Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. 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. Russians agree that their country always has been, always should be, always will be a great power, but they don’t measure it in wealth. Their wealth has always been much less than their Western neighbors, although they often confiscate the wealth of other people. What they measure their strength, their greatness, is in vast territorial extent and the ability to run roughshod over others and make them do whatever it is Russia wants. Also when they look at their security, they also look at it this way. “We need this vast territorial extent to be secure.” But they never turn it around. They’re always worried about other people invading them. “Do you suppose we pose a threat to anybody else?” They never turn it around that way. Except Russia has posed existential threat to its neighbors forever. There are so many neighbors you have never heard of because they’ve disappeared from the pages of history, courtesy of the Russians. Let’s go to the medieval period where Russia starts out as the princely state of Muscovy, Moscow. Well, it wipes out the other princely states. There was Novgorod the Great. It was a more progressive place. They wiped that place out, Rostov, there are a lot of other places. Later they’re eliminating the Khanates of Central Asia. These are states. It’s a different way of organizing yourself. The Khanate of Crimea, Kazan, Astrakhan, Kokand, Khiva, Bukhara, they get rid of all of it. Then there’s been this repeated vivisecting of European neighbors—Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Sweden and Finland—taking their territory one bite at a time. You can see it going on today. The Russians just don’t see that if you do this to other people… This is why at the end of the Cold War, everyone is stampeding into NATO. It’s not some conspiracy, it’s just what the Russians have done to them. Now I’m going to illustrate Poland’s fate to show what happens when you’re surrounded by rapacious continental empires. Three partitions of Poland in the 18th century. This is when Prussia, Austria and Russia are taking things. The Russians say, “But we didn’t take Polish territory.” They’re taking the Polish Empire. It’s a technicality. If you wonder why Poles cannot stand Russians, it would be this. It would also be the genocide-laced occupation of Poland that went on for several generations after World War II. Part of that, it’s Yalta again. The Russians insisted on moving Poland 200 kilometers to the west. That is not the normal thing to do to a country. It’s deep into German territory, so Russia can go eat a big part of Poland. Then Russia decides it’s going to cleanse the whole place, ethnically cleanse. So Germans are going to live in Germany, Poles in Poland, Ukrainians going to live in Ukraine. Millions of people—this is a war-devastated Europe where there’s no way to take care of refugees—are being sent hither and yon, and lots of them are dying.…

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