Sarah Paine: commitment

Transcript context

…Well, you’ve outlined the ways in which countries can chart a better course for themselves and that’s where the optimism can come from. Actually, I’ve told a story about the last Cold War that stayed cold in the industrialized world, which was a good thing, because it could have been nuclear. It was tragic in many other parts of the world, but at least it stayed cold in the industrialized part. There was a strategy that a very thoughtful generation of people, not just in the United States but all over the West, put together to allow for a non-nuclear landing for the Soviet Union when it fell apart. From this, you can derive some of the strategies that worked for ending it that way. These are the kind of strategies that we’re going to have to use in order to navigate the second Cold War. The other piece about the Cold War is the Soviet Union living miserable lives of their own making. But Americans were actually having a good time. They paid taxes, they had to pay for all the nuclear weapons. But as I recall, people are running around in Disneyland, they’re doing their European trips, they’re buying houses. So actually Americans, people in Western Europe, were living fulfilling lives while they’re waiting out for others to get with the program. If we’re going to make it through this second one, we need to start cooperating with our allies, building institutions, and improving laws. Don’t just burn down the house. We will get through this one too, and we will live fulfilling lives while we’re waiting for Putin to come up with something different or Xi Jinping to come up with something different. But if we blow through our good hand of cards... You interview all kinds of people at the cutting edge of technology. If we get rid of all of our university funding, we aren’t going to have the intellectual capital on which those businesses are based. If we’re going to dump all our allies for unknown reasons and just alienate them so they organize without us… If we’re going to just throw away entire institutions without thinking very carefully about what we’re doing… We become a cooperative adversary and we will be the bozo putting a plastic bag on our own head. I look at the rhymes here. The Soviets had this ancient leadership who just couldn’t get their act together and they’re living off of debt instead of thinking creatively. The rhymes are awful, but we don’t have to do it that way. So it is more optimistic, but we need to get our house in order. That’s why I’m doing these lectures. They’re lectures in strategy to give you tools on how to come to your own decisions. That’s your business, not mine. That is an excellent note to close on. Sarah, I want to thank you so much for doing this lecture series with us. It has been a true education across these six lectures, everything from individual wars to the strategic and tactical decisions which explain them, to the broader lessons for today’s world. I do interview lots of different kinds of people, but from a sort of view-per-minute average-adjusted basis, I host a Sarah Paine podcast. If you just sort by popular, Sarah Paine comes up a lot.…

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