Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

People are worried about whether there’s going to be an enduring relationship with China and Russia. If you look at this picture, the relations look more glacial than cordial, and the little one’s hauling on the arm of the big one. One wonders about that.

It turns out my expertise is on Russo-Chinese relations. That’s what I studied in graduate school. My dissertation was a history of their border from the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century until Outer Mongolia was snatched from the Chinese sphere of influence and parked in the Russian sphere in the 1920s. So it’s fun to talk about this particular topic.

Before I get going, I’m going to do some terminology. I’m going to use the word Russia to refer to the tsarist, Soviet, and modern periods, the same way that you use France to describe its many monarchies and many republics. The Bolsheviks thought they were special, so they came up with special words for special people: Soviet, Soviet Union. But it turns out they were temporary, and Russia is the enduring thing. So that’s it on terminology.

Before I speculate on what the future is going to look like, our only database that we have is whatever happened from this second backward, what people call history. It’s just whatever is in the past. That’s it; that’s our database. So I’m going to look at when Russia was strong and China was weak, from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, then the reversal of the power balance, and then the recent period, when China has been strong and Russia weak.

China and Russia discovered each other late in their histories. It was the early part of their last dynasties, when the Russians were after fur, very lucrative in those days. That brings them out to the Pacific. But their relations are only episodic until we get to the mid-19th century, which is where my story’s going to begin.

In the 18th century, China was strong and Russia was weak. But that doesn’t last very long. Both empires followed the rules for continental empires. If you want to survive in a continental world—that’s what both of them historically have been—you don’t want to have two-front wars because you have multiple neighbors. Any one of them can come in at any time. If they gang up on you, that’s trouble.

So you take them on one at a time. Also, you don’t want any great powers on the borders. This is the fundamental problem with their relationship. Today’s friend can be tomorrow’s foe. That is truly problematic. So what do you do to solve that problem?

Well, you take on your neighbors sequentially. You set them up to fail. You destabilize the rising, ingest the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between. You wait for the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. That is Vladimir Putin’s game.

But if you play this game, you’re surrounding yourself with failing states, because you’re either busy destabilizing them or ingesting them. So the curious might ask: Are Russia and China unlucky with all the very dysfunctional places that surround them, or are they complicit?

Also, there are no enduring alliances in this world because the neighbors figure out that the hegemonic power offers nothing but trouble in the long term. There’s also no counsel on when to stop expanding. So both Russia and China are known for overextending, overdoing it. That may help explain some of their periodic implosions over their long and bloody histories. They have very high mortality rates.

Before you dismiss this paradigm, you’ve seen it operating in real time in Syria and Ukraine. There are people who do this. It also explains why all those ancient ruins are ruins. This sort of warfare is ruinous. It lies at the basis of many of the great civilizations of Eurasia. This is how they did things.

I’m going to start my story in the mid-19th century, when the Chinese were beset by a whole series of rebellions that just about wrecked them. The Russians take advantage of all of this. Remember the second rule of continental empires: no great-power neighbors.

The Russians repeatedly derail the rise of China by scripting the Chinese to do things that are remarkably detrimental to Chinese interests, but pretty good for Russian interests. It takes the Chinese a long time to figure it out. They have governments coming and going in this period. It’s a difficult period, but they eventually figure it out by the time Mao reunifies China in 1949.

So I’m going to go through each of those examples in turn, starting with a really big one, which is the Opium Wars. This is when Britain and France are coming at China in order to force China to trade on their terms. This corresponds with the 2 biggest rebellions of China’s period of rebellions, the Taiping Rebellion and the Nian Rebellion.

Here’s a big chart. That’s a simplified chart. The rebellions start in the late 18th century. Rebellion is a misnomer. These are civil wars. Either they are minority peoples who want out of the empire—they want to secede—or they are other people who want to overthrow the government in Beijing. The peak period is in red. The really big ones are in white.

So China has got the 2-front war problem. It’s got Europeans coming at it, plus all of this. In fact, the Chinese have so many fronts, they don’t know how to deal with it. The Russians come to the Chinese and say, “Hey, we can deal with the British and French for you and solve that problem. You can deal with all the internal stuff. However, we need to have you sign a couple pieces of paper for us: the Treaty of Aigun of 1858 and the Treaty of Peking of 1860.”

What do they do? They cede to Russia large swaths of territory in Central Asia and the Pacific coastline. The Qing dynasty was vague on geography. They’re beset by these other things. They don’t understand that Europeans think these pieces of paper are permanent things. They figure that once they put their house back in order, they’re going to come back and get the territory later.

The second example of ruinous Russian mediation is going to keep China in turmoil. In the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan trounces China, booting them from their tributary relationship with Korea. Then the Japanese also want some territory on the Liaodong Peninsula. The Chinese go to the Russians to help them counterbalance Japan so that Japan doesn’t take this Chinese territory on the Asian mainland.

Russia gets its buddies, France and Germany—the so-called Triple Intervention—to gang up on Japan. Japan looks at 3 great powers and says, “I don’t think so.” So they bail. From the Chinese point of view, so far so good. Except what the Russians promptly do is take for themselves the very territory that had just been denied to Japan.

The story gets worse. All the European powers, or many of them, plus Japan, come in and carve out big concession areas throughout China. So China’s not going to have full sovereignty over its territory for several generations. Instead of 1 relatively small Japanese concession area, China gets foreigners everywhere. Think about the second rule of continental empire: no great-power neighbors. That’s not happening while this is going on.

The Bolsheviks come to power, and then they’re going to apply these rules as well. When they come to power, they’re very weak because Russia’s been devastated by World War I. The Bolsheviks don’t win their own bitter civil war until 1922.

So then, as now, they relied on a really cheap but incredibly effective strategy of strategic communication. The Russians really understand other people’s emotional life and what sets them at odds with each other. They know just how to serve out the propaganda that sets people at each other’s throats. Their propaganda is going to help the Chinese really despise the Japanese and the Europeans, while Russia’s even greater predations—the ones you’ve already seen—go unnoticed.

Here’s Lev Karakhan. He was a deputy foreign minister. In 1919, he sends a missive—his Karakhan Manifesto—to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. He says, “Hey, we’re not imperialists; we’re Bolsheviks. We’re gonna return all the lands from those unequal treaties and be your friend forevermore, unlike all the other evil imperialist powers. We’re not like that anymore.”

The Chinese are looking at this and thinking, “Wow, here are the Bolsheviks who’ve gotten rid of their imperialistic government. They’re putting together their shattered land.” So this offers hope to the Chinese that they can do likewise. It’s a model potentially to follow and a mentor who might help them.

Except here’s the detail. When the Bolsheviks started doing better in their civil war, they really dialed back what their offer was. The original offer was, “Tear up treaties, China gets all territory back, no payments necessary.” Under the new version of the Karakhan Manifesto, which the Russian Foreign Ministry telegraphs to the Chinese Foreign Ministry…

I've seen the document, or at least a copy of it, in the archives in Taiwan. They send it back and say, “We're willing to talk about these things. We're going to hold some negotiations.” The fact is, they didn't return these concessions until the mid-20th century, the 1950s, after the Westerners had returned almost all of their concession areas.

This is not trivial. When we think of concession areas in the age of imperialism in China, you think of British ones: Hong Kong. Well, Hong Kong isn't actually very big. The reason you know about Hong Kong is it makes lots of money, or at least it used to. The Russian concessions were huge.

They didn't make money, but what else is new? The Russians had by far the largest concession area of any other country. But the Karakhan Manifesto is the origin of the myth of Sino-Soviet friendship, that the Russians somehow treated the Chinese nicely. And the Chinese Foreign Ministry officials, who would've known better—their government is overthrown within the decade. Presumably, these documents just gather dust in the archives.

My fourth example of derailing China's rise concerns the First United Front between the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communist Party. Here's the leader of the Nationalist Party and also the leader of its armies, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. He led the Northern Expedition, reunifying China, at least nominally, by either defeating or co-opting all those warlords. There you can see different colors showing where the major warlords were.

Previous South China attempts to do this, or to secede from China—one or the other—had failed for lack of a proficient military. But Russia changes that. It provides aid, arms, expertise, and structures and things to fund the Whampoa Military Academy, which is in Canton/Guangzhou.

That institution is going to educate the officers, both Communist and Nationalist, who would lead not only this expedition but also become some of the civil war-era officers who make this reunification of China possible. But the Russians had a price. Give the Nationalists the aid, but the Nationalists then have to let the Communists into the Nationalist Party. That's what the United Front is.

This all coincides with a bitter succession struggle in Russia. This is the problem with dictatorships: They really don't do succession well. It's why elections are so convenient. Instead, you have Stalin and Trotsky going at it over which one was going to be the big cheese.

Stalin is all about socialism in one country. He thinks that Russia ought to focus on its own internal development. Whereas Trotsky says, “Nonsense, we need to focus on world revolution because only if there are sister revolutions abroad can ours survive.”

While this is all going on, the Chinese Communists really want to get out of that United Front. Why? Because it puts them in close proximity to the army, which is controlled by the Nationalists. They're getting worried about whether they're about to get killed.

The Russians say, “No, no, no, no, it's good. You stay in that United Front.” So they do. Chiang Kai-shek goes roaring up China. I've shown you the map. He reaches his home base in Shanghai, pauses, and turns his guns on the Communists and just massacres them in droves.

This is when Mao has to think of a rural strategy to power, because the urban strategy is no longer feasible. Once this happens, Stalin can use it to just trounce Trotsky in the internal power struggle because he can say, “Look, see, revolution in one country. It doesn't work abroad.” A lot of Chinese died proving Stalin's point. Another example where Russia literally derails the rise of China.

There's a railway system in Manchuria. We're going to talk rails. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905: Japan wins it and gets from Russia, which built all these things in Chinese territory, the southern half of that railway net in lieu of an indemnity.

Japan invests massively in railways, infrastructure, and apparently local politicians. But the ruling warlord apparently wasn't sufficiently attentive to Japanese needs, so they assassinated him in 1928. His son, Zhang Xueliang, the following year, in 1929, decides he wants his railways back from Russia.

What does Russia do? It's not either version of the Karakhan Manifesto. The Russians deploy over 100,000 troops, tanks, airplanes—the works—and just pound this man. The Russians keep their railways. So if you want to delay the rise of China, that sort of thing delays the rise of China.

But now for the first rule of continental empire: no two-front wars. You move fast-forward to the 1930s, and Stalin thinks he may very well face a two-front war with the Germans in the west and the Japanese in the east. Why would he think such thoughts? The Anti-Comintern Pact.

Comintern is short for Communist International. It is the Soviet outreach program. It's signed in 1936 between the Japanese and the Germans. Stalin goes, “Uh-oh, they're after me.” He plays every one of his China cards, and he holds lots of them.

If you want to disintegrate the neighbors in order to delay their rise, well, then you fund all sides of their civil wars and any side in between because you just want them to go at it. So he plays every card he's got. What he wants is for the Nationalists to stop fighting the Communists, and vice versa, and unite to fight the Japanese.

They're willing to do this provided Stalin provides conventional aid, which he does, but they think he's also going to provide soldiers. They don't get it. Once they're in, Russia is out of this thing. Stalin's plan, his script for the Chinese and Japanese, works beautifully, because when the Nationalists unite in the Second United Front with the Communists—going back to the dark side—the Japanese are apoplectic.

This is when they do the massive escalation in 1937, and they are off to overextension into parts due south of Russia. So this two-front Japanese-German war never materialized. Stalin was very successful, the Chinese less so, because the Chinese are fighting the Japanese so the Russians don't have to.

That comes at the price of millions of deaths and millions of refugees. That does indeed derail China's rise yet again. Next example. Per the Yalta Agreement, Russia finally gets into the war in Asia. About time.

In the very final weeks, in this August Storm, the Russians deploy 1.5 million soldiers. It's one of the largest military operations of World War II. They rapidly take Manchuria. That would be the normal thing, but here's the abnormal thing: They also take away Manchuria's industrial base.

That would not normally be what you do to someone. They take 83% of the electrical power equipment home to Russia, not turning lights on in Manchuria; 86% of mining equipment, 82% of cement-making equipment, and 80% of metalworking equipment. Plus, they take 640,000 Japanese POWs to be slave labor for decades, if they ever get home at all.

And they also take the northern islands, which are still under dispute today. But if you think about it, if you're going to do indemnities or reparations or whatever this is, China had been fighting Japan in one form or another for 15 long years. Russia comes in for the cameo performance at the very end.

So if there are indemnities to be paid for whatever Japan did in this war, surely China, not Russia, should have been the recipient of all this stuff. In addition, there's another example. Not only does Stalin walk away with the industrial base, but he walks away with Mongolia as well. How does that work?

The Yalta Agreement also stipulates that the status quo shall be maintained in Mongolia. So then you have to look at, well, what was the status quo? It was the Russian sphere of influence in the north, Chinese continuing control in the south.

Mongolia, which had always been both those places, had been part of the Qing Empire, never been part of the Russian Empire. Moreover, Stalin had already taken Tannu Tuva in 1944. It looks small on this map, but it's bigger than England. It had lots of gold, which the Soviets had monetized long ago.

So if you add up all the territory that the Russians took from the Chinese sphere of influence, from the 1858 Treaty of Aigun and the 1860 Treaty of Peking, fast-forward to detaching Outer Mongolia from the Chinese sphere of influence, here's what it really is: It's greater than all U.S. territory east of the Mississippi. This is not your normal land grab. So talk about derailing somebody—that would do it.

To be fair to the Russians, they did, albeit slowly, turn over all this Japanese-stockpiled military equipment in Manchuria to the Communists. They also, albeit belatedly, trained them on how to use the equipment and also how to run the Manchurian railway system. The Chinese Communists, as a rural peasant movement—how would they know how to do these things? They wouldn't.

It allows this conventional aid and logistics of being able to move people around. It transforms the Communists from a lightly armed guerrilla movement to a very heavily armed conventional force capable of the showdown phase of the Chinese Civil War. So, like the Whampoa Military Academy, this is essential aid for the Communist victory. Neither the Communists nor the Nationalists complain about the deindustrialization of Manchuria.

The Communists probably traded that industry for all the conventional aid that they got. The Nationalists traded it, and also Outer Mongolian independence, for a promise from Stalin not to aid the Communists—a promise that he promptly breaks. So Mao starts to figure out that something is up here. When he’s on a roll in his offensives in the civil war, there’s really bitter fighting.

The real movement in the last phase, the post-1940 phase of the Chinese Civil War, is in 1948. That year, Mao just moves, and he is roaring down south. He’s about to get to the Yangtze River, and Stalin’s like, “Hey, buddy, take a break at the Yangtze. Don’t exhaust yourself.” Mao ignores it.

Whereas Stalin might have wanted to keep a Nationalist rump state south of the Yangtze River, yielding a divided China in keeping with weakening your neighbor, Mao is not remotely interested in that. Here’s my 10th example, which is the Korean War. If you look at the Korean War, the first year is a war of movement. It’s up and down, up and down the peninsula. It’s unbelievable how much movement there is.

But then it stalemates for the last 2 years, and you think, “Well, what’s going on? Why don’t they settle the war sooner?” Both sides are taking incredible losses. Once China intervenes in the Korean War and once they halt various offensives to start peace talks, the Chinese do incredible tunnel work, probably the North Koreans as well, and build an incredible tunnel system.

It means the South Koreans and the UN forces are never going to get anywhere near the Soviet border ever again. From that moment on, Stalin thinks he’s got a low-risk, high-reward strategy where he’s going to weaken the United States and delay the rise of China. So what’s not to love about fighting to the last Chinese in Korea? Stalin thinks this is great, and it’s going to retard Chinese development. Also, because China is so isolated by this war—it has no international friends but Russia—it’s going to tie China to Russia ever more firmly and give Russia breathing space to rebuild after World War II while its Western enemies are wasting time in Korea.

If you put it all together—Chinese Civil War, Korean War, Russia’s on-again, off-again aid to different sides in the civil war, his double-dealing with both of them, what happened with Outer Mongolia and the Manchurian industrial base, Stalin’s advice to Mao to halt at the Yangtze, and then he’s fighting to the last Chinese in Korea—this is all consistent with the second rule of continental empire: no great-power neighbors.

1. Reversal of the balance of power

Once Stalin dies—the finest day of Mao’s life—there’s never as strong a leader in Russia again. By this time, Mao has figured out that the Russians don’t want a strong China. He has to bide his time for a while, but he understands what is going on. Mao has a growing list of gripes.

It’s not only that he didn’t like Stalin’s tributary treatment, but also Mao thinks, with his résumé, that he should become the leader of international communism. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, is like, “No way.” Khrushchev does not remotely have Mao’s résumé. Mao has just put together a continent by reunifying China. That’s not remotely what Khrushchev’s ever been able to do.

Mao also can’t stand either Khrushchev’s domestic or foreign policy. Domestically, Khrushchev is all about de-Stalinization. Mao doesn’t like that. He’s got a cult of personality. He doesn’t want to do things like that. Khrushchev is also interested in peaceful coexistence with the West, or at least nominally, whereas Mao is in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, which is based on a virulently anti-Western foreign policy.

They’re also forever squabbling about who’s aiding North Vietnam in the Vietnam War and who’s going to get credit for it. So all that’s going on. Now, Khrushchev has his own gripes about the Chinese. He looks around at the United States. The United States has basing all over the world. Its allies allow the United States to have bases.

China has hardly any Russian bases—these leftover concession areas—and China wants them back. Khrushchev can’t understand this. What he really can’t understand are the 2 Taiwan Strait crises of 1954 and 1958, where Mao started lobbing ordnance on Nationalist islands that are very close to mainland shores. Khrushchev is apoplectic because Mao hasn’t given him any advance warning.

By the way, this sort of thing could trigger some of the security clauses of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty, with nuclear follow-on effects. Then, while this is going on, Khrushchev wants to have a combined submarine fleet base. If we’re going to take all these risks, we need to have subs in different places. Mao says, “No way.”

Then Khrushchev has had enough and says, “Well, you’re not going to get the plans for the atomic bomb.” The whole thing becomes public in 1960, with anger all around. The 2—Russia and China—squabbled incessantly over the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese were interested in getting maximum aid from both, which they did.

They begged the Chinese to allow the Russians to ship things overland through China. The Chinese felt obliged to do it, but the terms of that overland trade were just food for all kinds of squabbling. It just didn’t end. So the story of the reversal in the balance of power between Russia and China arose from multiple factors. It doesn’t happen all at once. It is both a story of China’s rise and of Russia’s decline.

Step 1 for China is getting its own atomic weapon, which it does in 1964, so that it can get itself free of Soviet bondage. In 1964, after they detonated that bomb, Mao goes, “Okay, there are too many places occupied by the Soviet Union. The Russians took everything they could. We have not yet presented an account for this list of stolen territory.” All the territory I’ve shown you: “We want it back.”

The Russians’ jaws drop. Panic. The Chinese then are much more aggressive about what they consider to be their territorial rights. There is a border war over territories, and in particular this one island, Zhenbao Island, or Damansky Island, in the Amur River. Here’s how riverine borders—international ones—work. Under international law, the border is the thalweg, which is the center of the main channel of whatever the river is.

Russia had followed that with its European borders, not with China. It claimed both banks of the Amur. The Chinese are fed up with that, and they take Zhenbao Island. The Russians are furious, and they come to the United States. They say, “Would it be okay if we nuke these people?” We’re like, “No.”

The Russians scratch their heads, and they come back and go, “Okay, would it be okay if we use conventional weapons to blow up their nuclear stuff?” We go, “No, still not okay.” Mao gets it. The one that wants to nuke you is your primary adversary. So there’s a reshuffling of the primary adversaries.

Formerly, the United States was the primary adversary of both China and Russia. That would be a reason for them to cooperate. Now they’re primary adversaries for each other. The United States can play the swing role with all of this. For Russia, it’s really devastating having China as an enemy because it’s going to have to deploy mechanized, nuclear-armed troops all along its really long Chinese border, Central Asia, the works.

It’s already doing this with its European borders and occupying Eastern Europe, where the garrisoning costs are significant. Imagine if this country had to put those kinds of forces on our long Canadian and Mexican borders. It’d be bankrupting. Their economy was and remains a fraction of ours. But this breaking up of the earlier version of the bromance allows the United States to play the swing role.

Then Nixon and Mao both think ganging up on Russia would be a good thing, overextending Russia financially by overextending it militarily with all these armaments and things. In addition, what’s going on as part of China’s rise are internal reforms under Deng Xiaoping, when he abandons certain communist principles of economic management and gets a much more productive agricultural sector and industry and commerce. So China’s running double-digit growth rates for about 20 years, with significant compounding effects.

That's the story of China's rise. Now for this dystopian alternate universe of Russian decline. Here on the left is Leonid Brezhnev, who apparently had a stroke in 1976 that permanently impaired his thinking, and whose death in 1982 finished him off. He was replaced by Yuri Andropov, whose own health was pretty parlous, and he dies within 2 years. Then Konstantin Chernenko barely makes it a year before he's dead. It sort of sounds like us, but anyway, it doesn't work well.

If you look at Soviet growth statistics, they're really good right after the end of World War II. They're busy rebuilding. But when you get to the mid-1970s, they're going into terminal decline. When Gorbachev comes to power in 1985, Soviet growth rates have been 1–2% less than U.S. growth rates for the preceding decade. The compounding effects of that are pretty horrendous.

In addition, there are other problems. Leonid Brezhnev was in power for 18 long years, and not only did he collect cars—that was apparently the go-to gift for him—but in addition, he was collecting a bunch of non-performing piles across the Third World because this is manifesting Russian power. But it's expensive, and he doesn't have much of an economy to pay for it.

If you look at oil prices, they're very much associated with the decline of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin. It's because, in the Soviet era, government budgets relied as much as 55% on oil or energy revenues. So piggy banks are going to shrink if oil prices aren't doing very well. Gorbachev repeatedly said, "You know, we can't live this way anymore." He wanted, and he did initiate, political and economic reforms to try to save communism, except he really ruined the sclerotic patient doing what he did.

There are massive territorial implications for what he did. It's the loss of empire in Eastern Europe and also the loss of the ethnically based constituent republics of the Soviet Union. I'm going to show you Russia's territorial odyssey in maps. So this is 1938, before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, where they're dividing up Poland and parts of Eastern Europe—what the Nazis and Soviets want.

This is before then, but by the time you get to the end of the war, Russia's got the Baltic states, it's got Kaliningrad, it's got all of Belarus, and all of Ukraine. Then, of course, it gets Eastern Europe. Gorbachev works his magic, and you're down to Kaliningrad. That's where Russians stage a lot of weapons nowadays and apparently dump a lot of toxic waste. That's what Kaliningrad's all about.

2. Russian imperialism

So it was significant. At the end of 1991, when Russia's lost everything, they're down to a much-diminished rump state. That's followed by years of instability in Russia. Russians agree that their country always has been, always should be, and always will be a great power, but they don't measure it in wealth. Their wealth has always been much less than their Western neighbors', although they often confiscate the wealth of other people.

They measure their strength and greatness in vast territorial extent and the ability to run roughshod over others and make them do whatever it is Russia wants. Also, when they look at their security, they look at it this way: "We need this vast territorial extent to be secure." But they never turn it around. They're always worried about other people invading them. "Do you suppose we pose a threat to anybody else?" They never turn it around that way.

Except Russia has posed an existential threat to its neighbors forever. There are so many neighbors you have never heard of because they've disappeared from the pages of history, courtesy of the Russians. Let's go to the medieval period, where Russia starts out as the princely state of Muscovy, Moscow. Well, it wipes out the other princely states.

There was Novgorod the Great. It was a more progressive place. They wiped that place out, along with Rostov and a lot of other places. Later, they're eliminating the khanates of Central Asia. These are states. It's a different way of organizing yourself. The Khanates of Crimea, Kazan, Astrakhan, Kokand, Khiva, and Bukhara—they get rid of all of it.

Then there's been this repeated vivisecting of European neighbors—Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Sweden, and Finland—taking their territory one bite at a time. You can see it going on today. The Russians just don't see that if you do this to other people—this is why, at the end of the Cold War, everyone is stampeding into NATO. It's not some conspiracy; it's just what the Russians have done to them.

Now I'm going to illustrate Poland's fate to show what happens when you're surrounded by rapacious continental empires. Three partitions of Poland in the 18th century: this is when Prussia, Austria, and Russia are taking things. The Russians say, "But we didn't take Polish territory." They're taking the Polish Empire. It's a technicality. If you wonder why Poles cannot stand Russians, it would be this.

It would also be the genocide-laced occupation of Poland that went on for several generations after World War II. Part of that is Yalta again. The Russians insisted on moving Poland 200 kilometers to the west. That is not the normal thing to do to a country. It's deep into German territory, so Russia can go eat a big part of Poland.

Then Russia decides it's going to cleanse the whole place—ethnically cleanse it. So Germans are going to live in Germany, Poles in Poland, and Ukrainians are going to live in Ukraine. Millions of people—this is a war-devastated Europe where there's no way to take care of refugees—are being sent hither and yon, and lots of them are dying.

For the first time in their histories, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine become ethnically homogeneous states. Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia require Russian troops to hang on to some of their current gains. So a lot of things go on here.

If you compare it to what the West is doing, the United States has a Marshall Plan, you've heard of it. The United States is pouring aid into our Western allies to restore them after the war. Well, this is what Russia's doing. They've won the war, so their troops are there, but they never take their troops home.

Then they're busy running coups. Then they're busy shooting anyone who disagrees with them, or they send them to labor camps, whatever they're going to do. Then they redistribute every form of wealth there is, either through nationalization or collectivization. They're imposing this really non-functioning economic model on these people. It's called communism. It doesn't work. You wonder why Eastern Europeans aren't thrilled about a repeat of this. Well, come on.

Moreover, the story gets better. The people who made all this happen include this charmer and some of the most toxic people from the Soviet Union. Andrey Vyshinsky goes to Romania—lucky Romanians. He was running the show trials that were sending the original Bolshevik leaders to summary execution. What does he do when he gets to Romania? He appoints the ministers of justice, war, and the interior.

If you do that, you control the courts, army, and police. You can start expropriating everything and nationalizing things. You can start eliminating other parties. You make Romania trade only with the Soviet Union.

Another toxic personality is Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. He's another part of the A-list purge team. What had he done? He signed loads of execution warrants for his military colleagues and officers during the Great Purges. What a great guy. He's in Hungary—lucky people. He's not quite as competent as the other one.

In the elections of 1945 in Hungary, the Smallholders' Party wins. Oops, they aren't Communists. He doesn't ever make that mistake again. Then he's busily appointing Communist ministers to different ministries, carrying out land reform, taking over the civil service, getting the propaganda up and running, taking over youth and women's groups to infiltrate that way, and arresting all sorts of non-Communist politicians before he holds the 1947 elections, which, of course, the Communists win.

Afterwards, there's a really big purge where 10% of the population faces tribunals. Think of that. Of this room, 10% of you are going to tribunals because Russians are in town. Russia had a template for bloc building. I'm giving the details because you get a sense of how a continental empire runs business.

So the Russians want to leverage that. Then they've got this big Red Army presence. They want to use all of those things, which they do. Here's their template.

They're controlling the power ministries. What are they? Defense and Interior. If you do that, you're going to monopolize coercion and eliminate your opposition. If you control the Justice and Information ministries, you can arrest or kill at will. Then you control all the stories that are never told about this.

If you control Agriculture, particularly in those days, you're going to buy a lot of allegiance by redistributing other people's lands. That's going to wipe out class enemies, collaborators, all sorts of people you don't like, and the original elite that have been running rural areas.

They also had a story that they told about this. It's the big lie. Remember communism? Who are the really bad people in the communist story of how we all live? It's the imperialists, right? Imperialism is really bad.

Well, I've just shown you: Russians were the greatest practitioners of imperialism of the 20th century. They're doing this right as Western imperialists are giving up their colonies. Yet there's this big lie, the big fiction that the Russians are somehow nice guys.

They're using democratic forms. They don't eliminate Poland as a state, as the czars had done. It's still called Poland, but it's a fiction that it's independent. It's not. There's a fiction that they hold elections, but they're not democratic. We already know the outcome.

It's a dictatorship in reality. They're just purging the place. They're killing lots of Eastern Europeans. If you think Eastern Europeans don't remember this, they most certainly do.

Then there is a more regional template for how you do this. I've already talked about ethnic cleansing. They did that. Then they tried moving countries: Poland to the west; Mongolia, which I haven't talked about, to the east, in Chinese territory.

Then they want to take some stepping stones for later expansion. That's what Kaliningrad is all about. Another one is Moldova. That is territory between Romania and Russia on very important river systems.

Moldova's got problems with a place called Transnistria, which the Russians have poached. That story's still ongoing. Also, places like Azerbaijan: it's split between Iran and—well, now it's independent Azerbaijan—but it was split with the Soviet Union.

Then there are the divided states of Germany, Korea, Mongolia, and China. You want all your neighbors quarreling over their borders so that Russia can then set the terms and nibble them away a bite at a time. If it can take a whole thing, good for them.

So Russian national identity is not only about empire and territorial extent. It also has some big ideas attached to it: an ideology that somehow this territorial expansion is either progressive, beneficial, or positive. It's a myth.

Under the czars, the ideology was this Third Rome of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Third Rome was in Moscow. I know this is news to you. I'll explain how it works.

There's the Rome we all know about, the "Rome" Rome. That was Rome number 1, the one where the pope is. Rome number 2, according to the Russians, has to do with the Byzantine Empire. That was Constantinople, or Istanbul.

When that falls, the Russians go, "Ta-da, it's Moscow." Not really, but they used Russian Orthodoxy and spread the Russian Orthodox Church back in the day deep into Eastern Europe. When the Communists get in, they're not spreading Russian Orthodoxy; they're spreading communism.

The problem for Putin is that today neither communism nor Russian Orthodoxy are marketable ideologies. He's just stuck with being a really big place. That's where his little focus is.

Russia has a nightmare scenario. They don't always win these wars. They lose quite often. The Mongol yoke, or the Yellow Peril—their terminology, not mine—is the 13th century, when the Mongols just swept in and the Russian elites became tax collectors for the Mongols, an extractive role that has endured.

You think about Russians: they extract resources, their own and other people's, but they're not known for producing wealth. It's just resource extraction. This is some of the legacy of all of that.

The Russians have also suffered devastating defeats—to Napoleon, in World War I, and in World War II—that just devastated Western Russia. So they've had bad times. In our own time, Putin is dumping all of his ordnance on Ukraine, leaving Siberia wide open to China's ambitions.

So if he keeps the game up, he may well wind up with a Chinese yoke, and his nightmare will be there for him.

3. China’s and Russia's existential problems

The Chinese also have their own big ideas, not religious ideas or empire, but about civilization itself. Traditionally, the Chinese believe there's only 1 civilization, and that would be theirs. It's based on Confucianism. That would be a world order unto itself. That worked for them for a couple thousand years.

There are certain pillars of legitimacy that have endured, probably originating from this, but enduring ones. One is ethical rule. Well, that's gone for the Communist Party. Let's try the next one: economic prosperity. Whoops, going fast.

That leaves the Communists today with territorial expansion. That's ongoing with territorial incursions into India, South China Sea island building, and then all these gathering threats to Taiwan.

In part, what's going on is that the Communist Party wants to play the nationalism card the same way Putin is. If you haven't got anything else for you, play jingoistic nationalism, because we human beings seem to be particularly attentive to that one.

So if you focus on that, maybe the Chinese people won't look at the ethical lapses of the Communist Party or the fact that their paychecks aren't going anywhere anymore. Good old Xi, he doesn't have a marketable ideology anymore.

What's really scary is that Confucianism had just been this enduring feature of China—dynasties came and went, but Confucianism stayed—until China was unable to fend off Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War that I told you about, and the Europeans in the Opium Wars, when all of a sudden Confucianism just seemed totally inadequate.

When enough Chinese cease believing in Confucianism, that's when you get the 1911 Revolution, and it just vanishes as an organizing principle for running your government.

This is the total nightmare. One of the frightening things for the Communist Party is when people cease believing in communism. China's nightmare scenario is these horrible periods of chaos.

They're afraid that if the Communists go, China's going to devolve into these civil wars, these periods of luàn. A second one is that maybe the Soviet Union, when it shattered, may well be their fate—that maybe these communist regimes can't last forever.

So Russia's nightmare scenario is other people invading Russia. China's nightmare scenario is the collapse of China. It's 2 different ways, 2 different things to worry about.

The Chinese face a conundrum. If you no longer believe the economic theories on which communism is based, how do you justify one-party rule? The Communist Party has tried to soldier on without solving that problem.

The Chinese have learned a great deal from watching Russians as they play around with big ideas. They learned a great deal from Mikhail Gorbachev when he tries to fix communism, but he winds up killing the patient.

The Chinese, I think, their takeaway from what Gorbachev did is: don't hesitate to deploy the tanks. If you've got unrest in the streets, you just send tanks against civilians. It's a really quick fix.

You want to focus on economic reforms to the extent you can, certainly not political reforms. You also really want to Sinicize your minorities.

Why? In the Soviet Union, the Russians had had this fiction that all these occupied minority people wanted to be there and had equal rights. So they would sponsor all the nice folk dances and the language classes, and they'd have a bunch of token minorities in traditional dress and various political institutions.

But basically they had no power. It meant when the Soviet Union shattered, there were plausible divisions already set up on an ethnic basis. That is how you get places like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, et cetera.

China's like, "No way." This helps explain the genocide of the Uyghurs that's ongoing now. This is their rationale for doing it.

Then what you want to do—you can see Xi Jinping doing it—is prioritize maintaining the monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party over economic efficiency when those 2 things run at cross purposes. That helps explain some of Xi Jinping's growth-depressing choices that he's making.

Gorbachev discovered, when he tried to reform communism, that democracy and communism just don't mix.

If you give people elections, they're going to support multiple parties. When the communist track record becomes known—their incompetent economic management, summary executions, famines, just all the things that they've been up to—it's very hard for them to remain in power. Also, as Gorbachev discovered, democracy and empire don't mix. When you give different minorities, or occupied places, a choice to leave or stay, they bolt.

There's a consensus among the Han, the preponderant ethnic group in China, that they want to maintain the empire. So they don't care how many Tibetans immolate themselves. That's no longer going on now because the military has descended into Tibet. They don't care how many Mongols complain about lost lands. The Han want to keep it.

Also, for the generation that survived the Cultural Revolution—which would be Xi Jinping, he's precisely that age group—they do not ever want to go back to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. It was horrendous. So expect them to prioritize stability over liberty. This brings a third problem: democracy and communism don't mix, and democracy and empire don't mix.

In an internet and cell-phone age, where people are much more interconnected, how does a government maintain legitimacy to rule? Because elections are an incredibly powerful way to give authority to a government. This is where nationalism comes in. The Chinese Communist Party and the Russians, likewise, are trying to use jingoistic nationalism to stoke up popular loyalties, to deflect people from domestic problems and go, “Look at the hated outsiders.”

They aren't the only country to do this sort of thing, blaming outsiders. It's all the immigrants' fault or whatever. The problem with all of this is that when the Chinese did it in 1980, right after the Tiananmen massacre, the Chinese Communist Party decided to rewrite all the textbooks. So they're no longer going to focus on class enemies, but they're going to focus on using jingoistic nationalism.

They're going to focus on the evil Japanese, evil Americans, and focus things that way. Well, the problem with nationalism is it's a very heady drink. If you imbibe too much, it clouds the judgment. Moreover, it repels minority people within China's empire who are not interested in Han nationalism.

It frightens neighbors to coordinate with each other and find big powers to counterbalance this mess. It also impedes the de-escalation of unforeseen international dust-ups or crises. With Putin's latest adventures, one would assume that the Chinese have some real thoughts about what's going on now.

In Putin's case, he has thrown away the Soviet addendum to the rules for continental empire. What was that one? No hot wars. If you think about Soviet rulers, they were all veterans of World War II through Leonid Brezhnev. They understood that war is easy to get into, hard to get out of, and very unpredictable.

For them, it was proxy wars. They loved it when the United States got into hot wars. What is not to like about the Korean War and the Vietnam War, with the United States just tied down and Americans tearing each other's eyes out about these things? Great, great, great. Russians stayed out of it until after Brezhnev's stroke.

That's when they make the big boo-boo in Afghanistan. They go into Afghanistan, and then all of a sudden we have loads of fun giving Stinger missiles to the other side, inflicting costs on the Russians. The person who wanted to get into Afghanistan was Yuri Andropov, who was not a veteran. The uniformed military of Russia said, “Don't go into Afghanistan.” Andropov and friends ignored it and did their thing.

If you look at Putin, he has risen to power on a diet of hot wars. He comes to power in the early phase of the Second Chechen War, where he levels the Chechen capital of Grozny and leaves most of the rest of Chechnya an environmental waste zone. But he sorts that one out. Then he gets quite popular for his war with Georgia in 2008, where he detaches South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia.

Now he wants to build a naval base in Abkhazia because he's having trouble with his base in Crimea. Then, when he eliminates term limits for himself in 2012, which isn't very popular in Russia, he solves that by going into Ukraine in 2014 and walks off with about 7% of Ukrainian territory at very little cost. And Russians think that's great!

If you look at these little stepping stones, this is the way continentalists look at it. You've got all these little places lined up. You want to color it in. That's where Ukraine comes in, in 2022. Putin wants to reverse all these territorial losses. He wants the green things and the purple things. I don't know if he wants to do the Napoleonic Wars and go all the way to Paris. Who knows?

Here's how he looks at NATO—or doesn't look at it. You look at when people join. There are 2 great big periods of accession to NATO. One is in the early Cold War with all the smaller countries of Europe, which is everybody. We're all smaller than Russia. The Europeans join to protect themselves from Soviet imperialism.

Then, at the end of the Cold War, when these Soviet satellites can finally slip the leash, I've given you all the reasons why, they stampede into NATO. It is not NATO tricking them to join. They're stampeding in for excellent reasons. They've been proven right. Putin, when he works his magic the second time around in Ukraine in 2022, this is when the Finns and the Swedes decide neutrality's not going to cut it and they've got to join NATO.

But when Putin looks at this, he goes, “Oh, they're coming at us in arcs.” Well, this is ludicrous. Russia has posed an existential threat to these places forever. No one today wants to invade Russia. Who'd want it? It's full of Russians. We want them to stay home. There's no one there who wants Russia.

The Russians like to gaslight everybody else, like, “You're the problem.” It's been very effective. Lots of Americans will talk about NATO expansion and say, “Oh, this is why Putin went to Ukraine. You did NATO expansion.” He's gaslighting everybody. Russians are the problem. Also, it is their totally dysfunctional domestic system that offers everybody else nothing but problems.

Instead of focusing on that and fixing it so they can be a productive member of the rest of the world, they're not doing that. They're just invading other people. Back to the real problem: what are the prospects of a bromance with these 2?

Barring World War III, which would be the great powers going at it—if the great powers go at it, you might well superglue these 2. If that happens, whatever side is losing might well use a nuclear weapon, and then we're going to have toxic plumes everywhere. So we had better get our diplomacy right, because there are really serious consequences for getting it wrong in this particular era.

We're at the beginning of a second Cold War with a leadership that has not been chastened by surviving World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Those were the grownups who did a very effective job dealing with the early first Cold War. We haven't got those people anymore.

So if you look at primary adversaries and primary theaters, you don't want them to align for your enemies, because if they do, they'll coordinate. Currently, Vlad the Bad has a Ukraine fixation. Xi Jinping has got a Taiwan fixation—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 2 empires.

So far, nothing aligns with these 2. 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 2 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 nonstarter. 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, covets, and wants to have 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 the cards. China has 9 times the population, 9 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 was pouring resources into a really irrelevant theater in those days instead of taking those resources and putting them into a railway system that European Russia desperately needed to face off against Germany, which it did within the decade and lost.

He was overthrown in part because of bread riots in St. Petersburg, because no foreign aid could get in because he had an inadequate railway system. They’d be built later, and it would be good for Lend-Lease. So he and his family wound 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, a 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 and 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.

4. Q&A: Sino-Soviet split

First question: I want to understand the role of ideology in the Sino-Soviet split. These are the 2 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 communist countries do more to cement the relationship? I gave you all these bad things that Russia had done to China, which are not small things. Then isn’t the problem with communism that the economics of it don’t actually work?

Fundamentally, these 2 countries are continental powers. They’re continental empires. Sure, they change out ideologies. The ideology of the tsars changes out to communism, and China is changing out Confucianism for communism. But the principle that each one should be king of the roost hasn’t changed.

That would be a mutually exclusive proposition of who’s going to run Asia and then Eurasia, because they have a shared address, this long border. Also, with communism, it’s supposed to take over the whole world. We’re supposed to have a classless society. That’s why we don’t even worry about governments and things, because they’re eventually going to melt away.

Well, that’s all nonsense. As things go on further and further, you have dictators more and more entrenched, and they’re using communism. There’s another piece where it’s just amazing, about the big lie. I don’t know whether it was Stalin who said it, that if the lie is big enough, people will believe you. It’s just so out there, it’s so preposterous, they go with it.

It’s this notion that it’s the West through these imperial powers, right? And we buy this, that they’re not the ones. But if you look at it, I’ve given you the data. Then there’s this other one in our own time, this lie about, “Oh, it’s the West, it’s NATO expansion, this explains Putin.” I’ve given you the data. It’s nonsense.

Now, why do the Russians feel obliged to take other people’s territory? Part of it is feeling good while other people squirm. There’s that aspect. They’re not the only people who do those sorts of things. But it’s also from being on the plains of Eurasia, where throughout history, people have invaded you. So you have an established paradigm of how you deal with other people that is deep-seated over thousands of years.

I can’t totally answer the question because there are a lot of Russians and a lot of Chinese whose decisions together aggregate to what they do.

I want to understand Stalin’s decisions, in particular, in the case of telling the Communists during the Chinese Civil War that they can’t go below the Yangtze River, so that he can split up the Chinese, the Communists and the Nationalists in China, and leave China weak.

We know from all the actions in Stalin’s life that he was a devoted communist. He did collectivization and almost destroyed his regime because he was a devoted communist. At the same time, communism says that there has to be this worldwide revolution at some point. If there is a worldwide revolution, there will be other powerful communist countries. That’s implied in the nature of what a worldwide communist revolution is.

But at the same time, he doesn’t seem communist enough to want China to become fully communist. He cares more about real geopolitics. Tell me about how this works.

His version of communism: the Russians invented it. Actually, they didn’t. Marx invented it. But they’re the guys who think, “Well, we operationalized it, so we should run it forever.” So of course Russia is going to be the big communist country. A bunch of Chinese upstarts, from their point of view, are claiming, “No, no, no, we’re going to run the show.”

But did Stalin, as a communist, think, “Okay, at some point the whole world is going to be communist”? He thought that he personally would be managing the whole world?

Unclear. It’s a long horizon. In his lifetime, he was initially about socialism in one country, then communism on your borders, which is what he was working on.

As for the rest of the world, it takes Brezhnev to start going all deep into Africa. Stalin wasn’t interested in, say, India, because he thought they were a bunch of lackeys of the British. “How do they let themselves be colonized by the British? There’s something wrong with them.”

You also have to think about where history is at a given moment. He dies in ’53, not that long after World War II. How is it all going to turn out? His relationship with China, as far as he’s concerned, is going swimmingly when he’s in power. Mao goes there and kowtows in Moscow and does what Stalin wants him to do.

That’s Stalin’s experience until he chokes on his Cheerios, or whatever happened to him that morning.

If Stalin hadn’t died, do you think a Sino-Soviet split was still inevitable?

Yes. There wouldn’t have been Khrushchev’s secret speech. Obviously, Stalin wouldn’t have condemned the cult of personality. But the grievances you mentioned would still exist. I think the grievances would still exist.

Dictators’ deaths profoundly weaken their systems because they’ve got no good succession. It means you’re guaranteed a cat-fight royale going on. That’s what one waits for with Putin. Eventually, the man will die one way or another, and there will be a cat-fight royale for what happens after him.

Stalin was pretty old when he died, and Russians in those days had a lousy diet. I can’t remember if he smoked. His generation mostly did. So I don’t know how the future would have run with good old Uncle Joe there for longer. The Korean War would have still gone on longer. It’s really his death that ends that war then.

With the Korean War going on and on, I don't know what the implications are for us or for Mao. This is a really interesting thing to consider from this lecture. In retrospect, maybe one of the most important things, if not the most important thing that happened in the 20th century, is the Chinese Civil War.

At the time, you wouldn't think of this as a major event, especially since World War II had just happened. If you were living in 1948 or 1949, you wouldn't think of this as the main thing happening in the world. But given that we know in retrospect this is a really big country with a huge population, we should be paying a lot of attention to its internal political development.

I wonder if we should apply the same logic today, where there are other countries with huge populations that we don't think a lot about what's happening in. India or Nigeria. I really couldn't tell you the first thing about Nigeria, even though I know that it's a big country with a huge population. Let's not try, because I don't know anything about it either.

On China and the Chinese Civil War, there was an understanding that it was a really big deal. That's why Roosevelt—and the British are just thinking he's laughable—keeps trying to treat China like a great power. The British are saying, “They're not a great power, Franklin, not remotely.”

But he wants to bring them into the Cairo Conference. He also wants them to be a veto-wielding member of the United Nations, which, given China's military status, there's just no way. But Roosevelt is looking around and thinking, “There's no Japan out there. We want to have something in Asia to counterbalance.”

When you get to the Chinese Civil War, Americans who've fought some big wars are looking at it and saying, “It is not feasible for us to alter this outcome.” The thinking was—I think it was in the Eisenhower archives—that if they lived together long enough, they would go at each other eventually.

I want to zoom in on one particular episode during this period that I think is fascinating. In 1936, the Communists in China kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek, who's the leader of the Nationalists, and they're about to kill him. Stalin radios in through the Comintern. He says, “No, you can't kill Chiang Kai-shek. Even though he's your enemy and he's been massacring you, you've got to let him go.”

In exchange, Chiang Kai-shek has to promise to create a united front against the Japanese. There are 30,000 Communist guerrillas fighting the Japanese during this period, and there are 1.5–2 million Nationalist troops. The Communists get to claim the prestige of fighting the Japanese with a fraction of the effort.

This just seems like a brilliant move on Stalin's part in retrospect, because if they had killed Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist forces might have dissolved. There would have been a puppet government installed by Japan. It would have been a terrible thing for Stalin. It just seems like Stalin makes a lot of right calls in the theater in Asia at this time.

What is the understanding, the big picture, that lets him do this? There are dictators all over the world who stay in power for a long time. Do not dismiss their ability to stay in power. They're surfing quite a wave wherever they live, of people who butcher each other with great regularity.

I would suspect—suspect, because how would I have the evidence—that many of these long-term dictators have EQs that are off the charts. When you come in the room, they just know by gut feeling whether they're going to cap you or not. If they get a few extra people, so what? They just need to get rid of all the people who are going to cause them problems. Incredible abilities.

Also, what Stalin does—I think Saddam Hussein imitated him, but I could be wrong about that one—is have multiple security agencies with overlapping jurisdictions. No one quite knows who's running the show and who's in power, but they're all funneling information to Stalin. So he has better information than anybody else.

You can use one one day and another another day, which explains how all the heads of the equivalent of the KGB come and go. Most of the early heads of that wind up getting shot by their successors. You'd think they'd notice a pattern. They're very good at staying in power. They're really good at managing that problem.

It does not bring prosperity. That comes from the world of maritime trade, of following international law instead of capping your trade partner. You're not going to get a second trade deal if you do that. It's just so much more wealth-creating, this alternate universe, but that's not where these continentalists are.

There's still something a little under-explained about this. Probably lots of things are under-explained. Hitler's another dictator. Forget about making moves like deciding, “Don't kill this kidnapped person because it'll be a bad idea in the long run.” On the opposite end, he's declaring war against America even when he doesn't have to. He's just making these crazy moves.

Stalin is a special thing to explain. It's not just communism. It's something else that's making him a deft geopolitical actor.

You can do this in retrospect and go, “Crazy move,” because no one realized that the U.S. productive base could do what it did. Americans didn't even know. You tell me right now how the future's going to turn out.

When you look at history, you think it had to turn out that way because you can reverse-engineer at least a plausible story of why you wind up where you did. It may not even be the right story, but it yields the correct answer. So you think you got it.

But if you look at the future, how's this thing going to end with Xi Jinping and Putin? We don't know. Afterwards, you'll go, “Oh, something is profoundly stupid based on subsequent events.” But we don't know now.

There's a Russian proverb: Чужая душа — потёмки (chuzhaya uma, potyomki). Someone else's mind is darkness. You ultimately don't know what other people are thinking. You make your guesses, but then they do things.

When you showed the maps of China in 1850 and Russia in 1850, especially in 1900, Russia and China are still big countries today. But if you just look at Qing dynasty China, it's overwhelmingly big. It's the same with Tsarist Russia before the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

It makes you think that at various points through history, at most points through history, China was technologically dominant over the West, except during this one crucial period in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the Industrial Revolution in high gear. That changes the whole world.

Right. It reinforces the idea of how important it is to be at the technological frontier, especially at historically crux-y times.

Of course, we're in San Francisco. Many of us here believe that this is especially a crux-y time in the development of technology. Maybe we should continue investing in it instead of canceling all the science research projects. What will be the long-term effects of doing this?

You're thinking of America's great strengths: its alliance systems. Our great strength also used to be being at the head of innovation. We're going to eliminate those things and think it's going to go well for us?

I want to ask about your—I don't know if you call it a prediction, but your hypothesis—that at some point China and Russia will finish each other off or have some sort of conflict which will be bad for both of them.

They won't finish each other off. They're too big to be finished off. Unless we do a nuclear war, then we might finish all of ourselves off.

But the idea that there will be some sort of conflict between these 2 countries—I agree with the idea that China has a lot of people and a lot of wealth. Russia has a lot of water, and it has a lot of resources. These are complementary resources. They both have things that the other party has.

The question is, will they attain these things through war or through trade? It seems very improbable to me that—

China's got a lot of money. It can just pay for Russian oil. It can just pay for water. Why would it invade a nuclear-armed nation?

I never said it would do that. It's a question of whether Putin feels that his back is up against the wall. What price? We don't really know the terms of their trade. What are the real energy prices that China is paying for all of this? I don't know. Maybe some people do know.

I suspect that whatever the terms of trade are going to be, the Chinese are going to get a really good deal. If you look at what happened to Gorbachev at the very end of the Cold War, he's not going to war with anyone, but his internal situation is devolving so rapidly because their economy collapses.

He's already got lousy oil prices. In addition, he has so upset the centralized planning system that revenues are just collapsing around him, and he's about to be thrown out of power. He is desperate for the kind of loans that the Germans in particular are willing to give him in order to get not only Germany reunited, but West Germany staying in NATO. The next thing is East Germany is going to be in NATO too, and then NATO can have whomever. Those are trades he never would have made ever, but he's so desperate.

In that case, the West likes to pay people, so instead of paying him a low price, the West is paying him a high price to back off. In China, I suspect it'll be the opposite. They pay him less and less for whatever it is he wants if he really continues to corner himself in Ukraine. These terms of trade will get more and more in China's favor.

Does that look like the bromance ending?

North Korea has for decades been in a very desperate position. That's quite a bromance. But there's no risk of North Korea and China going to war. North Korea relies heavily on China. It's not draining China in any way. It's the other way around. That's what Russia's future may be.

Apparently, certain Russians, when Putin had invaded Ukraine in a big way, said, “Oh my God, that's our future. It's North Korea. That's where we're headed.” That could well be their future. It'll just keep going as they pour out wealth, and the Chinese will try to get very good terms of trade for resources and be niggardly, meaning giving very few things back.

5. Stalin's lessons from WW2

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 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: 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.

There's another concept that's useful: cooperative adversary. I've introduced this before. It doesn't mean the adversary wants to cooperate with you, but they just don't play their cards particularly well.

We're talking about China, which has had all of those rebellions I told you about, and civil wars and regional wars. It doesn't have these strong government institutions. It is much easier to script-write a place like that, to have them do things that are antithetical to their interests. You've got a cooperative adversary.

The Chinese aren't trying to cooperate, but from a Russian point of view they might be a cooperative adversary. Whereas with Hitler, Germany has all kinds of institutions and all kinds of well-educated people. Hoodwinking Hitler is going to be much more difficult than whoever he's dealing with in China in this period.

An interesting connection to make between World War II and this Russo-Chinese relationship is that the way that we used Russia—as this reservoir of military men that we can just ship armaments to and they can do the dying for us—is similar to how Russia uses China in the war against Japan.

Well, they're not actually shipping that much to China during that war, but at least during the Korean War.

Korean War, yes.

Interestingly, Russia is doing to them the kind of alliance that we had with Russia during World War II.

Think about today. It's like the Korean War in reverse because China's dribbling out aid to Russia. Russia's getting wrecked by Ukraine. Russia's got 3 times the population or something of Ukraine, but the death rate that it's suffering is really high. These are only children. This is no longer the Russia of 10-child and 6-child peasant families.

Look at it from Xi Jinping's perspective: The longer this goes on, the better. Just let Putin keep on working his magic, and I get to sell him stuff. I'll get him to lower the prices of resources because the man's desperate. Putin will find himself under a Chinese yoke that he does not like.

Then, at some point, the Russians will reassess, and I don't think they'll like that. The Russians fancy themselves being Europeans and have a whole, I believe, racist package that goes with the Chinese, so they won't like that whole situation. I don't know how long it takes them to do whatever they're going to do.

A lot of things in foreign policy, you're not going to solve them. They're huge countries; there's no way you're going to solve them. But you need to figure out how to manage them, to have a blast shield so that whatever fallout comes from their toxic—whatever they're doing—it minimizes how it hits your friends and partners.

This is why you should be focusing on maximizing the economic growth of your friends and partners, because that is the only effective way to deal with them. If you go it alone, who deals with a bully alone? Always gang up on them. Why would you ever want to go alone against a bully? You'd want to go in with lots of friends.

This is what the World War II generation did. The Marshall Plan—you could never get something like that through Congress now. Yet it's passed overwhelmingly in Congress because people get it that you have to spend real money so the European economies recover. How are they going to do it? Buying our stuff. It's a tremendous win-win.

In strategy, you want to figure out win-win things instead of these zero-sum things where, “Oh, I invite you over, I humiliate you, I feel good,” and then you're mad forever. It's pointless.

Great note to close on.

Don't humiliate people. Be kind to each other, yes.

It's a good callback because I've been asking you all these naive questions, and you've been very kind to not humiliate me.