Sarah Paine: observation

Transcript context

…Speaking of these different countries that the Soviets and the United States were competing for during the Cold War, you had this presentation where you say Reagan alone didn’t do this. But I wonder if the broader lesson is that nothing any US president did in terms of foreign policy… That was all a sideshow, this tête-à-tête competition for different Third World countries: “We’re going to get Brazil, we’re going to get Vietnam, we’re going to get Algeria.” That just seems much less significant than the fact that liberal capitalism was more appealing and out-produced communism. So even if some country, even if Brazil goes communist, this is not going to change the fundamental playing board here. If you do not protect the liberal economies of Europe, you’re not going to have anywhere to play the liberal economic game, and also Japan. One of the reasons you feel that liberal economies work is you’ve got economic miracles going on in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong back in the day. So if you abandon those places... Also in the Cold War, there was a tremendous amount of economic growth across the world, particularly in the Third World. Why? Because in the past, if there’s a civil war, whoever’s losing either comes to us or comes to the Russians and says, “Help us.” So whoever it is helps, and then the other side feels obliged to help, and then you’re just destroying wealth ever more rapidly. The Cold War was anything but cold in the Third World. Tens of millions of people died in these conflicts. So when you end that, all of a sudden they can start compounding growth. So there is a problem with not countering someone who’s going to impose communist systems all over the place. Communist systems are really good at putting dictators into power in a civil war situation. It’s very effective. That’s how Mao gets into power. The problem is, then they win the civil war, they’re in power, they annihilate the opposition, but then it produces compounding poverty thereafter. So there is this conundrum, and I genuinely don’t know the answer to this. In order to beat off these communist factions and guerrillas, we often through the Cold War had to support other dictators. Probably in many cases they were better than the communist alternative. It’s just very hard to beat Pol Pot and Mao in terms of how terrible you can be. But obviously this was in its own way problematic. Even if we didn’t have to support dictators, we had to alienate countries. You had this previous lecture that you gave on the Indo-Pakistani chapter in history where we had to alienate India in order to fend off against the Soviet Union in this little episode. I don’t know what the solution to this is. If you think that this theater mattered less, then you could say we should have just kept our hands clean of these different Third World countries. But to your point, if you want to be able to show that these countries are going to experience growth under capitalism, then you want them to not be under the subjugation of communists. But then you have to support sometimes objectionable regimes.…

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