Dr. Sarah Paine on Dwarkesh Patel: Why Japan Modernized Fast

1. 0:00 – 15:26

   Japan's Meiji reforms

   1. SPSarah Paine0:00

      Japan in this battle is just taking anybody, young boys, old people, whoever they can put into that army, they're putting into it. If the Russians had won one more battle against the Japanese, the Japanese supply lines would have collapsed. If Japan had demanded more at those peace talks, Nicholas II would have gone back to war and he would have slaughtered them, because he had all these crack troops that are just sitting there and the Japanese literally don't have the men. Little Japan defeats the greatest land power of Asia, China. Incredible. This, uh, effect on China was far more devastating than the Opium Wars. The Chinese like to talk about these as being rebellions or uprisings. Give me a break. They're civil wars. So I'm gonna talk to you today about one of the two great generations in modern Japanese history and they are the Meiji generation, named after the Meiji Emperor here, and that generation transformed Japan into the only, and f- the first and the only non-Western modern power in that period. And the second great generation of modern Japanese is, of course, the post-war generation that transformed their country into a global powerhouse. And I'm gonna ask a question or try to both ask and answer it, is what caused the reversal of the balance of power in Asia in the period that I'm gonna talk to you about? And it's a really consequential question about why these tectonic changes take place in the international system. Because historically, uh, China had always been, uh, the dominant c- civilization in Asia from time immemorial, and then upstart Japan, um, winds up doing things, or China winds up doing things, and it reverses, and it has profound effects. And it's a very relevant question in our own day when there's a- an ongoing reversal of the reversal, when China's on the comeback and, uh, threatening to put Japan back in its box. So it's really interesting to ask why, how do these things happen? So that's the background of what I'm, uh, talking about. But if you think about China back in the day before Japan trounced China in the first Sino-Japanese War, Chinese believed that there's only one civilization. Theirs, naturally. And they believed that, of course, it's the best 'cause there's only one. That makes it easily the best. But, uh, in ad- (laughs) in addition, there, y- if you think about all levels of, of human endeavor, Chinese institutions were imitated throughout the East. It's the richest country on, on the planet for many, many years. Um, incredible achievements in science, philosophy, you name it. And also there was another assumption that, uh, people didn't make a U-turn on the path to civilization. It's always forward towards Chinese civilization. Well, Japan, um, by westernizing, is taking a U-turn on the road to civilization. It's dumping, uh, Chinese civilization, and so already we got least two civilizations out there. And then when it trounces China in a war, uh, it suggests to the Chinese that they can't be better than the Japanese at the military things at least. And this, uh, effect on China was far more devastating than the Opium Wars. So you... the Chinese could write those off, the losses there, bunch of crazy Europeans, they're irrelevant to us. But when Japan did this, it basically detonated the Confucian underpinnings of Chinese civilization and the Chinese have been trying to find a suitable replacement ever since. For a while, they thought it was communism. Maybe they still do. So I'm gonna ask a question. Why did the Asian balance of power change? And now spoiler alert, I'm gonna give the answer. Um, and I'm gonna say clever decisions in Tokyo. But I'm gonna use a particular framework to answer this that I have found really useful and I learned it from teaching at the Naval War College where students are required to have a counterargument in papers and this is, um, what I learned from doing this. So I'm gonna have an argument, which is a thesis and then I'll have some data supporting it, but then I'm not gonna quit there. I'm gonna do... find th- the second best argument, the counterargument, the absolutely best alternate explanation, but not one that I think is the best one. I'm gonna give you the best one. That's my thesis, and I'm gonna go into that and it's incredibly valuable, particularly in our own fraught, uh, political times where, um, we need to hear each other out. You need to hear out the counterargument of what the other side is saying. And then what you'll often find out in a counterargument is that there are actually some very valid points in it and it leads you to think, "Oh, well, maybe I need to adjust my own argument." So changing your mind is a good idea s- if the data comes in. Also, it gets you away from mono-causal explanations where you come up with one cause, you think, "That's it. Time to quit." And if you're thinking about the counterargument, you might get other causes as well. Also, if you're gonna do something like on a job and you have to recommend a course of action, your thesis, you had better anticipate what the counterargument's gonna be and then the third part of this is the rebuttal, because you better come into that, um, meeting your boss with a retta- rebuttal in your back pocket so that you can deal with people who are saying you're wrong. And the rebuttal cannot be a repetition of the original argument 'cause you know what? That's annoying. Don't do that. Really annoying. The most effective ones are coming at the problem from a completely different, uh, direction from either argument or counterargument that then shores up your argument and my other direction is I got a Sino-Japanese problem and I'm gonna come around with a Russia angle. So this is my game plan of what I'm planning to do and the analytical reasons for doing it. Okay, so I have a thesis which I'm gonna give to you. Uh, when... in emails and written work and... lectures like this one. You really help people if you explain exactly what you're up to and you do it succinctly at the very beginning, so here it is. The Japanese leaders westernized their institutions, they integrated multiple instruments of national power into a coherent strategy, and then in the Russo-Japanese War, they quit that one exactly at the culminating point of victory for maximum gains, and together these three things overturned the balance of power in their favor. That's my thesis. Short, sweet. You've got it whether you agree with it or not, we'll, we will get there. Okay, so now I'm going to go to the first point. First points, you should start with a topic sentence. I'm gonna start one. Why am I doing this? This is, these are all sign post- posts to orient you to my argument so that you can absorb it. And also if you don't like it, it, you can see very clearly the parts that you don't like, and we can get in a fun conversation. So, my topic sentence for the westernization part is Ja- Japanese leaders concluded that in order to parry the threat of the Industrial Revolution, of all these imperial powers coming at them, was they needed to westernize their institutions in order to protect their national interests, that this was step one. So that's my topic sentence. Okay. So, what's going on? The Industrial Revolution started in England, or, uh, Britain more generally, in the late 18th century. It spreads to the continent after the Napoleonic Wars die down at the beginning of the 19th century. By the bid- mid-19th century, it had reached Asia. And it's profoundly disruptive to traditional societies whose, uh, traditional security paradigms no longer work when they're facing the weaponry of the industrialized age coming at them. And what the Industrial Revolution does, and why it's so revolutionary, is it produces compounded economic growth. Traditional societies are pretty much, pretty stable, but when you do compounding economic growth, the difference in power and wealth becomes stark between those who do and those who don't. And it's also based not only on technological changes, right, whether you've got all these fancy armaments and railways and telegraphs, but it's also based on institutions. What are institutions? They're how we organize each other. So when you think of institutions, you think of the buildings where people are, but that's not it. It's the people in there who are working on a shared project together, whatever, or a shared area of activity, and, uh, this is one of the hallmarks of Western civilization. This is what the Romans figured out, of institutions and laws, that this is a way of really harnessing people, and it's profoundly powerful. So I'll go into all of that. So Japan's looking at the world with this incoming industrial revolution, or, or the powers that have benefited from it, and it's watching its neighbor, China, being defeated twice in war, and they're horrified, not just appalled. And, um, so they're looking at it and going, "You know what? Maybe we'll be next." And they're right. The United States does unto Japan what Britain and France did unto China. What's that? The treaty port system. What it meant is that trade in Japan and China would take place in designated treaty ports, that the West would set tariffs on this trade, and that Western citizens in China or Japan would, uh, in these treaty ports, would not be subjected to Chinese or Japanese law, but home country law. And when Chinese and Japanese citizens were in Europe and the United States, they most certainly were not dealing with home country law. They were dealing with US or Western law, so it was not reciprocal in any way. In addition, each one of these treaties had a most favored nation clause in it which said the, the, the one who's negotiating this treaty, the most favored one, whatever they negotiate will be given to everybody else. So it meant whatever, uh, uh, one could negotiate accrued to them all. It meant that China, uh, lost sovereign- Japan lost their sovereignty when these treaties go in. And so the Japanese, unlike China, which fights war after war with these Westerners, trying to defeat them militarily and is unsuccessful, the Japanese say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're gonna assess what the nature of the problem is." And they sent, uh, fact-finding mission after fact-finding mission to Europe primarily, but also the United States. This is just the most famous one, the Iwakura Mission, which is off to the west in the United States as well in 1871. And they're studying not only Western military instrument, institutions, but a whole array of political, economic, legal, social, educational, the works, to understand the basis for Western power and the problem that is hitting them, and they arrive in Europe at a really interesting time. It's when Otto von Bismarck is just finishing up the third war of the unification of the Germanic states, and the Japanese think, "Ooh, this might be quite a model for us." Why? 'Cause Prussia transformed itself over a succession of three wars from the weakest of the five great European powers to second only to Great Britain, and it did so in part by unifying the Germanic states into modern Germany. And the Japanese are thinking, "Wow, this might be relevant to us because we're divided up into all these feudal domains that we have just tried to glue together, and what are the lessons to be learned here?" And as they're thinking about this and watching what Bismarck is up to, they come upon, uh, thinking about institutions and technology-And modernizat- I'm gonna use the words in the following sense, modernization means, uh, adopting the most state of the art technology, whatever it is. Not just military technology, um, but ce- uh, all, all manner of, uh, technology. And Westernization, the way I'm gonna use it, means adopting Westernized institutions and I don't mean just military institutions, I mean everything, from whether you Westernize your educational institutions or political, whatever it is. And the question is can you have one without the other? Can you modernize and have all the fancy, uh, gadgets and things without having the Westernized institutions that the societies that created these things had? And if you think about it, this dichotomy is still with us. There are a lot of fighters in the Middle East and North Africa who are more than happy to use state of the art technology, but the last thing they want is Westernized institutions. And the Japanese, when they posed this question back in the day, the Si- a- asking whether you can have one without the other, they de- decided the answer was no. They didn't particularly like Western culture, but they believed that in order to have, um, to not only use and import state of the art technology but become an independent producer of it, you've got to do some degree of Westernization. So they get home, they set themselves a policy objective which is to protect Japanese national security and sovereignty in an age of accelerating imperialism, and they come up with a two-phase grand strategy to do this. It's gonna be start with a domestic phase of Westernization, Westernize their institutions, and then they're gonna, when they're done with that, they're gonna have a foreign policy phase which is gonna be about starting an empire. Why do that? Because they look at all the powers of their day and think, "What's a great power look like in those days?" Well, it has an empire, so they go, "Well, we're gonna have an empire." All right. These- this is the domestic phase, these are known as the Meiji reforms in honor of the emperor who reigned in this period. It's between 1869, 1890, it's a whole generation. And if you look at them, they, uh, only two of them pertain to the military. There's the draft and then creating, uh, the general staff, and then if you look at the, the two that started all, they started at the top of the social pyramid with the feudal domains, that's the, uh, the, the power brokers of Japan, and they're getting rid of all of those, and then they go right to the bottom of the social p- pyramid, which is children, and deciding that they need to have compulsory elementary education because they don't believe you can have a modern country, a strong country without a literate population. But if you look at the rest of these things, you're getting a Bank of Japan, you're gonna be having something running your currency and other things, you've got a cabinet, a higher education, you're gonna have a professional civil service, constitution, a parliament, you're gonna have a court system that looks like a Western court system with laws that look an awful lot like Western laws. As a result of doing all of this, the Westerners had no excuse left for having a treaty port system because this mirrors what's going on in the West. So Britain, which is the precedent setter in these things, the superpower of its day, it renegotiates its treaties with Japan on the basis of juridical equality, and the other powers follow suit and do it. This happens in Japan a half century before China gets rid of its unequal treaties.

2. 15:26 – 30:42

   Trans-Siberian railway & Japan's 3-year window for empire

   1. SPSarah Paine15:26

      All right. So domestic phase is over the moment, um, Japan signs that treaty with Britain. The foreign policy phase has to do with Japan believes it needs an empire and its neighborhood is a mess. China is imploding for various reasons, which I will get to, and Korea's even worse. And China, because it's having a massive civil wars throughout China, can no longer fulfill its suzerain role to stabilize Korea, and the Korean royal house is busy mailing package bombs to each other. I kid you not. They're blowing each other up. What Japan is terribly concerned about is that Russia might try to fill this power vacuum. Why would Japan think that? Well, it's the Trans-Siberian Railway, that Russia decides in 1891 it's gonna build a Trans-Siberian Railway. To exactly what? Uh, there is no Russian population out there, and Japan understands exactly what it is. It's a bid for empire in Asia. Because once Russia completes this thing, it's gonna overturn the Asian balance of power because Russia's gonna be able to deploy troops where nobody else can. Therefore, treaty revision happens on the 16th of July, 1894. That's when it's signed on the dotted line with, with Britain. Nine days later, Japan fires the opening shots of the first Sino-Japanese War. And the Japanese fight three wars of Russian containment. I'm gonna talk to you about the two that went well for them today. The third one's a whole other topic. The first one's the first Sino-Japanese War when little Japan defeats the greatest land power of Asia, China. Incredible. The second one, which I'll get to a decade later, is the Russo-Japanese War when the Japanese defeat, sorry, spoiler alert, um, Russia, the greatest land empire of Europe. Amazing that they can do this. And the third one does not go nearly as well. That would be the second Sino-Japanese War from 1931 to 1945 that morphs into World War II that ruins the Japanese, but it's a different topic-... first Sino-Japanese War, to let you know what happened in it. It's comprised of two pairs of key battles. There are other battles as well, but this is a good way to understand it. The first battle is at Pyongyang. The Japanese defeat the Chinese army, which takes off and retreats all the way over the border river, which is the Yalu, back into Chinese territory. So Japan has actually achieved its war objective, which was to remove Korea from the Chinese sphere of influence. Battle number one, they've already done it. And the second battle occurs within the week, the same week, in mid-September 1894. It's the Battle of the Yalu, where the Japanese Navy trounces the Chinese Navy, which believe it or not, in this day, both countries had state-of-the-art navies. And Japan trounces it and gets command of the sea. That's terribly important for Japan. For Japan to reach the theater here, it's got to cross the sea. If there's a hostile navy out and about, it can sink troop transports, supplies, and other things. So it's very important to get rid of hostile navy. Well, the reason it gets command of the sea is because the Chinese decide they're never gonna engage with the Chi- with the Japanese Navy ever again, and they duck into port. Uh, and the Chinese are gonna solve that problem for them. There are a second pair of battles which are fought over the winter of 1894-95. China only has one naval refitting station where you can actually fix large ships. That's at Port Arthur. And they will take it by land, the same way they're gonna take it in the Russo-Japanese War. The Chinese fleet, what's left of it, flees to Weihaiwei, hang out in port. Japan lands an army on the Shandong Peninsula there, and also it blockades with its navy, and then the army turns the landward guns on the ships in port and they sink them all. And that is the end of that war. Okay. Here's what Japan got out of this war, and what I've got is a very simple framework, domestic, regional, international. This is a way for, to help you, uh, remember what I'm gonna tell you. Three-part frameworks, uh, are helpful for getting information to other people. Domestically, this victory in this war validated a very controversial Westernization program. All those Meiji reforms which sound so great in retrospect, uh, actually the Japanese population didn't like them. Who wants their kids being sent to, uh, elementary school if they were working on the farm before? And who wants this Westernized curriculum? Who likes Westerners anyway? And people are wearing all this Western clothing and stuff. It's crazy land. Why would anyone like that? Uh, once Japan wins this war and trounces China, a lot of Japanese have second thoughts about this. They're quite proud of their achievements, and it vastly increases the prestige of th- the military, particularly the army, and this is gonna have bad follow-on effects for civil-military relations because it's gonna increase military power over civil, uh, power. But it takes a while to play out. Regionally, Japan is replacing China as the dominant power, and Japan's getting the begin- beginnings of its empires, Taiwan and the Pescadors. Internationally, Japan becomes a recognized great power. And what's my proof? It would be the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which is Britain's only long-term alliance between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, alliance with Japan. However, this war gets the Eye of Mordor turned onto them because Russia is going, "Whoa, uh, rising power in Asia. Potential two-front war problem for us, with Europe and the West and whatever the Japanese think they're doing," and it triggers a Russo-Japanese arms race. And Russia, the Eye of Mordor turns from Europe to Asia, and that's gonna, uh, be problematic. So now my transition sentence. I've done part number one. Uh, not only did Japan Westernize its institutions in order to overturn the balance of power, but it also mastered grand strategy and integrated multiple instruments of national power. And here we go on that one. Marshal, uh, Yamagata, who was the writer of war plans for the very successful Sino-Japanese War, uh, he predicted another war within the decade, and the Russo-Japanese War came right on time. And in the meantime, Japan prepared for war, and it integrated, uh, such instruments of national power as diplomacy, intelligence, military, economics. I'm gonna go through each in turn, starting with diplomacy. Here you have Sun Tzu, who's China's big gur- uh, guru, Art of War, who's talking about, it's really important to disrupt alliances. In modern terminology, that would be isolating the adversary, that that might be a good thing to do. And that's the purpose of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. How does that work? What it says, its terms say that if more than one European power comes to Asia to fight Japan, that means Russia plus one European buddy, then Britain is gonna weigh in on Japan's side. So Britain is the number one power I- in Europe, so why would you ever want to help Russia out? Because it won't go well with you if Britain is on Japan's side. This alliance goes into effect, uh, from 1902 to nine- to 1907, it's a five-year event, opening a window of opportunity for Japan to sort out its empire in Asia. But the Trans-Siberian Railway, when it gets completed, is gonna threaten to close that window, and here's why. The Trans-Siberian Railway in those days, it's not north of the Amur. It's actually straight through Manchuria, this Chinese Eastern Railway. It's a- Russia's bid for empire of trying to control Manchuria. And it was unfinished. Uh, it hadn't been double-tracked, so that means you're always having to push, push trains off so, uh, other trains can pass them in the other direction. It's missing its Lake Baikal link. Don't think lake, think Switzerland. Lake Baikal is about the size of Switzerland. And the Boxer Rebellion, the Al-Qaeda of their day, and I'll get to them, uh, had destroyed much of the track, really upsetting the Russians. As a result of all of this, at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, which begins in 1904, the carrying capacity of that railway was only 20 to, or to 40,000 men per month to the front. By the end of the war, the last battle, it's 100,000 men per month. If those numbers had been available at the beginning of the war, Japan would have faced numerically s- uh, superior Russians from start to finish and would have been in a world of hurt. So Japan has got a, a window of opportunity that it's warring about.... uh, sorting things out. In addition, Japan engages in a really big military buildup. It gets a really big indemnity from the first Sino-Japanese War and it spends it, and that spending is finished at around 1901, meaning it's about ready to go to war. At the time the war breaks out, Russian naval assets in Asia were about three-quarters those of Japan, but Russia was s- uh, scheduled to surpass Japan's naval assets, uh, by about 1905. Again, you could see this window of opportunity threatening to shut. So if you look at it, Japan's window of opportunity of getting its empire, if that's what it thinks it wants, it, you gotta have treaty versio- vision in place, you've gotta isolate Russians, make sure that there's gonna be no other power interfering in these things, you gotta have your rearmament program. But look, this window is very short. It's gonna close in 1905-ish. And the th- uh, the, when you think of windows of opportunities, what they mean is whatever it is you plan to do has to be completed before it slams shut. If you're on the wrong side of the window, which is what happens to Japan in the second Sino-Japanese War, you are in a world of hurt. In addition, what it means is actually time is on the side of your adversary. It is a sign of weakness, not strength. The Japanese are looking at the Russians who are procrastinating. The Japanese are telling them, "Hey, we will trade, uh, recognition of your dominance of Manchuria if you'll, uh, recognize our dominance in Korea." The Russians didn't wanna do anything. They're procrastinating and trying to go beyond this window, and the Japanese are thinking, "Uh, we gotta sort it out before that happens." So another, uh, element of national power are psychological... PSYOPs as the US military likes to call them, psychological operations, and the Japanese, uh, were engaged in a really wide array of them, both at the front, at, in Russia and across the Russian Empire. At the front, the Japanese were secreting and all kinds of postcards for their Russian recruits there, showing the, the great life as a POW in rather posh Japanese c- accommodations, as opposed to the really bad life of getting disabled or killed in the front. Meanwhile, Russia was the only... I think there are only three European countries, including Russia, that lacked a legislature in this period. I think Montenegro is one of them, and maybe the Ottoman Empire might be the other one. Japan had a legislature. Russian population's sick of it, the war wasn't going well, and they start hitting the streets in the Russian Revolution, and Japan wants to advertise that to the troops. You want things to be stirred up in Russia so that Russia has to pull troops back into European Russia, so they're doing all of that. And then, um, this gentleman, he was a colonel back in the day, Colonel Akashi, but he's a general by the time this picture is taken of him. He's working in the Japanese legation in Stockholm, and he's busy cutting checks to Finnish and Polish revolutionaries who are part of the Russian Empire and want out, trying to stir things up there to have Russia, uh, have to be forced to pull the troops out of Asia. And then the Japanese have this gentleman in their employ and a lot of other people, Yuan Shikai. He is key in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty and becomes China's first president. But back in the day, he's running reconnaissance missions for the Japanese, telling them what the Russians are up to. And then, um, and when little detachments of Russian troops try to go out and about, um, these people are harassing them, which doesn't help Russian morale. Also, the Japanese are being really good about purchases from Manchurians. They aren't just taking things from people. They're actually paying, so they're triggering an economic boom in Manchuria, which means locals like them. And then, um, the Japanese also figure how to tap into Russian fleet communications so they know where the Russian fleet is most convenient. So this is the information element of national power. And then there's economics. Two-fifths of this war for the Japan- Japanese side is paid for with loans, so if they don't get the loans, they can't wage the war. In fact, one of the reasons Russia has to call it quits at the end of the war is when it tries to raise a final w- loan, uh, it failed. No one, uh, no one will pay for it. But the Japanese, uh, loans depend on battlefield success, as do interest rates, so if you're excess- successful in the field, the interest rates go down. So Japan is doing quite well with all of this. So, um, if you sum it all up, you can go the Japanese used diplomacy to isolate their adversary with this UK alliance. They used all these psychological operations to promote revolution and, uh, desertions. They're using the, uh, military, uh, uh, instrument to fund their rearmament, and then they've got the economics going with all of these loans. The US military is really partial to a Reagan-era acronym of DIME. Right? You can see here the D is for diplomacy, I is for information, M is for military, E is economic. Sounds like a bad, I don't know, cheerleading routine. Um, it's inadequate. Uh, it may be a place to start. It's cute and all that stuff, but cute does not mean complete. Think about it. One of the most important factors in this war, bar none, certainly for Russia, is railways. I don't see an R in there or, uh, anything. So by all means, this is better than only looking at military factors, but it's incomplete. (air whooshing)

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel29:25

      (jazzy music plays) YouTube Shorts have been a really great tool for us for bringing new viewers to our main interviews. For example, if a guest is talking about a historical event, we'll take a snippet of the conversation and then just use the real archival footage to bring it to life. But when they dive into hypothetical situations, that can be hard to visualize. For example, I recently interviewed Stephen Kotkin about Joseph Stalin, and Kotkin started this hypothetical dialogue between two Soviet-era co-conspirators.

   3. NANarrator29:51

      And I come to you and I say, "This Stalin guy, he's wrecking everything."

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel29:56

      We wanted to feel like you were really there in the room while this was happening, so we generated a picture of a Soviet official and we prompted Google's VO3 to have him say Kotkin's line.

   5. NANarrator30:08

      This Stalin guy...He's wrecking everything.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel30:13

      This was literally a one-shot, and it handled everything perfectly, including the pause. So we edited the video in and lip synced it to Cockayne's line.

   7. NANarrator30:23

      And I come to you and I say, "This Stalin guy, he's wrecking everything. We gotta take him down."

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel30:30

      Try View3 on the Gemini app with Google's AI Pro Plan or get the highest access with the Ultra plan. Sign up at gemini.google. Okay, back to Sarah.

3. 30:42 – 49:22

   The most important battle in the Russo-Japanese war

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel30:42

   2. SPSarah Paine30:42

      So, I've talked about Japan's westernization and I've talked about its master grand strategy, and now here's my third reason of how they, how they overturned the balance of power, and it has to do with pegging the culminating point of victory in the Russo-Japanese War. And now for a commercial break, I'm gonna give you some terminology, which are culminating point of attack, culminating point of victory. They're different. Culminating point of attack is an operational term. If you do not reach your culminating point of attack, it means you could have gone further, and it applies, the culminating point of attack applies to a single battle or a set of battles, which would be called a campaign. So if you don't go far enough in your battle, you could have taken more territory or whatever it was you were after. If you go too far, so imagine you're going deep into whatever territory it is. Your lines are ever more extended. Your enemy's lines are probably being shortened. Your supply problems are getting worse. Theirs might be getting better. If you go way too far, your enemy will launch a counterattack that will send you much further backwards than if you'd been a little more cautious about how far you went. So that's an operational term. The strategic term is culminating point of victory, and it concerns the objective for which the war was fought. Japan's fighting this war in order to protect its sovereignty, become a great power to do that. If you don't go far enough and, uh, if you don't reach your culminating point, you could have gotten greater winnings. If you go too far, typically what'll happen is you will trigger a third-party intervention. And what may have been feasible before that third party joined the party, uh, may no longer be. So, uh, this is, this is the point of the terminology. Oh, commercial break is over, and let's get going on the, the, uh, Russo-Japanese War. Here's a nice map of it. So it starts out with a Japanese surprise attack on Port Arthur, Lüshun. Modern name, I'm using traditional name. It's on the Liaodong Peninsula. This is the main Russian base. The Japanese have to get those, uh, ships in base and sink them even better, because their supply lines are in danger if that navy's out and about. Simultaneously, they land an army in Korea that's gonna go northwest into Manchuria, and if you look at the railway line, it goes Port Arthur all the way to Harbin up there. That's the east-west, uh, junction, uh, of the Trans-Siberian Rai- Railway. In those days, that's the Chinese Eastern Railway. And I've only listed a couple of the major battles, but basically, it's going up the railway system from Port Arthur upward, and you've got the Lia- Liaoyang and Mukden. And Japan has got only four armies until the very end of the war when it gets a fifth, and one army, as long as Port Arthur has ships in it, it has to be stuck there besieging it. And Japan's, uh, theory of victory in this thing is to have an annihilating battle. That's what, um, Bismarck had done to the French in the Battle of Sedan. And so the Japanese really need to get that army out of Port Arthur so that it can concentrate on these other battles. What happens is Russia keeps losing the battles, but it has an orderly retreat, moving ever further northward, extending Japanese lines. So that's a- an overview of how the war goes so you can orient the r- uh, the rest of the conversation here. If you look at the invasion routes that Japan uses in the first Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, they're remarkably similar because guess what? The geography hasn't changed, and so if you (laughs) wanna send an army in to, uh, desired locations, it may well have to take similar routes. And, uh, the British, the French, the Americans, Japanese had studied very carefully the first Sino-Japanese War. But the, apparently the Russians didn't waste their time on it because here's what's up. If the Russians had studied it carefully, they would've known the Yalu River is lethal to send an army across that if there's an army waiting for it on the other side. The Russians also would've realized that this Fengshui Pass and the Martian Pass, Martian means literally scratch the skies, that if you're prepared there, you're gonna ruin an army coming through. Of course the Russians aren't prepared there. And then they also would've known that the Liaodong Peninsula, it has a very narrow neck. If you cut the narrow neck, which is right where Dalney is, a big commercial port, you're gonna get that port which is connected to the railway and you're gonna be able to supply your armies going right up north. In addition, it means you're probably gonna get Port Arthur, the big naval base as well because it's b- basically been turned into an island and you'll probably get that. So, the Russians should've figured out that they, uh, but they didn't. The Japanese literally blast through these locations, and here's the key to reducing the fleet in Port Arthur. Since the Russians wouldn't sortie, they're just sticking in, in harbor, so the Japanese have to figure out a way to do it. Here's how it works. They have to get a bunch of these 11-inch Howitzers in place. Japan didn't own many of these. They're really heavy. It's really hard to transport them with horses and things. They've gotta put them behind the hills in Port Arthur, and then they've gotta take the high point, which is they, takes them a while to figure out that they needed to do this, is 203 meter hill. You put a spotter on 203 meter hill. This thing starts firing shots, and the spotter starts radioing in how you have to adjust the line of fire in order to hit the ships in harbor. So that's what's going on here. Here you can see the narrow neck there above Dalney. You can see it's a big port where you put a lot of ships but not a very protected port, and this star is where Port Arthur is and that is a protected port where you'd wanna put naval vessels, and you can see it takes the Japanese two months to work their way down the Liaodong Peninsula to get themselves in position to blow away the ships in port. Uh, meanwhile, Japanese armies are having a hard time while this is going on. It could be argued that maybe they even reached their culminating point of attack in the Battle of Liaoyang. Who knows? Liaoyang takes place less than halfway through the war. It's in early September 1904 and Japanese munitions, uh, numbers of officers, numbers of horses, it all goes critical. They don't have enough. They get away with it. Um, they win the battle but they don't... The Russians have an organized tr- retreat northward. And at the Battle of Shakhe, which happens next in, in October, the Japanese supply system almost collapses but they get away with it. And so, um, bad things are going on at land... uh, Japan doesn't have an infinite supply of soldiers. So you can also look, they don't have an infinite supply of artillery, howitzers and things. Here are their gun emplacements. Notice the green ones are army guns emplacements around Port Arthur. That makes sense. What's all the purple? They have so few guns, they're pulling them off ships in order to reduce Port Arthur and all these things they really need up in Manchuria. They need Nogi, General Nogi who's running all of this, his army up in Manchuria. And there you can see the circle is where 203 Meter Hill is that they need to take that as well. All right. So General Nogi who is commanding the Third Army which is in, uh, charge of the siege, he is really desperate to take... to reduce, uh, the fortress as soon as possible and he runs four different really costly infantry assaults on a fortress where you're killing lots of Japanese, uh, young men. And he chose, um... The first two occur right prior to major battles, Liaoyang and Shakhe respectively, um, because he wants to win those battles, uh, win Port Arthur so then he can take his guns and troops to fight at Liaohan- Liaoyang and Shakhe. Well, it's not to be 'cause he loses both of them. Uh, the- the assaults are insufficient. And it's only after the second one that he realizes the importance of 203 Meter Hill. The problem is Nogi gets 45,000 Japanese soldiers killed doing this. 45,000 soldiers in that day is an entire army, and I've already pointed out that Japan only had foreign armies until the very end of the war when it tries to cobble together a fifth one. Here's what the- what 203 Meter Hill looks like from down below. Here's what it looks like from up top, the kind of view you get. When there was a truce in early December 1904 and there was some talking between Japanese and Russian officers, Russian officers said, "You will never capture 200- 203 Meter Hill," to which the Japanese officer replied, "We'll purchase it in blood." And they did. And their gamble paid off because all these ships, you'll notice they're listing. It's because, um, they ain't sailing anywhere. The 203 Meter Hill, they take it the end of November and within the week, they are now sinking, all of these battleships. And they're gone within a few days and the R- Ru- the Russians, uh, give up at Port Arthur and the Third Army is up and, and heading into Manchuria where it'll be there for the Battle of Mukden which is a huge battle. It's got, what, 500,000 troops? But even so, Russia can muster, uh, 125,000 more troops than Japan can. Japan, in this battle, is just taking anybody. Uh, young boys, old people. Whoever they can put into that army, they're putting into it. And you could argue that they're well beyond their culminating point of attack but for incompetent Russian strategy. If the Russians had won one more battle against the Japanese, uh, their s- Japanese supply lines would have collapsed and it's unclear how far down, uh, the Liaodong Peninsula they would have had to retreat. Um, so, uh, this is when, uh, Japan's war termination plan goes into effect. The Japanese realized from the very beginning that they had a high-risk, high-reward strategy. And in contrast to World War II, they had a really w- carefully prepared exit strategy. So when Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi is convening the cabinet and they're gonna make the decision to fire the first shots in this war, he is already lining up a Harvard grad, uh, here, Viscount Kaneko who was an acquaintance of President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States, then president, and what they want is to have Viscount Kaneko, um, work on getting Roosevelt ready to do mediation at the end of this war. And the, the ch- peace treaty is gonna be held in... Negotiations are gonna be held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire negotiated by another Harvard alumnus, Baron Komura, who's gonna do all of that. Meanwhile, Ito sends his son-in-law who's a Diet member but also a graduate of Cambridge University off to Britain to keep the Anglo-Japanese Alliance solid. So the Japanese are very aware that you gotta have a way out of this thing. So it's in the Battle of Mukden that, uh, Field Marshal Yamagata decides it's time to call the American card at, at this moment. He said, "Look, the enemy's never gonna request peace unless we have invaded Moscow or St Petersburg." Something he knows to be impossible. And he does an assessment. He said, "Look, the enemy still has powerful forces in its home country. We have already exhausted ours. Second, while the enemy still does not run out of officers, we have lost a great number since the opening of, uh, the war and cannot easily replace them." At this moment, the Russian army was three times the size of the Japanese army and that army in theater was incompre- c- increasingly comprised of crack soldiers, not the, the kind of colonial kind of, of soldiers they'd started out with. And so this... Here's to Field Marshal Yamagata who in the first Sino-Japanese War, because the government in Tokyo was afraid he was gonna march on Beijing and do regime change, they pulled him out of theater and gave him a sinecure to make sure he didn't do that. Uh, this time, he's a wiser man. He goes, "We must now be prudent." And here are other members of this brilliant Meiji generation. The Chief of Staff of the Manchurian Army said, "Look, if you start a fire, you gotta put it out."And here is the Field Marshall Oyama, who is the commander of Manchurian forces. B- before he sets out to take command, he tells the Navy minister, "I will care for fighting in Manchuria, but I'm counting you as the man to tell me when to quit." So the Navy's gonna be the fire department, apparently. To tell you what the Navy was up to, they took Elliot Island to turn it into a cruiser base, and that's how they're running the blockade operations on Port Arthur of keeping the Russian fleet in until they can eventually sink it there. In addition, the Imperial Japanese Navy is busy laying mines. A lot of ships go down to mines. So, this is an interesting story. So Nicholas II, czar of Russia, doesn't much like it that his fleet is just sitting in port not doing anything, and so he sends Admiral Makarov out there to assume command. And I've had the, uh, misfortune to read Makarov's major literary contribution, which is all about naval strategy, and he's a real hero in Russia but then I read his book. It's, uh, unbelievable. He is... I- if you face a big ship, what do you do? A more powerful ship, you attack. If it's a smaller ship, what do you do? You attack. It's like, okay, one size fits all? I mean, how unanalytical. Uh, here's what happens to him. He comes in theater and within the month, another spoiler alert, he's dead. How did that happen? Uh, he followed his strategy. That's how it happened. (laughs)

   3. NANarrator44:13

      (laughs)

   4. SPSarah Paine44:13

      What he does, he arrives, everyone's really excited 'cause he's getting the guys out and thinking they're gonna be doing things. Uh, but on April 12th, the evening before he dies, there are a bunch of Japanese ships laying mines out of the harbor's entrance and he mistakes them for Russian ships and tells his people, "Don't fire on them." Oops. And the next morning, when he sorties with the whole fleet to be part of his, "We're gonna, uh, w-" It's always take the offensive. Well, they didn't sweep the harbor entrance for mines. His ship hits a mine and he goes down with the ship. All right, that is a tactical error, and he's a dead man because of it. However, there's a much more stratie- important strategic error that follows. Two weeks later, Nicholas II decides to send his Baltic fleet, named for the Baltic, that's where it is, um, all the way around to come and relieve the siege at Port Arthur in order to avenge all of this thing. Okay, what's the problem with that plan? Well, that's the problem with that plan, right? It's a long way to go. There is no air conditioning for the sailors, right? They come from northern climes. By the time they arrive, they're mutinous. Their ships are covered with barnacles, which means they don't move very fast. Meanwhile, once Port Arthur has fallen, the Japanese immediately reship their na- refit their navy so they were good to go, and, um, so the way this blunder plays out... Well, if you think about Britain, Britain will do these worldwide adventures but they had a complete basing system across the globe so that their ships had coaling stations, they could, uh, refit, put more water on, give people some R & R time, uh, r- uh, uh, re- uh, re- relaxation and things, uh, a- and also, the British were very careful, uh, to fight on their own terms whethe- at ever possible. You don't want to fight on the enemy's terms. Well, guess what? You're gonna be fighting right next to Japan barnacle chips and mutinous crews. Uh, that's not gonna go well for you. And the Japanese know, because now that Po- Port Arthur falls while this, uh, expedition is taking place, so then the purpose of the expedition is no longer there. They should've taken a U-turn and go home but no, no, no, they're gonna keep on going, so there is only one other possible location for them, which is a inferior base up at Vladivostok. So the Japanese know there are three ways to get to Vladivostok if you're coming up from the south. You're either gonna go the long, long way around through the Liparit Strait, and it's awfully narrow and it's the long way around; you can go through the Tsugaru Strait, which is a little wider but it goes by, by a bunch of big Japanese army bases and also a very large part of Hakodate. You wanna do that, that's kind of risky. So the short way is to go through the Korea Strait, which is broken in the middle by the Tsushima Islands, and the Tsushima Strait is to the east. It's 20 to 25 miles wide at its narrowest point, and that's the short way, which is what the Russians take. And guess what? They have a welcoming party there of all these newly refitted Japanese ships that know exactly what they're up to, and the Battle of Tsushima is one of the most, uh, lopsided naval battles in human history. The Japanese just either sink or commandeer basically the entire fleet, uh, proving the Russians had no idea of how to, uh, do naval strategy, that the navy had been a product of a bunch of aristocrats who, uh... The one who ran it was a guy who was, uh, known for, what was it, fast women and slow ships?

   5. NANarrator47:50

      (laughs)

   6. SPSarah Paine47:51

      Um, (laughs) it, it did not work out well for them. All right, while the negotiations are being held whe- on whether to hold negotiations, President Roosevelt suggests to the Japanese that they try to take Sakhalin Island. You can see the tip end of the Japanese home island, Hokkaido, and then there's Sakhalin. Why? Because it's much more valuable to the Russians than the Japanese and it'd be a good trade back item in the peace negotiations, 'cause for Japan it's nice fishing ground but for Russia, its sovereign Russian territory. Horror is ceding that sovereign Russian territory to anyone, let alone an Asian power given the, um, prejudices of the day. All right, to sum up what Japan got out of this war, it got its immediate war objective, uh, Russian troop withdrawal from Manchuria. That's what they wanted, and they get this Japanese sphere of, uh, influence in Korea. That's what they wanted, but guess... Remember at the very beginning, they wanted to trade Japanese predominance in Korea for Russian predominance in Manchuria? Whoa, well, this is what they really got. They got the southern half of Sakhalin Island, Russian territory. They got Southern Manchuria, and it's actually arguably the valuable half, the southern half, because that has Port Arthur and Dalny and all the r- railways that Russians had, um-... invested there, and then it confirms the outcome of the first Sino-Japanese War, that Japan is indeed the dominant power of Asia. So, um, I rest my case. Japan did it. Smart decisions in Japan is what overturned the balance of power in Asia.

4. 49:22 – 1:00:15

   China's implosion: imperialism, civil wars, and opium

   1. SPSarah Paine49:22

      Okay, but I promised you a counterargument. What would a smart person say who disagrees with me? And here's a, a perfectly good counterargument, which would say, yeah, it's great you think the Japanese are so clever, but actually China faced a perfect storm of catastrophes. And because China imploded, that's why it leaves Japan on top in Asia. The primary, uh, factor is that China's falling apart and the... this perfect storm of problems, I'll go through three, it's always a good number, people can remember three things, talking about the civil wars afflicting China, uh, that in an age of in- accelerating European imperialism and also, the Manchus who ran China, they're only 2% of the population, were suffering from all kinds of dynastic decline, which I will get into. China had reached its pre-industrial limits to growth. Its population kept on going up and up, but its agricultural productivity just could not feed people. And so people are trying to farm really marginal lands, either they're too vertical or they're- don't have, uh, reliable rainfall and you're getting massive soil erosion doing these things, and you're also getting a lot of famines. And famines, uh, are both the cause and the effect of civil wars. In this map, you can just see I've named some of the big rebellions on this one. It's to give you a sense that these rebellions affect all of China, not just a little here and there, but a lot of everywhere. And I'm now gonna give you a table. And this is a simplified table, only goes 1845 to 1895. It's part of a much bigger table that would cover the entire 19th century, and that table's an oversimplification. So the point is, this is not business as usual. In the red, uh, box, that is the height of these rebellions, 1851 to 1878. The biggest rebellion in there is the Taipings. It's estimated that 20 million people died in the Taiping Rebellion. To put that figure in perspective, and people know- don't know how many people died in all of these things. Eh, China didn't know how many people they had, much less how many people they lost. But it- it... to give you a sense of... in World War II, it's estimated that 55 million people died. So you're talking 20 million just in the Taipings, and I have no idea how all this adds up, but it's huge. The Chinese like to talk about these as being rebellions or uprisings. Give me a break. They're civil wars. Um, a whole bunch of them want to overthrow the dynasty in Beijing. A whole other set of them want to secede from the empire, often these minority p- uh, people who just want the Han, the predominant p- uh, people to go away, or the Manchus in this era. So, um, th- some of these provinces are devastated for generations. Okay, so that's point one, the civil wars. Point two is this coincided with an era of accelerating European imperialism where Europeans and also Japan- Japanese are carving out massive spheres of influence for themselves, so the Chinese are not gonna have sovereignty over their country, full sovereignty, for a very, very long time. And the story, the worst part gets even worse. This happens to China because China loses a succession of regional wars. It loses the First Opium War, the Second Opium War, the Japanese, uh, snag the Ryukyu Islands, and then in the Sino-French War, uh, China loses control over Indochina. And then in the Sino-Japanese War they're losing their tributary of Korea, and the Ili Crisis is up in Xinjiang, goes a little better for them. Uh, this is a mess. This is not business as usual. This is, uh... think about one country being afflicted by this much trouble. And then it comes at a time when the Manchus are in real trouble themselves. They had ridden to power on these fabulous cavalries and in tremendous operational success for, uh, people who are only 2% of the population that they dominate, and they transform China into the richest polity around, uh, the globe by the 18th century. But here's the problem with their tremendous success in their military campaigns. They're overextending China financially. Inside the round circle there, that's China proper. These are the core provinces of China that produce all the income, but the Manchus came in from Manchuria up there, but they also take Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. The areas that, uh, cost, uh... um, not Manchuria so much, but the other ones, they cost a lot of garrisoning. Uh, it costs a lot of money to garrison these places. And so, it looks like a great success, uh, but it's gonna have problems later on. And then here's what happens to the Manchu emperors. They no longer ride at the head of their armies. The Qianlong Emperor, who's considered to be, uh, uh, who ruled at the, uh, the height of the dynasty, what's he spending his money on? All sorts of interesting architectural programs, and that's why people think he's great, builds beautiful things. But these emperors are isolated, they don't have command experience, extensive spending habits, and then it gets better. So they got all these tributaries. Some of their tributaries produce really high-quality opium, and the emperors decide they want to sample the goods. And the people who are preparing it for them also want to sample the goods. And then the Manchu banner forces that are the Praetorian Guard of the Manchus are also sampling the goods. And then you go, why are the last Qing emperors incapable of producing offspring or have hardly any? 'Cause they have huge harems, so what's their problem?Well, if you're really totally high on drugs, you can ruin yourself, and so that is what goes on. No wonder they're losing these wars if, um, uh, some of your key thinkers are not thinking very clearly. So, the counterargument to my argument says, look, it's nonsense th- I mean, the Japanese may have been really clever, but this is the real big event, is this massive series of civil wars, uh, European imperialism, and, uh, the collapse of Man- Manchu minority rule. That would be the real thing. Now, if I leave my argument here, I've just shot myself in the foot because I've just decimated my original argument with a pretty good counterargument, and that would be bad, that would hurt. So you need to do a rebuttal, and, uh, it's really good to come from a unexpected direction, so I'm gonna try my direction, which is gonna be Russia, and say, "Look, Russia is the catalyst. Uh, it's, it's taking advantage of the collapse of China, and it's gonna catalyze things in a way there's, that Japan is gonna leverage, and it's gonna be Japan leveraging th- these things that proves that smart decisions in Tokyo answers the question." So, what's going on with Russia? Russia has always, uh, tries to expand its territory. It is today the largest country on the planet. Why they need more territory, nobody knows, but that's what they're after, and in these days, what they're taking are those two large areas, and by the time the Bolsheviks finish sh- working their magic, Russians have taken from the Chinese sphere of influence, it's... The Bolsheviks are beyond today, but, uh, it gives you a sense. They took more territory from Chinese sphere of influence than the United States east of the Mississippi. There's a lot of territory. But in this day, while the Opium Wars are going on and while the Taiping and Nian Rebellions, the two big ones, are happening simultaneously, the Russians go to the Qing and say, "Hey, we'll deal with those foreigners for you. We'll be an, uh, intermediary if you just sign on the dotted line for these treaties giving us all this land." And the Chinese were vague on, uh, geography and they didn't believe in treaties, they thought they'd get it back later, so Russia gets all this stuff, does exactly nothing because we know about the treaty port system, and the British and French got all of it, and Russia got this stuff, too. Once Russia gets this stuff, that's why they want the railway, because they wanna integrate it in there. So, the Trans-Siberian Railway is the blue thing, but understand that the blue part that's above the green part, that wasn't built until World War I. Russia builds the green part, which is the Chinese Eastern Railway, the name of it, in order to stake out its, uh, its plans for empire, and also notice it wants the warm water port, that's the orange part going down to Port Arthur, because Vladivostok, prior to the age of icebreakers, is frozen solid several months of the year. So, Russia's building this railway to save on construction costs, it's more direct going straight across Manchuria, contain Japan, stake out its claim to Manchuria. The Japanese get it, right? Well, that was earlier in this lecture. They see this coming and they don't like it. And then, uh, in addition to what's going on, the Chinese don't particularly like all the imperialists messing with their country, and so the Boxers is another rebellion, and these folks want all Westerners out of China and they wanna kill any stragglers, and they go into... They're all over China, they go into Manchuria, and the Russians send 100,000 troops, far more than any of the European powers, or even Japan sends a lot, to the rest of China to get the, to defeat the Boxers, which they do. And then the other Westerners and Japan remove their troops, Russia doesn't. And this is the thing that gets, uh, Japan's attention 'cause Russia's got 100,000 troops in Manchuria that won't leave, and that's when Japan is sick of Russia procrastinating and, um, we're gonna wind up getting into the Russo-Japanese War. So guess what? We're back to my original, uh, explanation, right? The Japanese finessed all of this and they wind up on top and it's, uh, by being very thoughtful in their grand strategy that, um, they reverse the balance of power. So, I'm gonna end this thing with General Nogi. General Nogi is the one who oversaw the four assaults on Port Arthur. He lost both of his sons in this war. One in the Battle of Nanshan, which is down the Liaodong Peninsula, and then his other, his favorite, under his command in Port Arthur. When the war was over, he asked the Meiji Emperor if he could commit ritual suicide and the emperor said no. So when the Meiji Emperor died, he and his wife did, and this poem helps explain why. "Imperial troops a million strong Conquered an arrogant enemy But siege and field warfare left A mountain of corpses. Ashamed What face can I show to old parents? How many men have returned This day of triumphal song?" Uh, wars bring much sorrow, and so I leave you with that, and thank you very much for your attention.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:00:14

      (applause)

5. 1:00:15 – 1:15:10

   Was Russia on track to dominate Asia?

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:00:15

      I loved this lecture especially, and to- and this topic especially, because it's about a conflict that many of us weren't educated on, but adds context to the other ones which are obviously super famous like World War II, adds context to the development of these powers which were the most powerful in Asia, so I'm not gonna keep wasting time, I just wanna jump into asking you a bunch of questions about this. Okay, um, one way you can explain Russia's loss here is that Japan had better tactics, and so given the fact that they had deployed similar amounts of men to the front, Japan with their better tactics was able to win, they, uh, w- in these different battles. But maybe the more important thing to explain is why Russia didn't deploy more men...... or didn't deploy its greater resources. It, uh, Russia's population is over 130 million people at this point, Japan's is 47 million or so. Well, you might say the Trans-Siberian Railway isn't completed by this point, but in 1905, it actually is complete, um, and so Russia could have continued the war. It has all these fresh troops it could send. So then the question is, why didn't they have the same will to... or the same ability to muster resources, their, their massive resources that Japan brought to bear?

   2. SPSarah Paine1:01:28

      Well, one is the, the railway's a bottleneck. Japan's starting the war deliberately before... while that bottleneck is bottled, uh, so that's one factor. Russia has massive troops. Also, the Russians are arrogant, right? They think Japanese... Uh, initially, the j- uh, the Russians think they're gonna do a regime change in Tokyo. That's their plan. How they plan to get to To- Tokyo is a mystery, but nevermind, and so they don't realize what they need. It's, uh, it's a c- a fairly common problem, um, in wars is gross underestimation of the other side, right? That's what's going on in Ukraine right now. Putin missed that one. He's not the only one, right? Hitler, uh, underestimated the Russians in World War II, and then you go, "Oh, why is everybody... What's going on with Japan?" And it had a really... Those Meiji reforms, they have an educated population. Russia's soldiers are a bunch of illiterates, and the Russian soldiers are going, "What? Why are we fighting in Manchuria? Tell me precisely why I'm here getting killed." Uh, the, the, the Russian soldiers had no buy-in, and, uh, you can ask, what exactly did the Russians want there? Apparently, there were some royal, uh, favorites who thought that they were gonna get some lucrative timber concessions on the Korean border. Okay, let's go into logistics. I've never heard there was a shortage of wood in European Russia, ever, (laughs) and then they're gonna ship it all the way back? Uh, this is, uh, a non-performing, uh, economic model. Uh, in addition, uh, Nicholas II is an incompetent tsar. Uh, I mean, t- and he's hiring, uh... The, uh, the guy who's running the navy is also incompetent. Their, uh, navy gets no training whatsoever. So great, you have extensive ships, but no one's trained in how to use them, whereas the Japanese have, and the Japanese, um, it's the value of the object, one of these concepts. Uh, how valuable is it to win for Japan versus Russia? Well, for Russia, it's already the biggest country in the planet, and there's nothing really that exciting out in Asia from their point of view. Val- maybe for Nicholas, 'cause he wants to be a great tsar and add to the empire, that would be a nice thing, but when the Germans come after him in World War II or World War I, I think he's gonna care about the other things more. So, um, that's one. For the Japanese, rightly or wrongly, their government and educated people consider it existential, and they're looking at China going, "That's our future if we don't fix things," and they're thinking the solution for Japan is empire, because in those days, that seemed to be the way powerful countries ran things. So it's a combination of, um, logistical, legitimate logistical bottlenecks. Um, Japan is... Since they're gonna be starting this thing, massive preparations. The Russians aren't planning to fight this thing. They're thinking that I determine when the war begin- whether wars begin or end. Excuse me, they don't.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:36

      So I guess you're saying Russia doesn't care about this conflict as much as-

   4. SPSarah Paine1:04:39

      Russians. Tsar Nicholas might, but his population is fighting it.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:44

      Hmm. So then he doesn't have the state capacity to mobilize his army as much?

   6. SPSarah Paine1:04:48

      Oh, that's the whole problem with Russia.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:50

      Okay.

   8. SPSarah Paine1:04:51

      Um, this is the power of institutions. Eh, g- Japan clearly can mobilize. Boy, is it doing well with the loans and all sorts of things.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:58

      Right.

   10. SPSarah Paine1:04:59

       It's, it's using these institutions, whereas Russia, remember, it doesn't have a legislature. It, um... The tsar doesn't have a cabinet, in a sense. He has ministers, but they don't ever show up at his house at the same time to sit around a table. He's just doing them one at a time. And then the Romanov family have lots of first cousins, right? You got everybody's having lots of kids, and so you got a million first cousins, and they are all deployed, uh, throughout, um, the ministries, basically being the spy system for the Romanov family of what's going on. Are any of these nice rich boys particularly competent? No.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:37

       Uh, I want to understand, um, World War I, they are able to mobilize many more men. They-

   12. SPSarah Paine1:05:43

       Oh.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:43

       Obviously, there was incompetence in World War I as well.

   14. SPSarah Paine1:05:45

       Oh, yeah.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:45

       But, like, the sheer... If there's... The amount of resources that the tsar-

   16. SPSarah Paine1:05:48

       Oh.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:48

       ... was able to bring to bear in World War I-

   18. SPSarah Paine1:05:49

       Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:49

       ... they brought to the Far East during this conflict.

   20. SPSarah Paine1:05:51

       Look at a map, and you'll see the railway grid-

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:53

       Mm-hmm.

   22. SPSarah Paine1:05:53

       ... is much more extensive in European Russia, and they... This is where Count Sergei Witte, their finest, uh, minister of late czarist period, he's the one who's doing... trying to do his version of a Meiji Restoration in his purview, which is the finance ministry, financing all these railways. So there are many more railways, and this is where Russia pot- s- population is. This is where their historical, um, uh, security threats come from, and Russians can get on board with protecting European borders.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel1:06:22

       O- once the Trans-Siberian Railway is finished in 1905, why doesn't Russia-

   24. SPSarah Paine1:06:26

       Just the... It's the part to Manchuria. It's not the... The one that goes on their side of the boundary's not completed until World War I.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel1:06:32

       I'm excited to announce my new sponsor, Hudson River Trading. They're a quant firm that accounts for around 15% of all US equities trading volume. And almost all of this trading goes through their deep learning models. But predicting market movements is just insanely hard. You have to deal with imperfect information, all kinds of heterogeneous data, with minuscule signal-to-noise ratios, and impossibly tight latency constraints. And if this weren't enough, you're in this arms race against some of the smartest people in the world who are continuously training their models against the data that you output.Because of this, HRT has built their internal AI team like a frontier lab. They've aggregated trillions of tokens of market data across every asset class and invested in a massive cluster of V200s. And they've built up an exceptional team of researchers to do fundamental ML research. Honestly, in terms of AI, the big differences between them and a frontier lab is that, well, one, HRT is very profitable, but two, their engineers and researchers not only have to make their models performant at scale, but also have to battle test them in this insanely adversarial environment. If you want to join them, you can learn more at hudsonrivertrading.com/dwarkesh. Okay, back to Sarah. I want to double-click on what part of the Meiji Reformation exactly helped Japan mobilize for this war because, okay, the population is literate. You have, um, institutions for having political say, but, like, how exactly does that help you have more people go to the front?

   26. SPSarah Paine1:08:11

       I don't know the answer, but I know, uh, Japanese, I mean talk about a culture that's about detail, about hard work, about service to the emperor, right? Um, I've done, uh, in your earlier podcast series a whole series about bushido. Uh, that they're imbued with service, um, to the emperor, and that if you go in wars, you win them. And so that's part of their culture. Now Russians don't als- also don't like being messed with when people invade them, but this time they're invading other people in an irrelevant part of the empire. And it's at a time when Russia is trying to industrialize itself but they haven't put enough money into their education system, so they have a bunch of illiterate troops running around. And let's face it, yeah, how can you read any of the manuals or do anything? Oh, yeah, and some of their generals, uh, one of them didn't know what a howitzer was, one of the guys who's planning stuff, and he can't read maps. Uh, uh, the level of incompetence of having royal favorites in your officer corps, well, they make these, uh, d- decisions. Also, there's split command in the Russo-Japanese War, so there's General Kuropatkin, who, who is the professional, who's actually had fought in, in the, again, the Ottomans and so he'd act- but those are colonial wars and he'd won some of those. He's a professional, but then, um, Admiral Alexeyev, who's the illegitimate son of I can't remember which tsar and a favorite uncle, I believe, of Nicholas II, he's out there, and no one knows who's actually in command except the royal favorite is probably the better bet. And so Kuropatkin wants to not engage the Japanese until that's way inland because he wants to extend their lines and then clobber them. And all these, uh, aristocrats that don't know what they're talking about say, "No, no, no, no, no, we're not gonna let these, uh, these racial inferiors do whatever. We're gonna take them on immediately." Well, okay. Uh, try that. Kuropatkin's strategy probably would've worked.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10:11

       Mm-hmm.

   28. SPSarah Paine1:10:12

       Just bring 'em on inland and, and let them enjoy it like Napoleon Bonaparte. You want to get to Moscow? Have at it then, and, and try winter in Moscow.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10:19

       Mm. One really interesting takeaway from this lecture, and I, I am curious if you agree with this, is we, when we think about this period in history we often think of Japan as the rising power in Asia.

   30. SPSarah Paine1:10:30

       Yeah, yeah.
6. 1:15:10 – 1:34:47

   Pearl Harbor (1941) vs surprise attack of Port Arthur (1904)

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:10

      for any errors I make. Okay, another thing that is, I think is super interesting in this, um, in this period is it potentially helps explain why Japan thought that Pearl Harbor-

   2. SPSarah Paine1:15:22

      (laughs)

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:22

      ... might work. Because superficially these two situations seem similar. In both cases w- you begin with, uh, this imminent threat that an adversary of yours is gonna gain massive military leverage over you. So, in the 1905, before war with Russia, is that the Trans-Siberian Railroad had been finished. In World War II, it's the worry that after Japan invades French Indochina, America does an oil embargo on Japan that gives them one to two years of oil runway before their entire empire collapses and grinds to a h- halt of oil. So there's this worry that they have to act now, um, otherwise they lose their, th- they're about to lose their leverage. And then there's this initial surprise attack, so Port Arthur in 1904 and then obviously Pearl Harbor. And even if you look at other battles like, uh, Midway and Mukden, this is, we'll have this sort of annihilating battle where we will expend our blood and just push them back. Curious to get your take on this-

   4. SPSarah Paine1:16:21

      Um.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel1:16:21

      ... interpretation.

   6. SPSarah Paine1:16:22

      One of them is, in both cases, Japan's seeing a window of opportunity, that, "I gotta operate in this window and get it over with," and it works out. It's, what... If you're doing that, that's a high-risk strategy, to get away with it, and so this is back to the, the, that they were just lucky argument. Another thing is you can look at, um, why certain wars turn out, and, um, another concept is a cooperative adversary. What's a cooperative adversary? It's not one that wants to cooperate with you, but it's one that, that doesn't play its cards remotely well. And if you can think about literally playing cards, if you're playing a, a game with a little child, they're trying to win, right? But they're a cooperative adversary because they just don't know how to play whatever the game is. And you could argue that Nicholas II is a cooperative ar- uh, adversary, and that's required, and the United States is not remotely a cooperative adversary and it goes really badly for Japan. And then it's also, uh, there's another piece which is, uh, uh, when you run one successful war, um, quite often you think it was easier than it actually was and less risky than it actually was, like this country does Gulf One where, um, the Allies pay for the whole thing, no Americans die, hard- or hardly at all, loads of Iraqis die, uh, they're out of Kuwait within days. I mean, wow. Uh, and then people are complaining we should've marched onto Baghdad. Well, okay, we did that. That didn't work out so well. But, um, a- and then after you do one of these things and you think you're good to go, and in Japan's case between the two, uh, Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, it shifted the balance of civil and military power in Japan, and people thought that its military officers had did the right thing and that the diplomats lost the peace.... generations to really sink roots, so they, they did as much as they could in a generation. But, um, their leadership, uh, was bereft compared to th- th- this is why the Meiji Generation is truly a brilliant set of leaders and what comes after, their children and grandchildren are not.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:25

      Yeah. But th- this is also another very important point. So the fact that the civilian leader of the Meiji Generation dies before the military leader-

   8. SPSarah Paine1:19:34

      Yeah.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:34

      ... reinforces the contingency of history. It didn't have to be that he died first, but then that sort of changes potentially the whole trajectory of history.

   10. SPSarah Paine1:19:41

       Yeah, individuals, trends, the whole thing matters.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:44

       Yeah.

   12. SPSarah Paine1:19:44

       And there's no saying, uh, I mean maybe if he'd stuck around it, everything would've been the same. You, since you can't rerun the experiment, this is where again, counterarguments are useful on so many human endeavors, you just don't have complete data. Or and maybe it's a s- and, and when you're doing things in the here and now, maybe the data will come in a little later or it just doesn't exist, and yet you gotta make decisions. And so if you're not willing to change your mind, you're just gonna double down on bad decisions, and it's incredible the number of people who, who don't want to change their minds. And that's why, uh, the why I made a big to-do about giving the argument, counterargument, rebuttal framework because it, I think it helps m- get you out of the rut so that you can change your mind. Like y- you're gonna tell me that Kotkin's got this thing and I'm wrong. I'm ga- maybe he's right.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:32

       (laughs)

   14. SPSarah Paine1:20:32

       I, I don't care, uh, uh, who's right, I care what's right.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:35

       Right. But going back to the question of, okay, what was, what w- what exactly was, um, different between the Russo-Japanese War and World War II? What was Japan's miscalculation?

   16. SPSarah Paine1:20:45

       Oh.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:45

       One of them has to be that, um, in the case of Russia, they attacked an adversary that was... It took one year of conflict to push them to the point of significant destabilization of the government. Whereas if the, if you thought the same thing would happen with America, we're gonna attack Pearl Harbor and there's gonna be all kinds of internal conflict, and they just misjudged the internal level of cohesion and functionality of American institutions, right? They thought the same thing would happen in Ru- uh, that happened in Russia would happen in-

   18. SPSarah Paine1:21:12

       You're missing the whole war.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:14

       Mm-hmm.

   20. SPSarah Paine1:21:14

       Their war is with China. Uh, instead of isolating the adversary, they bring in a whole new slew of adversaries, right? They're having trouble with China, that's the Second Sino-Japanese War. We all get all excited when we're involved but it starts in 1931, and their objective soon becomes an unlimited objective. They eventually want to do regime change in China. Whereas in the First Sino-Japanese War, Yamagata's thinking about doing regime change and the government pulls him out 'cause its, "Buddy, don't do that. We're gonna have all kinds of foreign powers intervening if you try." And then in the Russo-Japanese War they're not trying to do regime change in Russia. But in the Second Sino-Japanese War, they absolutely are trying to do regime change, they get more and more frustrated. Then their solution to that one is attack all the colonial int- (laughs) interests in Asia, that's when Pearl Harbor happens. And then they're bringing us, the British, and that brings the British Commonwealth, so it's Australia and New Zealand that do significant fighting, and then, um, the, the Netherlands. So, uh, it's a different event.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel1:22:16

       I want to go back to the Meiji reforms. So the Iwakura Mission, which is sent to fresh out to understand what, what did Bismarck do right? I think it's funny because Sergey White, who's the finance minister 1892 to 1902, he models himself as Russia's Bismarck. He wants to do the kind of industrialization that Germany went through in Russia, and yet the M- Meiji Generation succeeds in Japan in doing this kind of thing. In both cases, there's an authoritarian government-

   22. SPSarah Paine1:22:44

       Yeah.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel1:22:44

       ... that wants to have this kind of top-down reform. Why does it work in Japan but not in Russia?

   24. SPSarah Paine1:22:51

       Uh, Russia has, uh, just a phenomenal illiteracy rate. It's an empire which I think gets in the way. If you look at how many non-Russian people they're trying to dominate, it's like they're perennially overextended, right? 'Cause they're perennially occupying places that don't actually make them much money. In fact, they probably cost them more money to hang onto. Uh, and so they're perennially doing that. Um, I believe the Japanese are known to be incredibly hardworking. I believe the Chinese are known to be very hardworking. I have never heard anyone say the Russians are known to be hardworking, right? Maybe I missed something. I've heard they're like artists and they have the Russian (Russian) , their soul. Okay, great. Uh, (laughs) uh, I mean, that's like a big excuse to saying, "Well, you know, we may fail at everything, but our soul is superior." Ugh.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel1:23:43

       (laughs)

   26. SPSarah Paine1:23:44

       Um, so I think there are these other things that are, uh, at work. And in Germany, it's, it's the center of Europe, it's a highly developed place and it already has, uh, high levels of literacy. There's a lot more to work with in Germany, and it already has a, a better infrastructure. For Russia, it's huge when you're trying to build railway systems. Just enormous. And think about si- Trans-Siberian. If you just took all that track, just lengthen, put it all over European Russia, you really have something there.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:13

       Mm.

   28. SPSarah Paine1:24:13

       Yeah.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:14

       Um, okay, so this is a quote from Sun Yat-sen-

   30. SPSarah Paine1:24:19

       Uh-oh.

Episode duration: 1:56:21