Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…Interestingly, Russia is doing to them the kind of alliance that we had with Russia during World War II. Think about today. It’s like the Korean War in reverse because China’s dribbling out aid to Russia. Russia’s getting wrecked by Ukraine. Russia’s got three times the population or something of Ukraine, but the death rate that it’s suffering is really high. These are only children. This is no longer the 10 children, six children, peasant families in Russia. Look at it from Xi Jinping’s perspective, the longer this goes on, the better. Just let Putin keep on working his magic and I get to sell him stuff. I’ll get him to lower the prices of resources because the man’s desperate. Putin will find himself under a Chinese yoke that he does not like. Then at some point the Russians will reassess and I don’t think they’ll like that. The Russians fancy themselves being Europeans and have a whole, I believe, racist package that goes with the Chinese so that they won’t like that whole situation. I don’t know how long it takes them to do whatever they’re going to do. A lot of things in foreign policy, you’re not going to solve it. They’re huge countries, there’s no way you’re going to solve it. But you need to figure out how to manage it, to have a blast shield so that whatever fallout comes from their toxic, whatever they’re doing, it minimizes how it hits your friends and partners. This is why you should be focusing on maximizing the economic growth of your friends and partners, because that is the only effective way to deal with them. If you go it alone, who deals with a bully alone? Always gang up on them. Why would you ever want to go alone against a bully? You’d want to go in with lots of friends. This is what the World War II generation did. The Marshall Plan, you could never get something through like Congress now. Yet it’s passed overwhelmingly in Congress because people get it that you have to spend real money so the European economies recover. How are they gonna do it? Buying our stuff. It’s a tremendous win-win. In strategy, you wanna figure out win-win things instead of these zero-sum things where, “Oh, I invite you over, I humiliate you, I feel good,” and then you’re mad forever. It’s pointless. Great note to close on.…

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