Sarah Paine: preference

Transcript context

…So there is this conundrum, and I genuinely don’t know the answer to this. In order to beat off these communist factions and guerrillas, we often through the Cold War had to support other dictators. Probably in many cases they were better than the communist alternative. It’s just very hard to beat Pol Pot and Mao in terms of how terrible you can be. But obviously this was in its own way problematic. Even if we didn’t have to support dictators, we had to alienate countries. You had this previous lecture that you gave on the Indo-Pakistani chapter in history where we had to alienate India in order to fend off against the Soviet Union in this little episode. I don’t know what the solution to this is. If you think that this theater mattered less, then you could say we should have just kept our hands clean of these different Third World countries. But to your point, if you want to be able to show that these countries are going to experience growth under capitalism, then you want them to not be under the subjugation of communists. But then you have to support sometimes objectionable regimes. I think you had a more optimistic generation, ironically, optimistic. The people who had survived World War II, there was a real generosity. American servicemen and women were welcomed all over Europe and they were adored in Europe. They came back and they were a very generous group of people. Others felt generous to them. That’s when the GI Bill just passed saying, “You’ve saved everyone. Therefore we’re going to give you college educations, extend home loans to you.” Not to African Americans, they were excluded from this, which is a problem. But white Americans weren’t. It led to massive economic growth where people who’d never had a college education in their family, they did. All of a sudden, instead of having really hard manual labor, this real optimism. And then it extended to foreign countries. This is when this country was tremendously generous to others, and it worked very well for us. Think about the Marshall Plan. It looks really generous putting all this money into Europe. We made a fortune off of it, as did Europe. If you’re smart, you’re looking for win-wins of things where you both benefit because that’ll incentivize the other side to join in. This is basic strategy. This is one of the reasons I’ve got problems with the United States’ turn to zero-sum approaches where “I’m going to get everything, you get nothing. Then I look so smart when we do the clickbait on this moment where I get everything and you get nothing.” It’s much smarter. The other piece is that a lot of things don’t pay off immediately. George Bush is not reelected president. He absolutely deserved to be. Because what he did, the payoff was huge, ending the Cold War on Western terms. But it doesn’t pay off in time for the next election. I think this is where Americans miss it. You’re looking at what someone does on a given day when the real implications are what’s going to happen in a decade. Like on tax policy, if we keep racking up our debt, it may get us out of the corner today, but is it going to back us into a corner later on? This is where Americans need to think a little harder about long-term implications of things. I thought when you pointed out that it would cost 60 billion Deutschmarks for West Germany to pay Gorbachev to let East Germany join West Germany. That’s a lot of money. But if you think about decades and decades of future growth, it’s a huge bargain. It’s a mistake to think about how expensive things seem at the moment. It’s another huge country that you’ve turned.…

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