Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…In World War I, you do have a lot of powers which have at least some amount of franchise. In that war, it would have been much better to lose the war in 1914 or 1915 than to continue waging it until 1917. But even Britain doesn't back down. France doesn't back down. The problem with that war…This is another thing that is really helpful to do. To the best of your abilities, write down primary adversary, secondary adversary, tertiary adversary. Take all the powers in World War I on both sides and do their primary enemy, secondary, third. You find out it is a mess. Nothing aligns. So that, if you try to get out of that war, somebody's not going to like it because that's their primary objective. There's a lot of bad overlaps in who's going to get whatever parts of the Balkans at the end of this war. You really have to sit down and look at it. If I were doing a lecture on that, I have a whole other set of slides that would show you this. They're fighting parallel wars. It's really not a good idea to have royalty running the show. World War I is the war where militaries on all sides are running the show and civilians are taking the backseat, saying, "I don't really understand military operations. We're going to let you boys do it." Disaster. That war sets communism and fascism up, it puts them on steroids. You can argue we've been dealing with that mismanagement in one way or another ever since. For most of my life, I thought we had put fascism back in its box and we were down to dealing with communism. Now it seems that this very authoritarian vision which seems to rhyme with fascism… You can get into a big argument, what precisely is fascism? You try to define it. But it seems like we've come full circle in the collective West. It's a toxic way of dealing with all this. World War I is an absolutely mismanaged war. Then the people who live through that set up these institutions that have held the peace until the present day, when irresponsible leaders across the globe are not cautious enough. Here we are. There's a price to pay if you have a bunch of reckless drivers on the road trying to play chicken with each other. How this will all end, I don't know the answer. That's my reason for doing lectures on strategy. I'm going to give you concepts, some data to think about. You're going to have to form your own opinions and your own conclusions. But try to make it evidence-based and think about things. I recommend reading things more deeply. Don't just take what any one person has to say. Come to your own terms. That's the reason for doing all this. We're living in really portentous times where people may make decisions where there's no going back. If we blow our alliance system, we're going to be dealing with China alone. That won't go well. Particularly if we think we're going to corner them in some way, corner a great power like China and think that'll go well for us. It won't. The reason I brought up earlier the primacy of industrial output and population size in determining who wins a war is that at the end, you sort of made a comparison that Russia and China today are in a similar position as the Axis was preceding World War II, at least in terms of the disadvantages that they had.…

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