Sarah Paine — The war for India (Lecture & interview)

I need to start with a disclaimer because I work for the US government, and they require you to do a disclaimer. The ideas that you're about to hear are my ideas. They don't necessarily represent those of the US government, the US Navy Department, the US Department of Defense, let alone the Naval War College, where I work. Are we all good on this?

All right, so today I'm going to tell you a story of 3 protagonists: Russia, the United States, and China, that all wanted to work their magic on India and Pakistan, which didn't exactly appreciate it. So, 2 big topics. One is intervening in someone else's problems, a cottage industry for the United States. And before you do that, you really ought to check out the alignments: Who's the primary adversary of whom? How long has it been that way? And also ask these questions about all the neighbors and anyone who might want to crash the party along with you.

It's also a story of a series of limited wars. What's a limited war? It means it's for something less than regime change. So, however it turns out, the governments that started that war are still in place. And 2 of them resulted in quick victories, the ideal in warfare. The first one was the Sino-Indian War of 1962, and the other one was the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971. These wars changed things in many short-term, expected ways, and then in many long-term, highly unexpected ways.

So I'm going to go into all of this with you all. Here's my game plan, and it's literally a game plan. I'm going to start out with the pivotal decisions made by different players. Then, once they're made, certain things are foreclosed and certain things are possible. This is the playing field delimited by these pivotal decisions.

Then I'm going to look at the teams. Some allies were prime allies; others were subprime, and they mixed and matched over time. So I'll do teams, and then I'll do the game, the interaction, and at the end, I'm going to do the plays—some of the techniques, things that you can do to play this game.

1. Mao at war, 1949-51

Pivotal decision number 1: When Mao won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, it didn't end. He also spent the next 2 years not only eliminating Nationalist remnants, but also conquering Xinjiang and Tibet. Tibet had been autonomous since 1911, when the last dynasty had collapsed. Mao decides that he is going to reconquer Tibet.

Tibet's an interesting place. It contains, I think, about 40% of China's mineral resources. So there's a lot of money being made in Tibet for those with the capital to invest in big mines. If you look at this map, the Han Chinese, the preponderant group of China, dominate as far west as the Chongqing Basin and Sichuan. And then you go farther west toward Tibet.

China has put large armies into Tibet exactly twice: once under the Qianlong emperor in the late 18th century—they didn't stay for very long—and then under Mao in 1950. They have stayed forever and built roads so they could keep on sending more in. Between 1950 and 1957, China built a series of road systems through Tibet, and the western route there is the only one that provides year-round traffic.

The problem with the other 2 is, well, check it out: They go through 14 or 15 mountain ranges. It means you go vertical up, vertical down—do that 14 or 15 times. And then, between monsoon rains, snow, and mudslides, they're very difficult to maintain. The eastern one crosses the major river systems of South Asia, so that's difficult. Only the western route is the really good one, and it's really important for the Chinese. If you want to conquer Tibet, you truly want that one.

That western route provides not only the ability to control Tibet, but it also provides a pincer onto Xinjiang. If China wants to come in one way and the other way, it's a good way to get in. If you look at those 2 circles there, those are the disputed areas between China and India. The northern one is the Aksai Chin Plateau, which China has taken from India and India still claims. In the south is Arunachal Pradesh, which India still owns, but China claims. These are the areas that they're fighting over.

But once China took Tibet—before, there had been a big buffer zone between China and India, right? There's all this Tibet, and no one could really get in there. Now China's built roads so it can get into places where India cannot deploy troops until it gets into the road race with the Chinese. And so it reduces the buffer zone between China and India to these small Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. So it changes things. That's pivotal decision number 1: deciding to conquer Tibet.

Pivotal decision number 2 is the United States, in order to deal with the Soviet Union under Eisenhower, did what the wits back in the day called “pactomania.” What is that? It's forming all sorts of bilateral relations and also regional groupings in order to counter the Soviets institutionally and wall them in that way.

Part of this was what was called the Northern Tier strategy, as seen in the Baghdad Pact, where you get Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan to form this thing. It's to wall off the Soviet Union from the oil fields of the Middle East. And the other thing—you should look at this map before it goes away. Look where Pakistan's located, where you think it is, and then go to the east, and that's East Pakistan.

2. Pactomania and Sino-Soviet conflicts

In the 1971 war, there's going to be a civil war, and Pakistan's going to lose East Pakistan, which is Bangladesh today. So just keep that in mind. As part of the sweetener for Pakistan to join the Baghdad Pact, the United States allied with Pakistan and gave them a big military aid treaty.

Here's Nehru, the prime minister of India, and he is horrified. A military pact between Pakistan and the United States changes the whole balance of power in this part of the world and affects us most especially. The United States must realize that the reaction of India is going to be: “You're arming the Pakistanis. Whom do you think they're going to shoot? It'll be us.”

The Indians were just appalled that we did this. Afterwards, Eisenhower admitted it was “perhaps the worst kind of plan and decision we could ever have made.” It was a terrible era, but now we're stuck with it. What the United States is slowly discovering is that if you arm either India or Pakistan in this period, it's going to aim it at the other one. And so that pact poisoned US relations with India for the duration of the Cold War and set up things in ways the United States ultimately wasn't happy with.

Okay, those are 2 pivotal decisions. Now for a pivotal situation, it's really the devolving situation between Russia and China. Until Mao got atomic weapons in 1964, he really had to shut up. Because he needed Russian technological aid, he's been totally cut off from the West. After the Korean War, he's being isolated. So he truly needs Soviet aid. And if he wants nuclear weapons, he needs some of their aid to do that as well. So he has to keep his mouth shut.

But once he detonates an atomic weapon, here's what he tells the Russians, and they just about lose it: “There are too many places occupied by the Soviet Union. The Russians took everything they could. We have not yet presented an account of this list.”

Under the czars, the Russians took from the Chinese sphere of influence territory exceeding the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. Think the Chinese didn't notice? Yes, they noticed. So Mao all of a sudden is calling that out, and the Russians are appalled.

But Mao has other gripes against the Russians. Stalin, in the lead-up to World War II, had made sure to set up the Chinese to fight Japan so that he wouldn't have to. So that leaves him just fighting Nazis, not Nazis and Japanese. And then Stalin takes Mongolia, which had formerly been a part of the Chinese sphere of influence.

In the Korean War, he's more than happy to fight to the last Chinese. And then during the Chinese Civil War, the Russians tell Mao, “Oh, stop at the Yangtze. You need to take a little breather here.” Because he wants a divided China like the divided Germany he has, and then the divided Korea he's going to get. You want to be surrounded by these little broken states around you if you're a continental power.

And then Stalin dies, and Mao wants to be senior statesman of communism. Khrushchev is appalled by that. Then Mao is appalled when Khrushchev does de-Stalinization, because Mao has his own cult of personality.

And then Khrushchev wants peaceful coexistence with the West, while Mao is ramping it up in the Cultural Revolution, so there’s no meeting of the minds. And then all this becomes very public when it hits the propaganda press of the Communists—the Sino-Soviet split in 1960.

All right, the Russians have their own gripes about the Chinese, and here’s how they go. The Russians look around at the West, and particularly the United States, and go, “Wow, they’ve got bases everywhere. The British have got bases everywhere. How come our allies won’t give us bases?” I mean, well, if you occupy Eastern Europe, the whole place is a base, but that’s a different matter.

So the Russians want the Chinese to let them keep a couple of remaining czarist treaty ports, essentially, and want to expand them. And the Chinese say, “Forget it.” And in fact, after the Korean War, when the Chinese have troops all up in Manchuria, which is where these bases were located, and there’s a succession struggle going on because Stalin’s just died, the Russians have to return the bases because there’s just too much bad stuff happening where they live.

And then what Mao does in 1954 and 1958, which just appalls the Russians, are these 2 Taiwan Strait crises. What’s going on? Mao is lobbing all kinds of ordnance on these islands that are owned by Taiwan and are very close to the People’s Republic’s shores. And the Russians are appalled that they are not consulted, and yet they have a friendship treaty that obligates them to join a war under certain circumstances.

And the Russians are going, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, there could be a nuclear follow-on from this stuff.” So the Russians then ask the Chinese if it’s okay if they have a combined naval base on China’s shores. And China says, “Forget it.” The Russians are thinking, “Okay, well, then we’re not going to give you any of the plans for the atomic weapon.” And it all devolves. So there’s no love lost on either side.

And then what exacerbates these tensions is the Vietnam War, where China wants influence over neighboring Vietnam. That is pretty typical. But Russia wants influence over Vietnam to do a pincer on China, which China doesn’t like at all. Meanwhile, both of them want to prove their revolutionary credentials by aiding the North Vietnamese.

So Russia’s aid needs to come by train over China, lest the United States sink the good stuff if it goes by sea. So the Chinese feel obliged to let it go through, but they’re just hassling the Russians the whole time through. They take it apart, tear it apart, say it was from China. And the Russians are just apoplectic.

So their relations are getting worse and worse and worse, and the squabbling is just incessant. So it’s not surprising that the Sino-Soviet border conflict of 1969 breaks out during the Vietnam War. And while all this is going on, this is one of the river islands. The Amur River forms much of their border, and this is one of the islands there. And there’s much fighting over it.

And the Russians come to us, the Americans, and say, “Is it okay if we nuke these people?” And the United States says, “No, there’s no way it’s okay to nuke these people.” And Mao figures it out: the one that wants to nuke you, that’s the primary adversary. Prior to that moment, the United States is the primary adversary of both Russia and China. Now, with this, they’re primary adversaries of each other.

It causes a reshuffling of the allies, and I’ll get to that later. So, okay, I’ve done the playing field of the decisions that delimited it. But now I’m going to get to the allies, and some allies are better than others. And here we’ve got Mao and Khrushchev. Look at these lovebirds. Boy, when that divorce took place, boy, did it mess up the extended family. Never mind.

And the point, for my purposes tonight, I’m going to use the word “alliance” really loosely. If you sign a mutual defense pact, for my purposes tonight, that makes you an alliance—an ally. And if you’re a political scientist, you’ve got something that’s much more complicated, but forget it, I just can’t handle it. So we’re going to do it this way, all right?

So Stalin didn’t think much of Nehru at all. He thought he was a lackey of British colonialism. But Khrushchev thought India was really important to counterbalance China. And here’s Nehru thinking about it: “Well, look, we have to be on friendly terms with both Russia and America.”

But actually, he felt much more in common with Russia. Why? Because he favored Fabian socialist economic policies that were much more akin to what was going on in Russia than what was going on in the United States. Moreover, the United States was segregated, which appalled Nehru. And in addition, the United States was cozying up to all the colonial powers. So Nehru thought the Russians were the better bet.

While all this is going on, the Indians were non-aligned, and they treated the Chinese really generously. And I’ve got a whole list of generosity. So India immediately recognizes China in 1950. Countries like the United States didn’t, for forever. And when the Treaty of San Francisco, I think, is signed in 1951 in the United States, ending the war with Japan, India refuses to sign because China and Russia aren’t there to sign as well.

And then, to help China break out of its diplomatic isolation at the end of the Korean War, India signs a friendship treaty with China. And as part of that friendship treaty, it recognizes Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Under international law, contrary to what Vladimir Putin is doing lately, if you recognize someone’s sovereignty over territory, that recognition is permanent. You cannot back out of it legally under international law.

So the Chinese promise some peaceful coexistence or whatever they’re promising the Indians, but that has no permanence under international law, whereas this thing does. And then, from 1960 on, the Indians are voting to seat the People’s Republic of China, not Taiwan, in the UN.

3. The Sino-Indian War

Meanwhile, in the background, all this road-building is going on. Those roads are being built between 1950 and 1957. And the Indians aren’t going to figure out until 1958 that the roads are there. Meanwhile, the road is completed. The Chinese want to complete their control over Tibet, and so they’re going to send big armies up there.

And Tibetan culture is much more—it’s of Indian origin, not Chinese origin. So this repression of Tibetan culture just appalls the Indians. And then, 2 days before the People’s Liberation Army is going to make it into Lhasa, which is the capital of Tibet, the Dalai Lama—the spiritual leader of Tibet—flees to India, where he has remained ever since, to the absolute horror and anger of China.

So at about this time, the Chinese come to the Indians and say, “Look, why don’t we do a swap on sovereignty? You recognize our sovereignty over that Aksai Chin Plateau, where nobody lives, but it’s really good for the roads—China’s western route. And then we’ll recognize your sovereignty over this much more densely populated Arunachal Pradesh.” And Nehru doesn’t want to hear anything about it.

So during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Russia is much too busy worrying about who’s going to be lobbing nukes at whom, this is when China launches the 1962 Sino-Indian War, and China just takes the Aksai Chin Plateau. The Indians are appalled because they don’t have any roads to be able to deploy up there, whereas the Chinese do. Their defeat is just total. And they can’t believe the Chinese did this to them.

Here’s Nehru afterwards: “There are not many instances in history where one country—that is, India—has gone out of her way to be friendly and cooperative with the Chinese government and people and plead their cause in the councils of the world, and then for the Chinese government to return evil for good and even to go to the extent of committing aggression and invading our sacred land. Who does this?”

So I get it. The Chinese get the territory they want. That was the goal of that war. But what they have done is taken a country, India, which had leadership that was terribly idealistic and not interested in becoming militarized at all, and made them angry forever.

India immediately doubles the size of its army within the next 10 years, to up to 750,000 people. It creates 10 mountain divisions useful against China, and they’ve never ceased being so angry. And then, if you think about this, what if, instead of playing this game this way, China and India had teamed up? I would suspect we would be in a completely different world order now if that’s what they’d done instead.

But this is China’s decision, not India’s fault on this one. All right, so that wasn’t great. Let’s check out other possibilities once that happens to India. India is all of a sudden looking to Russia to counterbalance China.

You also have Pakistan wondering what to do, and what the Pakistanis noticed after all this was: Well, the Chinese are not going to be teaming up with India, right? They’ve just invaded the place. This is when Pakistan sees that China might have real possibilities as an ally.

Bhutto is going to play the China card for the nuclear chip, trying to get Chinese help for all of that. Here’s what happens: You have the 1962 war, and then in 1963, Pakistan really inexplicably is ceding territory to China. Who does that? There are various possibilities down here, but I’m surmising it’s because it’s going to help on nuclear development.

That would explain why you would give a lot of territory, but we don’t know. There was supposed to be some mutual defense pact, maybe, and there are some other things going on. You can imagine what it may or may not have been.

In the case of Pakistan and China, and India and Russia, they had quite a good relationship because the Pakistanis and the Chinese shared India as their problem, and the Russians and the Indians shared China as their problem. That worked pretty well. But the United States was just a disaster from both the Indian and Pakistani points of view, and vice versa, because the United States wanted to befriend both of them.

If you befriend one, the other is appalled, and so the United States wound up appalling everybody. What the United States wanted to have happen was for India and Pakistan to put aside their differences, combine against China, and stop communism from spreading. India and Pakistan wanted to use the United States for maximum aid to use against the other, which is a nonstarter for the United States.

Pakistan really would have liked it if the United States would be nice with China as well, because Pakistan wanted to have good relations with the United States and China. That was a nonstarter for the United States until 1971, when there were secret visits and things going on. That’s later on.

4. Soviet peace in India-Pakistan

In 1962, India gets trounced in this war with China. They look like they’re militarily feckless. Then, in 1964, Nehru dies, right? He’d been the head of India since independence in 1947. He’d been there a long time, so he’s dead.

In 1965, if you’re Pakistani, it looks like a good year to settle border problems. What they do is first invade through the south, if you look way down at the bottom there, likely the Rann of Kutch, and that seems to go pretty well. Then they decide they want to go for the thing they really care about, which is Kashmir, and they do that well—the enemy gets a vote.

The Indians invade straight through Lahore, which isn’t remotely what the Pakistanis had in mind. Then the United States does a double arms embargo on both of them for doing this. The problem is that the Pakistanis are much more dependent on U.S. military aid. The Indians were more diversified, so they just didn’t have enough spare parts to continue this thing.

It’s a very unhappy event for them. They lose it, and what happens is that neither the United States nor Russia wants either one of them fighting that war. The Russians are thinking, “We want the military aid to go to India in order to counterbalance China, not to decimate the Pakistanis.” The United States doesn’t want it either.

The United States is very happy that the Soviets broker the Tashkent Declaration that ends this war. But Pakistan is worse off after this thing, and India has restored its reputation for knowing what it’s doing on the battlefield.

For Pakistan, the United States is really problematic because we’re interested in being nice to them when we want something out of them, and then we’re not so interested when we don’t want something out of them because we don’t share a primary enemy. What we really wanted were listening bases.

5. US Aid and Alliances

The technology of the day was such that if you wanted to surveil the Soviet Union, you wanted to send these big U-2 planes over, given their ranges, and you weren’t supposed to be doing it. We had U-2 bases, I think, in Norway, West Germany, Turkey, Pakistan, and then Japan. In addition, we had a listening base at Badaber. These were really important things for us during this period, so we were paying the Pakistanis a lot of money to get them.

Except that one of these U-2 planes gets shot down over the Soviet Union. They finally get it, even though the planes fly at really high altitudes. Khrushchev is furious. He hauls in the Pakistani ambassador in Moscow and says, “Where is this place, Peshawar? We’ve circled it on the map, and we’re going to blow it off the map if you all don’t wise up.”

Between these threats in 1960 about the U-2 and the United States freezing arms in the 1965 war—which the Pakistanis believe they lost because of that—there were a lot of tensions. In that 1965 war, when we provided arms to everybody, we said, “Oh, we will guarantee that no one uses it,” meaning that the Pakistanis and Indians wouldn’t use it against each other. Of course, we could do nothing about that.

In the 1965 war, the Pakistanis were using U.S. tanks to go after the Indians in the largest tank battle since World War II. There were a lot of upset people in South Asia. Here is Ayub Khan, the leader of Pakistan, telling the United States:

“The United States forgets that our security hazards and political liabilities have increased to a dangerous level due to this U-2 stuff. We kept our part of the contract, whilst the Americans betrayed us at every turn. They built up India against us, they failed to help us in the ’65 war, and finally stopped military aid. They think that we exist for their convenience and that our freedom is negotiable. Dream on.”

When the lease came up for the listening post at Badaber in 1968, the Pakistanis canceled it. They were sick of it.

Meanwhile, the Indians weren’t too thrilled about the United States either. This is earlier, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. Here’s Mahatma Gandhi telling him, “Allied support for freedom and democracy seems hollow so long as America has the Negro problem in her own home.”

Indians were appalled by segregation. They knew exactly which end of the bus they’d be sitting on. There were issues both ways. In fact, Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, found the United States really impossible to work with.

They looked at capitalism as the way station to imperialism and fascism, whereas Americans looked at socialism as the way station to communism. There was no meeting of minds on all of this.

If you look at the alignments of the primary adversaries, India and Pakistan, then for most of the time, India is always Pakistan’s primary enemy. But you could argue that with the 1962 war, is it Pakistan or is it China who is the primary adversary of India?

Then, when you get to the 1971 war, which I’ll discuss a little more in a second, Bangladesh breaks off, and Pakistan is left with less than half the population. You could argue that for India, China is the primary adversary.

If you look at that reshuffling and also look at the 1969 war, that reshuffles the nuclear powers. Formerly, Russia and China had shared the United States as their primary enemy. But after the 1969 war, they’re each other’s primary enemy.

This gives the United States the swing position: team up with A or team up with B. The United States teamed up with China to overextend Russia in the Cold War because I had always felt that the Soviets were the bigger threat in those days.

As you’re looking at alignments, you can apply this kind of framework to any country on the planet to try to figure out what’s going on. Think about how alliances work.

6. The difference with WWII

If I look at the World War II Allies, probably one of the most effective alliances in world history, and think about what people ultimately want, the British want an empire in which the sun never sets, the United States wants to decolonize everybody, and Joe Stalin wants a communist wonderland. Those are mutually exclusive.

But to get there, you have to go through the common way station of getting rid of Hitler.

A common existential threat can be a superglue for the most unlikely partners. But let’s look at the Axis. What they want at the end of the war are spheres of influence in different parts of the world. For Italy, it’s an empire in the Mediterranean; for Japan, it’s the Pacific; and for Hitler, it’s all over Eurasia.

That’s not mutually exclusive. But if you look at who their primary enemies are—who stands in the way of those plans—it’s Britain for Italy, the Soviet Union for the Germans, and for the Japanese, first China and then the United States. None of it aligns. So they fight parallel wars and allow the Allies to take them out in detail.

When you’re thinking about alliances in the world today, when you’re wondering what’s going on with Iran or whatever, figure out who their real primary enemy is and get it straight. Is that primary enemy an existential threat for them? If you’ve got countries that line up against the same primary enemy—an existential threat for all of them—the most unlikely people will cooperate.

On the other hand, people who are very likely to cooperate, maybe like the fascists, all shared this basic ideology. But if they don’t have the same primary enemy and the same theater of interest—geographically, the same theater—they may not cooperate very well at all. So you can apply this to anything you want to apply it to.

So, back to my game here: if you’re looking at the cards people have to play, the United States has lousy cards because we don’t share primary enemies with anybody. So it’s a stalemate. You help India, the Pakistanis hate you. You help the Pakistanis, the Indians hate you. It’s a no-win situation.

But if you look at India, India and Russia share a China problem. That’s good; they can cooperate on that. Then you have Pakistan and China: they share an India problem. They can make things happen over that. So there are cards for them to play and 0 for the United States to play. It’s just the way it is.

The name of the game in strategy is to get the outcome that you want to have happen. How do you play this game of 5-person, 5-country cutthroat billiards to get remotely what you want out of it? For the English majors among you, I have a metaphor. For the rest of you, you can just bear with us.

Imagine a game in which every ball can be a cue ball, and players can take turns, come, leave, and do whatever at will. Sometimes they’ll cooperate some of the time, but they don’t necessarily want to put the same ball in the same pocket. If that’s the case, there’s going to be no enduring cooperation.

Understand that your goal is going to be the ultimate shot you want to take. But as you’re taking the intervening shots, people are going to try to disrupt it. How on earth do you get through this game? This is what the next section is all about.

If you look at this map and where Pakistan is located, it’s in a very strategic location, right in the center—not quite the center—of Eurasia, at the center of the Soviet boundary there. I’m going to give you a map. This is from Halford Mackinder, one of the finest and most famous people to publish on geopolitics.

This is his 1904 map. It’s actually quite famous. He talked about how Russia occupies the heartland. In his day, it was all about these railway systems. He thought that was the prime piece of real estate in the world.

7. The geopolitical map in 1904

Then it’s surrounded by this inner marginal crescent. If you look at where Pakistan is located, it’s right in the center there, right up by Russia. It’s a really crucial location, before satellite imagery was available, for putting listening posts on Russia.

Russia’s huge. You’ve got to have a bunch of listening posts to track their missiles and things. If you want access to Afghanistan—which, when the Russians go there, we want access, and of course, when we go there, we really want access—it’s a strategic location.

For the Pakistanis, the United States was so frustrating to deal with because we’d be on-and-off interested in them because we didn’t align on a primary enemy. Before satellite imagery, we really wanted to cozy up to the Pakistanis. So we had U-2 bases, but then there were technology changes.

Before we got facilities in Iran, we wanted this listening post in Badaber. But technology would eventually change. Then, for a while, we truly wanted the Pakistanis to get the mail through to China when we were trying to break China out of diplomatic isolation and then cooperate against the Soviet Union. Pakistan delivered the mail.

Then we set up an alternate arrangement in Paris to go through our embassies that way, and Pakistan was again irrelevant. When Russia was in Afghanistan, Pakistan was essential for getting aid to insurgents to cause the Russians trouble. Then, of course, when we were in Afghanistan, we really wanted to cooperate with the Pakistanis.

That worked until we captured Osama bin Laden without telling the Pakistanis, in their territory, in Abbottabad. Then relations were really not so great. It was a very bumpy ride. In these periods when we really needed the Pakistanis, we didn’t pay attention to human rights or the really big one: nuclear proliferation.

The proliferation was pretty steady. You look at the United States having trouble negotiating all this, trying to ensure that whatever you do in the short term doesn’t wreck you in the long term. But in order to get to the long term, of course, you’ve got to go through the short term.

After the U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union, and the Pakistanis were having a heart attack about that, the Pakistanis looked to cultivate better relations with China because the U.S. relationship was just too potentially costly. The Americans cut off the military aid.

Then, when the Pakistanis were being very nice about delivering the mail for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to line up invitations in Beijing, the United States was ignoring a humanitarian nightmare, because all of this coincided with the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.

Let me explain what that was. Pakistan was holding presidential elections. The dominant ethnic groups in Pakistan are Punjabis and, sometimes, Sindhis, like the Bhutto family. I think they’re Sindhi. But generally speaking, particularly in the army, the Punjabis dominate.

Bengalis live in what is now Bangladesh. They won the election, and the Punjabis were furious. So they sent the army to start butchering people in East Pakistan to overturn the election. Refugees were pouring into India. That was the backdrop of what was going on there.

For anyone who wasn’t in the know, the United States was saying nothing about this. There was this massive humanitarian crisis, and the United States had nothing to say. The United States has something to say about everything. But this had to do with the fact that this was the moment Nixon was trying to get himself invited to Beijing so that he could talk to Mao about cooperating with the Chinese to overextend the Soviets in the Cold War, which is ultimately what we did.

It was very important to win the Cold War, and this was integral to it. But everyone else was looking at it and going, “What on earth is going on?” Nixon was doing the mediation in the background. We had refugees fleeing all over the place.

India came to the United States and said, “Look, you need to tell the Chinese not to intervene in this thing.” And not only did we not do that, the Indians also said, “You need to bring this up at the U.N.—the human rights stuff—because India is literally getting millions of refugees trying to flee this mess.” The United States wouldn’t do any of it.

It gets even better. The United States had the gall to blame the Indians for the war. Dream on. Indira Gandhi was just furious about this. The United States had wished that India would cease being non-aligned and align with the West.

Well, they ceased being non-aligned, all right. They signed a military pact with Russia over this. Then they upgraded their relationship with Vietnam, which totally upset the United States. And it gets even better: they shut down Indian studies.

8. The US alienates Indira Gandhi

They wouldn’t give scholars any visas to come to India to study India. So you wonder why U.S. universities didn’t have any Indian studies programs? It’s all about this. That explains what was going on with all of that. It was a total mess.

Meanwhile, for Pakistan, as all this was going on, the Shah of Iran fell, I think in February 1979.

And then the Russians invade Afghanistan in December 1979. Suddenly, Pakistan is totally essential once again, and the Pakistanis are really getting sick of being kicked around. So when outgoing President Jimmy Carter offers them, I don't know, $400 million or something, this is Zia here going peanuts to the peanut farmer. The incoming Reagan administration then ups it to $3.2 billion, and that money gets funneled through the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. That's like the CIA+++ of Pakistan.

When you put that kind of money into that kind of bureaucracy, you're going to make them incredibly powerful. Then they're the ones who decide how they're going to allocate money to insurgents in Afghanistan. And I get it: there weren't any great choices, but they're arming some really anti-Western folks in there, probably some guy named Osama—last name bin Laden. Anyway, I'm not sure of the details on that one, but it is going to have 9/11 follow-on effects. Also, the Pakistani ISI is taking some of that money and putting it into Kashmir, which is going to have real problems for India later on. So there are real ramifications for all of this need for Pakistan. But actually, what is happening, anyway?

Throughout, the Pakistanis are getting closer and closer to building the bomb. So when the Russians go piling into Afghanistan, here's Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security advisor, telling him, “Our security policy cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.” Really? I thought that was our security policy. And the problem with proliferation is it tends to be a one-way street, whereas Afghanistan has been anything but.

Then Deng Xiaoping was in town, and he told Carter, “We applaud your decision to basically toss all these nonproliferation and human rights considerations for Pakistan and just arm them.” No kidding. Because the Chinese are providing the nuclear spare parts. So the United States isn't the only country to have trouble navigating this cutthroat billiards.

The Pakistanis have their share of boomerangs. Just look how the wars work. Wars create incredible costs. In the 1965 war, the Pakistanis get exactly nothing. Pakistan had been the largest aid recipient of the United States. I'm not sure if I got that right, but anyway, they're a huge aid recipient from the United States. After this war, we're not so interested. So that's a lot of money down the tubes.

Then, in the 1971 war, great guys, you lose Bangladesh, which, by the way, has over half your population. So Pakistan is no longer the most populous Muslim country; Indonesia is. And if you look at the Kargil War in 1999, this is when Pakistan tries again to go below the Line of Control in Kashmir to try to take some more of Kashmir back. Pakistan has to cross right back, and then it gets sanctioned for all of this. None of these wars have actually worked out very well for Pakistan.

And if you think about it, India and Pakistan are natural trade partners. So if you take all these wars and just add up all the costs, and then think of the opportunity costs if Pakistan had been able to take this money and spend it on road systems and education, and then all the lost trade, it gives you a sense of the real cost of all of this.

Okay, well, those are Pakistan's problems. India has its own problems. Here you've got Indira Gandhi and Richard Nixon; they really didn't like each other. I mean, look at her: she looks as if she's just been fed bad fish, and he looks like he served it up. They just cannot abide each other.

In the 1940s, when Kashmir is erupting, Nehru—her dad—thinks that the United States should be supporting India because it's secular and it's a democracy. And the United States is appalled during the Korean War when India remains nonaligned instead of supporting the United States because it's secular and democratic. The Pakistanis are totally outraged because they're looking at this going, “Okay, these Indians are nonaligned. We're aligned. We're taking these risks for Peshawar and stuff with the U-2s, and you're helping these people who are about to ally with the Soviet Union. Who are you kidding?” So it's a total mess.

The Indians have their own self-inflicted blows. Nehru, his very controversial but devoted advisor Krishna Menon, and his daughter Indira Gandhi were really good at making these totally insulting remarks to American VIPs. It hits the target without a doubt, but the ego that has just been hit is huge and, like an elephant, is not about to forget. Meanwhile, Pakistan, in contrast, is just being this welcoming host. So the United States is going, “Ugh, India and Pakistan.”

And it makes really bad trend lines for India, because in the 1962 war, the United States supported India; in the 1965 war, it's neutral; in the 1971 war, it supports Pakistan. That's not great. And India's own very heavy-handed treatment of the insurgency in Kashmir doesn't make that thing go away; it just gets worse. So they have their own problems.

China also has its own problems with this interaction. It's complicated. On the one hand, in the Sino-Indian War, absolutely, China gets the territory, but at what cost? You've got this permanent enemy forever. If they had teamed up, they actually would have had incredible leverage for what the global order is going to look like. But that's just not to be.

Moreover, if you look at the 1971 war, after the United States won't help with China, India is going, “Okay, I think we need nuclear weapons, because then we'll be able to protect ourselves against China.” And after that war, when Pakistan has lost over half its population and has to deal with India's population and territorial superiority—just overwhelming superiority—the Pakistanis go, “I think we need nuclear weapons in order to solve this problem.” So there's proliferation all over the place.

But as a result of the 1971 war, where Pakistan tries to overturn the elections, here you have an Indian defense analyst, Subrahmanyam, saying, “The Pakistani decision to overturn its elections by deploying the army to East Pakistan gave India an opportunity the like of which will never come again.” What they did is they armed insurgents in East Pakistan, then sent the conventional army in, and that was it for Pakistan: East Pakistan over.

The interaction with Russia works a little better. For Russia and India, it's really quite a good relationship. What Russia offers to India is not only military and economic aid, but also very useful vetoes on the UN Security Council. India does not want plebiscites in Kashmir that it might lose, so it gets the Soviet Union to veto those things. So there are no plebiscites.

9. Instruments of US power

And then, as India is trouncing Pakistan in the 1970 war—starting one war—and the United States wants them to halt India, no way. India wants to finish the job. So it gets the Soviet Union to veto that one, and India does indeed finish the job. Meanwhile, for Russia, India is really useful. It's a good counterbalance for China. So theirs is rather a beautiful relationship. They have very cordial relations.

Okay, so I think I've now covered the playing field, right? I've covered the players and teams and their problems with interacting. That's very difficult. Now for some of the plays and the instruments of national power. Here's the menu of choices: you can start with the light items—diplomacy, public support, and denial of public support. You can move into more expensive things down the menu.

One of the things you can do is help negotiate a really useful treaty, which the United States did. It brokered the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960. It's the only time that I know of—maybe you all know of something—where India and Pakistan have signed an agreement to the massive benefit of both of them.

What does this agreement do? You can see it's a really dense river system. Both India and Pakistan need to irrigate. To do that efficiently, you need dams, and both of them were poor and didn't have the dams. They were going to cost $1 billion. The United States was willing to kick in half that money if they would both sign the treaty. No terrorist event or anything derailed it, so they signed it. This treaty has been operating some of these dams ever since, to the enormous benefit of both countries.

Does the United States get any enduring gratitude from either one for doing this?

No. Zip. Okay, the next one is that the United States tried to exercise diplomacy and convince the Pakistanis and Indians to settle their differences, and it was a total flop. If you're going to try to befriend both India and Pakistan, you wind up becoming the enemy of one or the other.

United States diplomacy was based on certain false assumptions. One was that India and Pakistan could be cajoled into settling their differences. Anyone who's so stupid as to think that is crazy. If you're asking, “What are the origins of these differences?” Partition was brutal.

The British colonized the Indian subcontinent, and then they left in 1947. They left really rapidly, so there was no time to set up any institutional framework. Also, you're talking about millions of people. Pakistan was going to be one thing, and India was going to be the other. Hindus were fleeing, and Sikhs were fleeing out of Pakistan, while Muslims were fleeing out of India, going back and forth, and millions were killed while this was going on.

This is the origin, at least the modern origin, of why Pakistanis and Indians are so bitter. In addition, the United States thought, “Surely the China threat is going to make the Indians come around and realize this non-aligned stuff is nonsense.” Not quite. When India aligns, it aligns with Russia, not the United States. So that doesn't remotely work out the way the United States wanted.

Then the United States thought, “We in the West were rich. We give Indians and Pakistanis all this aid. This will force them to be nice to us and be less nice to the communists.” Wrong. India and Pakistan are really astute, and they get lots of aid from everybody.

When the great powers do align—Russia, China, and us, or at least 2 of those align—you can actually get stuff done. That's when you get the Tashkent Agreement for the 1965 war. The United States and Russia both wanted India and Pakistan to cease and desist and stop blowing each other off the map.

You also see this in the Kargil conflict, when Pakistan was yet again trying to resolve Kashmir by invading and then got itself into trouble. Nawaz Sharif, who was the head of Pakistan, all of a sudden got on a plane with his family. It looked like he was coming into exile, and he was trying to fly into the United States.

The United States said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you think you're doing?” It said, “You're not coming in here until you admit that you crossed the Line of Control. Then you need to get right back.”

So he agreed to sign the Washington Declaration and go right back. But it was absolutely humiliating for the Pakistanis to say, “Oh, yeah, we went south of the Line of Control. That didn't work out, so now we have to go right back.”

He had already gone to China and pleaded his case to the Chinese, and they told him to get right back because there was a lot of nuclear saber-rattling going on. The Chinese were not interested in a nuclear war over this. Pakistan had the choice of fighting India by its lonesome or crossing back. So they crossed back.

There were other cases in the post-Cold War period when the great powers cooperated and tamped things down, like terrorist incidents in New Delhi and Mumbai that didn't go anywhere because the great powers told the Indians and the Pakistanis to just dial it back.

Another thing you can do is publicly support someone. This is what went on with Goa, which was a Portuguese colony. The Indians wanted it back, and the Portuguese said, “No way. You cannot have it back.” The Indians took it back, and the United States supported Portugal.

Why? Portugal was a NATO ally, and we had very important bases in Portugal. So we kept the bases, but we made the Indians really angry. There are other areas of public support, or of not criticizing people publicly.

For instance, in the 1971 Bangladesh War, the United States refused to support India by telling China, “Don't enter this place.” Of course, it was December, so the road system would have been a little rough to even try that, but it made the Indians mad.

Or think during the Cold War. With Nehru, there was the 1956 Hungarian crisis, when the Russians sent tanks into Hungary. The Indians didn't say anything about that. There was the Berlin crisis in 1961, when the Russians were pretty rough, and the Indians didn't say anything about that.

Then Indira Gandhi came in, and when the Russians sent tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Indians said nothing. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, again, the Indians said nothing. This is one way that you make your allies feel better about things.

Another thing is that if you're one of the 5 veto holders at the UN Security Council, you can provide public support that way. I've already mentioned the Russian vetoes on Kashmiri plebiscites, which the Indians truly didn't want to happen, or short-circuiting the Indian offensive in Bangladesh.

This is what Russia did for India, and it was a very valuable thing for them. You can also put money where your mouth is: economic aid. It's interesting that the United States provided far more economic aid than either the Russians or the Chinese, but both Pakistanis and Indians still preferred China and Russia, respectively.

Some of this aid was really important. During the Bihar famine in 1967, the United States sent 20% of its wheat crop to India. It was worth $1.5 billion. That's not something to be sneezed at. Was it 90 million people? It's a lot of people who might have starved to death.

That didn't work out well at all because President Johnson was so mad at the Indians. From his point of view, they were cuddling up to the North Vietnamese, and the Vietnam War wasn't going well for Johnson, so he was furious.

He provided the aid, but he did it always at the last minute, ship to mouth. Indira Gandhi was furious. She said, “I don't ever want us to have to beg for food again.” And she never did.

So the United States got no gratitude or anything enduring. A whole other piece of it is that India isn't subject to famines anymore. Part of that is from the Green Revolution. Who did that? The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations figured out the different strains of grain that you want to grow.

Does the United States get any credit for that? No. Zip. Here's Krishna Menon, who was Nehru's controversial advisor, saying, “Look, we want to encourage a little competition between the donors.” And they did. India just kept racking up the aid. Even Indira Gandhi, who hated Nixon, was racking up the aid.

Back in the Eisenhower administration, the United States had noticed this. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said, “Look, concerning India and Pakistan, it's difficult to help one without making an enemy of the other.” Of course, the United States tried to help both and angered both of them.

Amazing.

Another instrument of national power is military aid. It is even more difficult to calibrate than economic aid.

You can see this with the pactomania event, where Eisenhower was building these bilateral relations and treaty organizations to contain the Russians. Formerly, there had been no Cold War in South Asia, but once Eisenhower allied with Pakistan, all of a sudden the Russians were in there too. So that's a bit of a boomerang.

When the United States provided military aid to Pakistan, that drove India to seek an alliance with Russia, which wasn't exactly what the United States wanted. Then, when the United States helped India right after the 1962 war with China, that alienated the Pakistanis, and they tried to buddy up with China—not remotely what the United States wanted to happen.

When the United States provided aid to the ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the Pakistanis were funding things to get the Russians out of Afghanistan, but they were also diverting it into Kashmir. So in 1989, this insurgency heated up, and it has remained heated ever since.

Then you wind up with China providing nuclear help to the Pakistanis. It's difficult with these things. You get a short-term thing, but then the long-term result may not be what you want at all.

The other instrument of national power, if you've got one, is the carrier battle group.

10. Carrier battle groups

You can send one of those around, which is what the United States did. Here's Enterprise. It was the United States' first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. During the 1971 war, the United States sent this into the Bay of Bengal, and the Russians sent some naval assets. It had no effect on that war: Pakistan lost.

Right. The Indians were furious. They regarded this as an absolute threat. How dare we do this, anyway? Maybe it would have been better to have left Enterprise in its home port rather than doing this.

Then, of course, there are sanctions and embargoes. The United States does this all the time. If you look at the list of the times we're embargoing stuff, at partition we're embargoing everybody. During the 1965 war, we're embargoing everybody. Then, as various people are making nuclear progress and doing different things, there are these embargoes that come and go.

Pakistan's really mad because India does an atomic test in 1974, and Pakistan doesn't do anything until much later. Pakistan is asking, why are you sanctioning us on this nuclear stuff? The Indians have actually done this; we haven't. If you look at this chart, you can see where the ups and downs of these sanctions go.

Clearly, they didn't stop proliferation, because in 1998 you have these tit-for-tat nuclear tests by both countries. The United States tries sanctioning them, but then it's just too late. They've already tested the stuff. The United States basically gives up, and then, after 9/11, of course, we desperately need Pakistan again to deal with Afghanistan. It's a complicated world out there.

Another instrument of national power is that you can trade off your territory if you really want to. Most people don't, but the Pakistanis clearly did that in 1963. We can all speculate on what they got. My hunch would be something to do with nuclear things, but it's not as if this information is out there in the public. It isn't.

Another thing you can do is fund the insurgency. This is done by the United States, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan. Think about it: if you've got a country that you don't like that has some minority people who want to secede and are fighting there, you can fund that insurgency. Then the country you don't like is pinned, because they're going to be paying attention to that insurgency.

While they're pinned there, they probably can't do things elsewhere that you might care about. So this is the logic of what's going on.

The United States belatedly decided, “Let's help the Tibetans.” The CIA helped them between 1957 and 1961. But look at the dates when we did the road system. The road system in Tibet was completed by 1957. It's too late, so all you do is get these people killed because the Chinese have got the road system all set up in there.

That doesn't exactly work. But after the 1962 war, all the way until 1979, when Deng Xiaoping calls it off, the Chinese are funding insurgencies among the Mizos, the Manapuri, and the Naga people. They all don't like different aspects of Indian rule, and the Chinese are more than happy to stir that pot.

The really big pot to stir is the Naxalites. It's huge. As long as the Pakistanis have East Pakistan, they can stir some of that up. By the way, these Naxalites are still there in India. They have not gone away. It's a serious part of India where they are.

Then, of course, Pakistan's location right next to Kashmir means they can stir that forever. The tragedy of these conflicts is what they become: frozen conflicts. If the outside power is playing its cards right—its amoral cards right—it's not bearing any of the costs. It's pinning someone it doesn't particularly like.

All the costs are borne by the local population, who are suffering horrendous deaths and a lack of economic growth. You're just having warfare where you live. What a total disaster. That's how it works.

But two can play at this game. The Indians, according to the Pakistanis, have funded the Baloch people. They straddle Iran and Pakistan and don't particularly like being told what to do, so apparently India is supposed to have put its finger on that scale.

The other thing the Pakistanis accuse the Indians of doing is encouraging a Pashtun insurgency up north. That would be a way of diverting Pakistani attention from Kashmir. If they're totally busy with the Pashtuns, they can do less in Kashmir.

The result of these things is that people are becoming more and more bitter. The hatreds just spike, economic growth isn't happening, and there's poverty everywhere. It makes these problems more intractable, not less.

When I think about these frozen conflicts, there are a number of ones that you know about besides Kashmir. There's Korea, and there's Palestine.

So if you look at Kashmir, if I've got it right, you fund that thing. What's great from China's point of view is that, if Pakistan is doing that, India is frozen and can't do other things because it's constantly paying attention to what's going on in Kashmir instead of going, “Hmm, China, I don't know about this.”

Or in the Korean War, back in the day, if things are all stirred up in Korea, China has to really pay attention to that. It delays the rise of China. In those days, that benefited Russia. But these things can change over time as to who the beneficiary is.

You can play this game and think about how it works in Palestine. I'm no expert in that part of the world, but I think this frozen-conflict veto-player idea works: there are these veto players who are vetoing peace very easily. All you have to do is send a certain number of package bombs, and peace is not going to happen.

Cutthroat billiards. What can you take away from all this? Common enemies cannot be conjured. Check out the alignments of who these common enemies are before you leave the parking lot, and figure it out for all possible players who might want to crash the party.

What's their primary objective? Who's their primary adversary? What primary theater are they truly interested in? Then you've got your hunches about how you think this is. You should reassess early and often to see if your assumptions are correct, and don't worry about changing your mind.

Some people get really hung up about being wrong. Don't worry. Reassessing is a sign of strength. It's like, “I got more information; I've changed my mind.” Good thing. Don't double down on bad information.

If you're looking into areas of the world that are ethnically diverse, where people have been at odds for a long time, expect veto players and real difficulty in settling that matter out. Part of good strategy is recognizing that some problems aren't feasible to solve. We all have scarce resources. You can't do everything, so focus on those things where you think you can solve.

But if the great powers align, things can happen. The story is even better than that. Sure, there are a few big powers, but the small and medium powers, if you add them all up, are by far the aggregate. Their aggregate wealth exceeds that of any one great power. If the smaller powers agree on what they're up to, then the big powers have to pay attention. That's a positive thing.

That is what I had to say to you this evening. Thank you for listening.

11. Q&A begins

So it seems like the lesson from this lecture—the big lesson—is that we couldn't be allies with both Pakistan and India at the same time. We had to choose one. Which one should we have chosen?

Our primary enemy was pretty much the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. China was a problem, but the Soviets were the big problem. India and Pakistan never fit that bill, so it had to do with whatever the problem of the day was.

Pakistan had a very critical location, and so we needed it for a whole bunch of things. You can see how that works. While you need them, you pay a lot of money to them, and presumably the money is worth it for them for the hassles of dealing with a difficult tenant. So that's how it worked.

But nowadays, the relationship with India is changing. In fact, it has changed. Their big buddy Russia, after the end of the Cold War, instead of being the big friend, was the big nuisance—not so much for India, but for everybody else.

Now, for India, its primary adversary is China, without a doubt.

And the United States, I think, is looking at China as the primary threat. To the extent that both of them see it that way, that will make them align, and Pakistan less so. It sounds like, at the time, it was right to choose Pakistan as the main ally for the United States.

Well, we tried to choose India too. We tried to do them simultaneously, but India is farther south, right? For a long time, before we got satellite imagery, you wanted to have listening posts and things up in Pakistan. India simply doesn’t have the location for that. So that was the original reason for interest in Pakistan.

12. The appeal of the USSR

I want to better understand why the Soviet Union was such a charismatic example for countries that were decolonizing, like India.

Well, I think you should go back and put yourself in the position of a generation and consider what your life experience was. If your life experience was World War I, the total butchery of it—you’re telling young men your age, “Go”—you’re in a trench—“I want you to go up and over the edge into oncoming machine-gun fire.” We know what’s going to happen when that happens, right? And they’re literally in battles like the Somme; they’re losing hundreds of thousands of people. I don’t mean casualties; I mean dead, dead.

And then you have the Great Depression afterward, and then add to it: India’s been colonized by a bunch of really opinionated white people, right? And transferring a lot of wealth out of India to England. And so you look at Marxism and, boy, it sounds plausible, right? It sounds like these evil capitalists—they’re just wasting lives. Surely this is the explanation.

Now, the technicalities of Marx’s labor theory of value don’t actually turn out to be accurate. It’s not just labor that produces value. Like Silicon Valley, you understand, it’s what comes up here that produces a tremendous amount of value. Marxist theory doesn’t recognize that, and so there are massive flaws in the theory.

And then when you put communism into practice, if you want to have equality—which is what they wanted—if you can have equality, you’re not going to have any liberty, right? Because in order to make it equal, you just expropriate, and then you divvy it out to everybody, and there’s no liberty in that, right? Another piece about democracies, even flawed ones—even if they have a semi-free press—a lot of the icky news bubbles up, but in dictatorships it doesn’t, right? So you compare the seamy sides of some democracies that aren’t doing that well to the public-relations presentation that the dictatorships are presenting.

So you can picture Nehru, of his generation: he’s sick of the British, right? And so Fabian socialism. He’s not for killing lots of people to impose socialism. He has a much lighter touch than Stalin.

One thing I was thinking about while you were mentioning that Gandhi and Nehru had a big problem with American segregation is that, at the same time, in the ’50s, by that point, over 10% of the Soviet population had at some point been in the gulags or were currently in the gulags. Segregation is very bad; gulags are even worse. And it’s the same proportion of the population that’s been in the gulags. Maybe people just didn’t know about the gulags back then.

I don’t think communists let you know those things, right? This was a shock for a lot of Russians because my husband and I were in the Soviet Union in the 1988–89 academic year, and that was early Gorbachev, before everything totally fell apart and there was no food. There wasn’t much food, but there was some food. And it was just as the Russians were suddenly being able to read in a fairly free press about the things that had happened. They were appalled about what had gone on under Stalin, and they just hadn’t realized all of it.

One of the reasons that socialism was appealing to these decolonizing countries was because, in the preceding decades, from the ’20s to the ’40s, the Soviet Union actually had pretty good growth rates. In those 20 years, their GDP went from 8% to 18% of world production. Was that just catch-up growth? What was going on by the time Russia did that?

Well, there was tremendous rebuilding after World War II. There’s another piece. It was so weird when we were in Russia in ’88 and ’89: anything that was sold at the markets that came from somewhere else, they would mark “imported.” The idea—and I remember thinking this is really weird, because normally you would say it’s, I don’t know, “Hungarian this and that” or whatever—I thought, “Ooh, this means that anything from somewhere else is better than what we’ve got.” That’s a really bad sign.

And they had what I would call a doughnut empire. Normally, when you think of an empire, Mother Central is the most developed part, and then there’s the periphery where all the natural resources are taken away. It was an inverted empire. Russia is the doughnut. The rich places are places like Czechoslovakia and Poland, which had been much richer places. And so the Russians—serf owners—are sucking in all the wealth from these places.

And I think that’s another reason why the shattering of the Soviet Union, when they lost all of their enserfed Eastern Europe, was such a mess for Russia. They did not realize, and they still don’t realize, the degree to which they were living off the wealth produced in the West—the European portions of Russia that have since become independent.

13. The last communist premier

Who was the last Soviet leader who truly believed in communism?

Gorbachev was a true believer. He did not believe it was possible to take a U-turn on the road to communism, so when he was doing his reforms, it was to improve communism, to make it better. So he absolutely believed in it.

When you started your career in Soviet studies and were trying to figure out what was going on in the Kremlin all the time, what was the key to figuring out Kremlinology? What was the key to figuring out what was happening in the Politburo?

Well, what I did for my doctoral dissertation—so I wrote a history of the Sino—well, the Russo-Chinese border, when it was figured out, which is between 1858 and 1924. This is when all this territory went. And what I did is—so most of this isn’t Soviet, right? It’s 1917 to 1924 that’s the Soviet part. But you go to archives in Russia, and you see what they’ll let you see. This is when you could go to those archives. They’re closed now.

And I went to Beijing and saw the archives you were allowed to see. And then in Nanjing, there were some other ones there. And then in Taiwan, the ones they would allow you to see, and then Japan, the ones they would allow you to see. And they’re all lying about different things or covering up different things. So it’s a jigsaw puzzle. You put it together that way. So that was how I did it.

And also, for Kremlinology as a whole, pay attention to what dictators say because they’ve got to communicate at some level to their own populations. They quite often tell you exactly what they want to do, and you think, “That’s insane. Who would do that?” Well, hello. Hello. Right? So read what they have to say and read what others have to say. Then you need to read things in the Russian language.

So I just read a lot of things. Just read broadly, read more broadly than whatever your topic is, because the unknown unknowns are what you’re after. What are the things that are truly important and you have no idea about? And the only way you get to those is through archives or reading broadly, where you bump into things: “Ooh, that turns out to be important.”

When you were giving the lecture, it seemed like these primary adversaries, whoever it is, are very permanent. And there’s some deep reason why it has to be this way. But if you look at the Sino-Soviet split, it’s just like they’re both communist, they’re both Leninist parties, and they have this falling-out over—there were a couple of things you mentioned, but it’s not clear why somebody has to be somebody else’s primary adversary or why you can’t turn that around.

Well, you can, but Russia and China have these territorial differences and the issues I listed there of fighting to the last Chinese in the Korean War. Mao didn’t really like that. There are a lot of Chinese who die in the Korean War, where the Russians sort of get them in there and then you’re stuck. You have to, for prestige reasons, stay there.

And the really big one I didn’t discuss in any detail: Stalin’s really worried about a two-front war—Nazis in the West and Japanese in the East. And so he brokers the Second United Front between the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communists under Mao at a place called Xi’an in late 1936.

Wait, is it 1936? And so it’s called the Xi’an Incident, where Chiang Kai-shek was reputedly kidnapped and held up there. But really, what’s going on is that it’s setting up the second United Front. Then the Japanese go ballistic, and that’s when they invade all the way down the coast and up the Yangtze River. That means the Chinese are fighting the Japanese for Stalin. The Japanese are not going to launch into Siberia, so that works for Stalin. But the Chinese realize this, and it’s not appreciated.

Yeah, but then they helped the Communists get into power in China, right? You’d think they’d be grateful for that.

No, no, he wanted to divide China. He’s telling Mao, “Stop at the Yangtze. You need a breathing space there.” And Mao keeps on going.

If you’re the president, if you’re the secretary of state, and you’re looking at these interweaving systems of alliances, and you give some guy aid because you need something and it pisses everybody else off, how the hell are you supposed to keep track of this? Do they have these matrices that you’ve got up there?

We have so many wonderful people working in the State Department. I’ve met a number of them because they come—they’re students at the War College. You should be proud of all the people who work for the Department of State. They’re all these different experts in different parts of the world. They get sent around hither and yon—very thoughtful people.

I’ve also read many CIA reports in the archives because I’ve gone to these presidential archives, starting with the Truman administration all the way up to Bush senior. As you get to the more recent stuff, less of it has been declassified. Most of the CIA reports I’ve read are for earlier periods; they’ve been declassified. It’s impressive, the level of analysis.

I know that the CIA has several parts. There’s the analytical part of it, and then there’s the part that sends people out to do—we aren’t even going to talk about what they’re doing—which is completely different. But they’re very fine analysts. The Department of Agriculture has very fine analysts about agriculture—the whole world.

We have a tremendous amount of expertise. The other thing that presidents, and also high-level bureaucrats, get is these daily reports. They’re very short because they have to be about what’s going on everywhere in the world that people think is important for them to know. There are a tremendous number of smart, well-educated people trying to get information to presidents, secretaries of state, and things.

Then you have all these regional desks. I don’t know—I can’t remember exactly. I don’t know the organization chart of the State Department, but you can look at it by region of the world. People work there and provide this. There are wonderful experts working on this.

You mentioned in the lecture that if China and India had figured out a way to work together, the world order could have looked completely different. Spell out the counterfactual for us. How would it have been different?

14. India and China’s lost opportunity

I spent the grand total of a week in India. It was a trip on the way back from Australia, and that was the amount of time we had. But we went into the Mahatma Gandhi Museum in New Delhi, and there’s a whole piece of it where Chiang Kai-shek is giving him things.

It became really clear that Chiang Kai-shek had a really good relationship with India—a deep respect for India. They shared this desire: We want to be independent; we don’t want the Japanese running around our country; we don’t want a bunch of Westerners running around. We share this with India. So I think if you get Chiang Kai-shek winning the Chinese Civil War and things, you might have had them team up and had a much more productive relationship.

That’s interesting because often, when you hear “Nationalists,” you think they’re the ones who are interested in territorial disputes. But in fact, they wouldn’t have cared about Tibet or something.

Well, next time you’re in New Delhi, go check out the museum. When I was there, it was about 20 years ago, but I remember being impressed: Wow, there’s all this. And then, when Gandhi was assassinated—this is Mahatma, not Indira, who was also assassinated—no relation—the Chinese Nationalists sent all sorts of condolences and different things. So, yeah, there could have been a different outcome.

I wonder if the worst thing about the Non-Aligned Movement was that, because they wouldn’t fall under anyone else’s nuclear umbrella, they wouldn’t align with the great power that had nukes. In order to keep deterrence, they had to build nukes themselves. So then you have this nuclear proliferation, and that was why it was really important to get people allied with one great power, even if it’s not you, just to prevent the nukes from going wide.

I think the 1962 war made Nehru realize that non-alignment was a nonstarter, and that’s for the reasons you’re talking about. It’s like, “Okay, we just got eaten alive by the Chinese. We need a big friend, and we probably need some big missiles eventually.”

It’s not immediate. The Indians don’t come around to the idea that “we absolutely need nuclear weapons” until the Bangladesh War, when China has become more of a threat.

By 1971, did Nehru really think that the Soviet Union might still win the Cold War?

Nehru’s dead in about 1964, so it’s his daughter.

When did they become allies with the Soviet Union?

Well, the official alliance—I’m just defining it; I made up what an alliance is—so I would say it is the security pact that Indira Gandhi signs in 1971.

Right. So at that point, did they really think the Soviet Union could have won the Cold War? Why didn’t they just choose the winner in retrospect?

I remember the Cold War vividly. We felt we were losing it most of the way through.

And why is that?

Because of the propaganda, right? We always felt that “they’re all living beautifully.” They’re very good at propaganda.

The United States had massive racial problems. Think about the 1960s. Martin Luther King was pointing out hideous problems with this country. There were civil rights demonstrations everywhere, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations everywhere, the women’s movement, the environmental movement. There were loads of unhappy people pointing out all of these problems, which is a good thing, because then the United States starts working on fixing some of these problems. Of course, they’re not fixed, but there’s improvement on them.

Whereas in Russia, no one can travel, so you can’t see how unbelievably poor they are. You go to Moscow and you think, “Well, this is a plausible city.” Well, there’s only 1 plausible city in the place. Or maybe it’s 2: St. Petersburg. Well, it’s Leningrad in those days. So people didn’t realize. But, yeah, we felt we were losing the Cold War.

In fact, at the very end of the Cold War, because I was in the Bush archives, Gorbachev was in, and Bush, Reagan, and then Bush were thinking, “Well, he just looks like another one of these people, and we’re not going to take the propaganda seriously.” Then they sort of go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” In 1988, Bush is going, “Whoa, maybe it is going to end.”

Then the United States teams up with Helmut Kohl of Germany to do the fastest “get the Russians out of Eastern Europe” ever. But Gorbachev is the one who wants to cooperate with the West.

One thing you should know about warfare: you think the winners win it. No, actually, it’s when the losers decide they’ve had enough. That’s when a war ends. Otherwise, it doesn’t end. So the Russians got sick of it, and they quit.

I wonder if there’s a lesson in here for what people call the “Cold War with China” today, where people think it’s really competitive—China might have a bigger economy than us soon. Really, if you actually got to see what’s happening day to day in China, maybe you might decide, like the Soviet Union, that there are a bunch of things broken with it. They’re not really competitive in the long run economically, and so we’re going to win.

Well, I don’t know—win, lose. But they have a very low per capita standard of living. Do the math. You go, “Yeah, they’ve got a big economy.” They’re not a third of the world’s population now, but it’s huge. Divide 1.3 billion, whatever it is, and you come up with a low number for per capita standard of living.

[Speaker?]

And I think for human beings, that's the number that matters, right? What does your family income look like? So they have a long way to go on that one.

I want to go back to Kissinger in 1971. Because they wanted somebody to send the message along to China to open up, they shut up about Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh, where numbers vary, but somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million people died. It's awful. Hundreds of thousands of people were raped. I know they didn't have email back then, but when there was no other way to get the message across, you have to abet a genocide in order to get a message across to Mao.

Well, first of all, the Cold War is a misnomer because the bloodshed in the Third World was horrendous. I will eventually compile the statistics on this—not that they're great statistics, but the numbers are obscene. I think Congo had a civil war where literally over 10 million people died, and that's only one of these things.

The United States cannot deal with all of these. And if you think about the time when the United States was really quite idealistic—the Iraq War—it goes in, it creates democracy in this place, it's a massive civil war, and then we're blamed for it. So be careful about where you intervene, because you may not be able to stop a thing, and then you'll get blamed for what's going on.

So Bangladesh is horrible, but it is not our fault. You will get overextended if you intervene in everything under the sun. Also, there's a question of why the United States, or anyone, should be doing all of it. Shouldn't it be through the UN and other things?

The really key thing was winning the Cold War. So Nixon absolutely did prioritize getting the mail through to Mao. He did. So, in 1971, good old Henry “HAK,” as he's known in the archives—Henry A. Kissinger—gets his secret trip in there, lines up Nixon's trip in ’72, and that's going to overextend Russia in the Cold War.

Why? Because with this Sino-Soviet split and all the rest of it, Russia has to militarize its entire border with China. It's already militarized its entire border with Europe. Think about this. You're talking about mechanized, nuclear-armed forces with all the tanks and everything else that goes with them. It is not cheap.

Imagine if the United States had to do this on our Canadian and Mexican borders. Bankrupting, right? And we're a lot richer than they are. So we team up with China, we provide them all kinds of naval technology, which is not going to bother us, and they give us listening posts. Again, we love listening posts right up on the Russian border.

And the Russians are scared stiff of the Chinese. The Chinese with good military equipment—that wouldn't be a good thing for them.

When Eisenhower was president, he built these bases in Pakistan to have the U-2 planes go to Russia. We had bases in Turkey, we had bases in Japan, and we had bases in a lot of other places in Europe. Was this marginal increase in coverage really worth breaking off the alliance with India, or pissing off India?

Oh, sorry, India. I think at the time people felt we absolutely had to be able to cover everything. I don't know the details of where they had their nuclear weapons and things stored, or all their testing areas, but I'm sure you needed to have the entire place covered. So, yeah, it was very serious with these nuclear weapons. They can reach the United States, so we had better know what's going on.

New books about the Cold War are coming out all the time. New books about World War II are coming out all the time. People are writing thousands of papers about this stuff all the time. How much new stuff are we learning every year? All these scholars are still studying this. What kinds of new things do we keep unearthing?

Well, I'm personally sick of writing about World War II. I've done enough of it, so I'm personally not going in that direction.

Yeah, it's endless. I think a lot of the books are these narrative, feel-good histories. They'll tell you about some regiment and all the heroic stuff they did. It's a nice, light airplane read, and a lot of people like that stuff.

I personally like things where I learn conceptual things that I can then apply to other problems. Those books wouldn't help me, but that's just me.

How do you decide which are the good history books and which aren't? You're just on Amazon. You can't read it yet. You're just looking at it on Amazon.

It's hard. What I would say is, give it a look: the 30-second test.

And what's that?

If the book's about another part of the world, flip through the bibliography, which you can do on Amazon, and zip through it for about 30 seconds. See if there's anything in the language of the country in question in the bibliography—how much?

If there's zip, I would toss it. I'm curious how many of you would be interested in reading a book that says it knows everything about the United States, and there's not a single English source cited. I think you'd regard the book as garbage, and Americans do this routinely.

It's a problem with political science degrees, where it would be very easy to require anyone who's going to do a specialty in comparative politics or international relations to pass a language test. Don't try Spanish if you think you're going to talk about the Middle East, right? If it's going to be the Middle East, it better be something like Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, or Hebrew. And better yet, if you're really going to be a serious Middle Eastern expert, try all 4.

That would be true expertise: being able to read books in the language and understand what other people are thinking about things. So that would be my basic advice: find people who aren't playing half-court tennis all about Team America. Get to the other side of the net and try to figure out what other people are thinking. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them, but it means you are making the effort to see where they're coming from.

During the Cold War, with all these proxy wars, was it good that we were just letting off steam in these smaller ways and therefore could avoid the bigger, great war?

It wasn't letting off steam. It was horrendous. I don't know the answer. In fact, my current project is a history of the Cold War, and I've read a lot of things. I'm going to compile a lot of tables on things like this.

Just putting the data together will take a long time, but then, when you get the table, it'll be a really quick skim. So if you've got a civil war occurring somewhere in Latin America or somewhere in Africa, and no one's aiding it, fine. Then if Russia puts its finger on the scale, of course we're going to put our finger on the scale.

That means the Russians are providing industrial-age weapons, and we're providing industrial-age weapons. What happens? Casualties just go through the roof. And that's what went on through the Cold War.

And then there was this magical inter-Cold War period when all that stopped. That's when you get this tremendous growth across the Third World, because there aren't these insurgencies just tearing up wealth.

And then you can see recently—look at North Africa. It's a mess right now, right? It's ISIS, or whatever it is in there, doing its stuff. Then you have Wagner Group, or whatever they are, in there, and you have the Chinese further south. Everybody's fighting everybody. You've got civil war all over the place.

That means military-age males want to get out because people kill you, right? They'll either dragoon you into fighting where you don't want to fight, or they'll just kill you outright. So they're all trying to get into boats to Europe, which is destabilizing. It's a mess. We're in the second Cold War, and this is part of it.

When you're doing this project on the Cold War, what were the biggest miscalculations that people were making? Were they too suspicious of the other side? Were they not suspicious enough? Were they too concerned about bases, or what were they missing?

I need to think more about that, because I think there are probably all sorts of things. Also, it's impossible to know the right thing to do. Afterwards, when it pans out, you go, “Well, that was a mess.”

It's hard to know, but I think it was probably a terrible mistake when Eisenhower thought, “Here's the Supreme Allied Commander of World War II, who knows all about hot wars, and doesn't want to do that.”

When the United States deposes Mosaddegh in Iran in 1954, I could see Eisenhower's view as, “Hey, we're just deposing one guy, and we're going to avoid the Russians taking oil fields here,” et cetera. And he thinks that's a better trade-off. Well, the Iranians have never forgotten that. They're furious to this day. Wouldn't you be if you were Iranian? Mosaddegh was democratically elected.

Or another time, actually, in Vietnam, we didn't push the South Vietnamese to hold elections because we knew Ho Chi Minh would win. He was the only national figure in Vietnam. So the United States is all about free elections. The Vietnamese could have run a free election, and Ho Chi Minh would have won. That was our assessment—that he would win. Okay, well, if you're for free elections, it means you don't get the outcome you want. And I wonder if that wasn't a terrible mistake, because the Vietnamese actually can't stand the Chinese. So they were always going to be a counterbalance to the Chinese.

But due to the McCarthy era, we purged all of our China experts. All these children of missionaries who knew a great deal about China—less so about Vietnam, but at least it was a related cultural group. So we had gotten rid of all that expertise in the McCarthy era. We were running blind in Asia.

What you just mentioned about the fact that we would curtail what kinds of elections you can hold in these countries after Germany and Japan surrendered: if they tried to elect another fascist party, we wouldn't have been like, “All right, well, that's what you guys voted for. They're in charge now.” We wouldn't have allowed it. So why is the principle different in Vietnam? Because the South Vietnamese would have voted for them as well.

We've just been fighting a massive war with Japan and Germany. There's no way we're going to let the Germans and Japanese decide anything initially. But what we did do for both Germany—our half, West Germany—and Japan is our best to set up democratic institutions so that, within a cycle or 2, they're making their decisions about whom they're electing. We are not choosing their leaders.

And it was a very generous peace. It was realizing that, in World War I, ostracizing Germans and ostracizing Russians probably doesn't work. You need to bring them back into the family of nations, because they're on the planet. They're not leaving the planet. And the generous peace with Germany—look at them. They're the most wonderful allies, as are the Japanese. They're terrific.

15. Soviet proxies in foreign politics

During the Cold War, the USSR is constantly funding these communist parties around the world, and these parties are doing exactly their bidding. Whatever Stalin says, they'll do.

I don't know about that.

Yeah. Feel free to clarify, but it doesn't feel like any other country managed to pull this off. There's not an American party in the French parliament that does exactly what the president would tell them to do. How did they pull this off?

I don't think it's that they did exactly what anyone wanted. What the Communists have is a really powerful doctrine for how you go from nothing to something in a failing state, how you start out with a bunch of people on some campus. Mao literally starts out as a junior librarian at Peking University. So I don't know, he's there with the librarians—I don't know, the ladies. Who knows what it is? It's probably guys in those days.

And then he's turning these people into cadres, eventually into guerrillas, and eventually into a conventional army. But they have a really good program that works the world over, and it's very effective for taking power within a broken state. It's lousy at producing prosperity thereafter.

Right. And you look at the Communist Party today: they're really good at staying in power. For a while there, under Deng Xiaoping, it ran in parallel—what the economic reforms needed to be to produce wealth and what the Party needed in order to be more powerful. But now that's running at cross-purposes, because for the Party to maintain its monopoly, all these much more educated Chinese aren't going to be interested in that anymore. And so it's time to lock those people up. And then you're going to have trouble keeping your economic growth rate going.

Mao dies, and immediately things improve. China experiences its growth trajectory. Stalin dies, and Khrushchev is not a teddy bear, but at least you cut down the Gulag system. And so it does seem like if you have an especially bad dictator, you do have this sort of regression to the mean, where the next guy's probably not as bad as the worst guy who's ever been in charge of the country. And I wonder if that implies that, if we got rid of Kim Jong Un or the Ayatollah or something, the next guy probably won't be as bad.

I don't know. But I think iconic leaders like Mao and Stalin were canonized by winning their wars—Stalin by winning World War II. The Russians revered him for doing that, and they had experienced it. Every Russian experienced World War II. It was central to their lives to win that thing. So Stalin is canonized for doing that.

And now the man who puts Humpty Dumpty back together again when no one else could, and then fights the great powers—the capitalist powers—to a stalemate in Korea, he's again been canonized. Whoever comes after them is not going to have that level of prestige. It's just going to devolve. Period.

And then, for the successors of Stalin, they were sick of being terrified about whether they were going to be purged. He kept putting bullets in people's heads, like Vladimir Putin. You do this long enough that people are horrified and don't want to have it. They don't want to live that way anymore. So there's that piece of it as well.

I guess I'm not sure what the answer is today. If you found out tomorrow that Putin is dead, is your estimation that things are going to improve or get worse?

My estimation in that kind of system is there's going to be a leadership struggle. That's the problem with dictatorships: they're absolutely brittle. And that's what's wonderful about having elections. Every 4 years or whatever it is, you have an election. Whoever it is, it's going to be whatever it is.

But in these dictatorships, no one knows. Stalin, literally, I think he didn't show up at breakfast. No one wanted to open the door. And then probably they decided, “Let's not open the door. Let's just let that door stay shut for a few days.” And then, when it starts stinking, “Well, no, perfect.” So you're going to be guaranteed a free-for-all.

So if there's a free-for-all over something like Ukraine, they will probably have to call that off because they've got to focus on Moscow. That's what happened with the Korean War. When Stalin dies, the Russians want it over because they've got all kinds of unrest. Various prisons in their own gulags are having riots. They're having, I think, some unrest in Bulgaria, maybe East Germany as well. They've got problems.

So they don't want to deal with the Korean War anymore. Who cares? Forget about it. So that would be guaranteed, which might be highly beneficial for Ukraine. But knowing Putin, he's an evil man. He'll probably stick around forever.

As you're discussing this Cold War history, how close did we get to a nuclear bomb? Some people argue that there were all these “close-miss incidents.” It basically should have happened, almost, in the sense of the odds. And some people say it wasn't going to happen—MAD had worked; it wasn't going to happen. Why would they risk a first strike?

It's a miracle we're here. I think in the Cuban Missile Crisis, it came down to a Soviet submarine captain. They had the political commissar and the military commissar. I have to reread this, but I don't know whether you needed a vote of 2 out of 3 to launch a nuclear weapon or whether 1 guy was senior and you had to get him to come along. I have to read the data.

But basically, someone put their foot down in the Soviet sub and refused to launch a nuke. Okay, we lucked out of that one. And then I think under Reagan there was an Able Archer exercise, or we were doing a war game or something, and the Russians looked at it and thought it was the real thing for a while. And that just scared the bejesus out of them.

And I think it was after that that Ronald Reagan started moderating his rhetoric. Whoa, you don't want to have them on the edge like this.

This is not going to be beneficial. So it was quite close. The advantage in the Cold War is that all our leaders, all the way through Bush Sr., were veterans of World War I. In one way or another, they had served—some of them on the battle line, like Bush Sr. had, and others near enough that they understood how dangerous it was.

And like all the Soviet leaders, Brezhnev and all those people had seen all sorts of people get butchered. So they were cautious in a way I don't think Vladimir Putin is.

Going back to the lecture, if it's true that you can't get primary adversaries to be friends with each other, and if you want to be friends with one of them, you're going to make enemies of the other one, the world is full of people who are enemies with each other. Does that mean that, at once, America can only be friends with half the world? And it's got to be, anyways, with the half that this half hates?

With India and Pakistan, it was so intense because of Partition, because so many people died. And it was recent—1947. So you wouldn't expect those animosities to die down. And also, there were new states trying to establish their legitimacy. So that was particularly difficult.

I don't know that most countries in the world necessarily want to kill all of their neighbors. And then you can look at things: forever, Britain and France were going at it, and then Germany became the primary problem between World War I and World War II. So then Britain is teaming up with France, its former primary enemy, and that whole problem goes away.

And then you have the generous peace after World War II. Not World War I—World War I was not a generous peace. And also, we have the mismanaged Great Depression that allows fascists to rise all over the place. But after World War II, generosity to the Germans—it's over.

Look at Europe. If you study European history, they're all trying to butcher each other for centuries. And then they realize, what a waste. Let's just trade and play by the rules.

Should we have cut off Lend-Lease aid to Stalin after 1943, when it's obvious that—

Bad idea.

—when it's obvious that they're winning against the Germans? If you'd done that, then they would have stopped advancing as fast in Eastern Europe. Is that what you're thinking? No, no. More of Europe could have been free earlier on.

No, because you're assuming that World War II was not a closely run thing. I think it's a much more closely run thing than you think. And no one is sure of how it's going to turn out. Everyone knows that if it goes longer, more of my kids are dying. So there's no way you are going to cut aid to the army that's fighting World War II.

All right, here's a concept for you. There's a main theater in the war. How do I know what the main theater is? That's where most of the people fighting are. That's the main front—the main theater. So you all think that the Normandy invasion was a big deal.

No, that is a peripheral operation. It is peripheral to the main theater. And if the Russians hadn't been doing Operation Bagration, this big operation that coincides with Normandy, no way would we ever have gotten onto the continent. And that's in 1944. So cutting Lend-Lease aid? Insane.

But you're eliminating the problem of fascism until people have forgotten what fascism meant. But you're left with the problem of communism.

By that same logic, look, the main theater in the Pacific War was in China, where most of the fighting was happening. Our Lend-Lease aid to Chiang Kai-shek was 1% to 2% of what we were sending to Stalin. In today's dollars, we sent Stalin $1 trillion worth of aid—just tremendous amounts of supplies—which he used to then install a communist totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.

If he had sent a fraction of that aid to Chiang Kai-shek and helped us with the Japanese, maybe he would still be in power. We wouldn't have to fight as much.

We couldn't get it in. If you want to deliver Lend-Lease, this is a problem in World War I. Why did Russia fall in World War I? Why would you ever let that happen? There's no way to get the aid in because Russia hadn't built its Murmansk Railway, which goes way up north, and it hadn't completed the Trans-Siberian Railway.

It didn't do those things until the Murmansk Railway in early 1917 and the Trans-Siberian in 1916. That's right before the Tsar falls. And so we couldn't aid Russia in World War I. It falls for lack of arms.

And then the blockade that the Japanese implemented was really effective. So to get aid in, you need railways and you need ports. The Japanese had covered all that, and they owned all the railway systems. So the only way we could get stuff in was by flying over the Hump, the Himalayas.

Okay, so you're going to fly in aviation fuel, plus the airplanes, and then you're going to try to bomb Japan from China. Imagine flying in aviation fuel. It's a nonstarter.

And I think the best argument you can make on that is that, rather than getting Chiang Kai-shek to do the Burma campaign in 1943–44—and he was dead against it—you let him keep all that equipment, whatever you got over the Hump, instead of sending it over to Burma, which, it turns out, was strategically irrelevant in this war. Let him keep everything.

Because when the Japanese try to do Operation Ichi-Go, it's their biggest offensive of the war. They're going right down through central China because the United States is cutting off so much of their maritime supply. They want to be able to have railways all the way through central China.

Anyway, Chiang Kai-shek gets wrecked in that. Maybe if more of the equipment had been available to him, maybe he would have been in better shape to put on a better showing in the civil war. He also wouldn't have looked to the Chinese people like a serial loser.

And it's not his fault. It's because he's an unindustrialized country trying to deal with the Japanese, whom we found very difficult to fight. So why wouldn't he find them difficult?

But we kept Lend-Lease going even after Berlin had fallen. Even after the first atomic bomb was dropped, only then did Stalin break the non-aggression pact with Japan and invade Manchuria. So he basically had no moral right to Manchuria. It was the Chinese who had been doing all the fighting, and he gets Manchuria.

We should have stopped Lend-Lease by then, right?

I think we stopped it very rapidly at the end of the war. So, yeah, the British were appalled at how rapidly the Lend-Lease aid stopped because they desperately needed it—they'd been wrecked by the war.

So, yeah, we did cut it off. But you definitely want Nazi Germany gone, and you want to keep supporting Russia until that happens.

Can I try another idea on you?

Yeah.

It seems like one of the big achievements of modernity is that we get countries to stop caring about history. The idea is, look, if you hear people talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on both sides, they'll go back 2,000 or 3,000 years about who has rights. In the Tucker Carlson interview, Putin was talking about things that happened in 500 BC.

So the big achievement is just, look, the past is the past. Whatever the borders are right now, we're going to enforce those. We don't care who claims to have rights to it because of what happened in the 1700s or something.

That is modern international law. And I don't know—you'd have to be a lawyer, probably a lawyer who actually knows when modern international law begins. But certainly, by the time you're getting through the World Wars, we're in modern international law.

And that's the problem with what Putin is doing in Ukraine: they signed multiple times, at the breakup of the Soviet Union and afterward, recognizing what Ukraine's borders were, and they're violating all of that.

Well, have fun with it, because the Chinese can play that game in reverse on Siberia, and we'll see how happily that one ends.

But I think there is a realization that these disputes go back forever. It's like musical chairs: we're now freezing whatever chair you're in. That's it. And that's modern international law.

And it turns out that those countries that focus on territory, ripping it off from someone else—it's negative-sum. You're going to fight over it, you're going to destroy it in the process, whatever.

And the Europeans are a great example to us all of just calling it a day. Let everybody travel, go get a rental property somewhere, and run your businesses. You really don't need to own Luxembourg or whatever it is. What a hassle. You want to offload their crazy domestic problems anyway and just run your transactions.

This is the miracle of the rules-based order. It is the only way to have rapid, compounded growth. And you go, well, how's it possible that China had this rapid growth for a while? And their dictatorship—how'd that work?

It's because they had the growth when they cooperated with the international order, when they rejoined the family of nations. Yeah, that's when they prospered. Now Xi Jinping is going to do a U-turn on that. Have fun.

The real motivation for the CCP is to keep itself in power. It's not a democratic system. And if keeping yourself in power doesn't align with making your country rich and therefore staying in the international order—if that is a correct mental model—then what's the pitch to Xi? Why should he abide by the international order?

Because we want him to abide by the international order, right? And if the idea is, like, well, “It's not going to work out for you”—I don't think it will work out for him or for the Chinese people. That's not a great sales pitch.

Yeah, but there are things that you just cannot convince other people. Another key thing in strategy is that you can have a very worthy goal, but you need to look at it carefully and go, “Is it feasible?” I don't think it's feasible to make Xi Jinping change his mind, because he's of a particular background and this is what he believes. And he has a whole bunch of other Chinese people around him who believe the same thing.

And we're going into a second Cold War. It's going to be a long wait till they change their mind. If you think about Gorbachev's generation, they decided—Gorbachev said over and over again—“We cannot live like this anymore.” The realization was that their standard of living was lousy compared to the West. So clearly, they needed to reform and do things. But that was his decision and his generation's decision to reassess and do something else.

It's going to be a long wait until the Chinese reassess or the Russians reassess. So then you have to think about protecting yourself and working with allies—your friends.

In the first Cold War, the Sino-Soviet split—getting China to oppose the Soviet Union—was a big deal in terms of winning that war. Who plays the role that China played in the first Cold War against China?

Oh, they still play. It's interesting.

So Putin has lost Russia. The Soviet Union fractured at precisely the time that China's rising. During the Cold War, China's really weak and Russia's in the dominant position. Well, I guess that's reversed.

So Putin is dumping all his ordnance on Ukraine, his Cold War stockpile, and he is leaving Siberia open—wide open—to Chinese predations. And I believe Siberia has precisely the resources that China covets, on lands the tsars stole. I think there's a big body of water out there called Lake Baikal. It's 20% of the world's surface freshwater. China is chronically short of fresh water in North China. Baikal is the only fix, and I think it's flat enough that you could pipe it around.

So I don't think the question is whether. It's not a question of whether the Xi–Putin bromance is going to end; it's when. And I assure you, the Chinese will pick the moment that is least convenient for Putin. You think they'd actually go to war about it, or would they just negotiate?

Oh, I bet it'll be a negotiation. You get them in a corner and say, “Okay, buddy, this is what we want. This, this, this, this.” And then he'll want some things from them and—

Sounds like what Zhou Enlai tried to do to Nehru. It didn't work out.

What do you mean? Zhou Enlai absolutely got the Aksai Chin plateau. Yeah, he offered the deal to Nehru. Nehru wouldn't take it. It's like, okay. I don't think, since they both have nuclear weapons, that kind of play is probably the play to make. But as long as Putin's desperate for whatever—for ordnance and other things—Putin's getting himself into a grand old corner.

You wrote a textbook about Chinese history from 1644 onwards. In Silicon Valley, there's this community called Progress Studies, and they're very interested in why the Industrial Revolution happened, how to increase growth, and what the history of progress has been like.

One big question is, why didn't China have the Industrial Revolution first, in 1750? They had a much higher fraction of the population, a much higher fraction of world output during this period. Why didn't they have higher growth rates and come up with all these technologies?

Well, there are whole books on the subject that I haven't read that look into this. But I would flip it around and go, well, the Industrial Revolution starts in Europe. That's the unusual thing. So the question isn't why China didn't, but why Europe did. And I have some guesses. There are very thoughtful books on this subject, and you can go find them and have fun reading them.

But if you look at Europe, it's a peninsula, and then it's got the Mediterranean there. They've got quite a very good river system—the Danube, the Rhine, and the Ruhr, all these different rivers. And so there has always been a lot of trade going on.

No one's ever been able to make a big empire in Europe stick. The Romans did quite well for quite a bit of time. Napoleon tried—not so good. The Nazis—not so good at all. And I guess the French tried on and off, and it didn't succeed. So you have all of these competing countries.

I think a lot of that was essential to the Industrial Revolution: focusing on commerce and having a lot of competing places. So you don't have 1 big empire that can just sit there, be fat, dumb, and happy. You have to innovate in order to survive against all these other little states.

Earlier, talking about how in North Africa or other regions there's been a bunch of chaos because people are constantly fighting—there are these insurgencies, these civil wars, these smaller wars happening all the time—and that causes chaos. But if you look at Europe throughout this period, these countries are constantly at war with each other. And the fact that no big empire forms apparently helps explain the Industrial Revolution.

So it seems to imply that we should see a bunch of growth in North Africa or something.

It's a tremendous innovation. And look at things long prior, like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. It's just a lot of these really bright people. Oh, yeah, my guess is it's related to all of this.

And I think the Industrial Revolution doesn't begin in England. The Industrial Revolution isn't strictly industry. Yeah, it's about textiles and steam engines and railroads and things, but it's also about institutions.

One of the big things for the British was insurance, so that when your trading vessel—the whole thing—sinks, you don't bankrupt all your investors because you've got that boat insured. And then banking rules, so you can't just rip off everybody's cash.

Britain, because it's surrounded by the moat, becomes a banking center. Because it's unlikely in a war to have some alien army come and just open all the vaults and take everyone's money. So there are these institutional things.

And then the British—trading countries like the Dutch Republic—want to be able to trade in peace. So they want people to just follow laws. It's not surprising that the founding father of international law was a member of the Dutch Empire: Hugo Grotius.

And so it's all a piece. It's this gravitation. The Romans are gravitating toward law and institutions, and then these competing places mean no one controls everything. I think the question is, what's special about Europe, rather than why it should have been somewhere else?

What's mysterious about China is not only that it doesn't have the Industrial Revolution first, but that its development starts so slowly. Japan copies Western institutions during the Meiji Reformation and industrializes almost a century before China is able to do the same thing. And look, they're communists for a while, so it makes sense that during the Mao period or during the civil war, that would impede development.

But even during the Qing dynasty or something, it takes till 1980 for them to start development. That just seems awfully slow.

Well, communism is a really lousy system. So they did that. In the 19th century, they had all these peasant rebellions where they were literally losing tens of millions of people, just devastating the country. So that's why the 19th century is a lost century, with all of that going on.

So it's hard. And then there's another piece that's hard for the Chinese. If you've been such a successful civilization in Asia the way they had been, they were the center of everything: culturally, in science, governmental institutions—you name the area of human achievement, and the Chinese were at the top of it all in Asia.

With that kind of success, it's pretty hard to reform yourself. And so they also fed themselves the Kool-Aid that the Chinese never absorbed foreign ideas; it was always foreigners absorbing their ideas. And of course, that's nonsense, because they were conquered by the Manchus and actually absorbed a lot of Manchu institutions. But that's not the story they're telling.

Whereas the Japanese are well aware they're absorbing Chinese institutions originally and Western institutions later, and so that isn't antithetical to who the Japanese are.

That's interesting. The past civilizational greatness may be an impediment to development.

Yeah, it's hard. Well, also because of the way they define civilization: there's only 1; everybody else are barbarians. People come and kowtow to China. Okay, great. But this doesn't set you up to learn from others.

16. Bismark’s cunning

One of the big dichotomies you talk about is the difference between limited and total objectives. How does Bismarck illustrate the value of having limited objectives?

Limited and unlimited objectives? Yeah, Bismarck does illustrate what an unlimited objective is. The simplest way to look at it is regime change. So if I have an unlimited objective against you, I win the war and you're going to be out of power, versus I win the war and, yeah, you lose a province, but you'll be in power.

So what Bismarck does—he's very clever. Well, he's operating in an age of kings. And actually, his achievements illustrate why you truly don't need royal families running the show. It's breathtakingly incompetent.

Initially, he fights the Danish War, so that's way up north, and it's over these 2 provinces. And he wants to set his fingers on the scale of the more northerly province, because then that'll give him the rights to march troops, I think, through the more southerly one to cause problems later.

So war number 1 is the Danish War. No one thinks too much about it. Prussia gets an extra province that was part of Denmark. No big deal.

But then he fights the Austro-Prussian War, and what he's after is that there are all these little Germanic states, and Austria had dominated a bunch of them. In that war, as a result of it, he collects a whole bunch of these other states, and no one is really paying attention that he's actually upending the balance of power in Europe.

They're just looking at it as limited. He's not toppling the Austrian government; he's not toppling the Danish government. And then he fights the Franco-Prussian War, where he takes Alsace-Lorraine, which are these provinces—if you look at it, it's like a salient into one country or the other. He takes that, and the French never forgive him. That leads into World War I later.

But by the time it's over, he's overthrown the balance of power in Europe. All of a sudden, Germany—Prussia, which was the weakest of the 5 great powers—suddenly has a central position. It owns the Germanic states; it owns the whole thing.

And Britain and others, who'd been asleep at the switch, are like, “Ooh.” They could have weighed in on the scale at any point in these things to alter outcomes, and they didn't. There's a real reason why the people who are losing out here are all monarchies. There's a reason why you don't want to have people inherit offices: they don't tend to be very good at it.

Actually, so World War I—I'm not sure how you explain World War I using limited and—sorry, was it ultimate objectives?

It's limited or—well, they're different. It's useful in warfare to think about limited versus unlimited objectives. So if you look at Ukraine today, Putin has one of the most unlimited kinds of objectives for Ukraine. He not only wants to topple the Ukrainian government, but he wants to eliminate Ukrainian culture.

And if you look up genocide in the dictionary, genocide can mean kill everybody, but it can also mean destroy their culture. That also applies to genocide. So Putin has a very unlimited objective.

Kyiv, on the other hand, does not have an unlimited objective. I mean, as much as they'd like Putin to go, they just want Russia to get out of Ukraine. Just get out of Ukrainian territory; stay in Russia. That's their objective. So the Ukrainians have a limited objective. Putin has an unlimited objective.

Yeah. In World War I, I mean, maybe other than the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there's—Germany doesn't have an unlimited objective with respect to France or Russia.

No, it doesn't. But it still devolves into this: 10 million people die.

It doesn't. Although the effect on Russia is to overthrow the government. In fact, it winds up overthrowing 1 government after another. I think as that war goes on, and as you lose a lot of people, then the objectives become more unlimited.

Whereas originally it was just, “Get back into German territory.” After a while, it's, “No, we want to overthrow your government for doing this.”

On a different topic: your name is Sarah Paine?

Yeah.

When I go on Amazon and I find your books, they're not listed as Sarah Paine; they're listed under the author S. C. M. Paine.

That's correct.

Why is that?

Well, it's interesting. When I first started out, I just wanted my books to be read for what the content of the book was. I didn't want them to be read based on whether I was male or female. Just read it for being a book.

And then when the first reviews came out, it was “he, he, he, he, he, he, he.” And this was by Americans doing this. And I thought, “Wow. I guess the idea—because I wasn't doing women's history, and this was a serious topic—that women don't do serious topics.”

So I guess I'm glad I did it. It looks like I'm a Briton, right? Because Britons love all the initials.

17. Training US officers

And then why do I have all the initials? It's because my dad named all—from his side of the family—my 3 older brothers, and there's me. And my mom felt that some names from her family ought to be dumped on me. Since there were 3 older brothers anyway, she had a lot of extra names going around. So she gave them to me, and I had no say in this.

When you're training these officers in the U.S. Naval War College—you've done it over many decades—has the quality of the people you're training improved or decreased over time? What's your class been like?

They're wonderful people. And also, I don't look at people linearly. It's a classroom; it has wonderful people in there. They're the next generation, and I will do everything I can for every single one of them to catapult them as far forward as I possibly can. So that's what it is.

Do other countries have some equivalent of the Naval War College, where they have this professional cadre of historians and strategists who are going through the archives, trying to figure out insights for current leaders?

Oh, not all my colleagues publish much of anything. So it varies. The Naval War College has always had a few very A-list people. And the most famous person by far ever to work there is Alfred Thayer Mahan, and he's a 19th-century figure—well, he dies in the early 20th century.

But he's the guy who, when the United States had been doing Manifest Destiny—a continental paradigm, because we're expanding, taking territory all the way to the Pacific—says, “Hmm, you know, power and position in the world really is about trade.” And he writes these enduring books that have lasted to the present.

So there are these occasional people like Alfred Thayer Mahan who are very special. And as for some cadre of anybody's, we're just professors. We teach mid-level and senior officers.

And then most of them never become flag rank, with the kind of leaders you're thinking about. So, I mean, I've talked to the occasional flag officer, but I'm just a minion.

So you started in Soviet studies, and you found yourself in the Soviet Union during its fall in ’88 and ’89. Why was that the field you started in?

I grew up during the height of the Cold War and listened to family dinnertime conversations all about it. And then you listened to people describing the Russians as being totally evil. And I thought, well, I’ll learn more about this. I’m curious.

And then I realized, whoa, it’s just unbelievable how cruel the Russians have been to each other and others. It’s like they’re a class by themselves. I don’t make it up. So the question is, why? I wanted to learn more about it.

And then in history, you do a minor field as well. I think the typical minor field for Russian history would be French or German. And I thought, “No, I want to learn about China.” I was just curious. And then I learned about China and realized that Russia and China have relations. But then Japan always weighs in, so I had to learn more about Japan. That’s where all of that led.

I also thought, I don’t want to be studying the United States. That’s where I’m from, and I want to learn about other countries. My presumption is that my bias would be pretty bad about the United States, or there would be things I wouldn’t see. I thought, I’m going to study other places because I don’t have any family ties. I mean, I’m not a descendant of Russian, Chinese, or Japanese immigrants, obviously. So these are places that I’m not related to. I was just curious.

What is the answer to that? You said you were trying to figure out why the Russians have been so cruel to each other through history, and then especially, I guess, after the Communist Revolution. Why is it?

18. Cruelty in Russian history

I don’t know the answer, but I know—I’ve just recently read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I should have read it years ago, when it came out, but I didn’t. So I finally read it. And if you read that, look at the level of cruelty. It’s mind-blowing.

It isn’t simply that the prisoners are mean to each other, or that the prison guards are mean to the prisoners, or that the guards are mean to each other. All that’s true. And it’s not simply that the civilians outside of the Gulag are mean to everybody. It’s family members who are mean to people who are in the Gulag, and the neighbors are mean to the family members who have anyone in the Gulag. And you start looking and going, who’s not being mean in this place? They’re all being mean.

Then you look at—I haven’t got the list of all the words—but I was reading a lot of Russian stuff last winter and maintaining a list of words in Russian. “Sila” means strength or coercion in Russia. In English, strength doesn’t mean coercion; it just means having power. But in Russian, it also means coercion.

Or détente: it comes from the French, which means a relaxation of pressure. The Russian word for détente means unloading a gun. So if you look at their language, it’s so coercive.

I think probably if you’re living in a really dangerous piece of real estate, which they are, with no defensible boundaries, you’re always fighting people. Their answer to surviving that is to be meaner than anybody else. They just do scorched-earth. You mess with them, they kill everybody, and they just don’t care.

We have the modern world now, where we can deal with each other with international law, so none of that stuff is necessary. But the Russians have not pulled from that tradition. You can read in the newspaper how absolutely cruel they are to their men in service. They don’t allow any of them to retreat. They’ve got the execution battalions behind them, so any kid who turns around is immediately murdered by their compatriots.

Who treats their own people like this? Russians do, but other people don’t. I mean, Solzhenitsyn talks in that part about how this is the direct result of the Communist regime’s policy: if somebody’s an orphan because their parents went to the Gulag, and you try to help the orphan, you must be a sympathizer for the criminals, and therefore you must also be sent to the Gulag.

So you have these orphans running around whose parents have been sent away. A lot of the orphans were put into orphanages, and then they wound up being set up to join the KGB in other places. So they were probably some of the execution battalion people. I don’t know the details, but there’s some of that going on.

The cruelty in Russia was remarked upon by Europeans who were traveling there in, I don’t know, the 17th century. So it goes back a long time, this level of cruelty. Peter the Great, back in the day, tortured his son to death. Who does that? He didn’t have a replacement son either, unlike Stalin.

Final question: this new project you’re doing on the Cold War, is it going to be a book? How will it come out?

Slowly. I’ve been working on it for years. It’ll be a culmination of previous research. It starts in 1917 and will end in 1991-ish.

Why 1917?

We may not have noticed that these crazy Communists in Russia were serious, but they did declare war on the capitalist order. It is really clear. The documentation is just there. They were trying to fund people to overthrow governments in Europe and all around the world immediately. This is in the 1910s, and then certainly in the 1920s.

They weren’t remotely powerful enough to do it, but they were like a Maoist phase-one insurgency, where people aren’t paying attention. They’re below the radar. They’re doing stuff.

It’s going to look at all the strategies that the Russians played, that we played, what medium powers played, what worked, and what didn’t. It’s going to be organized around concepts to understand these things.

On one level, if I can do it right, it’ll be a history of the Cold War from one year to another year. So there’s that, and then there’s another one about strategy.

People are trying to achieve objectives, and they’re trying different things and integrating different elements of national power. So it’ll be that. What I’ve found helpful in my own career are these concepts, like limited and unlimited war, primary adversary, primary theater, frozen conflict, or veto player. I find these things helpful, and so I’m going to put as many of those things in there as possible.

I’m of a certain age, so it’s passing the baton to the next generation. To say, this is what I’ve managed to figure out as I go putt-putt-putt, reading in archives, and then others can skim it and see if there’s anything worthwhile. If not—I tried, right?

I hope you’ll come back on the podcast once the book is ready.

Thank you.