Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…So if you look at basically all the main actors, none of them get even most of what they want. Some of them get the exact opposite of what they want. Germany and Japan initiate to expand their territory. Both of them end up with the smallest territory they've had in a long time. Britain starts the war- or not starts, but enjoins the war- in order to defend Poland. Poland ends up in totalitarian occupation afterwards, and the British Empire disintegrates. But Stalin ends up with the borders of the Soviet Union vastly expanded. China becomes Communist. How do we make sense? Is Stalin just a master strategist here? I believe there's a detail of how many tens of millions of Russians died on that thing. So great, it's a personal success for him. The numbers of Russians who were destroyed in that are incredible. So, okay, for dictators, yeah, they can have personal successes, I think more, it's in these horrible wars that dictators can rise. Also, Great Depressions provide hothouse conditions for dictators. I think the lesson is the last thing you want to do is fight a world war, but as Britain discovered in World War II, if Hitler's insistent, you're stuck. It might be a lesson for our own day. Isn't this Ukraine's problem? They didn't want to fight a war. What are you going to do? Putin launched. We don't exactly want to fight a war. Well, what are you going to do? Let Putin do whatever he wants forever, however long he wants? The reason you all are prosperous is there's a global maritime order in which people obey rules because it is so much cheaper to obey rules. Because what do you do when people break the rules? You hire a lawyer. It's not protection money or starting to blow up each other's buildings and destroying wealth at an incredible clip, which is what you're seeing going on in Ukraine. So these things are consequential, none of us makes all the choices, and when other people make bad choices, you're stuck responding to them. Before Mao, before the Communists completely won the civil war, did people anticipate truly how terrible the communist power would end up being in China?…

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