Sarah C. M. Paine - WW2, Taiwan, Ukraine, & Maritime vs Continental Powers

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.

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.

Putin, he's made a pivotal error.

He has no backdown plan.

He only has a double-down plan.

For the People's Republic to take Taiwan, I presume it's going to begin with an artillery barrage.

I presume that's going to be leveling Taiwanese cities, right?

Let's watch how it goes in Ukraine.

I can't imagine the Chinese being less brutal.

You're going to say that's okay?

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 going to 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

factions they have to appease.

Does it make sense to talk about countries having strategies?

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 U.S.

government, let alone the U.S.

Navy Department, and much less the place where I work, which is the U.S.

Naval War College.

Okay, so now that that's over, on to grand strategy.

Yeah, it is useful.

I'm going to 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 instruments of 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 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 the idea is you have national objectives.

You want to increase security somewhere.

You want to improve your own security.

That would be your big objective.

You want to improve trade, whatever.

And then you need to think about all of these different instruments of national power and how you're going to coordinate.

Those who don't coordinate get into into deep, dark trouble.

Right.

So, but maybe having a coherent grand strategy is the ideal.

Yes.

But if we want to understand history, you just mentioned the case of Japan.

A previous guest, Richard Rhodes, who wrote the making of the atomic bomb, talked about how after the war, the different branches of the military were competing with each other to see who would get more funding and who had access to nuclear weapons was a big part of that, and how many.

So, if throughout history we look and we see lots of 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 just talk about the factions and the individuals rather than the strategy of the country?

I think 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 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 counter-arguments.

And then they would hash it out and come up with some kind of combination of all or choosing one of them.

But yeah, there's going to be a big debate.

People are going to have all kinds of different ideas.

In fact, this is one of the great strengths of democracy is you have to listen to the counter argument.

Or the counter argument is called you lose the election and the other party is in.

But the notion that you're going to streamline it and not have disagreements, that's what

dictators do and they have problems.

They double down on bad decisions.

Yeah, 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

and also really well-apportioned budgets and spread between their different branches.

And in the case of Japan, they didn't.

I guess, is democracy the answer for why the U.S.

and Britain better coordinated their

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 want to start families.

It's the Great Depression.

It's terribly difficult.

And then when they get to

the age where they're going to 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, particularly Britain and the United States.

And their answer was institution building on a massive scale and integrating,

it is all

elements of national power.

This is when you've had the National Security Act passed in the United States setting up all kinds of organizations, et cetera, National Security Council, among other things.

And then you're setting up the United Nations, NATO, all manner of things.

A lot of it is coming off of World War I, the horrific war, and then doing a better job in World War II.

What I'm curious about is why, you know, you would think that the victors of a war would be the ones whose perception of reality is the most

inflated, whereas the losers are the one who have to come to terms with why they lost.

Whereas we see the opposite, the U.S.

had such good leadership, you know, know, Patton, Curtis LeMay.

There's so many great generals that came out of that time.

Whereas in Germany,

Hitler himself fought in World War I.

So it's hard to explain why he made so many mistakes.

Initially, Hitler did incredibly well.

I mean, his Blitzkrieg, incredible.

And think about Hitler.

If he had stopped with the Anschluss, where he gets

Austria and he's going to 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.

But then Hubris, right?

The Blitzkrieg worked so well, his generals told him he couldn't do it, but of course it worked.

And then he goes further and 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.

Now, you mentioned that if Hitler had stopped, I guess in 1939, after he had gone, you know, that 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 various options could be.

One is just after 1939.

Yeah, they are quit.

What if

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?

Or what happened after the fall of France?

Then he could have just controlled all of Europe.

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 these limited wars.

I'm uniting the German people.

That one he could maybe be able to sell.

That's why I quit after Anschluss.

The moment he's going into genocide against the Poles, because Poland's why Britain gets in the war.

The once he's into Poland, we're off to a different race.

Right.

But is that a race he could have won or at least settled in that maybe

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 he just have,

is it possible that there's a world in which Hitler just controls Europe?

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 combining with the West and taking parts of the Soviet Union, maybe, but that's not what he's about.

He's about, has this whole genocidal program that goes with him.

There's another issue is if you take too much, like if you're going to go kill off the Poles, the Poles never give up.

They've went through three partitions over their history.

The Polish identity never disappeared.

Then 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.

Then you think after Blitzkrieg, suppose that before Stalingrad,

he had stopped.

And at that point, didn't he control like 30% of the Soviet Union?

He'll never hold it.

He'll choke on his acquisitions.

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

All right, I'm going to 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 in an incredibly rapid clip.

You can do that, but it's really wealth-destroying.

Since the Industrial Revolution in the West,

there has been a growing consensus that that's probably not the way to do things.

We We are far better 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 you can make a lot of wealth by doing that.

And that was the conclusion that if you look at since the Industrial Revolution, who's making all the money?

People who buy into that system.

And

the Hitler 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 going to do compounding wealth by having rules that we can all adhere to, and then we'll run our commercial transactions that way.

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 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 killed out so many of his people, he would have have been hated, right?

Ah, but Hitler killed more and was more hated.

What you're thinking about is what did the Russians do?

I'm going to flip it.

What did the Germans do?

A useful concept comes from the Samuel Griffith's translation of Sunza, which talks about death ground.

What's death ground?

It's when your enemy puts you on death ground, which means they're going to 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 going going to get out.

The Ukrainians initially welcomed the Germans.

Why?

Because Stalin and friends had imposed the terrible famine of the early 1930s on them.

And they couldn't imagine that anything would 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 before the invasion of Crimea in 2014.

You've got Ukraine, which has a very corrupt government, and people were at sixes and sevens about whether they want 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 coexist with these people is over.

And our irony is Putin's forging Ukrainian national identity.

And wars often do this.

In the United States, we start out with our 13 colonies, and they're all very different.

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.

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

Now, do you think of that as different than, obviously, we didn't commit genocide or anything, but do you think of that as different than the sort of total unlimited policy objectives that, for example, Germany had in Ukraine or Japan had in China?

Or

we also pursued unconditional surrender against the South in the Civil War, right?

So how do you think about it?

Because that's also something where your back is up against the wall.

Why did that not result in the same kind of morale?

Because

the United States did not put the people of these countries on death ground.

The leadership had self-put themselves on death ground.

Basically, 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, well,

we were planning to, that he would get executed at the end of the war.

But the Japanese people eventually figured out that they weren't on death ground.

And in fact, the Japanese people were so exhausted by the whole thing that the society shattered.

But the United States was never 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 because they're massacring.

They're being massacred.

There was a firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden and Berlin.

I think it was in your book that 84,000 people died in that one night firebombing in Tokyo.

It's terrible.

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

Well, A, I don't know, but B, Japan had been at war since 1931 in China.

They'd been sending large armies.

This isn't

like recent U.S.

wars, the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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 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.

Can you imagine how Japanese soldiers felt about this?

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

Oh.

Despite knowing about these things that you were talking about?

It's true.

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 that Japanese belonged to was Japanese people and everybody else.

But within Japan, you come from a province, a locality, etc.

You go school, education, various places.

You belong to a job wherever you have, and there are 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 organizations.

And when 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 because you're going to live to fight another day.

In Japan, you're a failure.

And therefore, if you come home back as a failed soldier, you bring dishonor to yourself, your family, your locality, anyone you are associated with.

So that's why it is so difficult 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.

It's something like a tenth of our economy.

They have something like a 13th of our, I can't remember whether it's coal or steel production.

And they don't have any local oil production.

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 a shattering that occurs.

And 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 be proclaimed deranged, and he had a perfectly good underage son to be used as a figurehead.

He knew that he couldn't do much about it.

At the very end, when he decided he was about to get nuked,

that's when he intervenes to break the deadlock at the cabinet meetings.

And there are a variety of people at the very top who realizes it's over.

Could Hirohito have intervened earlier?

I doubt it.

Let's go back more than five years.

If he intervenes when Japan is overextending in China, is there any chance that he could have succeeded?

I doubt he thought of Japan overextending in China.

What expertise does he have?

He liked guppies.

He liked studding fish in his backyard.

He has no expertise.

And then, of course, there's the hubris of it all, that we're going to dominate this place.

And they look at the Chinese as an absolutely feckless, backward place.

It'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.

We're not the problem.

The Japanese are the problem.

And it is.

What the Japanese do that super glues China and is the great impetus to nation building.

You can see parallels with Hitler doing the same thing in Russia.

And

also right now,

Putin's busy canonizing Zelensky and creating a real nation out of Ukraine that's never going to forget these ongoing events.

Yeah.

Well, what I learned from your book that I thought was really interesting and also tragic because of the counterfactual was one of the strategies you suggested could have been that Japan could have, if it thought like a continental power, it could have allied with the nationalists to beat the communist in Russia, maybe waged almost a three-front war with Germany, the nationalist, and Japan, beat the communists, and prevented the communists from taking hold in China.

And given the consequences of communism in Russia and China, and how many lives could have been saved if, you know, I guess Hitler was beaten and then the communists are beaten, that Japanese choice just seems so tragic.

Let's say they do it.

That means Hitler forever.

And that means if you're anything but a nice Aryan,

your days are numbered.

Certainly, it will have been the most massive ethnic cleanse ever in Europe.

Suppose the Third Reich had survived.

Maybe that stopped at the point you were talking about where the German lands were reconstituted.

Suppose that had happened.

If you look at the Soviet Union, you know, Stalin kills more of his people than Hitler had by that point.

And I wonder if we have sort of burnished Stalin's reputation a little bit because we had to ally with him in World War II.

but then the cycle we see in the Soviet Union is the inherent corruption and inefficiency of the totalitarian system, and then it breaks down, there's reform because people realize how crazy things have been.

If the Third Reich had survived, would we see that same cycle there where the system breaks down?

And would we also remember them the same way as the Soviet Union, where it was so evil, but at some point it just, you know, you just can't sustain that level of craziness forever?

I suspect it would be worse.

Why?

Because the Germans are far more more efficient than the Russians were in those days.

And

the Nadiezda Mandelstam.

She was married to the poet Osip Mandelstam.

And she was talking from the prison camps and saying, well, at least it's Russians doing this, because if it were Germans, there'd be no hope.

With Russians, there's always a hope because they're inefficient.

And she's Russian talking about it.

Hitler is,

he's talking about

annihilating entire peoples.

But so with Stalin with

killing off the

entire classes of Ukrainians.

Yeah, well, his idea is Ukrainians need to pretend they're Russians, and then they can, that's fine if they do that.

The question you're asking is: it's not a happy ending, what you're describing.

It's a horrendous ending.

What is a scenario in which both Hitler and Stalin could have been defeated in World War II?

Is there some system of alliances or counterfactual where that happens?

I think the problem is World War I.

World War I has enormous consequences.

It is

the West,

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 going to do.

And then

the generals keep sending people waves and waves of young men up over the trenches.

And what do you think is going to happen to them if you send them over the trenches?

This is how you get these horrific death rates, hundreds of thousands in a battle.

It's 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 pernicious ideologies on steroids, fascists and communists.

And that's how you get all that evil, is out of a gross mismanagement of World War I.

Once they're off and running, you've got problems on your hands and you've got a long solution.

So back to your initial question, does Grant's strategy matter?

Yes, it does.

Look at World War I when they didn't practice it and when the civilians, 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

it was the beginning, the loss, the victory in World War I,

but at horrific cost was the beginning of the end of the British Empire.

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

Whereas Stalin only fights Hitler after he himself is invaded and in in fact collaborates with him to dissect Poland.

After the war, Stalin, you know, Russia expands to beyond any ambition that a Tsar might have from Eastern Europe to Manchuria, I guess not Manchuria, but whereas the British Empire is about to collapse and, you know, it loses all its territories.

What explains the sort of the differing outcomes of the two countries post-World War II?

And why did the post-war objectives of Stalin succeed much better?

Does it mean mean like retaining empire versus losing empire?

Yeah.

Okay.

They're fundamentally different kinds of empires.

So Russia is a classic continental empire.

What it owns is contiguous.

Britain's empire was all about trade and having enough coaling stations around the world.

That was initially what it was all about.

You got to have coaling stations everywhere, and then you want to get the trade through.

And then what the British did is they trained barristers all over the world.

What are barristers or lawyers?

And local people, right?

And so it lays the basis, not on purpose, but in fact, of having international law, where people who are eventually going to be running these independent countries have a legal training to use international law to their own country's benefit.

But anyway, 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 in the Napoleonic Wars.

That's what Napoleon leverages, is the levee-on-masse,

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 going to fight and resist.

It will make the commercial advantages, well, there won't be commercial advantages.

It'll be too expensive to hang on.

So Britain, in most cases, did not fight to hang on to its empire.

It

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 60s, 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 that if you fast forward uh to now russian standards of living are i think 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 idea that they have this huge.

They don't.

Yeah.

And the compounding is a very important point because I think Tyler Cowen is an 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.S.

per capita GDP would be lower than that of Mexico's.

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 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 impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea.

Right.

It's powerful over several generations.

Right.

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

Did so well.

Or in this terms of after World War II, it ended up with so much.

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

But it's horrendous, the cost.

I should say why Stalin did so well.

Well, yeah, because other people died and he lived and he kept his dacha.

Okay.

The reason I asked it in this way is I'm trying to understand the counterfactual in which it doesn't happen because it was so bad.

Did the failure of FDR to be sufficiently anti-communist, especially towards the end of the war, did that contribute to how much

land that the Soviet Union was able to accumulate?

Oh, well, there's a choice at the end of the war.

So there was some talk about whether to invade up through the Balkans and try to put Western armies there.

Okay,

so let's put you back in time as a serviceman.

And you look at it and go, do you want to lose your life by going up through the Balkans?

Or are we just going to call it a day?

And also, by the way, Stalin is a land power with a huge army in place.

He's fighting at advantage.

Do you really want to lose your life doing that?

And you have U.S.

leaders looking at it and going, this is going to be good enough

because

the costs are too high.

Because, I mean, there's a sort of narrative that the FDR was almost a communist sympathizer.

It wasn't that.

It was just this strategically didn't make sense.

Well, A, he died, right?

So we don't know fully, but he was mobilizing

the United States to prepare for war while the America firsters

were saying, no, no, isolationism is the way to go.

So he was preparing all of that.

And yeah, you have to, if you're going to defeat Hitler,

If you're an offshore power like Britain and the United States are, as in the Napoleonic Wars, you need a local continental power with a huge army if you're going to deal with that continental problem.

Russia has that army.

So you're going to cooperate with Russia in the near term to get rid of the really big problem, which is Hitler, who's far more efficient than the Russians are.

He's also located near the high-value areas of Europe, the industrialized parts of Europe.

So whereas Russia is further away, you're going to deal with Hitler first.

And then if you're going to have Stalin your ally, of course you're going to say nice things about him.

Well, that doesn't make you you a communist.

That just is managing an alliance.

What are you going to spit in his face while you're fighting the war?

But why believe him when he says that, and you all said that there will be elections in Eastern Europe once the Soviet Union...

Oh, well, we tried.

We tried very hard.

The Britons tried very hard, particularly in Poland, because think about why does Britain get into the war?

It's over Poland.

And it's not feasible.

When you get to the end of the war and the Red Army is fully in control of Poland, there is nothing we're going to be able to do about it.

Americans have had enough of the fight.

There's cases in history where it seems there was a hinge point,

let's say after the Bolsheviks take over Russia or after Mao was consolidating communist control of China, where I guess in general our

bias is to be anti-I don't know,

it's always hard to plan some takeover.

But in those cases, it seems like the hold and the way in which they got in was so tenuous and contingent that would it have been possible and desirable for us to extend greater efforts to prevent these regimes from getting in the first place, where we've had to deal with them for decades or sometimes centuries afterwards, the consequences of them getting to power?

Well, if you're a Russian of any persuasion, I suspect you'd be really angry that some American from across the seas is going to determine what kind of government you live under.

That's a problem there.

And then you asked me earlier about overextension.

So are we going to go around the entire world and telling others how to live?

And then there's another issue, which is

people like Stalin are a reflection of the country at the time.

The notion that one guy, Stalin, weighs a magic wand and everyone does what he wants, and this notion that Stalin personally is responsible for these millions of deaths.

There are millions of people pulling millions of triggers for all these deaths.

There are a lot of people who think it's a good idea.

So they are a reflection of a place.

Now we, in order to understand this, we personify it with Stalin.

It's your earlier issue about generals.

We personify how wars turn out often by generals because that gives us a grasp on it.

But it's a much more complicated thing.

How contingent was the

global rise of communism?

Because

you've done so much research on Russia and China, Chinese history.

In what percentage of worlds do the Bolsheviks take over in Russia?

And if that doesn't happen, does communism spread to China and beyond?

Because there's not the Bolshevik example and support of these global communist parties.

The Russian revolution is essential to the spread of communism.

And how likely is that?

What are the chances that the White Army could have won?

Does that make sense?

Oh, yeah, yeah, unlikely.

If you look at Russian rail networks, They had the two centers, Moscow and St.

Petersburg, which the Bolsheviks controlled.

So if you're anybody else, that means you're on the end of these different railway lines and there isn't the ability to link up with everyone.

Whereas the Bolsheviks at the center can fan out.

And so it gives them,

they're also occupying the industrial centers.

So it gives them the ability to pick off their enemies in detail and win that thing.

How about in China?

What are the odds that after the war, the nationalists could have consolidated control of China?

It's difficult.

The Japanese.

The nationalists don't get credit for all the fighting of Japan.

There was no way to get Lend-Lease aid to them during the war.

If you want to get Lend-Lease aid in, you've got to have ports and railway systems.

And if you look at China, the Japanese did a

very effective blockade of China's coast.

So we're trying to fly stuff over the hump, which is the Himalayas, and you're flying...

jet fuel over the hump so that the planes that you also fly over the hump that you can then use them it's just it's it means that there's no way to supply the nationalist armies.

Yeah, they do some things in Burma, which arguably is a terrible mistake.

I suspect it would have been far better leaving Shang Kai-shek with all that stuff.

And then it would have been useful for him in the final stages of the war to get a few wins against the Japanese to make him look good.

But basically, the Japanese had eviscerated his armies.

And then think about it as the communists, you constantly blame the incumbent government.

Oh, all of our problems.

It's all about the nationalist corruption, and they are corrupt, don't get me wrong.

But the reason they're having troubles is because of the Japanese.

So the Japanese did end the nationalists.

One interesting point you made in your book was that

not only were so many nationalists killed in the conflict with Japan, but there was a selection effect that the sort of most competent and brave were the first soldiers to die, and that left,

not the best of the corrupt left to fight the communists.

That would be speculation.

That's also a

comment that's been made about World War I, that Britain, for instance, lost so many of its best.

And so

they don't go on to have children.

They don't go on to become strategic leaders.

They're unavailable in World War II.

Can you talk more about these consequences of what are the kinds of people who are most likely to die in a war and what are the broader consequences for?

I have no idea.

I mean, how would I know?

Statistical evidence isn't there.

I mean, you know, the obvious is like able-bodied people are the most likely, right?

And then

the more able-bodied, though.

It depends.

A lot of the people who died in World War II are civilians and they starved to death.

A huge numbers.

In fact, at the end of the war,

what is it, in the Pacific, if you look at Japanese deaths from 41 when we get involved to 45, I can't remember the statistics, but it's like tens of thousands of Japanese are dying in 41, and you finally get up to hundreds of thousands in 44, but it's going into the millions in 45,

and it's because of starvation.

Is this the intentional starvation of the hundreds of people?

It's war times.

It's just facts.

If you're in a war where you've destroyed all transportation and the ability to get goods anywhere, and you've killed the farming population all over the world, you get famine.

And by the way, this is an argument for when people say, well, the atomic bombs, can you avoid doing that?

That ended the war really really fast and probably saved millions of lives because they didn't starve.

I meant the war was over, and all of a sudden, you're starting to ship food around.

But why did Germany and Japan continue the war after it was obvious that they would lose?

And speaking of the deaths, weren't millions,

I don't know if it's majority, but like a huge chunk of the deaths happened after 43 when it was quite obvious that they were going to lose, right?

I know.

Well, it's because they're all on death ground, the leadership, et cetera.

And then the population's been fed this story that if the other

side wins, they're all going to be murdered too.

Wars are easy to start, and they are very tricky to end.

And this has been your life, right?

You have watched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Easy to start, very hard to get out of.

And now we're into Ukraine and we'll see how long this goes on.

Speaking of which, a 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, you know, 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 military and civilian leadership that we decide to do in Iraq war and Afghanistan war?

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, I work at the U.S.

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 lot of the kinds of questions you're asking is what we ask students.

And so we assign all these things.

How much it influences them later in their career, you'd have to ask them.

But surely you must be optimistic about it.

Or there's a reason why you do this work, right?

Presumably you think that better understanding these previous situations helps leaders now make better decisions and then I'm curious to what extent do you think that pipeline is functioning I have no idea about the pipeline but but about me I can answer those I grew up during the height of the Cold War and started graduate school it was as it was ending but I didn't know it was ending.

And so I have the full-up Cold War education where I did study at the Soviet Union when it was, and they had all these huge programs which no longer exist.

And

if you want to 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.

They study the world from their point of view.

So

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 going to play this game.

Well, they no more

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.

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 going to learn about China, and then I realized, oh, I'll learn about those two.

Japan's in there, so I got to 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.

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

I suspect the answer would be zero.

And how do you consume these?

Do you read the translations or how do you?

I know.

I can make bad spelling errors in numerous languages.

I read these things slowly, lots of large dictionaries.

And so 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

read it slowly.

Yeah.

It is perhaps the best military history I've ever read.

And also I've really enjoyed,

remind me the title of your book on Japan, the Meiji.

The Meiji one, it's just Imperial Japan.

Right.

Those.

And you also have these other textbooks and collections of essays, which I highly recommend because of the thorough nature and the diversity of sources.

Let's actually talk about your research.

Maybe tell me more about where you've done research around the world and throughout your different projects.

Because I think people might not know the extent to which

for the years you've dug into the trenches on these.

I have co-edited with my husband, Bruce Ellman, a series of books on naval operations.

The United States is a maritime power.

If you want to understand the maritime underpinnings of U.S.

security, go to those, particularly a book on peripheral operations, expeditionary warfare, which is what we do.

The expedition will be crossing the ocean to get there.

And commerce raiding and blockades, that that is a key to U.S.

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,

it's a major point of strategy of whether to intervene or not intervene.

So it's important to understand the maritime 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.

They exist.

Now you're asking me about research.

Oh, back in the day,

what was it?

It was a year in the Soviet Union when it was, and then a year in PRC right after Tenamen, it was delayed for a year.

And that was quite exciting.

There were armored trucks over on Beijing University, not to protect the students, but to

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.

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, because you 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 foreign ministry archives but then it's much less afterwards and

in China well China and Russia they've both closed down.

There's no way I wouldn't go into either country at this stage.

Oh, you think even more so than after TNMN or after during the Soviet Union?

It's more hostile now than then?

We're 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 in China,

you could

still get into various archives.

I was using the Qing archives, and then the nationalist archives were much more closed.

And then now the archives are just plain closed.

Go to Russia now, get yourself arrested.

And China, likewise, they've shut down all of these archives.

So to compensate for the last, I don't know, it's not quite 10 years, spent two months every summer going to U.S.

Presidential Archives.

So starting with, we didn't do it quite in order, but Truman, Eisenhower.

And then this last

spring, we just did the George Bush Sr.

Archives.

And now I'm in Britain using their wonderful national

archives, looking particularly from the 1917 to 1945 period.

And though I'm researching the Cold War, and you go, oh, but the Cold War didn't begin to 1947.

I would argue the Cold War began in 1917 because we have this notion that, oh, I decide when wars begin, or my side, not quite if the other side declares war on you.

And the Bolsheviks made it very clear that they had declared war on the capitalist order.

And Britain was 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.

To what extent were, not the United States as a whole maybe, but factions within the United States,

this is a common sort of theme that, you know, were the educated classes very naive about communism, And to what extent did that play into the delay of the United States and

recognizing the Cold War?

You talk about in your books about

the Red Star over China.

Was that the name of the?

And then there was another one.

No.

There was another best.

Yeah, yeah.

Edgar Snow, and there's Jack Reed's 13 Days or something like that.

What was it?

I think it's George Bernard Shaw made a comment.

is that if you haven't been a socialist before the age of 30, you have no heart.

And if you remain one after the age of 30, you have no brains.

That it's the idealism of it all.

And World War I seemed to vindicate so much of what Karl Marx said about how capitalist countries are just imperialist.

They don't care about the young.

They just throw them over the trenches and destroy them.

Which is so ironic given how communist countries have dealt with their populations and how callously they have wasted their time.

That's called the big lie.

And

it is amazing how these big lies live and

very powerful.

But then when they crumble, they're gone for good.

People believed, even when I was in graduate school, there were a bunch of people saying, oh, Russia, it has no drug problem.

It has all these blah, blah, blah, that's better, because they're believing the Kool-Aid that's being dished out.

from Moscow, which is lies.

Now,

what explains the credulity

these people in the U.S.

and Britain on the Soviet Union's claims about

everything from its economic growth to its humanitarian

to the way it dealt with its own populations, why were some people so asleep to this?

I don't know, but I suspect is the sins of the West are really obvious because we have an open press.

For anyone who'd been through World War I and had any male member in the family who'd been at the trenches and came back and talked about it, it was pretty horrific, right?

And so you can't believe that anything's going to be worse than that.

Or if you go to China under Shang Kai-shek, and he had a semi-free press.

That's how we know about things.

And so you look at the incredible corruption going on there.

You go, wow, how can anything be worse than this?

Well, actually, it can be a lot worse than this.

You talked in your book, The Wars on Asia, and elsewhere, about 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 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

the wealth of Korea, Taiwan, these other areas now, and how much the industrialization under Japanese is.

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 atrocities, that's not a winning game plan.

If you go before then, 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 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 going to deny

that there was no

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 do things like publish all kinds of magazines, so incredible numbers of like technical journals about agronomy and things, so that 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 and the locality, and from there all the way up.

So they really have local control.

When the United States goes into plate, went to places like Korea, excuse me, the Philippines, which happens at more or less the same time, Philippine

war as like its 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 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,

the Koreans and the Taiwanese actually have something to work with, and then they're off and running.

And Shang 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 redistribute Taiwanese land.

No problem there.

He comes in with all the weaponry, redistributes.

It's bloody doing it.

He offers the Taiwanese bonds.

They think it's going to 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

the bonds for all of this.

So 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.

Deng Xiaoping is 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.

Oh, that's bad news.

We're into bad news.

But

do not deny the achievements of the Meiji generation.

They're enormous.

And then because Japan does all the atrocities, they can no longer brag about these previous things.

There's so many interesting things there.

There's a book, How Asia Works, by this economist, Joseph Studwell, where he is trying to analyze why Korea, Taiwan, Japan did so well after World War II.

And in the case of Korea, he tells a story where I think they have this factory where they're starting to export goods.

And

they're working like six, seven-hour days.

And the floor manager tells one of his underlings the money that I think the reparations on which we're supporting this economic growth from Japan, or maybe they're talking about just the infrastructure in general, that came at the cost of your family being raped by Japan.

So this is basically blood money that we're using to grow the economy.

You better work hard to make sure it was worth it.

But, okay, sorry, the broader question I wanted to ask was, so the economic development what Japan is doing in Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan, if they hadn't made this mistake of fighting a war with America, let's say something like the Japanese Empire survives and isn't crazy militaristic.

I don't even know if this is a question, but I'm just thinking about the counterfactual where you could have this really wealthy and prosperous area of Asia.

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 going to have tariffs.

This is the Holly Smoot tariff in 1930.

We're just going to wall it off because we've got to keep jobs for Americans.

Okay, this is half-court tennis.

You're not thinking, well, what's everybody else going to do?

retaliate exactly in kind.

So for the Japanese, who had been good citizens within the international order, they had maintained really high positions in the League of Nations, which we had been irresponsible and never joined.

The Japanese, this pulls the rug on all the Japanese who'd said we need to cooperate within the international order.

Japan's trade-dependent.

What are they going to do?

No one will trade with them.

Their closest people won't.

Okay, they look at the world and go, well, we need an empire because we've got to have it big enough so that we get food and the basics for us.

And that's where, so 30 is Holly Smoot, 31's invasion of Manchuria.

So let's go back to grand strategy.

This is Americans having no grand strategy of not thinking deeply about

life is an interaction, right?

I can tell you whatever I want to, but then you're going to make your own decisions.

If I don't consider what your decisions might be, I'm going to be in deep, dark trouble.

And I think about Hawley and Smoot, they didn't live to see what

they wrought.

A lot of young men across the world died because of that.

People like them, failure to think more broadly.

And think about it, the lesson of 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, because 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.

So it's a great lesson.

So Japan then is making an ugly decision because 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.

Japan, if it had just sat in Manchuria and just sat, they probably would have been just fine.

Because they do stabilize Manchuria.

They are bringing some income back in.

But the moment that they escalate big time in 37, they ruin their economy.

And it takes a number of years to play out fully.

It's a disaster for themselves, most of all.

Just a broader picture of what I'm learning from these military histories, and especially your books, is

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, like a single decision point by a single person that cascades.

And then you overextended China, now you need more oil, and now you have to feel like the need to invade America.

And the importance of leadership in preventing these sorts of catastrophic mistakes.

Yeah, no, it's what I would call a pivotal error.

Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor is a pivotal era.

They are already grossly overextended into China.

They want to cut out foreign aid.

They think, oh,

remember that Hawaii is not a U.S.

state, doesn't become a state until 159 or something.

So, and they probably take this racist view of Hawaiians of whoever they think Hawaiians are.

And so, their idea is: we're going to take a newspaper, thwap the dog on the snout, and the dog will quit.

And And instead, you create great power allies all across the Pacific for 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?

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 error.

Actually, I want to ask ask you about that.

So, you know, Japan invades Manchuria in 1931, Hitler invades Poland in 1939, and in retrospect, we think of them as part of the same great global conflict, whereas they were separated by eight years.

I wonder if you think of Ukraine today as eight years down the line, or 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 could cascade into something like that?

Of course.

Yeah, this is the problem 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 our leaders are meeting with each other.

If you get into some global war with people with nuclear weapons, when the losers decide that 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.

You know, you think about low probability but high consequence events.

I don't know what the probability is, but I know the consequences are huge.

And the probability is iterated over many years and decades.

Right, yeah.

You've got to always not use nuclear weapons, right?

That Pandora is already out of the box has been opened, that nukes are there.

Especially if there's no retirement plan for Putin.

Well, one of the things that's interesting from your book, I think you mentioned this explicitly in the Wars in Asia, there's things that are seen by one side as

we are deterring the other side, are often seen as the other side as a provocation, where

the embargoes from the U.S.

are seen as Japan as a deadline to attack.

I think you had some other examples like this.

I think people who are

less empathetic to the Ukraine cause have said, well, extending NATO, which we thought would be deterrence, is that was actually a provocation for Putin.

But what should we just generally make of that lesson?

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 Britons, 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?

And they've had a whole history of Russians doing terrible things to them.

I'm not making it up.

This is what Russia's been up to.

They have been correct that Russia is going to do more terrible things.

They were correct doing everything they could to get into NATO.

And also

be in the EU.

And they've, it's incredible in my lifetime.

I'm 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 been freed of Soviet domination, it's been massive compounding of standards of living.

It's allowed people your age to travel the world,

allowed to have aspirations in their lives, right?

There's no podcasting.

Yeah, well, yeah, but 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?

I cannot or you cannot change how Russians think about things, right?

Russians have to,

how they think about the things, that's their decision.

But

if you look at Europe as a peninsula, you're better off with more insulation from Russia than not.

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

Well, I think what was hoped, and it hope

has been said not to be a strategy, the hope was that trying to get Russia to join the party.

Trying to 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

it's horrendous trying to run a business there.

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 downstairs.

I think that's a special way of offering people.

That was the hope is join the party.

because you will become wealthy too.

Russian standards of living have been stagnating for quite a while.

That Putin's model of the

basically taking over your neighbor's stuff and then whatever you have a bomb flat bringing home is it's not an efficient way to make wealth.

And you're killing so many people.

So

I don't believe that we in the West have this

denying people of Eastern Europe

saying, hey, well, actually, because the Russians have such an attitude, you get to be their serfs forever.

I guess it's not about,

not that it's just, but there are broader considerations for the same reason that you were talking about earlier that would not have made sense for Americans.

It would have not been plausible that we would have kept fighting further to prevent Eastern Europe at the time from succumbing to the Red Army.

The Ukrainians are doing the fighting right now.

But I mean,

supplied by tremendous amounts of Western aid.

Yeah, they are.

But that's pennies on the dollar.

It's they're willing to fight for their country.

It's not about the cost to the United States.

It's not like the 40 billion billion or whatever.

How does this nudge the nuclear war numbers

or the nuclear war probably?

What's the nuclear war going to do, Putin?

The Ukrainian forces are dispersed.

What's the target?

It's going to be Kyiv, I suppose?

Or I don't know.

He thinks that he's out of options, so let's go bomb NATO headquarters or something.

I think the Chinese have whispered in his ear, and this is pure speculation, is, buddy, if you do this,

Everybody on the planet is going to get nuclear weapons, and all of a sudden we aren't going to have this little small club of people with nuclear weapons, and the consequences are going to be rather horrendous.

And also, look at China, it has more nuclear-armed neighbors than anyone on the planet, and some of them are totally nuts.

Putin himself, right?

I would think, oh, well, let's try North Korea for a country that's got starvation in the 21st century.

How did you do it?

Although, on this point, another thing your books have emphasized is how often leaders make mistakes that make no strategic, make very little strategic sense and are very stupid.

You can imagine, even even though it would be very stupid for Putin to escalate, especially if he personally is going to be, you know,

there's no retirement plan, I could imagine him doing very stupid things.

Well, let's put stupid out of it because it's not explanatory by saying, well, someone's stupid, because it means you write off understanding their reasoning.

So a lot of Westerners, when they think of governments, think about governments operating in the interest of their population.

So when their decisions don't improve standards of living, security, and things, then we say those aren't good decisions.

All right, but that's not the game.

In China, for instance, it's all about maintaining the monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party to rule.

And if that conflicts with having higher living standards, you better believe they're choosing the Communist Party.

So, you're watching those kinds of decisions going on right now where their most talented entrepreneurs are being relieved of their enterprises.

Or Putin, as you said, he's made a a pivotal error.

He has no backdown plan.

He only has a double-down plan.

Expect him to double down forever.

And

then the question is whether all the oligarchs want to keep doubling down with him and his generals, or whether they, I don't know, give him something extra in his Cheerios some morning.

Who knows?

So I feel like this is one of the lessons you were actually talking about earlier, where you don't want somebody to feel like they're up against the wall

on debt's ground, where even even if it would be an unjust sort of resolution, some sort of ceasefire where Putin can save face.

I wonder if your sort of historical lessons would bring you to that conclusion.

Oh, and Putin,

he will be back for more

and understand that that's just the case.

But then, what is the solution?

We can't have unconditional surrender unless we're.

No, no, no one's marching onto Moscow.

The United States has done this for many years is you don't recognize the territories that he's taken, which means the Russians are stuck with a sanctioned regime of some type forever.

And you go, oh, well, that'll weaken.

Certain people won't adhere to it.

It will depress Russian growth forever, which goes back to an earlier part of this conversation: it's really powerful.

And it was some Russians who themselves, at the very beginning, said, Oh, no, we are going to be like North Korea.

Yeah, you will be.

That's exactly where he's heading them.

We don't control when the Russians reassess.

We can't even predict when or whether they'll reassess.

We can't predict whether there'll be some kind of incipient civil war in Russia, right?

Which would be, well, destabilizing by definition.

Who knows how that goes?

But the Ukrainians are fighting for their country.

And though the, you want to, one of the things you asked me in an email about is whether superior finances wins wars or something.

It's superior alliance systems that win wars.

And it's interesting that the Europeans, particularly the Eastern Europeans, are the leaders of all this.

And isn't it fascinating that the Finns and the Swedes, who forever were neutral, are now all over this?

And they know.

So

what is it?

The enemy gets a vote?

The Russians have a vote.

As long as the Russians are playing this game, our best bet is to support Ukrainians.

Because unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, where the locals did not do the bulk of the fighting, this is when the locals are.

And that's key on whether you also were emailing me and asking me about successful versus unsuccessful interventions.

When the locals do all the fighting, that's when your best odds are of helping them.

Yeah.

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.

What explains why those occupations are so much more successful?

Easy.

One is a case of rebuilding institutions, and the other one is building them from scratch.

You can rebuild things rapidly.

And if you think of after the war, how things were bombed out in Western Europe, and quite rapidly they repair buildings and things.

So both Germany and Japan had had an extensive list of functioning institutions from local police officers, offices, to educational systems, to governments that local, provincial, et cetera, governments, and running the train systems and businesses and all of this have been absolutely functional.

And so finding the expertise to recreate that.

is easy.

And of course, Germans and Japan, Japanese may be living there, so they are very interested in rebuilding.

And then what the key thing the United States then did, I knew more about Japan than Germany, is

the Japanese are hemming and hawing over what their constitution was going to 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

constitutions so they can pull it all together.

It was long before there's an internet where you can figure these things out.

And they're figuring out what the constitution is going to be.

And so he just, they cook it up over the week.

And what

the Japanese think, the ones we're dealing with, they think, well, you know, the Americans are going to leave.

And so we'll go along with this constitution.

But once the Americans are out, we're going to do whatever.

And what Prime Minister Yoshida, he was the first post-war Prime Minister, he said, well, we thought we could change it back.

But he realized because of the vote, universal suffrage, allowing women to vote, and there had been a certain amount of land reform, he said there was no going back.

It permanently changed the balance of power in Japan.

Another feature is the Japanese, the Imperial Japanese Army had so disgraced itself.

Their strategy had led to the firebombing of the home islands.

Talk about a total failure.

And in Germany,

the same sort of thing.

You have universal elections and things.

And

it took a while to get the Western zones united because

all the fighting with the Russians over the air zone, you eventually get two Germanies, et cetera.

But 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 Afghanistan and Iraq, right?

They've never had, 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 developed country?

Well, some people say centuries, right?

And then there's a whole other piece, which is the Germans and the 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 Iraq, there's no sense of a nation.

They have these,

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?

You're just got a civil war going on there, talking about a death ground kind of civil war where one's in power and just ruins the others.

Another 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 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 going to intervene.

And they're going to intervene in very destabilizing ways.

Very difficult.

In Japan, it's an island.

It's hard for people to intervene.

Germany, we put a lot of money into it

with having troops and getting the German army and other things up and and running.

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

And then they're going to make it very highly defensible

before it's all over.

And Europeans as a group understand that it is absolutely in their

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 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.

Speaking of miracle generations, the Meiji generation, as you have written about,

so many reforms, learned from the West, improved every aspect of

Japanese governance and

economics and education and law and whatever.

And

within the generation, then you have people coming to power who make quagmire after quagmire, make mistake after mistake.

And there's other cases like this where there's some cases where the countries managed to solve the succession problem after a really competent generation.

In Singapore, after Lee Kuan Yew, it seems like the government has

kept up the system which promoted such efficient bureaucrats.

Whereas

other cases where after Bismarck in Germany, 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 was not carried over?

Well, I wouldn't pick on them because they're brilliant.

It's amazing what they achieve.

They go, well,

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 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 on to the things

in which it's in their interest to sign on to them.

Like you sign on to treaties, and then you have provisos 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 have worked on improving the institutions that they have.

But institutions 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 like gossamer, but then you spin enough of it and then it really holds.

But then there are people like Hitler who come through and they undo the work of others.

Bismarck, when you ask about him, it's highly personalistic.

That's not about an institution.

That's about a guy leveraging the king.

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.

I was about to mention, well, another maybe generation that managed to create good institutions was the American founders.

But then there was also the failure that led to the Civil War, right?

So even there, some institutions were weak.

Our original sin.

Right.

Slavery.

Yeah.

We were talking about Taiwan and its development.

We'll get into Taiwan in a second

as part of the invasion, but let's talk about Taiwan.

So that's where the nationalists went after the Chinese Civil War.

I think until recently, the narrative has been that the CCP is incredibly competent and very good at engineering good policies and economic growth in China.

And then we look at Taiwan, and obviously it's so much richer than China in a per capita basis.

Would that have been what China would have been like if the nationalists had remained in power?

Unknown.

Because

when the nationalists came to Taiwan, they were in really deep, dark trouble.

And one of the ways the Taiwanese have maintained the moral high ground, which is necessary for them in order to guarantee foreign aid, is being democratic.

That their really exposed position put enormous pressure on them to democratize, because the United States is sitting on them and going, you need to get democratic.

And also the nationalists engaged on a real comprehensive after-action report on Taiwan.

And they concluded, why did we lose?

Well, it was this incredible corruption and the need to do land reform.

I don't think land reform was feasible for Shang Kai-shek on the mainland.

Why?

Because that's his power base, all the landowners.

And

you try to reform them, you'll get a headshot.

Whereas on Taiwan, it was bloody doing land reform.

The local Taiwanese did not appreciate getting expropriated, and there were massacres over it.

Although in Korea, I think Park did land reform, and that was native.

Syngman Rhee apparently did it even earlier.

That it was one in the land reform they did there was the Japanese at large expropriated areas, so it was easier to do that.

And so he, Syngman Rhee, does land reform immediately.

It's not been well studied, and it'd be fascinating if someone actually did study it.

And it probably helps explain why tremendous loyalty within the Korean armed forces to the South Korean government.

Yeah, and how Isha works, Stadwald makes the interesting point that because these countries are so overflowing with labor that it makes sense in these countries, so instead of having a single landowners with large tracts of land, having lots of peasants who can tend to

mechanization may be not the best idea when you have so much labor that can actually do these things that are not scalable.

Okay, anyways, going back to Taiwan, so modern day, now China, because of zero COVID, less foreign investments, data intervention in the economy.

I think

consumers aren't spending as much.

The economy, the growth rate is slowing.

And obviously because of demographics.

Does this increase or decrease the odds of Chinese action on Taiwan?

You know, I don't know.

I honestly don't know.

But it's, again, I think a better way of looking at it, or at least the way I would look at it, is talk about looking at consequences, high consequence.

It's guaranteed that if they go into Taiwan, it is a high consequence event, without a doubt.

And what the odds are, I don't know.

However, if you listen to their speeches, they tell you they're going to do it, right?

They're consistent.

And the West learned that you read improbable speeches, right?

People read Mein Kampf and said, oh, this is a nutcase.

No one would ever do that.

Well, it quite accurately represented people, even in dictatorships, they have to transmit message to population, and they quite often very accurately tell you what they're going to do.

Putin has been quite clear what he's been up to.

Stalin was very clear what he was up to.

So let's judge Xi Jinping at his word, and he says he's going to go for it.

Now, whether he's still in power, I don't know.

But here's a problem for which we don't have a solution.

The Chinese people have to figure out the solution.

The Chinese Communist Party, to me, has clearly made the decision that it wants to maintain a monopoly of political power.

And for a while there in Dudeng Xiaoping, that worked because the reforms that they wanted to make for agriculture and things, they could maintain their monopoly of power, but do things that allowed people to get much wealthier, right?

And so that went in tandem for a number of years.

Now we're at the inflection point where you have a lot of educated people and businesses who are really integrated into the world, and they want to make autonomous decisions.

Also, you want it with some very large, very successful companies, and they have quite a bit of cloud.

And the Communist Party worries about this because what do people want at that point?

It's probably some influence over political decisions.

And the Communist Party said that's off the table.

Okay, if it's off the table, how do you keep it off the table?

All the things that you're talking about.

This 24-7 surveillance state, think about, in fact, since you have a computer science background, you'd have better understanding of this than I.

Think about the cost if the United States had a 24-7 surveillance system where you're literally doing it down to who's jaywalking, who's not, in order to put it into their social security score.

Who's kid in their classrooms rolling their eyes at their teachers, I kid you not, and putting it down as a ding on that kid's social.

And also, who knows what's accurate and inaccurate on the facial recognition stuff?

So they start chalking up the wrong scores for the wrong people.

The cost would be incredible.

Just

all the people power you're going to have to devote to this.

And then all the false positives, which will be incendiary for the people who are falsely considered disloyal.

This is where they're at.

And now we're doing the National Disappearing Act, where, oh, we don't know where

their Minister of Defense, he's suddenly like, he's a non-person.

And, oh, by the way, what happened to the foreign minister?

Give me a break.

Let's do grown-ups day.

Yeah, and then the cost is also so gruesome in comparison to, especially, maybe you can tell me more about this, but in the rural areas, especially, aren't there so many cheap interventions of, you know, give them like iron supplements and folic acid and give them, you know, $20 eyeglasses, and you could raise the

childhood nutrition that is lacking in rural parts of China by so much that it would actually be worth it for the government if you think of the additional tax revenue that healthy people can bring in the future.

They're not going to, they're so worried about Xi Jinping's and other guys making a series of pivotal errors.

I mean, his handling of COVID was just stupid, right?

COVID started in China.

Go investigate it and figure out where it came from.

And then it would be a non-starter.

But instead, they do the massive cover-up, et cetera.

And then all of a sudden, instead of just being unlucky that COVID started there, it's all of a sudden, no, you're complicit.

And a lot of people have died across the globe over this.

And it came from you.

And you clearly were letting people out of the country knowing full well that they were vectors of spreading this disease.

This is a problem.

The rest of the world's not going to forget.

There are just too many millions of people who died.

You were talking about the cost of the surveillance.

I'm actually, this raises an interesting question of

what percentage of the Soviet Union's GDP was dedicated to the NKVD or

I think what they

when we were the United States was trying to evaluate what the load of the military was on the economy and the CIA was trying to figure it out to the best of their ability.

And then because they don't have a convertible currency, it's really difficult to, and then they're busy lying to each other.

That's the whole other thing in communist states and dictatorships.

You're incentivized to lie about everything.

And think about the compounding effects of these lies.

It means I can't make good decisions because everyone around me is lying.

And then it gets worse at the top.

You're going to watch as

these cascading things happen to the Chinese and the Russians as a result.

So it turned out at the end of the Cold War, oh gosh, I won't remember it accurately over the top of my head, but if you did the whole military-industrial complex, it's well over half their economy is being devoted to this.

Which is crazy because during the peak of World War II, the fraction of U.S.

GDP was like 45%.

That's right.

I think they think Nazis were 55%.

But don't call it, I may be remembering these incorrectly, but it was horrific in Russia.

And the problem for Russia, so if in the Soviet Union, so let's say we're running little subunits, but I'm afraid I'm not going to get enough parts in, so I lie about how few I have, even though I got lots more.

And then you're busy lying.

So then when we compile macroeconomic data, A, we don't really know what the price of anything is.

We don't know the value of labor, of capital, and we don't know what consumers really want.

And so Russia is massively misallocating capital, labor, and

they don't understand computer preferences.

So when you asked me earlier, are people stupid?

It's more they've got all this incorrect data, and by the time they realize that

something's wrong,

they are already in a deep, dark crisis.

This is late in Brezhnev, where the numbers are just amass.

And so when Gorbachev comes in in 1985, it's just a massive implosion.

And

then he tries to save the beast, and of course, his cure kills the beast.

Speaking of which, by the way, so after World War II, the production in Germany and Japan, these companies that were making weapons, you know,

Mitsubishi and Volkswagen and BMW, now they become world-class consumer.

They produce world-class consumer products, GE in America.

Whereas in Russia, they have, is it the T-34,

the tank that was like state-of-the-art?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, apparently that thing was built on American chassis.

Apparently, it's based on our technology that we weren't interested and of course they took the chassis, etc.

But in World War II do not forget about Len Lease.

This is another lesson of World War I.

Imperial Russia fell.

Disaster.

Absolute disaster.

Why did they fall?

Well, no one bothered to supply them with, really focus on supplying them with adequate weapons.

They had huge armies, but they're sending their young men in without rifles and saying, well, when you get there, go pick one off.

With a dead body.

Yeah.

I think that means they've done no training.

And you're just wasting people.

And then, can you imagine being that soldier and thinking, this is how my government treats me?

So World War II,

the emphasis on supplying Russia is huge.

So what do we supply?

We supply all the things that make them move.

So it's rolling stock and getting their train lines going.

They produce planes, but they can't do the jet fuel.

It's high-octane.

You may know more about it than I do.

We're providing all that.

Russians will starve.

We provide a tremendous amount of food.

You know, spam, which on email, spam.

It comes from that canned pork and whatever.

Actually, if you think about it, if you get one of those little spam cans, that'll keep you going.

And we spent that all over the world.

And that's the origin of spam on the computer.

People, by the end of World War II, were so sick of spam.

But anyway,

we fed the Russians and we provided them all kinds of things that without it, they could not have fought.

So fast forward now, we're providing those things for Ukraine.

Right.

The

Ukrainians can feed themselves, et cetera, to keep them in the fight.

But why didn't the impressive industrial war output of the Soviet Union transfer into these

the same way that it did in Germany and Japan and these consumer, especially consumer brands?

It's their model for development.

This is a big difference between their model for development and the Meiji model.

The communist model is heavy industry and largely for the military.

And the Meiji, even though they wind up with a big military, it's about getting these consumer products in and light industry.

And then they go on to do

heavy industry.

And it turns out that the Meiji model is the better one.

It just works better for an economy.

And so the Russians aren't interested in doing consumer goods, right?

It's all about the

communist power

having monopolizing power and then playing God in whatever region they control, right?

And dictating whether other people live or die.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, let's go back to Taiwan.

What are the odds you would give of a Taiwan conflict?

Maybe you can give me your like over-under five years, 10 years, 20 years.

I have no idea.

I think you have to prepare for it.

It will best position you to deter it, even though you may fail at deterring it.

And then if you fail at deterring it, it will best position you to deal if bad things happen.

Being at the Naval War Carlton and seeing how people are talking about this, I mean, how likely is it that the U.S.

would actually directly intervene on the behalf of Taiwan and directly fight the Chinese?

I think

that if you think about Taiwan, what is it?

It's a country of 20 plus million people.

If you look across the globe, how many countries have about 20 million plus people?

Lots.

Yeah.

It's probably most countries in the world are kind of that sizes.

So if you say it's okay to go level a country, because for the People's Republic to take Taiwan, I presume it's going to begin with an artillery barrage.

I presume that's going to be leveling Taiwanese cities, right?

We've watched how it goes in Ukraine.

I can't imagine the Chinese being less brutal.

You're going to say that's okay.

Our whole, think about this maritime system of international law.

What is the fundamental

underlying principle of it all?

It's sovereignty.

It's the notion that just because you're big, you can't go and destroy someone who's small.

This is the fundamental basics of the whole thing.

Yeah.

Although,

in the case of Taiwan, it's hard to argue that one island that is right off the coast of China and which China, unlike any other area, has

for decades said that they want to conquer.

It's not like they've been saying, well, once we get Taiwan, we also really want to conquer India.

And, you know,

actually,

oh, they've just been redoing their maps about what they say, what is Uttar Pradesh is ours.

That would be a detail, right?

Yeah.

But it just, it's hard to see.

They get, they conquer Taiwan and they get emboldened to then conquer Korea.

Like, I mean,

what's the cascading effect we're in?

Well, look at Chinese history.

It is a continental empire.

What is the paradigm?

Territorial conquest.

Take a look at it.

This is it.

And they're not off that paradigm.

They're still on it.

On the doctrine of strategic ambiguity, what is your opinion on this?

Because World War I, I mean, you have belligerents who are surprised that it wasn't the Kaiser surprised that Britain intervened on behalf of Belgium and he was so upset about it.

The Kaiser.

I don't know the details, but that man was, someone said, what?

He wasn't the sharpest quill in the porcupine.

But just generally, is it wise to have this,

won't they?

Attitude where does it do a good job of deterring them?

I think you want to be ambiguous in the United States because otherwise it would enable Taiwan to autonomously do, well, like under Shang Kai-shek, if we had been unambiguous, the man might have done crazy stuff.

And then all of a sudden we get pulled into a world war.

Right.

But if you think about a Taiwan conflict,

just because there's a conflict there does not mean the United States has to send its military in

toe-to-toe.

I would think it would give China a long-lasting timeout from the international world order, right?

It'll be sanctuary.

Think about, this is what's so tragic about China.

Think about how many people have been lifted out of poverty.

So many since Deng Xiaoping, hundreds of millions.

It is a great achievement of our lifetimes.

It's happened since you were born.

And why did that happen?

It's China's reintegration into the rest of the world of joining the maritime order, following the basic credit card rules of paying for transactions, and then your transactions are also guaranteed.

That is the win for China, the true win.

And taking Taiwan, who needs it?

The Taiwanese are perfectly fine doing their own thing.

And they've made it clear they don't want to be taken over by force.

Who would be?

So the problem in China is the Communist Party wants to maintain its monopoly on power.

And so it used to claim the moral rectitude card.

Well, they can't do that anymore.

They're so corrupt.

And they used to claim the economic growth card.

Well, that one's going away.

They're left with one card.

It's the nationalism card.

And they're playing it butt hard because it's a unifying thing for Chinese, for the Han ethnic group in China, who constitute the overwhelming majority, that Taiwan should be theirs.

It's a mistake.

It will be a pivotal error if they make that mistake.

But guess what?

Other countries cannot control what the Chinese government decides to do.

It's foolish to think you can control it.

It's beyond your abilities.

Although we can control whether we get in a head war with

another global superpower, what are the odds you would give to a war

between China and the U.S.

going nuclear?

It would be the most catastrophic error imaginable for the United States and China to have a military conflict.

There will be no winners.

There will be massive numbers of losers.

All right,

let's talk about nuclear weapons for a minute.

Think about how Americans are so mad at each other about wearing a mask or not wearing a mask.

Talk about something that's stupid.

Talk about something that's not a big deal, wearing a mask or not.

If anybody nukes anybody else's city, do you think the world is going to be remotely the same way?

Can you imagine?

So we can't even be logical about masks or just letting other people do their thing about masks.

We can't even do that in the United States.

So we have many diplomats who are doing their best to prevent this eventuality.

But understand

that we do not control the decisions of others.

For instance, I'm going to make best so you don't have children.

But if you ever have children and little ones, right, the ones that you can pick up and put down,

they will wind up doing things that you cannot, you're genetically related to these people.

You love these people.

And they will do stuff that you think is just wild.

And you will put enormous pressure on them not to do these things.

And they'll do it anyway.

So the notion that we can take a country of one billion and change and make them do anything.

Right.

But the reason I ask is, is

an island of 20 million people, as you said, there's many countries with 20 million people.

Is that worth getting into an altercation that could potentially lead to a nuclear war?

Ah, the global order, I'm going back to the circle, it's based on sovereignty.

If you allow this, it doesn't mean you have to go to a nuclear war.

You just never recognize whatever it is.

And then you sanction China from then until kingdom come so that they are not part of the maritime trading order.

And you tell them they need to cough up Taiwan.

Understanding China and the way the government works, could the CCP survive a failure to take Taiwan?

If they invade, they fail, and then because of that, they get kicked out of the global order.

What do you think happens to the CCP?

I don't know, but look at North Korea.

Talk about a failed place.

It's amazing to me how long the Kim dynasty has maintained its power.

It's just unbelievable.

They're starving.

So don't count on any short-term ending.

Think about

those countries that are willing to cooperate with each other, not invade, negotiate their disagreements, work through international organizations, improve international organizations.

That world is what you want to protect, and you want to allow people to come and join.

So, if Russia changes its mind,

new government, etc., you want to bring them back into just the way

Japan and Germany were brought back in.

You want to protect that order forever.

Our prosperity is based on it.

And it involves serious defense spending, et cetera.

And

others who want to do the problem with the Communist Party paradigm of we're going to have a monopoly, it's a route to poverty.

Think about it.

When the Communists took over, they didn't restore grain harvests that had happened during the Civil War, you know, the 1930s version, until after Mao was dead.

It's incredible.

It's a really lousy system for promoting economic growth, and it matters in a poor country, right?

It's going to determine your poor per capita standard of living.

And the poorer you are, the more that makes a huge difference to you to have something.

So communism doesn't produce wealth.

It's an incredibly effective way for taking power within a failing state and putting a dictatorship in power.

It's incredibly good at that.

But it doesn't deliver prosperity afterwards.

Since World War II, I don't know if this is fair to say that our Navy has not been tested to the same extent as our Air Force and Army in the engagements we've had.

None of our forces have been as tested.

The Marines

the most in the Army because they're doing land engagements.

But if you think that Iraq or Afghanistan's a peer competitor, give me a break.

Yeah.

I think what our GDP is like 325 times that Afghanistan.

It is a different event, which is why the Ukrainians are looking at us when they get advice from us going, excuse me.

Right.

Yeah, so given that that's the case, I mean, how confident should we be that, you know, we have these like $15 billion carriers and even in these war games, many of them go down?

I was talking to the other person I interviewed in the UK was Dominic Cummings, who was the chief advisor to the previous government.

And he said that in the war games, for the British carriers to survive, they have to exit the

zone of contention, which would make them useless.

So how worried should we be about our preparedness for a naval war?

You always need to be prepared.

You have to be thinking about it constantly.

What are carriers of incredibly useful is

going toe-to-toe with a peer competitor, what you're describing, the vulnerabilities are absolutely there, particularly if you want to get up close and personal.

On the other hand, what a carrier provides you is all over the world,

it gives you a base.

So if you're not going after a peer competitor, then they're incredibly useful, right?

And we own them.

And then the question now is going forward, do you want to build more carriers?

Or do you want to build something smaller that just takes drones?

Or what are you doing?

And that's the big decision, and I'm not qualified to answer it.

But for the ones that you have, they're tremendously useful for doing these non-peer events.

And again, I am not qualified to answer operational questions like these.

Yeah, I guess I am curious about it, though, because we are seeing in Ukraine, you know, these drones that are taking out extremely expensive tanks.

Bingo.

The impact of asymmetric warfare, how do you see that shaping?

Warfare has always been asymmetric.

Isn't that the game?

game you you figure out whatever they've got and then you do something different which is the asymmetry right or the thing of just having like cheap drone armies that can you know yeah debilitate billion dollar or million dollar equipments this is it this is it and you're very much part of the generation going back to your uh your education in computer science is and these technologies and apparently this uh the the the printing that they're doing,

3D printing that they're doing in Ukraine.

Yeah, it's going to absolutely change things.

I don't know to what degree.

I'm not an expert.

But yeah, and the other issue with the United States is we build a lot of these very expensive platforms, these ships and things, and airplanes, and then you wonder whether you can afford to lose them.

And then thinking creatively, this is where war games come into play.

And planning is, okay, what would be the value of these smaller things?

Can they carry the water when the time comes, et cetera?

And I think

you're you're going to learn a lot from this ukraine war about what works and what doesn't what is your opinion on how competent and effective the military is in general

because given that there isn't been like a huge war for quite a while can have they been able to maintain the um the standards and the efficiency i am not qualified to answer that literally i mean i teach at a uh the naval war college but that does not make me an expert on how uh the pentagon runs its business i think the general feeling about the federal government is

there are incredible inefficiencies, but it's very difficult to get rid of them.

I mean, in the civilian part of it as well.

Once people get a Federal Service job, it's very difficult to

get rid of that particular job, et cetera.

Are there plans around the Naval War College or elsewhere about

how to make the system more modern and efficient?

Oh,

I teach in the strategy department, so we do strategy, not all of this other stuff.

Is the era of great generals over?

So, you know, through history, we have, and maybe you answered this already when you said that we overemphasized looking back how much these generals mattered.

But

for some reason or another, they've become historically famous, people like Von Molzar or Patton or MacArthur and so on.

Whereas I can't even, off the top of my head, like name a famous general of Iraq in a very different way.

I did one.

I'm sure, yeah, but Valeri Zeluzhin, who runs the Ukrainian army.

Think about the people you're picking.

You're picking people who were part of a global war, right?

A really high-stakes war.

And then, as I pointed out, we use these generals to personify a whole group of people, right?

So

I suspect the ones you're going to find are going to be the ones in Ukraine.

And the fact that they've done as well as they have done so far is incredible.

And then it's not just the generals there, right?

You have Zelensky, who is the public face of diplomacy.

It's incredible, right?

From the night with his little sound bite is, what is it?

I don't want a taxi.

Right.

And then if you think of the people there who are running the rail system, who have kept things supplied, or the people who are repairing their electric power plants, there are so many Ukrainians of different professions who are are holding that thing together.

So there are plenty of great people to be found there.

What is the process that leads to the loss of civilian control of the military?

For example, in Japan, you know, and why has the U.S.

been robust against this?

In Japan, it's interesting.

If you go back to the Meiji leaders,

so they're, who are they?

They're the people who won a civil war against the last Tokugawa shogun.

And they wound up, if you look at their career paths, is they had civil and military jobs as they swapped around and they all knew each other so that the head of the Army and the Navy and the prime ministers, they all interacted, but they didn't create an institutional mechanism.

They did have

a cabinet, but they didn't have a full-up legal forcing together of all the civil and military parts of the government and have them operate on a rather level playing field.

The Army dominates.

So when that generation dies, everyone gets much more stovepipe careers.

So they're much better educated than their parents and grandparents have been.

But their education would be strictly in the army, as opposed to, oh, well, the founder of the Army also founded the police force.

And he knew perfectly well he knew the finance minister and had great respect for the finance minister.

And then you have people not respecting each other.

And I would suspect, I'm making this up because I don't know the details in China, but if you think about Deng Xiaoping, he's on the long march.

He's one of the younger members.

He must know everybody.

And I know he's in and out of prison, so he knows the people who are in.

He knows the people who are out.

And so then when you get to Xi Jinping, they're a much more stovepipe group of people.

They don't have the institutions.

Actually, in China, they do have institutions for party control over the government.

So that's how communist...

governments have maintained very good control over their militaries.

In fact, if you look at communists, they're really good at civilian control over militaries.

So, yeah, they have.

In fact, that was Trotsky's contribution to the back in the Russian Revolution of how you take a bunch of white officers and veterans of World War I, but keep track of them.

And it has to do with political and military commissars.

So

the military commissar is the officer who's actually professional.

The political commissar is the one who's got a connection with the secret police, who, if the military commissar doesn't do as told, they'll come in and kill him, maybe his whole family for good luck.

And it's very effective in the commissar system.

It's

these paired things.

China's still got the commissar system.

In the U.S., though, in the Old War College, you have these systems of the officers from, like, I don't know, I don't know what the actual progression looks like, but from like West Point or whatever.

Are they seeing the civilian, but from the time in which the higher levels of the military,

from their education to their promotion, are they in the military the entire time or do they also have this wide, widespread of experience?

Military officers,

they have a very extensive education, it's often a succession of MA degrees.

So, some of them in very technical things, like I don't know, if you're nuclear subs, you better know how to run the nuclear plant and engineering things.

And then they come later on to places like the Naval War College to learn about strategy and other things.

In terms of civil control over the military, if you go back to the American Revolution, Continental Army, you couldn't even get funding, right?

And And it goes very gradually over time.

And then you have MacArthur, who is just ignoring Truman, and he's making all kinds of threats.

Truman thinks he's got a way of settling out the Korean War, and MacArthur says things that overturn that.

So eventually you have

MacArthur getting fired.

which is telling military officers you can't do that.

And then when you get, what is it, under Barack Obama, we have some military officers shooting off their mouths and they get fired instantly.

To now,

we have full-up civilian control.

But it was with MacArthur.

He was trying to run policy.

And he got himself fired, but he was tremendously popular.

And it's the joint chiefs of staff who actually fire him.

They agree with Chuman.

They don't want MacArthur having his finger on the atomic button.

It scares them to death because they think he'll press it.

Why have the communists, speaking of the political and military commissars commissars under system, why have they been so good at propaganda historically?

You talk in the Wars of Nations about how despite

the imperial things they did and the ways in which they sabotaged things, they had much better PR than the Americans ended up having.

Well, if you think about how communists started, so if you get 1917, the Bolsheviks, they're really weak.

And you think about people who are weak, what can you do?

Well, words.

Words are key.

So you're using words to cultivate loyalty so you can get cadres to come your way.

And you're going to use words, since you don't have the ability to threaten people militarily, you're going to use words to try to undermine them.

And we've seen this happen

the world over.

I think, wasn't the story Al-Qaeda was pretty good at words and doing their recruiting, et cetera.

And then it takes the great powers that are targeted this for quite a a while to realize that whoever these people are, like the Bolsheviks, you think they're crazy people.

Ignore them.

But then all of a sudden, well, gradually, you see the chemical effects and go, they are a threat.

And then you need to get going with your own information.

warfare.

And I'll give you an example.

The United States had quite a robust information warfare during the Cold War and by the later phases.

And it involved like Voice of America and BBC.

Basically, just tell people the truth.

Tell people the truth about just the news in the world, relative standards of living, and just pour it in.

And the cumulative effects will be to destroy the allegiance of people in their own governments, which is what happened.

At the end of the Cold War in 91, it's not, we just ceased funding that because we thought it's over.

End of history, right?

And then I remember I was

on sabbatical.

in California at the Hoover Institution, and one of the people there was a great expert on Ukraine.

And this one there was RTV on, and he said, RTV is really dangerous, the Russian propaganda station.

I said, oh, it's ludicrous.

They're just telling nuts stories.

He was right.

I was wrong.

He was absolutely right that those crazy stories started getting a life of their own.

And then if you look at Biden, when this war was just about to begin in Ukraine, he made the decision to release a lot of the intelligence about, hey, they're about to invade.

Here's where they're coming.

And he has completely buried Putin in the information war.

So it took us a while to wake up.

Now we're back.

And if you look at it right lately, what is it?

Is it the U.S.

ambassador in Japan has some really lively tweets about the Chinese?

They're hilarious.

You need to Google them if you haven't read them.

We're back on,

and actually, the United States is really good.

Hollywood,

the movies.

We have so much talent in this department.

So a lot of it's just based on telling the truth.

But lies, as we've noticed, take a long, long time to, it's very easy to tell a lie.

It

takes a long time to get all the facts to prove it is a lie.

Why was the Axis so much worse at collaborating than the Allies, especially given the fact that the Axis were at least, it seemed like they should be much in much greater collaboration.

They were all these nationalist militaristic movements, whereas the Allies, you have communists and democracies.

And

in your book, you talk about when Japan's fighting Russia, Germany has a non-aggression pact with Russia.

When Germany does Operation Barbarossa on Russia, Japan has a non-aggression with Russia.

So

if they had a two-front war, I mean, what could have happened?

When Pearl Harbor happens, Germany isn't warned, but then gets dragged into a war against America.

Yeah,

why didn't the Axis better coordinate?

All right, I think I'm going to turn your question inside out.

So you're thinking about, I'm thinking about alliance systems.

So what did one side do versus the other side do?

So I'm thinking about the alliance itself, flip it around to the enemy,

which is the Axis powers put their enemies on death ground.

That is why the war began.

That is an incredibly clarifying event.

And that got Britain, which really, really hated the communists, to ally with them immediately.

Forever, Britain thought that the dangerous thing

were the communists, not the fascists in Germany.

But then, when the Germans worked their wonders, the Germans, the Germany, Britain's go, oh,

it's the communists who are the primary threat.

And so if you look at it that way, that's one thing.

Another thing, another concept to think about are primary enemies versus secondary enemy.

So if I ask you the question for

Germany

to get what it wants in the world, who's its primary enemy?

And the answer would be Russia, right?

Because that's where it wants to do its Leibensraum and stuff.

And you go, well, Italy, who's its primary enemy?

To do its Roman Empire III or whatever number they're up to.

And the primary enemy would be Britain, would get in the way of those plans.

And then you go, okay, and who's the primary enemy of Japan?

It's actually not us, it's China, because that's where, if they win, that's the prize to be taken.

So then you flip it around and go, okay, primary enemy of Britain, Germany.

Primary enemy of the United States, Germany.

It was never Japan, and we deliberately understood that Japan would never threaten us directly in the way that Germany ultimately would if it took over all of Europe.

And then you ask Russia, primary enemy, Germany.

So no kidding, we got three, we got three aligned on primary enemy.

So it's a very effective alliance.

Get rid of Germany and it falls apart, which is actually predictable.

When you lose the primary enemy, which is Hitler, he's gone.

All of a sudden, we're back to communists versus capitalists.

And the Cold War is off and running.

People act like it's a surprise.

No, it's not.

Primary enemy gone.

Back to the question about

the major generation.

And then I think you compare them to Deng and the other reformers.

So actually,

maybe this is a two-part question.

How similar where, I mean, we see see these sorts of industrializations across Southeast Asia.

How similar

what happened many decades later in Korea and Taiwan and China,

did Japan just do that exact same thing earlier?

And how come in Korea and Taiwan, you have a sort of dictatorship or an authoritarian government that leads this effort and then it transitions to democracy?

Whereas in China and Japan, that didn't happen.

What explains the difference there?

Is it just the power of of the U.S.?

Well, A, if Japan hadn't gotten into World War II, who knows what would have happened?

If the West had not mismanaged the Great Depression.

If that didn't happen, do you think there's a chance Japan liberalizes in the 30s?

Perhaps.

It's conceivable.

But there's also another thing about human beings.

Do we human beings require the absolutely scorching, horrible lesson to suddenly realize

You need to do these things.

You're going to be better off.

And that's where the searing lesson was World War I.

And that World War II generation set up institutions that have held the peace in the industrialized world, not the third world where all the proxy wars were fought, but in the industrialized world till very recently.

On the authoritarian regimes, communist systems that insist upon a monopoly of power of the Communist Party are a separate problem.

Authoritarian regimes

where

you wind up, what the places you're talking about in Asia, they invested extensively in education, extensively in infrastructure, extensively in industry of all types, and allowed all kinds of private ownership.

And

the story in private ownership and collective ownership, you can have a lot of government planning, a lot of government ownership, and the economy works perfectly well.

And you can look at different European countries, different percentages.

When you go to 100%

government control, you kill your economy.

And so Korea, Japan, et cetera, didn't do that.

And so they get educated people who then, for 20 years, really put themselves on the line, putting the pressure on their own governments to democratize.

Why was

the Soviet Union in World War II, why was their strategy in Asia,

at least it seemed that way from reading your books, so much better in Asia than it was in Europe, where in Asia they're playing off these different parties in China against each other, China against Japan.

In Europe, they don't even see, Vietnam doesn't even see Barbarossa or doesn't prepare for it adequately.

Why were they so much more effective in Asia?

I don't know.

I would imagine, cooperative adversaries, that China has been a failed state, had been a failed state for such a long time.

So it's hard for the Chinese to, they're trying to glue

put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

So what works in Asia versus Europe where you have developed countries with a whole cadre of experts, right?

Which is not the case case in China.

So there are a lot more people in the West who are going to be reassessing, and

they have robust institutions.

It goes back to institutions, whereas China is trying to just build these the first time around.

Yeah.

Difficult in China.

Why doesn't China think like a continental power?

They have a vast coastline where a lot of their wealth is around that coastline.

And, you know, as back as the 15th century, you have these huge navies.

Wasn't it Zhenghe?

They had a bigger navy, bigger expeditions, far bigger ships than Columbus.

Yeah, yeah.

They had a big navy at different times.

So why do they think like a continental?

Being a continental power or having a continental location is not a choice.

It's a fact of geography.

So if you look at

China,

huge land border.

It's got a huge coastline as well.

But historically, where has China's national security threats come?

It's the north, northwest.

If you look where the passes are, of people coming on in or down straight through Manchuria, etc.

And

China, in order to maintain its empire, just dominate China itself, let alone keep these other people out, has had to have a large standing army.

When it has built a large navy like Zhanghe, it's when it's got extra pocket change and extra money, then you can go do this.

But

if

that changes and you have trouble with people on your borders, you've got to spend your money that way.

It's very difficult to have a world-class Navy and a world-class army.

If you think about Britain, it maintained the big navy and always had a tiny army until they ramped it up in World War I, which was the beginning of the end for them,

as being the dominant power that they had been.

What level of competence should we assign our estimates of how well the PLA would function in a war?

Whereas at least the United States States military has

these practice rounds in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We don't even know what the modern PLA,

how that actually would function in a war.

And obviously, as you were mentioning earlier, in authoritarian systems, there's this lack of information and feedback that could lead to

all kinds of catastrophes where people are not prepared.

What should we think of the PLA's competence?

I don't know, but I think the people who are worried about that are the Vietnamese and the Indians,

the people who are likely to meet them.

Back in 1979, when the Chinese tried to work their magic in Vietnam, they had massive casualties.

The Vietnamese killed more Chinese in a matter of weeks than all U.S.

losses in Afghanistan, in fact, all U.S.

losses in Vietnam over however many years we were there.

You think the Chinese are going to be good at expeditionary warfare and sending these people anywhere?

I mean, think about it, where would you be fighting them?

So it's great they got a big army.

So where are they going to deploy them?

Why have the wars in China been so deadly?

You have, you know, millions, sometimes

compared to other theaters.

It's continental warfare.

That's how it goes.

Yeah.

It's the same reason Russia, so many Russians died.

I believe if you measure the number of locals who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then they've had the civil war on top of it, it's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people.

We go, oh, it wasn't too bad for Americans.

For those who live there, it was quite bad.

The Taiping Rebellion, I guess, another.

Tens of millions.

No one knows how many people died in that thing.

Yeah, well, I think one of the takeaways for you, so if you look at Chinese history over the course of it, all these different rebellions that go back hundreds of years, all these different wars they fought, and you look at it and go, wow, millions of Chinese killing each other.

A mark of good strategy is not killing your own, right?

So if the Chinese have been doing this for a long time,

don't expect them to be great strategists, which isn't a happy thing, actually.

It might mean they do crazy, stupid things that are so detrimental to themselves.

Right, yeah.

Some final questions about studying history in general.

So, you know, I started computer science, I talked to a lot of people in these technical fields, and being around them, I think I have a sense of what it means to understand a technical field well.

What does it mean to understand history or strategy well?

Well,

on history,

you have to do tremendous amounts of reading.

And

it's over a career.

Also, publishing is really essential not only to, you hope, give people the best ideas that you've encountered, but also it forces you to really come to terms with what you do think and why.

And I feel after every book, whatever I was, I'm like a one-click better.

Or, like, you've probably got good eyesight, unlike me.

If you go in for an eye appointment, the guy will go click, click, and go, say, one better, or is this better?

I feel like after a book,

it's one better.

Do I see 2020?

No.

And then after a year abroad, like I'm in England for a year, where I just get to think, read extensively, try to be open-minded, try to look for the unknown unknowns.

What is it I'm completely missing?

What is it that I'm totally wrong about?

Being open to reassessing, ooh, I got that wrong.

So it has to do with reading extensively.

If you're going to be studying other societies, you had better read the language.

I'm not particularly good at any of these languages, but I do try hard.

And it's taken years for me to bungle my way through them as I do.

But that's really essential.

too much of U.S.

graduate education people want to do and politically, particularly in political science, where they're asking very important questions for international relations and things and comparative politics, they don't require them to have high-end linguistic skills.

They should.

And part of it is, if you learn a different language, you do kind of a mind-meld.

If you learn Japanese, you have to learn all of these formality things and what's called keigo.

It's honorific Japanese.

My Japanese is terrible, but learning as much as I've learned makes you realize how this hierarchical society, part of how it works, and how get a sense of how they think about things and they categorize stuff.

So we're back at the opticians where there's, if you do the language, you get a few more clicks.

And having to live there when doing these archival research.

Yeah, and then just asking people questions when I live there, why this, why that.

And then what's funny is you come back home and it gives you a new sense of

what makes one's own country special because things that you just assume everyone does, you go, well, everyone doesn't quite do this.

Have you come across something in your archival research?

I don't know if there's a story of something super shocking.

Or one of the things I'm remembering from your book is you mentioned that you had a speculation that both the nationalist and the communist help the Russians cover up the rape of Manchuria because, or they were both given like hush payments, or well, no, they cut a deal, it didn't work.

And that's my interpretation.

Right.

And if you're further archival evidence that I'm happy to reassess.

But anything, maybe not exactly like that, but something you've learned just from like you found this, you dug up this thing that nobody noticed.

Well, I'm not a ha person, a gotcha person, but working at the Naval War College, so I start out a career, I'm studying Russia and China.

And so I'm learning about, do not realize it, but I'm learning about two great continental empires, two of the greatest in human history.

And it's fascinating learning about that.

Then I get a job, because two jobs jobs in one place, my husband and I go to the Naval War College.

And suddenly I'm teaching about British and U.S.

maritime strategy.

What do I know about that?

That's why my husband got me to do all these co-edited books about naval topics, just to learn more about it.

And that's where I got the idea about maritime and continental ors.

And I can't remember if I emailed you.

I gave the Marshall lecture.

It was published in the Journal of Military History.

And in it, I summarize my views on what the difference between a continental and maritime power is.

And that's one of my big career takeaways.

It's a fundamentally different way of looking at the world.

So, Putin honestly looks at the world: if I control territory, that's what makes me secure.

Maritime powers, they start with Britain, which is, hey, I'm secure if I can maximize money from commerce, because then I can buy Navy and buy allies with armies and stuff.

And then eventually, this

order of organizing trade by international law, and

the Dutch Republic is instrumental in this with Hugo Grotius, who is the founding father of international law.

They want to run transactions by law, etc.

That this is an international order that's win-win.

You join it, you get security, you have input on how it evolves because it's a work in progress.

Whereas this continental thing is negative sum.

And you can see it in Ukraine.

So Putin wants more territory.

Okay, he's got a zone.

He took the eastern Ukraine and he took Crimea in 2014.

But it's a negative sum because he destroys whatever businesses had been being run in Donbass and he absolutely kills

most of the tourist industry.

And

then you could look right today.

It's so negative sum in Ukraine.

He is destroying wealth at a really rapid clip.

It's really a stupid way to run to.

And if you go to Taiwan, so if PRC tries to take Taiwan, it's a continental view, more terry, sorry, somehow we think it's going to improve our security, no, they'll level it.

And they'll hurt themselves.

Whereas if they just ignore the Taiwan thing and say, oh, they're so annoying, let them run their own place, who wants them anyway, and then trade with them, they'll both make money.

And so when I look at this,

that's my biggest career.

takeaway is that if we go through international law and international institutions, and this is not a hegemon, political scientists love to talk about, ah, America, the hegemon, right?

No other country in the world wants an American hegemon.

There may be some people in the United States who think that looks great, but no one's gonna

buy into a world order in which the United States is the hegemon and pushes everyone else around.

I get it, we're big and we're influential.

Other people are influential too, but this maritime order where, yeah, we're an important part of it, but have many other people in it, it's a win-win.

And you can look at some with Biden right now.

He's doing all of these meetings with Europeans of managing what's going to go on in

Ukraine, et cetera.

And it's based on agreement.

of all these different countries chipping in big and small,

big and small.

And who's prosperous and who's not, may I ask?

The maritime.

Yeah, they are.

And who are the ones who have massively increased their standards of living since the Cold War?

It was really the third world.

Except now we got Wagner or whatever's left of it.

And also China's now got these private military things running roughshod over Africa, which all it's going to do is tank African growth rates, which for a while were going double-digit.

So that's one of my big career takeaways.

And I tried to put it into the one lecture that I was asked to do and the one article, which is like a 20-page read.

It's a super interesting way to think about things.

Does that imply, by the way, that China will never be,

I don't know, I feel like a couple years back, people were, especially looking at the growth rates in China, they were thinking, oh, it's going to have the biggest economy, therefore it will be the leader of the global order.

Does your analysis imply that because it's not part of that maritime system, it will, even if it's, let's say it's economic growth, picks up, it will still not be the leader of the world in the same way.

Doing what they're doing is all going to depress growth.

They could join the maritime order any day.

That is what at the end of the Cold War, everyone wanted them to do.

Everyone wanted Putin to join it.

The Russians, if you think about all the money Putin has spent on his crazy military stuff, imagine what would have happened if he'd spent all that on the Russian road system, because our road system is deplorable.

And imagine if he had devoted his attention to trying to have a better legal system so that people could start small businesses, get bigger without having someone then come in on them for protection money.

Think where Russia would be now.

It would be dramatically better.

They have so much energy, so many raw resources.

Oh, they have so many talented people.

But Russians don't see it that way.

They see it in this continental view.

And they're the ones who have to come to terms with what they think.

In the meantime, this is why containment's brilliant.

In the meantime, those of us who join the maritime order need to work with each other, and then we contain the problem by saying, you cannot join us on equal footing until you behave yourselves.

You get a timeout, right?

You get a timeout from the global order, but we would welcome you back in.

The problem with Putin is he's done so much damage to Ukraine, there are going to be reparations involved, and the Russians won't want to pay those.

What are the mistakes and biases that come come about from self-studying history as opposed to

formally studying it?

In what way is it most likely to be incomplete, your understanding of strategy or history as a result?

Well, let's do history.

History is one thing.

I think about my education at Columbia.

I had the most absentee landlord professors.

They just didn't waste their time on me.

I just did a tremendous amount of reading, and while I was there, I took twice the courses

to,

I did the equivalent of two PhDs of coursework as a graduate student.

Yeah, because going to graduate school is such an expensive event and time and money and everything else.

So I just took massive numbers of courses to read the reading list of what they had given me.

And that was tremendously helpful, having some guided readings, et cetera.

On the strategy part, this is where the Naval War College has been

essential to my publications.

In the strategy and policy department,

what we do and what civilian academia doesn't do, and it's tragic because they're better positioned, is it's a big team-taught course, the strategy course.

All the students at the war college have to take the main strategy course, the main joint military operations course, the main national security affairs course.

And it's a one-year MA.

In that

one trimester in which we have them, it's like four-fifths of their coursework.

It's our course.

And then there's a junior and a senior course, so we do teach two trimesters out of three.

All right.

So because it's team-taught and the lectures are given by different faculty members, so I attend everybody else's lectures or I did originally, and I attend all the new ones.

You learn so much from your colleagues, and then they learn from each other.

And so you're asking me about Bismarck.

Why would I know about Bismarck?

Because

we used to do a case study on Bismarck.

I had colleagues who actually knew something about him, which I don't.

And I listened intently and I did the readings.

And then from teaching strategy, I learned all these concepts and I've given you some of them.

And they're tremendously useful for studying wars.

And I never would have learned about maritime powers without being the Naval War College.

It is the only institution of higher education in the United States that focuses on the strategic prerequisites for and possibilities of being a maritime power.

It is essential to know this to practice U.S.

foreign policy.

Why?

Because unlike Ukraine, if you have a continental position, if someone threatens you and invades on a given day, you have a choice on that given day, the day they chose.

Either you're going to capitulate or you're going to fight.

So they determine when the war is going to begin.

In our insulated position, unless we start doing terrible things to the Mexicans and the Canadians, right?

And Mexico is our biggest trade partner, and Canada must be not far behind.

When there are wars that are important to our national security, we decide, like in World War I and World War II, do we get in?

If so, when do we get in?

And that is really, and in Afghanistan, in Iraq, do we get in?

Do we not get in?

We could have avoided Iraq altogether if we'd wanted to.

And I'm not a Middle Eastern expert, so you'd have to talk to those people about pros and cons.

Afghanistan, since we had been attacked, the chances were we were going to be in on that one because of a direct attack on us.

It is incredibly important to understand this maritime position.

That's why I've co-edited all these books with my husband, the ones I mentioned to you about maritime things,

which for us took us years to do.

But if you want a short course, so you get half a dozen of these books, I realize I said, half a dozen boring books, how did this happen to me?

But it's actually a fast way of learning about what the maritime instrument can and can't do for you.

The strategy course was absolutely essential from what I know about strategy.

I have done my best in books to put what I've learned there.

The one I'm working on in the Cold War is going to be organized around these strategic concepts of how did each side try to manipulate the other, and how did the medium powers try to wing in on the game?

And what are the strategies that they're using, the paradigms, etc.?

So I'm going to try and pour as much of this in there because this is what education is.

It's passing the baton from one generation to other, saying, this is what I've learned over the course of my career.

A year off and running.

And I'm really excited to read that actually.

It'll take me years to finish it.

It's not happening anytime soon.

And then, final question: what, I mean, my audience probably is overwhelmingly represented in technology and those kinds of worlds.

What is it that you especially want them to understand about history and history and strategy?

Oh, I think what I want them, on history and strategy, it's going to be a well-informed person and read broadly, but I think for them, technology, they need to think broadly of these technologies about which they have deep expertise.

is are do these technologies privilege dictatorships or democracies?

I do not know the answer to these things.

And when you're creating architectures for things like the internet, et cetera, think about these things.

Think about consequences.

I suspect, and I don't know this, that when China does its Belt Road initiative, I would presume it's also selling a nice little IT package to keep the dictator in power, that if you want to keep track of your population here, this is the IT thing you need to do to firewall this, that, and the other thing.

So since the West is the part of the world that has developed most of these technologies and continues to be at the forefront of it, think very deeply about whether you're going to ultimately privilege dictatorships over democracies.

Because The reason tech has been able to be so vibrant, think about it, is you live within the castle walls of this maritime order that people follow the rules and then you're protected on the outside.

You have military things, etc.

If those walls are breached by dictatorship or by really stupid grand strategy, like our country's come perilously close in the last few years, perilously close.

If Trump had been president at the time Ukraine was invaded, Ukraine would be no more.

We would have Russian armies right up to the Polish border now.

And it's been, these things are terribly consequential.

And then another piece is, so you're well educated and you're in the growing part of the United States where you talk to each other at all of these meetings, etc.

Think about

organizing things.

I look at, for instance,

We have tremendous problems with refugees or illegal immigrants coming over our borders because we have basically failing states to the south of us.

Is there anything that foreign investment or anything can do to help over a 20 or 30 year period to alleviate this?

Because it will improve our own national security if instead of refugees pouring over our borders, you have people making good t-shirts or eventually putting phones together, et cetera.

But that's the sort of thing that people who are in your world, who you meet each other at these business meetings and talk to each other and think about, okay, I got the here and now, but

there's also a charity part of it of

maybe my charity work is to me thinking about these other things.

So in my line of work, what do I do for charity?

I talk to anyone for free.

And I really appreciate that.

On the point about the

whether we're enabling democracies or dictatorships, isn't the difficulty that it's so hard to tell in advance?

I'm sure that Gutenberg didn't think he was helping the Protestant Reformation or that

the guy who made the radio didn't realize what he was doing for Hitler.

And even with the AI, the thing it was initially thought, oh, well, it helps you collect all this information and congregate it.

But we're seeing that China has been behind on these language models because

it's really hard to align them to

not say anything bad about the PRC or the CCP rather.

So, I mean, isn't the difficulty that it's hard to tell in advance who it is hard.

It is hard, but the people you're talking about who are your prime audience are the bright people who have some insights into it.

And I think about, well, what do you want to do in your life?

I would think one of the pieces would be contributing in some way that makes things a little better, however you're going to define better.

Awesome.

I think that's an excellent place to close this episode.

Thank you so much for your time and really the best military history.

So I highly recommend them to better understand not only those periods of history, but broader strategies and lessons and insights about our own time.

So anyways, this is a huge huge pleasure.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Oh, thank you for having me and asking all the fun questions.

It's been a pleasure.

Or gotten some kind of value out of it.

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