and down matters far more than whether another, uh, country in Eastern Europe gets to be part of NATO or not?

   27. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:04:02

       Well, I think what wa- what was hoped and it, uh, hope is, has, has been said not to be a strategy. The hope was that trying to get Russia to join the party, so trying to, um, integrate their energy supplies into Europe, paying them good money for it, have them make lots of money on that, hoping that they would invest this into their road system, which is lamentable, and hoping that they would invest this to cleaning out their business laws, which are, uh, it's horrendous trying to run a business there. As y- as you watch right now, as different things get nationalized and taken over and different business leaders who are successful wind up unaccountably dropping out of six-floor windows and things or old people always seem to fall down stairs, I think that's a, uh, a special way of, of offing people. That was the hope is join the party because you will become wealthy, too. Russian standards of li- uh, living ha- have been stagnating for quite a while, that Putin's model of the, uh, basically taking over your neighbor's stuff and then whatever you have a bomb flat, bringing home is, i- i- it's not an efficient way to make wealth. And you're killing so many people. So, uh, I don't believe that we in the West have this denying people of Eastern Europe, uh, saying, "Well, actually, the, because the Russians have such an attitude, you get to be their serfs forever."

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:27

       Or I, I guess it's not about, uh, wait, not that it's just, but there are broader considerations for the same reason that you me- were talking about earlier that would not have made sense for, uh, Americans or would not have been plausible that we would've kept fighting further to prevent, uh-

   29. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:05:42

       Ah-

   30. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:42

       ... the Eastern Europe at the time from succumbing to the Red Army.
7. 1:10:50 – 1:21:25

   Japan/Germany vs Iraq/Afghanistan occupation

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10:50

      Uh, uh, actually speaking of Iraq and Afghanistan, after World War II, our occupations of Japan and Germany were very successful in rooting out the toxic ideologies and completely transforming the society and culture, whereas, you know, Afghanistan and Iraq, we didn't have the same effect.

   2. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:11:07

      (laughs)

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:11:07

      What explains why, uh, those occupations were so much more successful?

   4. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:11:11

      Easy. One is a case of rebuilding institutions and the other one is building them from scratch. You can rebuild things rapidly. I mean, think of after the war how things were bombed out in Western Europe and quite rapidly they repaired buildings and things. So both Germany and Japan had had an extensive, uh, list of functioning institutions from local police officers, offices, to educational systems, to governments that, uh, local, provincial, et cetera, governments and, uh, running the train systems and businesses and all of this have been absolutely functional. And so finding the expertise to, uh, recreate that is, is easy. And of course, Germans and Japan, Japanese are gonna be living there, so they are very interested in rebuilding. And then what the key thing the United States then did for, I know more about Japan than Germany, is, um, we, uh... The Japanese were hemming and hawing over their, what their constitution was gonna be like, and so MacArthur finally got fed up and in one week he got his staff to write this constitution. And they're running around Tokyo going to bombed-out libraries or whatever trying to find examples of Western con- uh, constitutions so they can pull it all together. This was long before there's an internet where you can figure these things out and they're figuring out what the constitution's gonna be. And so he just, they cook it up over the week. And what the Java- the Japanese think, the ones we're dealing with, they think, "Well, you know, the Americans are gonna leave and so we'll, we'll go along with this constitution, but once the Americans are out, we're gonna do whatever." And what Prime Minister Yoshida, who was the first, uh, postwar prime minister, he said, "Well, we thought we could change it back," but he realized, uh, because of the vote, universal suffrage, allowing women to vote and there had been a certain amount of land reform, uh, he said there was no going back. It permanently changed the balance of power in, in Japan. And another, uh, feature is the Japanese, the Imperial Japanese Army had so disgraced itself. Uh, their strategy had led to the firebombing of the Home Islands. Talk about a total failure. So and in Germany, um-... uh, the same sort of thing. You have, uh, universal elections and things and in the... it took a wh- a while to get this, uh, the western zones united because, uh, they're all fighting with the Russians over their zone. You eventually get two Germanys, et cetera. But, um, you then you have a very competent post-war generation, both in Japan and Germany, who understood full well the horrors of the war that they'd been put through as conscripts and they are really intent on rebuilding their societies and they're the miracle generations in both countries. There's no parallel for that in, uh, Afghanistan and Iraq, right? They- they've never, uh, had f- they've never been developed countries. Germany and Japan were developed countries. So, and then you think, "Well, how long does it take to become a gel- uh, developed country?" Well, uh, some people say centuries? (laughs) Right?

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:16

      Right.

   6. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:14:16

      And then there's a whole other piece-

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:19

      (laughs)

   8. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:14:19

      ... which is the Germans and Japanese had a real sense of nation, right? Nationalism. So you don't have to worry about nation building because they have a sense of national identity. You do worry about state-building, so we were doing helping with state rebuilding. Well, in Afghanistan and, um, Iraq, there's no sense of a w- a nation. They have these, uh... I'm no expert on these parts of the world but my understanding is you have these very different ethnic groups, many of whom want to kill each other, right? Y- y- y- you just got a, a civil war going on there. I'm talking about a death ground kind of civil war where one's in power and just ruins the others and the other gets in power, they ruin the other people. And that's what's going on in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, because they're internal locations, right? They're in the middle of continent- continents and they're surrounded by a variety of neighbors, and if you look at those neighbors you go, "Ooh, a bunch of those people are gonna intervene." And they're gonna intervene in very destabilizing ways.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:18

      Yeah.

   10. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:15:18

       Um, very difficult. In Japan, it's an island, it's hard for people to intervene. Uh, Germany, we put a lot of money into it, uh, with having troops and o- of getting the German Army and other things up and running.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:30

       Wow.

   12. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:15:30

       And this may well be Ukraine's future, where they will, uh, be, have... Well, they already apparently do have the finest army in Europe.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:42

       Wow.

   14. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:15:42

       (laughs) And then they're gonna make it very highly defensible before the, uh, before it's all over.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:47

       Wow.

   16. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:15:47

       And Europeans, uh, as a group understand that it is absolutely in their inf- uh, interest to have an impregnable border around Ukraine. It protects them all. And Europe doesn't threaten Russia. They would love it if Russia would join the party. "Join the rules-based order. You'll make money. You'll do well." Except, uh, the oligarchs in question, this real minority of people who run Russia, and Putin, they personally won't do as well. Well, now they're war criminals so they're out of luck. (laughs)

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel1:16:17

       Speaking of miracle generations, the Meiji generation, a- as you've written about, uh, m- so many reforms learned from the West, um, improved every aspect of, um, you know, Japanese governance and, um, y- economics and education and j- law and whatever. And it, you know, within a generation, then you have people coming to power who make quagmire after quagmire, uh, make mistake after mistake. And there's other cases like this where, uh, th- there's some cases where the- the- you know, countries manage to solve succession problem after a really competent generation. You know, in Singapore after Lee Kuan Yew, it seems like the government has, uh, they- they've kept up the system which promoted such, uh, efficient, um, bureaucrats. Whereas, um, you know other cases where, you know, after Bismarck, uh, in Germany, y- you have the mistakes that led to World War I. What was the failure that the Meiji generation made that their level of grand strategy and insight w- was not carried over?

   18. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:17:13

       Well, I wouldn't pick on them 'cause they're brilliant. It's amazing what they achieved. And you go, "Well, eh, so it wasn't perfect?" No one's perfect. So I wouldn't pick on that particular generation. They're brilliant, as are Japan's post-war leaders. The way I look at it goes back to your initial question about grand strategy, is institutions are really important. Institutions structure decision-making. Now, it's very difficult to figure out what types of institutions to build, and, uh, when you see failings in them you go, "Oh, I've got to do something next time." But this again is the brilliance of this evolving maritime order in which we live, where people sign onto the things in which it's in their interest to sign onto them. Like you sign onto treaties and then you have provisos of the parts you don't want. And you join these international organizations and then you influence how they develop, et cetera. So these organizations have been instrumental, the ones built right after World War II, in holding the peace. Japan, MacArthur's constitution and then Japan's subsequent leaders has worked on, uh, improving the institutions that they have. But institutions, uh, take a long, long time to build. I think about it, it's sort of like a spider's web so that you spin, spin, spin this thing that's in- like gossamer, but then you spin enough of it and then it really holds.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:37

       Yeah.

   20. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:18:37

       But then there are people like Hitler who come through and-

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:40

       Mm-hmm.

   22. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:18:40

       ... they undo the work-

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:42

       Right.

   24. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:18:42

       ... of others. Bismarck, uh, when you ask about him, it's highly personalistic. That's not about an institution, that's about a guy leveraging the king.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:50

       (laughs)

   26. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:18:50

       And there's a reason for getting rid of royalty running the show. And then yeah, there are emerging institutions in Germany, a general staff and some other things that are very important.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:00

       I was about to mention, well, another maybe generation that managed to create good institutions was the American founders. But then (laughs) there was also the failure that led to the Civil War, right? So th- uh, even there, some institutions were weak.

   28. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:19:11

       Yeah. Our original sin.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:13

       Right.

   30. SPSarah C. M. Paine1:19:13

       Slavery.

Episode duration: 2:24:33