Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…n's had to move it to Novorossiysk. Great, he can't do too much there. Have fun with that one. There are many fewer possibilities for him nowadays. His second favorite liquid playground is the Baltic. Kaliningrad is sovereign Russian territory. Back in the day, I guess if they wanted to blockade the Baltic states, they could try it. But after the latest iteration of the Ukraine war, Sweden and Finland have ditched neutrality. They're part of NATO. Baltic states are also NATO. The Baltic is really a NATO lake. There's not too much Putin can do there. His latest gig is cutting undersea cables. That's about where he's at. I mean just look at it. Trying to leave the Baltic, it doesn't happen in wartime. You're stuck in there. It turns out that Putin and Russia are much more vulnerable to blockade than the other way around. It's very easy to close up the Baltic and Black Seas. You look out on what's going on and they're hemmed in. It's all way up north. Russia has two really big naval bases, one on the Bering Sea and one in the Barents Sea. But the problem is when they deploy out of those bases, they have to go by NATO territory. You can see why Greenland and Iceland are strategic, because for Russia to deploy, it's got to go in between those places. Then on the Bering Sea, the more promising one for Russia, it has to go by the United States. The problem is how do you supply the thing on the Bering Sea? It's just a long way from any industrial base. Another part of Putin's sad story has to do with NATO. If you look at NATO, you can look at its accession in arcs. Initially in the Cold War, the early Cold War, it's all these smaller European nations and everybody's smaller than Russia. It's by far the biggest country on the planet. Why they need more territory remains a mystery. Initially it's the smaller places joining NATO to protect themselves. Then at the implosion of the Soviet Union, it's all its former satellites fleeing at the first possible moment and saying, "NATO, NATO, let me in." Then with Ukraine in 2022, part of the Ukraine war, Sweden and Finland, which long had preferred neutrality, said, "Whoa, no, no, we're going to join NATO." Now the Russians look at this and they go, "Well, this is NATO coming at us in arcs." They're ignoring their complicity in all of this. If you occupy places and brutalize them for generations, this is what you get. Here is Putin's muse. I don't know if it's his muse, but it's a guy who expresses a lot of ideas like Putin's: Aleksander Dugin. Here's his view of how the world should be. It's not a universal rules-based order where we all trade with each other. Rather we're going to divide it up into these spheres of influence where each is a world unto itself. Dugin's worked it out for all of us. Here are the places that Russia's actually taken lately. At the end of the Cold War, it took Transnistria from Moldova. In 2008, it took Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia. Then 2014, it's taking Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk from Ukraine. Look how it really works. This is a continental view. You want to color it all in. That's what the 2022 invasion of Ukraine is. eorgia. Then 2014, it's taking Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk from Ukraine. Look how it really works. This is a continental view. You want to color it all in. That's what the 2022 invasion of Ukraine is. It's the way a continental power looks at territory. The United States thinks that Putin is just worried about us and NATO. Actually, Putin's problem is China. NATO doesn't want Russian territory. Who would want it? It's full of Russians. Stay at home, please. Just don't leave. But China might want it. Also, Putin has said that if you really feel deeply about a place, forget about boundary treaties, you should be able to take it. Well, Tsarist Russia took a lot of places from China that the Chinese might feel deeply about, that have precisely the resources that China needs. They have not only energy and all those sorts of things out in Siberia, but water. Lake Baikal holds 20% of the world's surface fresh water. China's been blowing through its water table in North China. That one, I think the topography works such that you could pipe it all in. Putin is dumping his ordnance on Ukraine that never wanted to invade, while he's letting this problem metastasize. Speaking of the problem, here he is. What are Xi Jinping's possibilities? You like the little natty upgraded Mao suit? Here's his world, welcome to it. What he's got are 20 neighbors, 13 by land, seven by sea, many of which despise China for excellent reasons. Not all of them, but some have them. If you look at it, it's all of these narrow seas. If Xi Jinping wanted to blockade somebody I guess you could try Korea, because you got the Yellow Sea and then the Sea of Japan, except Japan sits out there. That's a complicating factor. Better bets are in the South China Sea, because Vietnam, Brunei and Cambodia don't have alternate coastlines. If they want to reach the open oceans, they've got to transit the South China Sea. However, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, all have other coastlines that face the high seas. Remember, I've just given you a whole discussion about the Battle of the Atlantic. When people have high seas access, it's really difficult to shut them down because China would have to go all the way around to be on the far side to shut everything down on the other side. Maybe they're just going to obliterate it, I don't know. Anyway, the South China Sea is such a legal mess. No one knows who owns what. In any kind of war, you're going to have all these neutrals who might suddenly join sides if they don't like what's happening. But you can get a sense of what the possibilities are there. It's very difficult. Usually in a war, we've already done narrow seas, right? The North Sea, the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, they shut down in wartime to commercial traffic. It simply can't make it through. Surface fleets have great difficulty. If the neighbors, as Ukraine has shown, just buy the right drones—and since the sea's a little bigger—buy some submarines, some planes, shore artillery, that might be enough to just close down China's merchant marine and also its navy. own, just buy the right drones—and since the sea's a little bigger—buy some submarines, some planes, shore artillery, that might be enough to just close down China's merchant marine and also its navy. If you want to go the other way of working, well, what about Xi Jinping doing a surprise visit on the west coast? There's a lot of open ocean. Hawaii would be the nearest big island and it's a long way away. Hawaii's dependent on imports for everything. It's not very useful. But for the United States going the other way, the islands get bigger and better the closer to China that you get. I leave you with Alfred Thayer Mahan, captain and later admiral, by far the most famous person ever associated with the U.S. Naval War College where I spent my career. Here are his prerequisites for playing the maritime game. One, you need a moat. You've got to have insulation from attack if you want to play this game. You need a dense internal transportation grid to get the goods out in peacetime, reliable egress by sea to get the navy out in wartime, a dense coastal population that's going to be running all the trade, a commerce-driven economy. Then you need a government that's stable that is going to support funding a navy and supporting commerce. Let's line up Russia and China with these prerequisites. Well, neither one's got a moat. They’ve got more neighbors than any other two countries on the planet. Definitely not that. Internal transportation grid, Russia's remains lamentable. China's is getting better. Neither one has reliable egress by sea with these narrow seas. Sure, Russia's got the Arctic, but there's nothing up there. There are polar bears. Great, go get bitten. As for dense coastal population, yes, China has a dense coastal population, but Russia doesn't way up north. Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China was more under Deng Xiaoping, but under Xi Jinping, he is privileging the crony sector over the private sector. Neither one has stable government institutions. The litmus test of that one is whether you have transparent, regular transfers of power, usually through elections. A dictator for life does not remotely qualify. So sure, China and Russia remain continental problems, but I don't think they understand the maritime limitations of where they're at. Of course, peace would be the better thing. Keep compounding growth and war, as the Ukrainian war shows daily, what a waste of Russian assets. But sadly, the enemy gets a vote. That's what I had to say for you this evening. Thank you so much for coming and being such a wonderful audience. Thank you.…

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