Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…opposite ends of Eurasia. Xi Jinping is also causing India problems and doing South China Sea island building. But they’re on opposite ends of their two empires. So far, nothing aligns with these two. Even in a world war, their primary theaters probably would not align in the same way that the Axis primary theaters did not align. They might well disperse their resources in different directions. But the problem is we have a lot of people with nuclear weapons now. You really don’t want to do the hot war. If the West and others manage things correctly, I’ve given you a huge historical legacy of fraught relations. Play your cards appropriately and these two will take care of each other. The rest of us can, if we do it right, not launch trade wars on each other, but rather try to maximize our prosperity so that we get stronger and stronger while they’re busy in these wealth-destroying wars. Putin is just blowing through all of his assets in Ukraine to no purpose. That’s how we fought and won the last Cold War. Putin, he’s trying to do empire in the age of nationalism. It’s a non-starter. He’s dumping all of his ordnance on Ukraine, leaving Siberia wide open. Xi Jinping has moved right in even before the Ukraine war. The Belt and Road Initiative is peeling away the former Russian sphere of influence in Central Asia. Putin is doing this hot war gambit when Russia’s weak and China is strong, making it particularly damaging. Why would it matter? Siberia has precisely the resources that China now needs and covets and wants to have them contiguous so other people can’t mess with them. In particular they want water because they’ve blown through their water table in North China. Lake Baikal has over 20% of the world’s surface fresh water. So if you want a quick fix, it’s the best one. China is known for big water projects. They’ve been damming the Mekong and the Yangtze. They’ve done massive water projects. So that may be in Russia’s future. Who knows? Xi Jinping now holds all of the cards. China has nine times the population, nine times the GNP of Russia, and their per capita GNPs are converging. Not good news for Putin. The question isn’t whether this bromance is going to last forever, but rather when it’s going to end. When is Xi Jinping going to decide he’s got the right amount of leverage to get whatever it is he wants? What’s going on now illustrates the perils of getting your primary adversary wrong. Nicholas II fought a recreational war against Japan, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. He is pouring resources into really an irrelevant theater in those days, instead of taking those resources and putting it into a railway system that European Russia desperately needed to face off Germany, which it does within the decade and loses. He is overthrown in part because of bread riots in St. Petersburg, because no foreign aid can get in, because he has inadequate railway system. They’ll be built later and it’ll be good for Lend-Lease. So he and his family wind up shot in a Siberian basement. It takes a decade to play out. I don’t know how it’s going to go for Vladimir Putin on all of this. If we play our cards right, maybe he’ll go down as lonesome. ly wind up shot in a Siberian basement. It takes a decade to play out. I don’t know how it’s going to go for Vladimir Putin on all of this. If we play our cards right, maybe he’ll go down as lonesome. We may have to wait a long time. On the other hand, if we get into a hot war, nuclear war, and in the meantime, if the United States kills off its alliance system which is one of its greatest strengths, by doing a gratuitous trade war on our allies, then we have a dust-up with China… Well, let’s think about this. Japan tried this go-it-alone, my-way-or-the-highway strategy with China back in World War II, when China was a failed state, and it wrecked Japan. China now has a population that’s a multiple of ours, an industrial base that’s a multiple of ours. Why on earth would you ever want to take them on alone? So I’m going to quote Pericles, who was the leader of Athens at its height when it was building all these ancient ruins that weren’t ruins when they were being built. They’re gone. This warning came on the eve of the succession of Athenian blunders and ancient Athens never recovered: “I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices.” Our leaders truly need to ponder this before they wreck all of us, themselves included. So thank you for your attention. That’s what I have to say about Sino-Soviet things. First question, I want to understand the role of ideology in the Sino-Soviet split. These are the two major communist countries in the world. They have this big ideological, world-changing mission. We’re going to spread communism around the world. That isn’t enough to prevent war over, in the case of 1969, literally just some islands in the middle of a river. There’s nothing super consequential at stake here. Why didn’t the fact that they were both these communist countries do more to cement the relationship?…

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