Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…al base, Stalin’s advice to Mao to halt at the Yangtze, and then he’s fighting to the last Chinese in Korea—this is all consistent with the second rule of continental empire: no great power neighbors. Once Stalin dies, finest day of his life, there’s never as strong a leader in Russia again. By this time, Mao has figured out that the Russians don’t want a strong China. He has to bide his time for a while, but he understands what is going on. Mao has a growing list of gripes. It’s not only that he didn’t like Stalin’s tributary treatment, but also Mao thinks, with his resume, that he should become the leader of international communism. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, is like, “No way.” Khrushchev does not remotely have Mao’s resume. Mao has just put together a continent by reunifying China. That’s not remotely what Khrushchev’s ever been able to do. Mao also can’t stand either Khrushchev’s domestic or foreign policy. Domestically, Khrushchev is all about de-Stalinization. Mao doesn’t like that, he’s got a cult of personality. He doesn’t want to do things like that. Khrushchev is also interested in peaceful coexistence with the West, or at least nominally, whereas Mao is in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, which is based on a virulently anti-Western foreign policy. They’re also forever squabbling about who’s aiding North Vietnam in the Vietnam War and who’s going to get credit for it. So all that’s going on. Now, Khrushchev has his own gripes about the Chinese. He looks around at the United States. The United States has got basing all over the world. Its allies allow the United States to have bases. China has hardly any Russian bases, these leftover concession areas, and China wants them back. Khrushchev can’t understand this. What he really can’t understand are the two Taiwan Strait crises of 1954 and 1958, where Mao started lobbing ordnance on Nationalist islands that are very close to mainland shores. Khrushchev is apoplectic because Mao hasn’t given him any advance warning. By the way, this sort of thing could trigger some of the security clauses of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty with nuclear follow-on effects. Then while this is going on, Khrushchev wants to have a combined sub fleet base. If we’re going to take all these risks, we need to have subs in different places. Mao says, “No way.” Then Khrushchev has had enough and says, “Well, you’re not going to get the plans for the atomic bomb.” The whole thing becomes public in 1960 with anger all around. The two, Russia and China, squabbled incessantly over the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese were interested in getting maximum aid from both, which it did. They begged the Chinese to allow the Russians to ship things overland through China. The Chinese felt obliged to do it, but the terms of that overland trade were just food for all kinds of squabbling. It just didn’t end. So the story of the reversal in the balance of power between Russia and China arose from multiple factors. It doesn’t happen all at once. It is both a story of China’s rise and of Russia’s decline. d. So the story of the reversal in the balance of power between Russia and China arose from multiple factors. It doesn’t happen all at once. It is both a story of China’s rise and of Russia’s decline. Step one for China is getting its own atomic weapon, which it does in 1964, so that it can get itself free of Soviet bondage. In 1964, after they detonated that bomb, Mao goes, “Okay, there are too many places occupied by the Soviet Union. The Russians took everything they could. We have not yet presented an account for this list of stolen territory.” All the territory I’ve shown you, “We want it back.” Russians’ jaws drop, panic. The Chinese then are much more aggressive about what they consider to be their territorial rights. There is a border war over territories, and in particular this one island, Zhenbao, or Damansky Island in the Amur River. Here’s how riverine borders work, international ones. Under international law, the border is the thalweg, which is the center of the main channel of whatever the river is. Russia had followed that with its European borders, not with China. It claimed both banks of the Amur. The Chinese are fed up with that and they take Zhenbao Island and the Russians are furious and they come to the United States. They say, “Would it be okay if we nuke these people?” We’re like, “No.” The Russians scratch their heads and they come back and they go, “Okay, would it be okay if we use conventional weapons to blow up their nuclear stuff?” We go, “No, still not okay.” Mao gets it. The one that wants to nuke you is your primary adversary. So there’s a reshuffling of the primary adversaries. Formerly the United States was the primary adversary of both China and Russia. That would be a reason for them to cooperate. Now they’re primary adversaries for each other. The United States can play the swing thing with all of this. For Russia it’s really devastating having China as an enemy because it’s going to have to deploy mechanized nuclear-armed troops all along its really long Chinese border, Central Asia, the works. It’s already doing this with its European borders and occupying Eastern Europe where the garrisoning costs are significant. Imagine if this country had to put those kinds of forces on our long Canadian and Mexican borders. It’d be bankrupting. Their economy was and remains a fraction of ours. But this breaking up of the earlier version of the bromance allows the United States to play the swing role. Then we cooperate. Both Nixon and Mao think ganging up on Russia would be a good thing, overextending Russia financially by overextending it militarily with all these armaments and things. In addition, what’s going on as part of China’s rise are internal reforms under Deng Xiaoping when he abandons certain communist principles of economic management and gets a much more productive agricultural sector and industry and commerce. So China’s running double-digit growth rates for about 20 years with significant compounding effects. That’s the story of China’s rise. Now for this dystopian alternate universe of Russian decline. e. So China’s running double-digit growth rates for about 20 years with significant compounding effects. That’s the story of China’s rise. Now for this dystopian alternate universe of Russian decline. Here on the left is Leonid Brezhnev, who apparently had a stroke in 1976 that permanently impaired his thinking and whose death in 1982 finished him off. He was replaced by Yuri Andropov, whose own health was pretty parlous and he dies within two years. Then Konstantin Chernenko barely makes it a year before he’s dead. It sort of sounds like us, but anyway it doesn’t work well. If you look at Soviet growth statistics, they’re really good right after the end of World War II. They’re busy rebuilding. But when you get to the mid-’70s, they’re going into terminal decline. When Gorbachev comes to power in 1985, Soviet growth rates have been 1–2% less than U.S. growth rates for the preceding decade. The compounding effects of that are pretty horrendous. In addition, there are other problems. Leonid Brezhnev was in power for 18 long years and not only did he collect cars, that was apparently the go-to gift for him, but in addition he was collecting a bunch of non-performing piles across the Third World because this is manifesting Russian power. But it’s expensive and he doesn’t have much of an economy to pay for it. If you look at oil prices, they’re very much associated with the decline of the Soviet Union, rise of Vladimir Putin. It’s because in the Soviet era, government budgets relied as much as 55% on oil or energy revenues. So piggy banks are going to shrink if oil prices aren’t doing very well. Gorbachev repeatedly said, “You know, we can’t live this way anymore.” He wanted, and he did initiate political and economic reforms to try to save communism, except he really ruined the sclerotic patient doing what he did. There are massive territorial implications for what he did. It’s the loss of empire in Eastern Europe and also the loss of the ethnically-based constituent republics of the Soviet Union. I’m going to show you Russia’s territorial odyssey in maps. So this is 1938, before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Nazi-Soviet Pact where they’re dividing up Poland and parts of Eastern Europe – Nazis’ and Soviets – of what they want. This is before then, but by the time you get to the end of the war, Russia’s got the Baltic states, it’s got Kaliningrad, it’s got all of Belarus, all of Ukraine. Then of course it gets Eastern Europe. Gorbachev works his magic and you’re down to Kaliningrad. That’s where Russians stage a lot of weapons nowadays, apparently dump a lot of toxic waste. That’s what Kaliningrad’s all about. So it was significant. At the end of 1991, when Russia’s lost everything, they’re down to a much diminished rump state. That’s followed by years of instability in Russia.…

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