Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…In 1931, when Japan attacks Manchuria, Japan commandeers the Chinese Eastern Railway, which the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 said was supposed to be under Russia’s purview. People in the Politburo are telling Stalin, “Look, we’ve got to be aggressive against this.” Stalin says, “Look, I don’t want to raise tensions against another great power. Let’s just let this slide, let’s keep tensions low.” This is quite similar to what happened with splitting up Poland in 1939 and then Barbarossa, where in both theaters he makes this calculation, “I’m going to let certain things slide so that I don’t have to face off against these great powers on my border. I don’t want to go to war with them.” In the case of Japan, it works because Japan decides to attack China and not Russia. In the case of Germany, it doesn’t. Yeah, in Germany, he’s trying to run the same script. He thinks it’s going to work for him. That’s what the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is about. Not remotely. He needed to read Mein Kampf to understand, “No, you’re a menu item for Hitler. He’s eventually going to come around.” In our own day we don’t really want to absorb the bad news. I could be wrong, but I believe that Putin wants not only all of Ukraine, which he says he wants, but also he wants the Baltic states and he wants to keep on going. This is profoundly bad news. If that’s the case, then it means for Europeans at least, they’re going to have to divert all kinds of resources to this problem, which is something they don’t want to do. Because like us, they’re indebted too, and there are other things they would prefer to spend their money on. We don’t like the bad news that this is where we’re at. You have to make nasty trade-offs. Stalin tries to work the same magic and thinks it’s going to work for him and he doesn’t get it. He becomes the menu item for Hitler and it just about wrecks him. But it works beautifully against Japan. It’s just interesting to see. It makes sense why he thought it would work. When he’s getting information that the Germans are lining up millions of men along this huge border, he says, “This is British disinformation.” He uses the exact same logic when Japan is invading Manchuria, that the idea that he had to fight Japan was British disinformation. Even though it was a mistake, it helps us understand why he thought this way.…

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