Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…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. Don't count on any short-term ending. 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, etc. The problem with the Communist Party, the 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 the grain harvest that had happened during the Civil War. 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. It's going to determine your per capita standard of living. And the poorer you are, the more that makes a huge difference to you to have somebody say. 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, is it fair to say that our Navy has not been tested to the same extent as our Air Force and Army have in the engagements we've had?…

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