Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…I loved this lecture and this topic especially, because it's about a conflict that many of us weren't educated on. But it adds context to the other ones which are obviously super famous, like World War II. It adds context to the development of these powers, which are the most powerful in Asia. I'm not going to keep wasting time. I just want to jump into asking you a bunch of questions about this. One way you can explain Russia's loss here is that Japan had better tactics. Given the fact that they had deployed similar amounts of men to the front, Japan with their better tactics, was able to win in these different battles. But maybe the more important thing to explain is why Russia didn't deploy more men or didn't deploy its greater resources. Russia's population is over 130 million people at this point. Japan's is 47 million or so. You might say that the Trans-Siberian Railway isn't completed by this point. But in 1905, it actually is complete. So Russia could have continued the war. It has all these fresh troops it could send. Why didn't they have the same will, or the same ability, to muster their massive resources, that Japan brought to bear? One is that the railway is a bottleneck. Japan's starting the war deliberately while that bottleneck is bottled. That's one factor. Russia has massive troops. Also, the Russians are arrogant. They think Japanese… Initially, the Russians think they're going to do regime change in Tokyo. That's their plan. How they plan to get to Tokyo is a mystery, but never mind. So they don't realize what they need. It's a fairly common problem in wars, a gross underestimation of the other side. That's what's going on in Ukraine right now. Putin missed that one. He's not the only one. Hitler underestimated the Russians in World War II. Then you go, “What's going on with Japan?” With those Meiji reforms, they have an educated population. Russian soldiers are a bunch of illiterates. And the Russian soldiers are going, “What? Why are we fighting in Manchuria? Tell me precisely why I'm here getting killed.” The Russian soldiers had no buy-in. You can ask what exactly did the Russians want there. Apparently, there were some royal favorites who thought that they were going to get some lucrative timber concessions on the Korean border. Okay, let's go into the logistics. I've never heard there was a shortage of wood in European Russia, ever. And they're going to ship it all the way back? This is a non-performing economic model. In addition, Nicholas II is an incompetent tsar. He's hiring the guy who's running the navy who is also incompetent. Their navy gets no training whatsoever. Great, you have expensive ships, but no one's trained in how to use them, whereas the Japanese have. For the Japanese, it's the value of the object, one of these concepts. How valuable is it to win for Japan versus Russia? For Russia, it's already the biggest country on the planet and there's nothing really that exciting out in Asia from their point of view. Maybe for Nicholas II, because he wants to be a great tsar and add to the empire, that would be a nice thing. But when the Germans come after him in World War I, I think he's going to care about the other things more. For the Japanese, rightly or wrongly, their government and educated people consider it existential. They're looking at China going, that's our future if we don't fix things. They're thinking the solution for Japan is empire, because in those days that seemed to be the way powerful countries ran things. It's a combination of legitimate logistical bottlenecks. Japan, since they're going to be starting this thing, has massive preparations. The Russians aren't planning to fight this thing. They're thinking, “I determine whether wars begin or end.” Excuse me, they don't. So I guess you're saying Russia doesn't care about this conflict as much as……

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