Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…time solutions to continental problems. In a global war you go for blockade, and then counter their commerce raiding, peripheral operations, massive production, and then joint and combined operations. So that was then. How about now? This is what NATO looks like. You can look at the United States with our western and eastern coasts that are unencumbered. You wouldn't be able to blockade those. The two narrow seas are the Sea of Labrador and the Caribbean, but it’s basically hard to imagine that the United States Navy wouldn't be able to deploy in wartime. The same thing is true on the big peninsula of Europe. Turkey may not be able to deploy, but Spain, France, and Norway, there are these unencumbered coastlines. They'll probably get their navies out. Eurasia is a completely different story. This is where China and Russia live. No one's done this to them. This is just the way it is. It's all of these narrow seas that become kill zones in wartime. I've described it to you how it works. I get it there's the Arctic up there, but there's no economic activity or population. Being able to run things in the Arctic doesn't do you very much good. Nature naturally contains both Russia and China. It's just the way it is. Let's start with Putin here, Vlad the Bad on his little Mongol pony, a continental mode of transport. If you live there, what can you get out of it? It's a long horse ride if you're going to do it that way. Whom can he blockade? Well, he's got one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which has been under repair since 2018. Long time to be in the shop. It required the largest dry dock that Russia has to repair it, and then it flipped the dry dock, which then gashed the hull. There's been all sorts of charges of embezzlement, various fires on board. It's not getting repaired anytime fast. It's just like an occupational hazard problem. That one's not doing him any good. Putin has got two liquid playgrounds that he likes. One's the Black Sea. Before he got involved with Ukraine, in theory he could have blockaded Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and Georgia if he wanted to. That was why he's interested in the Kerch Strait, which would blockade the Sea of Azov, because he wanted to take Ukraine from east to west. That was part of the plan. He used to have, maybe still does, it’s unknown, one overseas base, Tartus in Syria. Talk about a garden spot. I guess if you want to go bomb civilians, that would be a location for you. But now that Bashar al-Assad has moved to Moscow, it's unclear how that works. In any case, it's a useless base because in wartime, no one gets through the Dardanelles. That place can be shut down with mines. The Ukrainians have shown that you don't even need a navy to stop a navy in narrow seas. It should be a real wake-up call to anyone on a narrow sea. Just by using drones and shore ordnance and planes and things that you can wreck navies. In fact, the Russian naval base used to be at Sevastopol in Crimea. Putin'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. 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.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.