Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Sarah  Paine. She is a professor of strategy and policy  

at the Naval War College and she has written  some of the best military history I've ever read.  

We're going to get into history, strategy,  and all kinds of interesting topics today. 

My first question, does grand strategy  as a concept make sense? While you have  

these countries, the people making these  decisions are individuals and they have  

so many individual ambitions and desires and  constraints from internal politics to factions  

they have to appease. Does it make sense  to talk about countries having strategies? 

Before I get going, I have to make an obligatory  disclaimer. My views do not necessarily represent  

those of the US government, let alone the US Navy  department and much less the place where I work,  

the US Naval War College. Okay, now  that that's over, on to grand strategy. 

Yeah, it is useful. I'm going to define grand  strategy as the integration of all relevant  

instruments of national power in the pursuit  of national objectives. If you think about  

modern governments in the West, they have  cabinets and they sit before the president.  

Those cabinet portfolios represent the different  instruments of national power. Can you imagine  

trying to run foreign policy without having  those people at your table and coordinating? 

If you look at countries that have  not coordinated all instruments,  

for instance, Japan in World War Two versus Japan  during the prior period of the Meiji Restoration,  

by the time the Japanese got into World War Two,  they were really prioritizing the Army and the  

Navy too, but the military was their main  instrument of national power. They were not  

coordinating with civilians. They assassinated  those people and got into deep, dark trouble.  

They didn't listen to their finance minister  who told them it was unaffordable. So yes,  

grand strategy is absolutely necessary. If you have national objectives like you  

want to improve your own security or you want  to improve trade then you need to think about  

all of these different instruments of national  power and how you're going to coordinate. Those  

who don't coordinate get into deep, dark trouble. Right. So maybe having a coherent grand strategy  

is the ideal but if we want to understand history  maybe it’s more useful to talk about factions and  

individuals? A previous guest, Richard Rhodes,  who wrote the Making of the Atomic Bomb, talked  

about how after the war, the different branches of  the military were competing with each other to see  

who would get more funding  and who had access to nuclear  

weapons was a big part of that and how many. If throughout history we see lots of competition  

between the different parts of the government  in ways that explain their choices, for example,  

in the case of Japan, why they invaded China  instead of pursuing a maritime strategy,  

then isn't it more useful to just talk about  the factions and the individuals rather than  

the strategy of the country? I think it's the  

individuals making their arguments for what they  think the strategy should be. I'll give you an  

excellent example of how the sausage was made. I was perusing the Eisenhower archives a number  

of years ago. So here's the Allied Commander from  World War II, then President of the United States,  

and what he would do is bring in all the relevant  parties to whatever the decision is. He would  

have them recommend various courses of action and  they would offer arguments and counter arguments,  

and then they would hash it out and  come up with some kind of combination  

of all or choosing one of them. Yeah, there's going to be a big  

debate. People are going to have all kinds  of different ideas. In fact this is one of  

the great strengths of democracy. You have to  listen to the counter argument or the counter  

argument is called “you lose the election”  and the other party is in. But the notion  

that you're going to streamline it and not have  disagreements, that's what dictators do and they  

have problems.They double down on bad decisions. Yeah, that's actually one of the questions I  

eventually wanted to ask you. In World War II,  we see that many of the countries had really  

well coordinated and apportioned budgets  spread between their different branches.  

And in the case of Japan, they didn't. Is democracy the answer for why the U.S.  

and Britain were better coordinated? Part of it. And I think part of it is  

a different issue. If you think about who the  strategic leaders of World War II were, they  

were the conscripts of World War I. Think  about people slightly younger than you,  

maybe your age as well, if they survive to come  off that front, then they come back and they want  

to start families. It's the Great Depression. It's  terribly difficult. And when they get to the age  

where they're going to be strategic leaders, they  have the harm of sending their own children in.  

So they thought deeply about what had gone wrong  in World War I. This is in the West, particularly  

Britain and the United States. And their answer  was institution building on a massive scale  

and integrating all elements of national power.  This is when you've had the National Security  

Act passed in the United States, setting up  all kinds of organizations like the National  

Security Council, United Nations, NATO and  all manner of things. A lot of it is coming  

off of the horrific war that was World War I  and then doing a better job in World War II. 

You would think that the victors of a war would be  the ones whose perception of reality is the most  

inflated, whereas the losers are the ones  who have to come to terms with why they lost,  

whereas we see the opposite. The U.S. had  such good leadership like Patton and Curtis  

LeMay and there are so many great generals  that came out of that time. Whereas in Germany,  

Hitler himself fought in World War I so it's  hard to explain why he made so many mistakes. 

Initially, Hitler did incredibly well. His  Blitzkrieg was incredible. If he had stopped with  

the Anschluss, where he gets Austria and is going  to take Czechoslovakia, and said, “Oh, I'm uniting  

the German people.” he would have gotten away  with it and probably be considered a brilliant  

leader by Germans. But then, hubris, right? The  Blitzkrieg worked so well, his generals told him  

he couldn't do it, but of course it worked,  and then he goes further and overextends. 

When you look at what you think are great generals  on the Western side, they are great generals but  

their success has to do with a whole lot of  other people. If we hadn't broken the codes,  

which the British and the Poles helped us  do with the various Enigma machines, would  

it have turned out the same? If you don't have  Henry Ford, who's turning his cars into tanks,  

and the people who built the Liberty ships,  would it have been the same? If you do not  

have scientists doing the Manhattan Project,  would it have been the same? Think about the  

enormous mobilization within the United States,  where Americans are all on board and in Britain  

and all over. So when you go, “Ah, Patton.”  he actually has a whole civilian architecture  

behind him. We tend to personify it as  the general. It ain't so. It's everybody. 

You mention that if Hitler had  stopped, I guess in 1939, after he had  

expanded the borders of Germany beyond where they  had ever been in history, I want your opinions on  

what is the latest at which he could have stopped,  and maybe not avoided war, but at least solidified  

and consolidated the biggest possible empire? Various options could be… one is just after  

1939. What if he invades Poland with the  Soviet Union, but he doesn't invade Russia  

after or declare war on the United States,  and maybe at some point negotiates a peace  

with Britain. Would that have been possible?  Or what about after the fall of France? Then  

he could have just controlled all of Europe. A, I don't know. But B, I think he could make  

the ploy — I'm just a continuation of Bismarck.  I'm fighting these limited wars. I’m uniting the  

German people. That one he might have been  able to sell and quit after Anschluss. The  

moment he's going into genocide against the  Poles we are off to a different race because  

Poland is why Britain gets into the war. Right but is that a race he could have  

won or at least settled? In that, maybe if it  wasn't for Churchill and Britain is just like,  

“You know what, we'll just let Hitler  have Europe.” and then he doesn't go to  

war with America. Is it possible that there's  a world in which Hitler just controls Europe? 

I think the problem with your question is  that it’s just not who Hitler was. He wrote  

in Mein Kampf exactly what he wanted to do and  that what you're describing is not what he's  

about. If he were about combining with the  West and taking parts of the Soviet Union,  

maybe? But that's not what he's about. He has  this whole genocidal program that goes with him. 

There's another issue is that if you take  too much, like if you're going to go kill  

off the Poles, the Poles never give up. The  Poles went through three partitions over  

their history but the Polish identity never  disappeared. If you do that, it never goes  

away. You will never have stable borders and  then it's easy for others to fund insurgencies  

because you have this dominated population  that hates being dominated. It's not stable. 

Then suppose that before Stalingrad, he had  stopped. At that point didn't he control like  

30% of the Soviet Union? He'll never hold it.  

He'll choke on his acquisitions. Ah. Did Germany have the power under another  

leader to just hold that whole section of Eurasia? All right. I'm going to flip this whole argument.  

You're talking about people doing territorial  conquest and taking things and butchering enormous  

numbers of people to get it. You can watch this in  real time in Ukraine. This is how it goes — You're  

butchering a lot of people. You're destroying  wealth at an incredibly rapid clip. You can do  

that but since the Industrial Revolution in the  West, there has been a growing consensus that  

that's probably not the way to do things. We are  far better at crafting international institutions,  

international laws, treaties that we sign  on to, the parts that we want to and then  

we adhere to them. And then that allows  us to go all over the world running our  

little credit card transactions. No one kills  us and you can make a lot of wealth doing that. 

Since the Industrial Revolution, who's making  all the money? People who buy into that system.  

Territorial expansion isn’t the way. It's a real  throwback to a pre-Industrial Revolution way  

of managing your national security. This is how  traditional continental empires always did it. The  

Industrial Revolution with compounding economic  growth, offers a completely different alternative,  

which says we're going to compound our wealth by  having rules that we can all adhere to. And then  

we'll run our commercial transactions that way. Why was Russia eventually so robust in pushing  

back against the Germans? Despite  losing tens of millions of soldiers,  

the government doesn't collapse like the Tsars did  in World War I. And not only that, but a communist  

country is able to produce really advanced  tanks in large and reliable numbers. There  

are so many mysteries there like why did central  planning work? Why didn't the government collapse?  

Despite the fact that Stalin killed off so many  of his people. He would have been hated, right? 

Ah, but Hitler killed more and was more  hated. What you're thinking about is what  

did the Russians do? I'm going to  flip it. What did the Germans do? 

A useful concept comes from the Samuel  Griffith' translation of Sun Tzu, which  

talks about death ground. What's death ground?  It's when your enemy puts you on death ground,  

which means they're going to kill you, and  therefore, you have no choice but to fight,  

because if you don't fight, you're dead. And even  if you fight, your odds are poor, but at least  

that's the only way you're going to get out. The Ukrainians initially welcomed the Germans.  

Why? Because Stalin and friends had imposed  the terrible famine of the early 1930s  

on them. And they couldn't imagine that anything  would be worse than that until they met Nazis,  

who then had them dig their own mass graves.  The Ukrainians rethought that whole thing.  

And if you do this to people, you will conjure  a formidable enemy. So that's what happened to  

Russia. You can see it happening to Ukraine now  before your eyes. Go back before the invasion  

of Crimea in 2014. You've got Ukraine, which  has a very corrupt government and people were  

at sixes and sevens about whether they want  to do Ukrainian things or Russian things.  

Fast forward to now, where you have Russians  blowing away the people who were most loyal  

to them in the eastern part of the country.  Their apartment buildings are being leveled  

by Russians. Ukrainians think, “Aha. This idea  that we can coexist with these people is over.” 

The irony is Putin's forging Ukrainian national  identity and wars often do this. In the United  

States, we started out with our 13 colonies and  they're all very different but the Revolutionary  

War starts forging a national identity. And by  the time you get to the end of the Civil War,  

where you have northern armies, at least those  people have been all over the country. They have  

a real sense of nation by the end of that one. It's interesting because the strategy we pursued  

with Germany and Japan was unconditional  surrender. Obviously we didn't commit genocide  

or anything, but do you think of that as different  than the sort of total unlimited policy objectives  

that Germany had in Ukraine or Japan had in  China? We also pursued unconditional surrender  

against the South in the Civil War. How do you  think about that? Because that's also something  

where your back is up against the wall. Why  did that not result in the same kind of morale? 

Because the United States did not put the  people of these countries on death ground.  

The leadership had put themselves on death  ground. Basically the problem for Tojo Hideki  

is that if he backs down on anything, he's out  of office and then he doesn't know what happens  

after that. So he personally is on career death  ground and he thinks, and we were planning to,  

that he would get executed at the end of the war.  But the Japanese people eventually figured out  

that they weren't on death ground. In fact,  the Japanese people were so exhausted by the  

whole thing that the society shattered. The United States was never going to  

start massacring the German people in the  way that the Russians massacred the Poles  

when they moved in or the way the Germans  massacred the Poles. How do you wind up  

with eight or nine million Polish deaths in  World War II? Think about that. That's a large  

number. It’s because they're being massacred. But there was a firebombing of Tokyo, Dresde,  

and Berlin. I think it was in your book  that 84,000 people died in that one night  

of firebombing in Tokyo. Yes. It's terrible. 

Why did that not make them put them in the  mind frame of a sort of total death ground? 

A, I don't know, but B, Japan had been at war  since 1931 in China. They had been sending  

large armies. This isn't like recent U.S. wars,  the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Here they are sending hundreds of thousands of  troops to occupy Manchuria. The Chinese don't  

give up. It goes on and on and on. So by the time  you're getting to 1945, it's a long time. Also,  

they had committed atrocities in China and  they knew all about it. And the atrocities  

got even worse. When there were wounded Japanese  soldiers, their commanders ordered their fellow  

soldiers to execute them because they didn't want  cripples going home. They couldn't deal with them  

there. And so rather than have the allies pick  them up, they executed them in place. Can you  

imagine how Japanese soldiers felt about this? How then do we explain the famously high morale  

of the Japanese military, where they would  refuse to surrender even after given orders  

by their superiors? Despite knowing about  these things that you're talking about. 

Oh, it's true. It's because it's a  different culture. In Japanese culture,  

you belong to in-groups or out-groups. So the  biggest in-group that Japanese belonged to was  

Japanese people and everybody else. But within  Japan, you come from a province, a locality,  

etc. You go to school and get your education at  various places. You belong to a job wherever you  

are and there are various units within your job.  And you owe loyalty. It's obligation. In the West,  

it's all about liberties and my rights. In the  East, it's about obligations to other people. So  

you owe obligations to all of these organizations. When soldiers are thinking about war, they're not  

thinking about grand strategy. They're thinking  about operational success. In the west, the moment  

you as a soldier start losing a battle, you can  retreat and surrender and it's not dishonorable  

because you're going to live to fight another  day. In Japan, you're a failure. And therefore, if  

you come home back as a failed soldier, you bring  dishonor to yourself, your family, your locality,  

anyone you are associated with. So that's  why it is so difficult for them to surrender. 

However, by the time you get to the end of  the war, they are so exhausted. Their economy  

is something like a tenth of our economy. They  have something like a 13th of our coal or steel  

production. And they don't have any local oil  production. They're importers of food and they're  

not getting that food. So by the time you get to  ‘45, they're exhausted. And a shattering occurs. 

Finally, at the very end, you have Emperor  Hirohito, who knew full well earlier that he  

would be assassinated or proclaimed deranged  if he disagreed. And he had a perfectly good  

underage son to be used as a figurehead. He knew  that he couldn't do much about it. At the very  

end, when he decided he was about to get nuked,  that's when he intervened to break the deadlock  

at the cabinet meetings and there were a variety  of people at the very top who realized it's over. 

Could Hirohito have intervened earlier? I doubt it. 

Let's go back more than five years. If he  intervenes when Japan is overextending in China,  

is there any chance that he could have succeeded? I doubt he thought of Japan overextending in  

China. What expertise does he have? He likes  guppies. He likes studying fish in his backyard.  

He has no expertise. And then, of course, there's  the hubris of it all, that we're going to dominate  

this place. They look at the Chinese as an  absolutely feckless backward place. It's had all  

these warlord things going on and it doesn't dawn  on them that by their extreme brutality in China,  

the Chinese finally get it going. “We're not the  problem, the Japanese are the problem.” And it is  

what the Japanese do that superglues China  and is the great impetus to nation building.  

You can see parallels with Hitler doing the  same thing in Russia. And also right now,  

Putin's busy canonizing Zelensky and creating  a real nation out of Ukraine that's never  

going to forget these ongoing events. Something I learned from your book  

that I thought was really interesting, and  also tragic because of the counterfactual,  

was one of the strategies you suggested.  If Japan thought like a continental power,  

they could have allied with the Nationalists  to beat the Communists in Russia, maybe waged a  

three-front war with Germany and the Nationalists.  And then Japan beat the Communists and prevented  

the Communists from taking hold in China. Given  the consequences of communism in Russia and China  

and how many lives could have been saved if  Hitler was beaten and then the Communists are  

beaten. That Japanese choice just seems so tragic. Let's say they do it. That means Hitler forever.  

And that means if you're anything but  a nice Aryan, your days are numbered.  

It certainly would have been the most  massive ethnic cleanse ever in Europe. 

Suppose the Third Directive survived. Maybe it  had stopped at the point you were talking about  

where the German lands were reconstituted. Suppose  that it happened. If you look at the Soviet Union,  

Stalin kills more of his people than Hitler had by  that point. I wonder if we have sort of burnished  

Stalin's reputation a little bit because we had  to ally with him in World War II. But then the  

cycle we see in the Soviet Union is the inherent  corruption and inefficiency of the totalitarian  

system. And then it breaks down and there's reform  because people realize how crazy things have been. 

If the Third Reich had survived, would we see  that same cycle there where the system breaks  

down? Would we also remember them the same way as  the Soviet Union where it was evil but you just  

can't sustain that level of craziness forever? I suspect it to be worse. Why? Because the  

Germans are far more efficient than the Russians  were in those days. Nadezhda Mandelstam, who  

was married to the poet Osip Mandelstam,  talking from the prison camps said,  

“At least it's Russians doing this because if it  were Germans, there'd be no hope. With Russians,  

there's always a hope because they're inefficient  too.” And she's a Russian talking about it. 

Hitler is talking about  annihilating entire people… 

But so was Stalin with killing  off entire classes of Ukrainians. 

His idea is that Ukrainians need to pretend  they're Russians and it’s fine if they do  

that. What you’re describing is not a  happy ending. It's a horrendous ending. 

What's the scenario in which both  Hitler and Stalin could have been  

defeated in World War II? Is  there some system of alliances  

or counterfactual where that happens? No. I think the problem is World War I. 

World War I has enormous consequences. All  sides allowed their generals to make strategy.  

No one is doing grand strategy in World  War I. It's all about operational success,  

this is what we're all going to do. And then  the generals keep sending up waves and waves  

of young men up over the trenches. What do  you think is going to happen to them if you  

send them over the trenches? This is how you get  these horrific death rates. Hundreds of thousands  

in a battle. In our own day it's inconceivable. You have a massive power vacuum because of that  

war. Not only does it upend Europe by getting rid  of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire,  

the Russian Empire, but it puts two really  pernicious ideologies on steroids. Fascists and  

communists. And that's how you get all that evil.  It's out of a gross mismanagement of World War I.  

Once they're off and running, you've got problems  on your hands. And you've got a long solution. 

Back to your initial question, does grand strategy  matter? It does. Look at World War I when they  

didn't practice it and the civilians allowed  the officers to make all decisions. Britain  

is a country that is maritime by geography but  then they built a continental sized army. That is  

not Britain's great strength in World War I. The  victory in World War I was at the horrific cost of  

the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Britain is the only country that fights Hitler  

all the way from 1939 to 1945. Whereas Stalin  only fights Hitler after he himself is invaded  

and in fact collaborates with him to dissect  Poland. After the war, Russia expands beyond  

any ambition that a czar might have had. Whereas  the British Empire is about to collapse and  

loses all its territories. What explains the differing outcomes of these  

two countries post World War II? And why did the  post war objectives of Stalin succeed much more? 

You mean like retaining an empire versus  losing an empire? They're fundamentally  

different kinds of empires. Russia is a classic  continental empire. What it owns is contiguous.  

Britain's empire was all about trade and  having enough coaling stations around the  

world. That was initially what it was all  about. You have coaling stations everywhere  

and then you want to get the trade through.  And then what the British did is they trained  

barristers all over the world, barristers are  lawyers. That lays the basis, not on purpose,  

of having international law where people  who are eventually going to be running these  

independent countries have a legal training to use  international law to their own kind of benefit. 

But anyway, Britain has this non-contiguous empire  and after the war, it does not have the ability  

to hang on to them because of nationalism.  Nationalism starts in the Napoleonic Wars.  

That's what Napoleon leverages to create the  mass of his armies because French people feel  

nationalism and it's incredibly powerful. And  nationalism has been spreading its way around  

the world ever since. Once you have nationalism,  have fun hanging on to a non-contiguous empire  

because the locals are going to fight and resist.  There won't be commercial advantages because it'll  

be too expensive to hang on. Britain, in most cases, did not fight to  

hang on to its empire. It left and negotiated its  way out. Whereas France did the fight in Vietnam,  

which it lost, and the fight in Algeria,  which it lost. The British didn't do that. 

Russia is a different event. It's all  contiguous and wherever that red army is,  

it can hang on to it. And so yeah, it hangs  on to Eastern Europe forever at a great cost.  

But if you look over time, initially Stalin  rebuilt and does quite well. But then in  

the 60s, 70s, all of a sudden their growth  rates are not like Western growth rates. 

Yeah, they're still growing, but the difference  is growing and the compounding effects of this  

are enormous. If you fast forward to now  I think Russia's entire economy now is  

less than Mexico. There's nothing wrong  with Mexico, but the Russians have this  

idea that they have this huge, they don't. The compounding is a very important point  

because Tyler Cowen has an example of this  in one of his books: that if U.S. economic  

growth rates had been 1% lower every year from  1890 to the 20th century, the U.S. per capita  

GDP would be lower than that of Mexico's. Bingo. And this is to give a tangential  

comment. This is how sanctions work.  People look at sanctions and go, “Oh,  

they don't work because you don't make whoever's  annoying you change whatever they're doing.” What  

they do is they suppress growth so that whoever's  annoying you over time, you're stronger and  

they're weaker. And the example of the impact  of sanctions is compare North and South Korea.  

It's powerful over several generations. But the question about why Russia did  

so well? In terms of, after World  War II they ended up with so much. 

But before you say they did so well, look  at the tens of millions of people who died. 

That's my point. The cost is horrendous. 

I should say why Stalin did so well. Well, yeah, because other people  

died and he lived and he kept his dacha. The reason I ask it in this way is I'm trying to  

understand the counterfactual in which it doesn't  happen because it was so bad. Did the failure of  

FDR to be sufficiently anti-communist, especially  towards the end of the war, contribute to how much  

land that the Soviet Union was able to accumulate? There's a choice at the end of the war. There was  

some talk about whether to invade up through the  Balkans and try to put Western armies there. Let's  

put you back in time as a serviceman. Do you want  to lose your life by going up through the Balkans?  

Or are we just going to call it a day? And also  Stalin has a land power with a huge army in place.  

He is fighting me at an advantage. Do you really  want to lose your life doing that? And you have  

US leaders looking at it and going, this is going  to be good enough because the costs are too high. 

But there's this narrative that FDR was also  a communist sympathizer. You’re saying that it  

wasn't that and it was just that  it strategically didn't make sense? 

Well, A, he died so we don't know fully. But he  was mobilizing the United States to prepare for  

war while America firsters were saying, “No,  no. Isolationism is the way to go.” So he was  

preparing all of that. And yeah, if you're going  to defeat Hitler as an offshore power like Britain  

and the United States are, as in the Napoleonic  Wars, you need a local continental power with a  

huge army if you're going to deal with that  continental problem. Russia has that army. 

So you're going to cooperate with Russia in the  near term to get rid of the really big problem,  

which is Hitler, who's far more efficient  than the Russians are. He's also located  

near the high value, industrialized parts of  Europe whereas Russia is further away. You're  

going to deal with Hitler first. And then if you're going to have  

Stalin as an ally, of course, you're  going to say nice things about him.  

That doesn't make you a communist. That is just  managing an alliance. What are you gonna do? Spit  

in his face while you're fighting the war? But why believe him when he says that there  

will be elections in Eastern  Europe once the Soviet Union? 

Well, we tried. We tried very hard. Britain  tried very hard, particularly in Poland,  

because think about why Britain got into the  war? It's over Poland. And it was just not  

feasible. When you get to the end of the war  and the Red Army is fully in control of Poland,  

there's nothing we're going to be able to do  about it. Americans have had enough of the fight. 

There's cases in history where it seems like there  is a hinge point. Let's say after the Bolsheviks  

take over Russia or after Mao was consolidating  Communist control of China, where it's always  

hard to plan some takeover. But in those cases,  it seems like the way in which they got in was so  

tenuous and contingent that… would it have been  possible and desirable for us to extend greater  

efforts to prevent these regimes from getting  in the first place? Where we've had to deal  

with the consequences of them getting into power  for decades or sometimes centuries afterwards. 

If you're a Russian of any persuasion, I suspect  you'd be really angry that some American from  

across the seas is going to determine what  kind of government you live under. That's  

a problem there. You asked me earlier about  over extension. So we're going to go around  

the entire world telling others how to live? And then there's another issue, which is that  

people like Stalin are a reflection of the  country at the time. The notion that one guy,  

Stalin, waves a magic wand and everyone does  what he wants and that he is responsible for  

these millions of deaths? There are millions of  people pulling millions of triggers for all these  

deaths. There are a lot of people who think it's  a good idea. They are a reflection of the place. 

We personify this with Stalin to understand  this. It's the earlier issue about generals.  

We personify how wars turn out often by  generals because it gives us a grasp on  

it. But it's a much more complicated thing. How contingent was the global rise of communism?  

You've done so much research on Russian and  Chinese history, in what percentage of worlds  

do the Bolsheviks take over in Russia? And if that  doesn't happen, does communism spread to China and  

beyond? Because there's not the Bolshevik example  and support of these global communist parties. 

The Russian revolution is essential  to the spread of communism. 

What are the chances that the White Army  could have won? Does that make sense? 

Unlikely. If you look at Russian rail  networks, they had the two centers,  

Moscow and St. Petersburg, which the Bolsheviks  controlled. So if you're anybody else,  

it means you're on the end of these different  railway lines and there isn't the ability  

to link up with everyone. Whereas the  Bolsheviks at the center can fan out.  

They also occupy the industrial centers.  So it gives them the ability to pick off  

their enemies in detail and win that thing. How about in China? What are the odds that  

after the war, the nationalist could  have consolidated control of China? 

It's difficult. The nationalists don't get the  credit for all the fighting of Japan. There was  

no way to get Lend Lease aid to them during the  war. If you want to get Lend Lease aid, and you've  

got to have ports and railway systems. And if you  look at China, the Japanese did a very effective  

blockade of China's coast. So we're trying to  fly stuff over the hump, which is the Himalayas,  

and you're flying jet fuel over the hump so  that the planes can then use them. It means that  

there's no way to supply the nationalist armies. Yeah, they do some things in Burma, which arguably  

is a terrible mistake. I suspect it would have  been far better leaving Chiang kai shek with all  

that stuff and then it would have been useful for  him in the final stages of the war to get a few  

wins against the Japanese to make him look good.  But basically the Japanese had eviscerated his  

armies. And then think about it as the communists.  You constantly blame the incumbent government.  

“Oh, all of our problems. It's all about the  nationalist corruption.” And they are corrupt.  

Don't get me wrong. But the reason they're  having troubles is because of the Japanese.  

So the Japanese did end the nationalists. One interesting point you made in your book was  

that not only were so many nationalists killed in  the conflict with Japan, but there was a selection  

effect that the most competent and brave were the  first soldiers to die. And that left not the best  

of the crop left to fight the communists. That would be speculation. That's also a  

comment that's been made about World War I, that  Britain, for instance, lost so many of its best  

and so they don't go on to have children.  They don't go on to become strategic  

leaders and are unavailable in World War II. Can you talk more about these consequences  

of what are the kinds of people who  are most likely to die in a war and  

what are the broader consequences for it? I have no idea. How would I know if the  

statistical evidence isn't there? I mean, obviously the able-bodied  

people are the most likely, right? And  then the more able-bodied though... 

It depends. A lot of the people who died in World  War II are civilians and they starve to death.  

Huge numbers. I can't remember the statistics, but  tens of thousands of Japanese are dying in ‘41 and  

you finally get up to hundreds of thousands in'  44, but it's going into the millions in '45. And  

it's because of starvation. Is this the intentional  

starvation of the Hunger Plan? It's war time. It's just facts. In a war  

where you've destroyed all transportation and the  ability to get goods anywhere and you've killed  

the farming population all over the world, you  get famine. And by the way, this is an argument  

for when people say, “Can you have avoided the  atomic bombs?” That ended the war really fast  

and probably saved millions of lives because  they didn't starve. The war was over and all  

of a sudden you're starting to ship food around. Why did Germany and Japan continue the war after  

it was obvious that they would lose? And  speaking of the deaths, didn’t a huge chunk  

of the deaths happen after ‘43 when it was  quite obvious that they were going to lose? 

I know. Well, it's because the leadership was all  on death ground and the population's been fed this  

story that if the other side wins, they're all  going to be murdered too. Wars are easy to start  

and they are very tricky to end. And this has  been your life too, right? You have watched the  

wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Easy to start,  very hard to get out of. And now we're into  

Ukraine and we'll see how long this goes on. Speaking of which, a broader question is,  

how well do you think the insights of scholars  like you have been integrated into the thinking  

of military leaders? Where people like you  have written these extensive books about  

how empires overextend and how invasions can be  more complicated than you think. To what extent  

does that actually percolate to the military  and civilian leadership that they would decide  

to do an Iraq war and Afghanistan war? You're asking the wrong person. You need  

to interview those people and ask them what  influenced them. At my low level in the weeds,  

I work at the U.S. Naval War College, we have  officers from the United States and all over  

the world who come on in. We assign them readings  from the kind of scholars you're talking about,  

what we do in strategy and policy or case  studies about wars, and have them think about  

a lot of the kind of questions you're asking is  what we ask students of. So we assign all these  

things. How much it influences them later  in their career, you'd have to ask them. 

But surely you must be optimistic about  it. There's a reason why you do this work,  

right? Presumably you think that  better understanding these previous  

situations helps leaders now make better  decisions. I'm curious to what extent you  

think that pipeline is functioning? I have no idea about the pipeline,  

but I can answer about me. I grew up during the  height of the Cold War and started graduate school  

as it was ending but I didn't know it was ending.  So I had a full up Cold War education where I did  

study the Soviet Union when it was and they had  all these huge programs which no longer exist. 

If you want to make good decisions, you have  to be knowledgeable. You have to be able to  

make an accurate assessment about yourself and  the other side and so I've devoted my career to  

understanding the other side. One of the things  that I think Americans are particularly prone to  

is what I call half-court tennis. They study the  world from their point of view. So they're always  

focused on Team America. It's like half-court  tennis, they look only at their side of the court.  

Balls come from mysterious places. Some people get  new rackets. Who knows where they come from? And  

then somehow I'm going to play this game. Think  about people who love football in the States.  

They know about all the opposing teams and who's  strong and blah, blah, blah. Well, foreign policy,  

you need to understand the other side. It's not  just about me and it's all about the interaction. 

Growing up in the Cold War I'd heard that  the Russians were really evil so I thought  

I'd learn more about it. I first started  learning about Russia and then I decided I  

was going to learn about China. And I realized,  “Oh, Japan's in there.” So I got to learn about  

Japan and wind up studying their relations  and tried to be open minded and understand  

the world from their point of view. Not that it's  right or wrong, but just trying to understand it. 

So for your point of view, when you're picking up  a book and you want to avoid half-court tennis,  

give the book a 30 second read. What's  that? Go flip to the bibliography,  

flip through it for 30 seconds, and see if at  least some of the citations are in the languages  

of the countries being discussed. Because how  much respect would you have for a book about  

the United States that has not a single source  in English? I suspect the answer would be zero. 

How do you consume these? Do  you read the translations? 

Oh, no. I can make bad spelling errors in  numerous languages. [Laughter] I read these  

things slowly with lots of large dictionaries.  You say you've got my book, Wars for Asia, go  

take a look at the footnotes in the back. You'll  see they're in Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. 

Yeah. It is perhaps the best military history  I've ever read. And also, I've really enjoyed  

your book on Japan, The Japanese Empire. And you  also have these other textbooks and collections  

of essays, which I highly recommend because of  the thorough nature and the diversity of sources. 

Let's actually talk about your research.  Maybe tell me more about where you've done  

research around the world and throughout  your different projects. Because I think  

people might not know the extent to which you've  dug into the trenches on these over the years. 

I have co-edited a series of books on naval  operations with my husband Bruce A. Elleman.  

United States is a maritime power. If you want  to understand the maritime underpinnings of  

US security, go to those. Particularly a book  on peripheral operations called Expeditionary  

Warfare, which is what we do. The expedition will  be crossing the ocean to get there. And commerce  

rating and blockades which is a key  to US foreign policy. And the problem  

is if you exercise a continental foreign policy,  you're prone to get into all sorts of wars you  

don't need to get into. But because we have  huge oceans that separate us from our problems,  

it's a major point of strategy of whether to  intervene or not intervene. So it's important  

to understand the maritime position in the  United States. So there are these maritime books  

that if you're interested in learning about that.  They're not fun reads. [Laughter] But they exist. 

You were asking me about research. Back in  the day, I spent a year in the Soviet Union,  

when it was, and then a year in PRC right after  Tianmen was delayed for a year. That was quite  

exciting. There were armored trucks all around  Beijing University, not to protect the students,  

but to neutralize them and then it happened. And  then three years in Japan over the years and three  

years in Taiwan over the years of just reading  deeply in the archives. Donald Rumsfeld has been  

much vilified as the former secretary of defense.  But one of his quotations that I love is, he said  

he wasn't worried about the known unknowns because  he'd go after those, but he's worried about the  

unknown unknowns. And that's why you do archival  research. What is it that I know nothing about  

that is actually terribly important? So I did a  bunch of archival research in Japan. That dries  

up after World War II, you can get into military  archives and their foreign ministry archives, but  

then it's much less afterwards. Well, China and  Russia, they've both closed down. There's no way  

I wouldn't go into either country at this stage. Oh, you think even more so than after Tiananmen  

or during the Soviet Union?  It's more hostile now than then? 

We were in the Soviet Union while Gorbachev  was in power. And I actually got into the  

foreign ministry archives there, but only  for the Tsarist period. And in China,  

you could still get into various archives.  I was using the Qing archives and then the  

nationalist archives were much more closed. Now  the archives are just plain closed. Go to Russia  

now, you will get yourself arrested. And China  likewise, they've shut down all of these archives. 

So to compensate for that, for the last 10  years I’ve spent two months every summer  

going to the U.S. presidential archives. Starting  with, we didn't do it quite in the same order but,  

Truman, Eisenhower, and then this last spring,  we just did the George Bush Sr. archives. And  

now I'm in Britain using their wonderful national  archives, looking particularly from the 1917 to  

1945 period researching the Cold War. You might  go, “Well, but the Cold War didn't begin in 1947.”  

I would argue the Cold War began in 1917  because we have this notion that, “Oh,  

I decide when wars begin.” Not quite if the other  side declares war on you. And the Bolsheviks made  

it very clear that they had declared war on  the capitalist order. Britain was much more  

attuned to this and worried about communist ideas  filtrating to labor movements and all this other  

stuff. So I'm reading their archives, whereas the  United States was much more asleep at the switch. 

To what extent did the educated classes being  naive about communism play into the delay of the  

United States into recognizing the Cold War?  You talk about this in your books about the  

Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow. And also Jack Reed's Ten Days. George  

Bernard Shaw made a comment that if you  haven't been a socialist before the age of 30,  

you have no heart and if you remain one  after the age of 30, you have no brains. 

It's the idealism of it all. World War I seemed to  vindicate so much of what Karl Marx said about how  

capitalist countries are just imperialist.  They don't care about the young. They just  

throw them over the trenches and destroy them. Which is so ironic given how communist countries  

have dealt with their populations and how  callously they have wasted their young... 

That's called the Big Lie. And it is amazing how  these big lies live and are very powerful but  

then when they crumble, they're gone for good.  Even when I was in graduate school, there were  

a bunch of people saying, “Oh, Russia has no drug  problem.” because they're believing the Kool-Aid  

and lies that's being dished out from Moscow. What explains the credulity of these people in  

the US and Britain on the Soviet Union's claims  about everything from its economic growth to the  

way it dealt with its own populations?  Why were some people so asleep to this? 

I don't know, but I suspect that the sins of the  West are really obvious because we have an open  

press. And for anyone who'd been through World War  I and had any male member in the family who'd been  

at the trenches and came back and talked about  it, it was pretty horrific. And you can't believe  

that anything's going to be worse than that.  Or if you go to China under Chiang Kai-shek,  

he had a semi-free press and that's how  we know about things. You look at the  

incredible corruption going on there, you go,  “Well, how can anything be worse than this? 

Well, actually, it could be a lot worse than this. You talk in your book The Wars on Asia and  

elsewhere about the Japanese occupation of  Manchuria and how they industrialized the  

region and at the end, it had 50% higher GDP  per capita than the rest of China. And it was  

the most industrialized part of Asia outside  of Japan. Japan also colonized Taiwan. We see  

those are some of the wealthiest parts of Asia  now. And then we also see the impact of the  

communist counterfactual in other parts of Asia. In retrospect, what should we make of the impact  

of the Japanese occupation given the wealth of  Korea, Taiwan, these other areas now? And how  

much the industrialization under Japan mattered? Let's go back in time. If you get before World War  

II, which is one of the really huge atrocities  that the Imperial Japanese Army commits without  

any doubt, going into someone else's country and  committing atrocities is not a winning game plan.  

If you go before that, if you think of the Meiji  Restoration, they colonized Taiwan and they  

colonized Korea. It was brutal in Korea because  the Koreans resisted and then the Japanese got  

nasty. Taiwan was much less resistant. To  this day, the Taiwanese do not have this  

bitterness about Japan that the Koreans do. I'm not going to deny that there wasn’t any  

brutality. There was brutality. But what the  Japanese did when they moved into Korea and  

Taiwan is they set about creating infrastructure.  They put in train lines. They set about educating  

people. Do they put them in the top positions?  No, the top positions are for Japanese. But they  

do things like publish all kinds  of magazines. Incredible numbers  

of technical journals about agronomy and  things so that you have this incredible  

improvement of output because you're spreading  knowledge to the Taiwanese and to the Koreans. 

And because they do it from the bottom up, unlike  the United States, they control the police force  

and the locality and from there all the way up so  they really have local control. When the United  

States goes into places like the Philippines,  which happens at more or less the same  

time, the Philippine war is like early 1900s. The  United States wants to deal with English-speaking  

elites, sound familiar, who are located in the  capital. And so we try to negotiate that way.  

But it never modernizes what goes on. These very  traditional and actually not conducive to growth  

relationships of massive land control by not  particularly efficient landowning classes remains. 

The Japanese do it by literally building  local organizations from the bottom  

up. Do not get me wrong, it's not remotely  democratic. People who disagree at the time  

are treated brutally. But it turns out it's a very  effective means for economic development because  

when they're booted, in 1945, the Koreans  and the Taiwanese actually have something  

to work with. And then they're often running. Chiang Kai-shek, who'd been horribly corrupt in  

the mainland, he could not do land reform in the  mainland. Why? Because that's his officer corps.  

They will kill him. In Taiwan, he can definitely  redistribute Taiwanese land. No problem there. He  

comes in with all the weaponry and redistributes  the land. It gets bloody doing it. He offers the  

Taiwanese bonds. They think it's going to  be like the lousy bonds that he distributed  

on the mainland. Turns out those bonds were worth  money. I don't know how many years on that it was  

that people actually collected on their bonds  for all of this. So the Japanese actually had  

many of the pieces for a really  effective plan for economic development. 

And if you look at China under Deng Xiaoping,  who's he imitating? The Japanese. Deng Xiaoping  

is rather like a parallel, his generation to the  Meiji generation. And think about what came after  

the Meiji generation. Bad news. Well, we're into  Xi Jinping. Bad news. We're into bad news. But  

do not deny the achievements of the Meiji  generation. They're enormous. And then because  

Japan does all the atrocities, they can no  longer brag about these previous things. 

There's so many interesting things there. There's  a book, How Asia Works, by this economist Joseph  

Studwell, where he is trying to analyze why Korea,  Taiwan and Japan did so well after World War II. 

In the case of Korea, he tells a story where  they have this factory where they're starting  

to export goods and they're working six, seven  hour days. And the floor manager tells one of  

his underlings that the reparations on which  we're supporting this economic growth from Japan  

came at the cost of your family being raped  by Japan. So this is basically blood money  

that we're using to grow the economy. You  better work hard to make sure it was worth it. 

Sorry, the broader question I wanted to ask was,  the economic development that Japan is doing in  

Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan, if they hadn't made  this mistake of fighting a war with America..  

Let's say something like the Japanese Empire  survives and isn't crazy militaristic. I don't  

even know if this is a question, but I'm just  thinking about the counterfactual where you could  

have a really wealthy and prosperous area of Asia. Let's go back to our wonderful America of the 30s,  

the Great Depression hits and it's a mess.  And so what we decide is we're going to have  

tariffs. This is the Hawley-Smoot tariff  in 1930. We're just going to wall it off  

because we got to keep jobs for Americans. This is half-court tennis. You're not  

thinking about what everybody else is going  to do? Retaliate exactly in kind. So for the  

Japanese who had been good citizens within  the international order, who had maintained  

really high positions in the League of Nations,  which we'd been irresponsible and never joined,  

this pulls the rug on all of them. This pulls the  rug on Japanese who said we needed to cooperate  

with the international order. Japan is trade  dependent. What are they going to do? No one  

will trade with them. Their closest people  won’t. They look at the world and go, well,  

we need an empire because we have got to  have it big enough so that we get food and  

the basics for us. ‘30 is Holly Smoot  and ‘31 is the invasion of Manchuria. 

Let's go back to grand strategy. This is Americans  having no grand strategy of not thinking deeply.  

Life is an interaction. I can tell you whatever  I want to but then you're going to make your own  

decisions. If I don't consider what your decisions  might be, I'm going to be in deep dark trouble. 

And I think about Hawley and Smoot. They  didn't live to see what they wrought. A lot  

of young men across the world died because  of the failure of people like them to think  

more broadly. Think about the lesson of the Great  Depression. The moment the international economy  

starts getting cold, there are meetings of  bankers and foreign ministers, the world  

over to prevent it from going crazy ever again  because they realize what the consequences are. 

You take people who are poor already and then  you have a Great Depression, you get desperate  

decisions. And then once you start a war, it's  very difficult to stop. So it's a great lesson. 

Japan then is making an ugly decision because  it's stuck. So they go into Manchuria, which  

is where all their investments are to protect  them. China's got this crazy civil war going on.  

Japan, if it had just sat in Manchuria, they  probably would have been just fine because  

they do stabilize Manchuria. They are bringing  some income back in. But the moment that they  

escalate big time in ‘37, they ruin their economy.  And it takes a number of years to play out fully.  

It's a disaster for themselves, most of all. Just a broader picture of what I'm learning  

from these military histories and especially your  books is that there’s these bigger forces of like,  

which country has more production and so on,  but then you can have these individual mistakes,  

a single decision point by a single person, that  cascades and then you over extend in China and you  

need more oil and you feel like the need to invade  America. And the importance of leadership in  

preventing these sorts of catastrophic mistakes. It's what I would call a pivotal error.  

Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor is  a pivotal error. They are already grossly  

overextended in China. They want to cut out  foreign aid. Remember that Hawaii is not a  

US state, and it doesn't become a state until  ‘59 or something. And they probably take this  

racist view of Hawaiians of whoever they think  Hawaiians are. So their idea is that they are  

going to take a newspaper and slap the  dog on the snout and the dog will quit. 

Instead you create great power allies all across  the Pacific for the Chinese. So yeah, there are  

pivotal errors that you can make at which point  there is no return for the status quo. You've seen  

Putin make a pivotal error. He was getting away  with hanging on to the Donbass and the Crimea. Now  

he made the pivotal error to try to take the whole  enchilada. There is no going back on that error. 

Actually, I want to ask you about that. Japan  invades Manchuria in 1931. Hitler invades Poland  

in 1939. In retrospect, we think of them  as part of the same great global conflict,  

whereas they were separated by eight years. I  wonder if you think of Ukraine today as eight  

years down the line or the things that could  come, maybe not as a consequence but at the  

same time as this, which could lead to  another global situation. Do you think  

that it could cascade into something like that? Of course, yeah. This is the problem with all  

of this. Of course, it could and there are many  people working to prevent this from happening.  

You see all of these meetings where our leaders  are meeting with each other. If you get into  

some global war with people with nuclear weapons,  when the losers decide that rather than losing,  

they're going to go for one more roll of  the die, which is a nuclear weapon. Then  

the question is whether the people below them  will actually implement the order, etc. Think  

about low probability but high consequence  events. I don't know what the probability is,  

but I know the consequences are huge. And the probability is iterated  

over many years and decades. Right, yeah. You've got to always  

not use nuclear weapons, right? That Pandora’s  box has already been opened, the nukes are there. 

Especially if there's no  retirement plan for Putin. 

One of the things that's interesting from  Wars for Asia, is that there are things  

that are seen by one side as a deterrence are  often seen by the other side as a provocation. 

The embargoes from the U.S. are seen by Japan as  a deadline to attack. I think you had some other  

examples like this. People who are less empathetic  to the Ukraine cause have said, “Extending NATO,  

which we thought would be a deterrent, was that  actually a provocation for Putin?” What should  

we just generally make of that lesson? First of all, I think you should look at  

the people living in the countries in question.  Before we decide that Americans are the important  

people in the world, or since we're in  Britain now, British, and therefore anyone  

in between doesn't count, I believe that's wrong. All of the countries that joined NATO desperately  

wanted to join NATO. They've had a whole history  of Russians doing terrible things to them.  

I'm not making it up. This is what Russia's  been up to. They have been correct that  

Russia is going to do more terrible things.  They were correct in doing everything they  

could to get into NATO and also be in the EU. It's incredible to remember what the standards of  

living of people in Eastern Europe that the Soviet  Union had dominated were and what it is now. Since  

they have been freed of Soviet domination, it's  been a massive compounding of standards of living.  

It's allowed people your age to travel the world  and have a lot of aspirations in their lives. 

They can do podcasting. [Laughter] But when you talk about, “Oh,  

should we deny these things because we got  some egos in Russia that want to maintain  

a continental empire?” You or I cannot change  how Russians think about things. How they think  

about the things is their decision. But if you  look at Europe as a peninsula, you're better off  

with more insulation from Russia than not. But isn't this another case of not thinking  

in terms of both halves of the court in tennis  where compared to the possibility of nuclear war,  

just nudging that number up and down matters  far more than whether another country in  

Eastern Europe gets to be part of NATO or not? Hope has been said to not be a strategy but the  

hope was in trying to get Russia to join the  party. Trying to integrate their energy supplies  

into Europe and paying them good money for it.  Having them make lots of money on that and hoping  

that they would invest this into their road  system, which is lamentable, and hoping that  

they would invest this into cleaning out their  business laws. It is horrendous trying to run  

a business there. As you can see right now as  different things get nationalized and taken  

over. Different successful business leaders wind  up unaccountably dropping out of six floor windows  

and old people who always seem to fall downstairs.  I think that's a special way of offing people. 

That was the hope. Join the party because you  will become wealthy too. Russian standards of  

living have been stagnating for  quite a while. Putin's model of  

basically taking over your neighbor's stuff and  bringing home whatever you haven’t bombed flat  

is not an efficient way to make wealth and you're  killing so many people. So I don't believe that  

denying people of Eastern Europe saying, “Well,  actually because the Russians have such an  

attitude, you get to be their serfs forever.” But there are broader considerations for the  

same reason that you mentioned and we were  talking about earlier, that it would not  

have made sense for Americans to have kept  fighting further to prevent Eastern Europe  

at the time from succumbing to the Red Army. The Ukrainians are doing the fighting right now. 

But supplied by tremendous amounts of Western aid. Yeah, they are, but that's pennies on the dollar.  

They're willing to fight for their country. It's not about the cost to the United States. It's  

not like it’s 40 billion or whatever.  How does this nudge the nuclear war  

numbers or the nuclear war probabilities? What's the nuclear war going to do to Putin?  

The Ukrainian forces are dispersed. What's  the target? It's going to be Kiev, I suppose? 

Or, I don't know, he thinks  that he's out of options. So  

let's go bomb NATO headquarters or something. I think the Chinese have whispered in his ear,  

and this is pure speculation, “Buddy, if  you do this, everybody on the planet is  

going to get nuclear weapons and all of  a sudden we are going to have this little  

small club of people with nuclear weapons and the  consequences are going to be rather horrendous.” 

And also look at China. It has more nuclear  armed neighbors than anyone on the planet and  

some of them are totally nuts. Putin himself, right? 

Let's try North Korea for the country  that's got starvation in the 21st century. 

Although on this point, another thing your books  have emphasized is how often leaders make mistakes  

that make very little strategic sense and are  very stupid. You could imagine, even though it  

would be very stupid for Putin to escalate,  especially if there’s no retirement plan,  

I could imagine him doing very stupid things. Let's put stupid out of it because saying someone  

is stupid is not explanatory. Saying they are  stupid means you write off understanding their  

reasoning. A lot of Westerners, when they think  of governments, think about governments operating  

in the interest of their population. So when  their decisions don't improve standards of living  

security and things, then we say those aren't  good decisions. But that's not the game. In China,  

for instance, it's all about maintaining the  monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party to  

rule. If that conflicts with having higher living  standards, you better believe they're choosing  

Communist Party. So you go watching those kinds  of decisions going on right now where their most  

talented entrepreneurs are being relieved of their  enterprises. Or Putin, as you said, he's made a  

pivotal error. He has no back down plan. He only  has a double down plan. Expect him to double down  

forever. And then the question is whether all the  oligarchs want to keep doubling down with him and  

his generals or whether they give him something  extra in his cheerios some morning. Who knows? 

I feel like this is one of the lessons  you were actually talking about earlier,  

where you don't want somebody to feel like they're  up against the wall, on death’s ground, where even  

if it would be an unjust sort of resolution,  some sort of ceasefire where Putin can save  

face can be good. I wonder if your historical  lessons would bring you to that conclusion. 

Putin will be back for more and  understand that that's just the case. 

But then what is the solution? We can't  have unconditional surrender unless we're... 

No, no one's marching into Moscow. The United  States has done this for many years. You don't  

recognize the territories that he's taken, which  means the Russians are stuck with a sanction  

regime of some type forever. And you go, “Oh,  well. that'll weaken. Certain people won't adhere  

to it.” It will depress Russian growth forever,  which goes back to an earlier part of this  

conversation of sanctions being really powerful. And it was some Russians who themselves said,  

at the very beginning, “Oh, no. We are going  to be like North Korea.” Yeah, you will be.  

That's exactly where he's heading them. We don't  control when the Russians reassess. We can't even  

predict when or whether they'll reassess. We can't  predict whether there'll be some kind of incipient  

civil war in Russia which would be destabilizing  by definition. Who knows how that goes? But the  

Ukrainians are fighting for their country. One of the things you asked me in an email is  

whether superior finance wins wars or something.  It's superior alliance systems that win wars. And  

it's interesting that the Europeans, particularly  the Eastern Europeans, are the leaders of all  

this. Isn't it fascinating that the Finns  and the Swedes, who forever were neutral,  

are now all over this? And they know. The enemy  gets a vote. The Russians have a vote. As long  

as the Russians are playing this game, our  best bet is to support Ukrainians. Because  

unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, where the  locals do not do the bulk of the fighting,  

this is where the locals are fighting and that's  key. You also were emailing me and asking me about  

successful versus unsuccessful interventions.  When the locals do all the fighting,  

that's when your best odds are of helping them. Actually speaking of Iraq and Afghanistan, after  

World War 2 our occupations of Japan and Germany  were very successful in rooting out the toxic  

ideologies and completely transforming the society  and culture. Whereas in Afghanistan and Iraq,  

we didn't have the same effect. What explains why  those occupations are so much more successful? 

Easy. One is a case of rebuilding institutions and  the other one is building them from scratch. You  

can rebuild things rapidly. Think of how after the  war Western Europe rapidly repaired and rebuilt  

bombed buildings. Both Germany and Japan had an  extensive list of functioning institutions from  

local police officers, offices, to educational  systems, to local provincial governments and  

running the train systems and businesses and  all of this have been absolutely functional.  

And so finding the expertise to recreate that  is easy. And of course, Germans and Japanese  

living there are very interested in rebuilding. I know more about Japan than Germany and then  

what the key thing the United States then did  is — the Japanese are hemming and hawing over  

what their constitution was going to be like and  so MacArthur finally got fed up and in one week  

he got his staff to write this constitution  and they're running around Tokyo going to  

bombed out libraries trying to find examples  of Western constitutions so they can put it all  

together. It was long before there's an internet  where you can figure these things out and they're  

figuring out what the constitution is going to be. They cook it up over the week. And what the  

Japanese are thinking is “Well, the Americans  are going to leave. So we'll go along with  

this constitution but once the Americans  are out, we're going to do whatever.”  

And what the first post-war Prime Minister Yoshida  said, “Well, we thought we could change it back.”  

But he realized because of universal suffrage,  allowing women to vote, and there had been  

a certain amount of land reform, he said there  wasn't any going back. It permanently changed the  

balance of power in Japan. Another feature is that  the Imperial Japanese Army had disgraced itself.  

Their strategy had led to the firebombing of  the home islands, talk about a total failure. 

It’s the same sort of thing in Germany. You  have universal elections. It took a while to  

get the Western Zones united because of all the  fighting with the Russians over their zone. You  

eventually get two Germanies, etc. But then  you have a very competent post-war generation,  

both in Japan and Germany, who  understood full of the horrors  

of the war that they'd been put through  as conscripts. And they are really intent  

on rebuilding their societies and they're  the miracle generations in both countries. 

There's no parallel for that in Afghanistan  and Iraq, right? They've never been developed  

countries. Germany and Japan were developed  countries. And then you think, well, how long  

does it take to become a developed country?  Some people say centuries. And then there's  

a whole other piece, which is that the Germans  and Japanese had a real sense of nationalism.  

So you don't have to worry about nation building  because they have a sense of national identity.  

You do worry about state rebuilding. So  we were helping with state rebuilding. 

In Afghanistan and Iraq, there's no sense of a  nation. I'm no expert on these parts of the world,  

but my understanding is you have these very  different ethnic groups, many who want to kill  

each other. You've just got a civil war going on  there. We're talking about a death ground kind  

of civil war where the ones in power just ruin  the others. And when the others get in power,  

they ruin the other people. That's  what's going on in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

In addition, because they're internal locations  in the middle of continents they're surrounded by  

a variety of neighbors. And if you look at those  neighbors, you go, “Ooh. A bunch of those people  

are going to intervene.” And they're going to  intervene in very destabilizing ways. Japan is  

an island. It's hard for people to intervene.  Germany, we put a lot of money into it with  

having troops and getting the German army  and other things up and running. This will  

be Ukraine's future where they will be… well,  they already apparently do have the finest army  

in Europe and then they're going to make it  very highly defensible before it's all over.  

And Europeans as a group understand that it  is absolutely in their interest to have an  

impregnable border around Ukraine. It protects  them all. Europe doesn't threaten Russia. They  

would love it if Russia would join the party.  Join the rules based order. You'll make money.  

You'll do well. Except the oligarchs in question,  this real minority of people who run Russia,  

they personally won't do as well. But now  they're war criminals, so they're out of luck. 

Speaking of miracle generations, the  Meiji generation, as you have written  

about, learned so many reforms from the West,  improved every aspect of Japanese governance and  

economics and education and law. And within the  generation, you have people coming to power who  

make quagmire after quagmire, make mistake after  mistake. There's some cases where countries manage  

to solve the succession problem after a really  competent generation. For example, Singapore after  

Lee Kuan Yew. It seems like the government has  kept up the system which promoted such efficient  

bureaucrats. Whereas in other cases,  like after Bismarck in Germany,  

you have the mistakes that led to World War I. What was the failure that the Meiji generation  

made that their level of grand strategy  and insight was not carried over? 

I wouldn't pick on them because they're  brilliant. It's amazing what they achieved.  

It wasn't perfect but no one's perfect. I wouldn't  pick on that particular generation. They're  

brilliant. As are Japan's post-war leaders. The way I look at it goes back to your initial  

question about grand strategy. Are institutions  really important? Institutions structure decision  

making. Now, it's very difficult to figure out  what types of institutions to build. And when  

you see failings in them, you know I've got  to do something next time. But this again is  

the brilliance of this evolving maritime order in  which we live, where people sign onto the things  

in which it's in their interest to sign on  to them. You sign on to treaties and then  

you have provisos of the parts you don't want.  And you join these international organizations  

and then you influence how they develop, etc.  So these organizations have been instrumental,  

the ones built right after World  War II in holding the peace. 

MacArthur's constitution and then Japan's  subsequent leaders, have worked on improving  

the institutions that they have. But institutions  take a long, long time to build. I think about  

it as sort of like a spider's web. So that you  spin, spin, spin this thing that's like gossamer,  

but then you spin enough of it and then it really  holds. But then there are people like Hitler who  

come through and they undo the work of others.  Bismarck, when you ask about him, it's highly  

personalistic. That's not about an institution.  That's about a guy leveraging the king. There's  

a reason for getting rid of royalty running  the show. And then, yeah, there are emerging  

institutions in Germany, a general staff, and  some other things that are very important. 

I was about to mention that another generation  that managed to create good institutions was  

the American founders. But then there was also the  failure that led to the Civil War, right? So even  

there some institutions were weak. Slavery, our original sin. 

Let’s talk about Taiwan. That's where the  nationalists went after the Chinese Civil  

War. I think until recently the narrative  has been that the CCP is incredibly competent  

and very good at engineering good  policies and economic growth in China.  

And then we look at Taiwan and obviously it's  so much richer than China on a per capita basis.  

Would that have been what China would have been  like if the nationalists had remained in power? 

Unknown. Because when the nationalists came to  Taiwan, they were in really deep, dark trouble.  

And one of the ways that Taiwanese  have maintained the moral high ground,  

which is necessary for them in order to guarantee  foreign aid, is by being democratic. Their really  

exposed position put enormous pressure on them to  democratize. Because the United States is sitting  

on them that they need to get democratic. Also the nationalists engaged on a real  

comprehensive after action report on  Taiwan asking why did we lose? Well,  

it was this incredible corruption and the  need to do land reform. I don't think land  

reform was feasible for Chiang Kai-shek on the  mainland. Why? Because that's his power base,  

all the landowners. And if you try to reform  them, you'll get a headshot. Whereas in Taiwan,  

it got bloody doing land reform. The  local Taiwanese did not appreciate getting  

expropriated and there were massacres over it. Although in Korea, I think Park did  

land reform and that was native. Syngman Rhee apparently did it even  

earlier. One point in the land reform they did  there was that the Japanese had large expropriated  

areas so it was easier to do that. And so  Syngman Rhee does land reform immediately. It's  

not been well studied and it'd be fascinating if  someone actually did study it. It probably helps  

explain the tremendous loyalty to the South Korean  government within the Korean Armed Forces within  

the Korean Armed Forces. In How Asia Works, Studwell  

makes the interesting point that because these  countries are so overflowing with labor that it  

makes sense in these countries to have lots  of peasants who can tend to the land instead  

of having a single landowners with a large  tract of land. Mechanization is maybe not the  

best idea when you have so much labor that can  actually do these things that are not scalable. 

Anyways, going back to Taiwan. The growth rate of  modern day China is slowing because of zero COVID,  

less foreign investments, data intervention in  the economy. I think consumers aren't spending  

as much. And also obviously because  of demographics. Does this increase  

or decrease the odds of Chinese action on Taiwan? I honestly don't know. But I think a better way  

of looking at it is to look at consequences.  It's guaranteed that if they go into Taiwan,  

it is a high consequence event without a doubt.  What the odds are, I don't know. However,  

if you listen to their speeches, they tell you  they're going to do it. They're consistent. 

The West learned that you read improbable  speeches, right? People read Mein Kampf  

and said, “Oh, this is a nutcase.  No one would ever do that.” Well,  

it quite accurately represented people. Even in  dictatorships, they have to transmit messages  

to the population and they quite often very  accurately tell you what they're going to do. 

Putin has been quite clear of what he's been  up to. Stalin was very clear of what he was up  

to. So let's judge Xi Jinping at his word and  he says he's going to go for it. Now, whether  

he's still in power, I don't know. But here's  a problem for which we don't have a solution,  

that Chinese people have to figure out the  solution.The Chinese Communist Party has  

clearly made the decision that it wants to  maintain a monopoly of political power. And  

for a while there, during Deng Xiaoping, that  worked because the reforms that they wanted  

to make for agriculture and things, they can  maintain their monopoly of power but also do  

things that allow people to get much wealthier.  So that went in tandem for a number of years. 

Now we're at the inflection point where you  have a lot of educated people and businesses  

who are really integrated into the world and  they want to make autonomous decisions. Also,  

you have some very large, very successful  companies and they have quite a bit of clout.  

The Communist Party worries about this because  what do people want at that point? It's probably  

some influence over political decisions. And  the Communist Party said that's off the table.  

Okay, if it's off the table, how do you keep  it off the table? All the things that you're  

talking about. This 24x7 surveillance state. Since you have a computer science background,  

you'd have a better understanding of this than  I. Think about the cost if the United States had  

a 24x7 surveillance system where you're literally  doing it down to who's jaywalking and who's not,  

in order to put it into their social  security score. Whose kid in their  

classrooms rolling their eyes at their  teachers, I kid you not, and putting  

it down as a ding on that kid's social score. And also, who knows what's accurate and inaccurate  

on the facial recognition stuff. So they start  chalking up the wrong scores for the wrong people.  

The cost would be incredible. All the people  power you're going to have to devote to this.  

And then all the false positives, which will  be incendiary for the people who are falsely  

considered disloyal. This is where they're at. And  now they’re doing the National Disappearing Act.  

We don't know where their minister of defense  is. He's a non-person. And oh, by the way, what  

happened to the foreign minister? Give me a break. Yeah, and the cost is also so gruesome in  

comparison to the alternatives. There are so  many cheap interventions like giving people iron  

supplements and folic acid or giving them  20-dollar eyeglasses, that could raise  

the childhood nutrition that is lacking in  rural parts of China by so much that it would  

actually be worth it for the government if  you think of the additional tax revenue that  

healthy people can bring in the future. They're not gonna do that. Xi Jinping  

is another guy making a series of pivotal  errors. His handling of COVID was just stupid,  

right? COVID started in China. Go investigate it  and figure out where it came from, and then it  

would be a non-starter. But instead, they do the  massive cover-up, etc. And then all of a sudden,  

instead of just being unlucky that COVID  started there, it's all of a sudden, “No,  

you're complicit.” A lot of people died across  the globe over this, and it came from you,  

and you clearly were letting people out of the  country knowing full well that they were vectors  

for spreading this disease. This is a problem that  the rest of the world's not going to forget. There  

are just too many millions of people who died. You were talking about the cost of the  

surveillance. It is an interesting  question that what percentage of  

the Soviet Union's GDP was dedicated to the NKVD? When the United States was trying to evaluate what  

the load of the military was on the economy,  and the CIA was trying to figure it out to the  

best of their ability, it was really difficult  because they don't have a convertible currency. 

And then they're busy lying to each other.  That's a whole other thing in communist states  

and dictatorships. You're incentivized to lie  about everything. Think about the compounding  

effects of these lies. It means I can't make good  decisions because everyone around me is lying,  

and then it gets worse at the top. You're going  to watch as these cascading things happen to  

the Chinese and the Russians as a result.  It turned out that at the end of the Cold  

War that if you did the calculations for the  whole military-industrial complex, well over  

half their economy is being devoted to this. Which is crazy because during the peak of World  

War II, the fraction of US GDP was like 45%. That's right. I think they think Nazis  

were 55. But don't quote me on it, I  may be remembering these incorrectly,  

but it was horrific in Russia. Let's say we're  running little subunits in the Soviet Union but  

I'm afraid I'm not going to get enough parts  in. So I lie about how few I have, even though  

I got lots more. And then you're busy lying. So  then when we compile macroeconomic data, and we  

don't really know what the price of anything is,  we don't know the value of labor, of capital,  

and we don't know what consumers really want.  So Russia is massively misallocating capital,  

labor, and they don't understand preferences. So when you asked me earlier, are people stupid?  

It's more that they've got all this incorrect  data, and by the time they realize that  

something's wrong, they're already in a  deep, dark crisis. This is late in Brezhnev,  

where the numbers are just a mess. And so  when Gorbachev comes on in 1985, it's just a  

massive implosion. And then he tries to save the  beast, and of course his cure kills the beast. 

Speaking of which, after World War II, the  companies in Germany and Japan that were  

making weapons, Mitsubishi and Volkswagen and  BMW, became creators of world-class consumer  

products. For example, even GE in America. Whereas  in Russia, they had... is it the T-34, the tank? 

Apparently that thing was built on American  chassis. Apparently it's based on our  

technology that we weren't interested  in. Of course, they took the chassis,  

etc. But in World War II, do not forget about  Lend Lease. This is another lesson of World War I. 

Imperial Russia fell. Absolute disaster. Why did  they fall? No one bothered to focus on supplying  

them with adequate weapons. They had huge  armies, but they're sending their young men in  

with their rifles and saying, “When you get there,  go pick one off of a dead body.”I think that means  

they've done no training. And you're just wasting  people. Can you imagine being that soldier and  

thinking this is how my government treats me? So in World War II, the emphasis on supplying  

Russia is huge. So what do we supply? We supply  all the things that make them move. So it's  

rolling stock and getting their train lines  going. They produce planes, but they can't do  

jet fuel. It's high octane. You may know more  about it than I do. We're providing all that.  

Russians will starve. We provide a tremendous  amount of food. The word ‘spam’, like in email  

spam, comes from that canned pork. If you get one  of those little spam cans, that'll keep you going.  

And we sent that all over the world and that's the  origin of spam on the computer. People by the end  

of World War II were so sick of spam. But anyway,  we fed the Russians and we provided them all kinds  

of things that without it, they could not have  fought. So fast forward now, we're providing  

those things for Ukraine. So that the Ukrainians  can feed themselves. To keep them in the fight. 

Why didn't the impressive industrial war  output of the Soviet Union transfer into  

the same way that it did in Germany  and Japan and these consumer brands? 

This is a big difference between their  model for development and the Meiji model.  

The communist model is heavy industry and  largely for the military. And the Meiji,  

even though they wound up with the big military,  it's about getting these consumer products in  

light industry. And then they go on to do heavy  industry. It turns out the Meiji model is a better  

one. It just works better for an economy. And so the Russians aren't interested in  

doing consumer goods, right? It's all about  the communists having monopolizing power and  

then playing God in whatever region they control  and dictating whether other people live or die. 

Let's go back to Taiwan. What are  the odds you would give of a Taiwan  

conflict? Maybe you can give me your over  under five years, ten years, twenty years. 

I have no idea. I think you have to prepare for  it. And it will best position you to deter it,  

even though you may fail at deterring it. And  then if you fail at deterring it, it will best  

position you to deal if bad things happen. Being at the Naval war college and seeing  

how people are talking about this.  How likely is it that the U.S. would  

actually directly intervene on the behalf  of Taiwan and directly fight the Chinese? 

Taiwan is a country of 20 plus million people. If  you look across the globe, how many countries have  

about 20 million plus people? Dwarkesh Patel 

Lots. Sarah Paine 

Yeah, probably most countries in the world  are above that size. So if you say it's okay  

to level a country because for the People's  Republic to take Taiwan, I presume it's going  

to begin with an artillery barrage. I presume  that's going to be leveling Taiwanese cities,  

right? We've watched how it goes in Ukraine.  I can't imagine the Chinese being less brutal.  

You're going to say that's okay. Our  whole thing about this maritime system  

of international law. What is the fundamental  underlying principle of it all? It's sovereignty.  

It's the notion that just because you're big, you  can't go and destroy someone who's small. This is  

the fundamental basics of the whole thing. Yeah, although in the case of Taiwan,  

it's hard to argue that one island that is  right off the coast of China, and China,  

unlike any other area, has for decades said that  they want to conquer. It's not like they've been  

saying that once we get Taiwan, we also really  want to conquer India and Burma and Vietnam. 

Actually, they've just been redoing  their maps. They say what is Uttar  

Pradesh is ours. That would be a detail, right? Yeah, but it's hard to see. They conquer Taiwan  

and they get emboldened to then conquer Korea?  What's the cascading effect to worry about? 

Well, look at Chinese history. It  is a continental empire. What is  

the paradigm? Territorial conquest. Take  a look at it. This is it. And they're not  

off that paradigm. They're still on it. On the doctrine of strategic ambiguity,  

what is your opinion on this? Because in  World War I wasn't the Kaiser surprised  

that Britain intervened on behalf of  Belgium? And he was so upset about it. 

I don't know the details, but someone said that  man wasn't the sharpest quill in the porcupine? 

But just generally, is it wise to have  this, will they, won't they attitude?  

Does it do a good job of deterring them? I think you want to be ambiguous in the United  

States because otherwise it would enable Taiwan  to do crazy stuff. Like under Chiang Kai-shek,  

if we had been unambiguous, the man might  have done crazy stuff and then all of a  

sudden we get pulled into a World War. But if you think about a Taiwan conflict,  

just because there's a conflict there does  not mean the United States has to send its  

military toe to toe. I would think it would  give China a long lasting time out from the  

international world order. It'll be sanctioned. This is what's so tragic about China. Think  

about how many people have been lifted out of  poverty. So many since Deng Xiaoping. Hundreds  

of millions. It is a great achievement of our  lifetime. This has happened since you were born.  

And why did that happen? It's China's  reintegration into the rest of the world,  

of joining the maritime order, following the basic  credit card rules of paying for transactions and  

then your transactions are also guaranteed. That is the win for China, the true win. And  

taking Taiwan, who needs it? The Taiwanese  are perfectly fine doing their own thing.  

And they've made it clear they don't want  to be taken over by force. Who would be? 

The problem in China is a Communist Party  wants to maintain its monopoly on power.  

It used to claim the moral rectitude card. Well,  they can't do that anymore. They're so corrupt.  

They used to claim the economic growth card. Well,  that one's going away. They're left with one card.  

It's the nationalism card. And they're playing it  hard because it's a unifying thing for Chinese,  

for the Han ethnic group in China, who constitute  the overwhelming majority, that Taiwan should  

be theirs. It's a mistake. It will be a pivotal  error if they make that mistake. But guess what?  

Other countries cannot control what the Chinese  government decides to do. It's foolish to think  

you can control it. It's beyond your abilities. Although we can control whether we get into a  

head war with another global superpower.  What are the odds you would give to a war  

between China and the U.S. going nuclear? It would be the most catastrophic error  

imaginable for the United States and China  to have a military conflict. There will be no  

winners. There will be massive numbers of losers. Let's talk about nuclear weapons for a minute.  

Think about how Americans are so mad at each  other about wearing a mask or not wearing a  

mask. Talk about something that's stupid.  Talk about something that's not a big deal,  

wearing a mask or not. If anybody nukes anybody  else's city, do you think the world is going to  

be remotely the same way? Can you imagine? We can't even be logical about masks  

or just letting other people do their thing about  masks. We can't even do that in the United States.  

We have many diplomats who are doing their best  to prevent this eventuality but understand that  

we do not control the decisions of others. For instance, I'm going to make a guess that  

you don't have children. But if you ever have  children and little ones that you could pick up  

and put down, they will wind up doing things that  you cannot fathom. You're genetically related to  

these people. You love these people. And they  will do stuff that you think is just wild. You  

will put enormous pressure on them not to  do these things and they'll do it anyway.  

So the notion that we can take a country of one  billion and change and make them do anything… 

But the reason I ask is, is an island of 20  million people worth getting into an altercation  

that could potentially lead to a nuclear war? Ah. The global order, going back full circle,  

is based on sovereignty. If you allow this,  it doesn't mean you have to go to a nuclear  

war. You just never recognize whatever it  is and then you sanction China from then  

until kingdom come, so that they are not  part of the maritime trading order. And  

you tell them they need to cough up Taiwan. Understanding China and the way the government  

works, could the CCP survive a failure to take  Taiwan? If they invade, they fail. And then  

because of that, they get kicked out of the global  order. What do you think happens to the CCP? 

I don't know. But look at North Korea. Talk about  a failed place. It's amazing to me how long the  

Kim dynasty has maintained its power. It's  just unbelievable. They're starving. Don't  

count on any short-term ending. Those countries  that are willing to cooperate with each other,  

not invade, negotiate their disagreements,  work through international organizations,  

improve international organizations, that world  is what you want to protect. And you want to allow  

people to come and join. So if Russia changes  its mind, new government, etc, you want to bring  

them back into just the way Japan and Germany  were brought back in. You want to protect that  

order forever. Our prosperity is based on it.  And it involves serious defense spending, etc. 

The problem with the Communist Party, the paradigm  of we're going to have a monopoly, it's a route  

to poverty. Think about it. When the communists  took over, they didn't restore the grain harvest  

that had happened during the Civil War. The 1930s  version until after Mao was dead, it's incredible.  

It's a really lousy system for promoting  economic growth, and it matters in a poor  

country. It's going to determine your per capita  standard of living. And the poorer you are, the  

more that makes a huge difference to you to have  somebody say. Communism doesn't produce wealth.  

It's an incredibly effective way for taking power  within a failing state and putting a dictatorship  

in power. It's incredibly good at that. But  it doesn't deliver prosperity afterwards. 

Since World War II, is it fair to say  that our Navy has not been tested to  

the same extent as our Air Force and  Army have in the engagements we've had? 

None of our forces have been as tested.  Probably the Marines the most in the Army  

because they're doing land engagements. But  if you think that Iraq or Afghanistan is a  

peer competitor, give me a break. I think our GDP is like 325 times  

that of Afghanistan. It is a different event,  

which is why the Ukrainians are going  “Excuse me?” when they get advice from us. 

Given that that's the case, how confident  should we be in our $15 billion carriers?  

The other person that I interviewed in the UK was  Dominic Cummings, who was the chief advisor to the  

previous government, and he said that in the war  games, for the British carriers to survive, they  

would have to exit the zone of contention, which  would make them useless. So how worried should  

we be about our preparedness for a naval war? You always need to be prepared. You have to be  

thinking about it constantly. One, our carriers  are incredibly useful in going toe-to-toe with  

a peer competitor. The vulnerabilities you are  describing are absolutely there, particularly  

if you want to get up close and personal. On  the other hand, what a carrier provides you  

is that it gives you a base all over the world.  So if you're not going after a peer competitor,  

then they're incredibly useful. And we own them. So the question now is going forward, do you want  

to build more carriers? Or do you want to build  something smaller that just takes drones? Or what  

are you doing? That's the big decision and I'm not  qualified to answer it. But for the ones that you  

have, they're tremendously useful for doing these  non-peer events. And again, I am not qualified  

to answer operational questions like these. Yeah, I guess I am curious about it because  

in Ukraine we have these drones that are  taking out extremely expensive tanks. 

Bingo. The impact of asymmetric  

warfare. How do you see that shaping up? Warfare has always been asymmetric. Isn't  

that the game? You figure out whatever they've  got, and then you do something different,  

which is the asymmetry. Right. Or the thing of just  

having cheap drone armies that can  debilitate billion-dollar equipment. 

Yeah, this is it. And you're very much part of  the generation going back to your education in  

computer science and these technologies.  Apparently the 3D printing that they're  

doing in Ukraine is absolutely going to change  things. I don't know to what degree. I'm not an  

expert. The other issue with the United States is  we build a lot of these very expensive platforms,  

these ships and airplanes, and then you wonder  whether you can afford to lose them. Thinking  

creatively, this is where war games come into  play, and planning is “Okay. What would be  

the value of these smaller things? Can they  carry the water when the time comes, etc?”  

I think you're going to learn a lot from this  Ukraine war about what works and what doesn't. 

What is your opinion on how competent and  effective the military is in general? Because  

given that there hasn't been a huge war for quite  a while, have they been able to maintain the  

standards and the efficiency? I am not qualified to answer  

that. I teach at the Naval War College  but that does not make me an expert on  

how the Pentagon runs its business. I think the  general feeling about the federal government is  

that there are incredible inefficiencies  but it's very difficult to get rid of them.  

In the civilian part of it as well. Once people  get a federal service job, it's very difficult  

to get rid of that particular job, etc. Are there plans around the Naval War  

College or elsewhere about how to make  the system more modern and efficient? 

I teach in the strategy department, so we  do strategy, not all of this other stuff. 

Is the era of great generals over? Maybe  you answered this already when you said  

that we overemphasize looking back how much these  generals mattered but for some reason or another,  

they've become historically famous.  People like von Müller, Patton,  

or MacArthur. Whereas off the top of my head,  I can't even name a famous general of Iraq. 

I can name one. You have Valery Zaluzhny,  who runs the Ukrainian army. Think about the  

people you're picking. You're picking people who  were part of a global war, a really high stakes  

war. And then as I pointed out, we use these  generals to personify a whole group of people. 

I suspect the ones you're going to find  are going to be the ones in Ukraine.  

And the fact that they've done as well  as they have done so far is incredible.  

And then it's not just the generals there,  right? You have Zelensky, who is the public  

face of diplomacy. It's incredible. From  the night, his little sound bite — “I  

don't need a ride. I need more ammunition.” And then if you think of the people there  

who are running the rail system who have kept  things supplied or the people who are repairing  

their electric power plants. There are so  many Ukrainians of different professions  

who are holding that thing together. So, there  are plenty of great people to be found there. 

What is the process that leads to the loss of  civilian control of the military? For example,  

in Japan. And why has the  US been robust against this? 

In Japan, it's interesting. If  you go back to the Meiji leaders,  

who are they? They're the people who won the  civil war against the last Tokugawa Shogun.  

If you look at their career paths, they had  civil and military jobs as they swapped around,  

and they all knew each other. The head of the  Army and the Navy and the prime ministers,  

they all interacted. But they didn't create an  institutional mechanism. They did have a cabinet,  

but they didn't have a full up legal forcing  together of all the civil and military parts  

of the government and have them operate on a  rather level playing field. The Army dominates. 

So when that generation dies, everyone gets  much more stovepipe careers. They're much better  

educated than their parents and grandparents have  been but their education would be strictly in the  

Army, as opposed to, “Oh, well. The founder of the  Army also founded the police force. And he knew  

the finance minister and had great respect  for the finance minister.” And then you  

have people not respecting each other. I'm making this up because I don't know  

the details of China but if you think about Deng  Xiaoping, he's on the long march, he's one of the  

younger members. He must know everybody. And  I know he's in and out of prison. So he knows  

the people who are in and he knows the people  who are out. Then when you get to Xi Jinping,  

they're a much more stovepipe group of  people. They don't have the institutions. 

Actually, in China, they do have institutions for  party control over the government. So that's how  

communist governments have maintained very  good control over their militaries. In fact,  

if you look at Communists, they're really good  at civilian control over militaries. In fact,  

that was Trotsky's contribution back in the  Russian Revolution of how you take a bunch of  

white officers and veterans of World War One and  keep track of them. It has to do with political  

and military commissars. The military commissar  is the officer who's actually a professional.  

The political commissar is the one who's  got a connection with the secret police,  

who if the military commissar doesn't  do as told, they'll come in and kill  

him and maybe also his whole family for good luck.  And it's very effective in the commissar system. 

In the U.S., though, in the Naval War College,  you have these systems of the officers from West  

Point or whatever, I don't know what the actual  progression looks like. Are they seeing the  

civilian from their education to their promotion?  Are they in the military the entire time, or do  

they also have this wide spread of experience? Military officers have a very extensive education.  

It's often a succession of MA degrees. Some  of them are very technical things. Like if  

you're in nuclear subs, you better know how to  run the nuclear plant and engineering things.  

And then they come to places like the Naval War  College to learn about strategy and other things. 

In terms of civil control over the  military, if you go back to the American  

Revolution, the Continental Army couldn't even get  funding. And it grows very gradually over time.  

And then you have MacArthur, who is just ignoring  Truman and is making all kinds of threats.  

Truman thinks he's got a way of settling  out the Korean War, and MacArthur says  

things that overturn that. So eventually  you have MacArthur getting fired, which is  

telling military officers you can't do that. And then when you get some military officers  

shooting off their mouths under Barack Obama,  they get fired instantly. We have full-up  

civilian control. With MacArthur, he was trying  to run policy and got himself fired, but he was  

tremendously popular. And it was the joint chiefs  of staffs who actually fired him. They agreed with  

Truman, they don't want MacArthur having his  finger on the atomic button. It scared them  

to death because they thought he would press it. Speaking of the political and military commissars  

and their system, why have the communists  been so good at propaganda historically?  

You talk in Wars for Asia about how, despite  the imperial things they did and the ways in  

which they sabotaged things, they had much  better PR than the Americans ended up having. 

If you think about how communists started, if  you take 1917, the Bolsheviks, they're really  

weak. And you think about people who are weak,  what can you do? Words are key. So you're using  

words to cultivate loyalty so you can get cadres  to come your way. And you're going to use words,  

since you don't have the ability  to threaten people militarily,  

you're going to use words to try to undermine  them. And we've seen this happen the world over,  

I think wasn't the story of Al Qaeda was pretty  good at words and doing their recruiting, etc. 

It takes the powers that are the target of this  quite a while to realize the effects of this. You  

think the Bolsheviks are crazy people and ignore  them but then gradually you see the cumulative  

effects and they are a threat and then you need  to get going with your own information warfare. 

And I'll give you an example, the United States  had quite a robust information warfare by  

the later stages of the Cold War. It involved  Voice of America and BBC and it was basically,  

just tell people the truth about the relative  standards of living. The cumulative effects  

will be to destroy the allegiance of people in  their own governments, which is what happened. 

At the end of the Cold War in 1991, we ceased  funding that because we thought it's over.  

And then I remember I was on sabbatical  in California at the Hoover Institution,  

and one of the people there was a great expert on  Ukraine, and this one time when the RTV was on,  

the Russian propaganda station, he said RTV is  really dangerous. I said, “Oh, it's ludicrous.  

They're just telling nut stories.” He was right.  I was wrong. He was absolutely right that those  

crazy stories started getting a life of their own. And then if you look at Biden, when this war was  

just about to begin in Ukraine, he made the  decision to release a lot of the intelligence  

about, “Hey, they're about to invade. Here's  where they're coming.” And he completely  

buried Putin in the information war. So it  took us a while to wake up. Now we're back. 

The US ambassador in Japan has some really lively  tweets about the Chinese, and they’re hilarious,  

you need to Google them if you haven't read  them. We're back. And actually the United States  

is really good at this department. Hollywood, the  movies, we have so much talent in this department.  

A lot of it's just based on telling the truth. But  lies, as we've noticed, take a long, long time.  

It's very easy to tell a lie. It takes a long  time to get all the facts to prove it is a lie. 

Why was the Axis so much worse at collaborating  than the Allies? Especially given the fact that  

it seemed like the Axis should have been in  much greater collaboration. They were all  

these nationalist militaristic movements, whereas  the Allies, you have communists and democracies. 

In your book, you talk about when Japan's fighting  Russia, Germany has a non-aggression pact with  

Russia. When Germany does Operation Barbarossa on  Russia, Japan has a non-aggression with Russia.  

So if they had a two-front war what could have  happened? When Pearl Harbor happens, Germany isn't  

warned, but then gets dragged into a war against  America. Why didn't the Axis better coordinate? 

I'm going to turn your question inside out.  I'm thinking about the Alliance system. What  

did one side do versus the other side do? I'm  thinking about the Alliance itself. Flip it  

around to the enemy which is that the Axis  powers put their enemies on death ground.  

That is why the war began. That is an incredibly  clarifying event. That got Britain, which really,  

really hated the communists to ally with them  immediately. Forever, Britain thought that the  

dangerous thing were the communists, not the  fascists in Germany. But then when the Germans  

worked their wonders, Britains got all “It's  the communists who are the primary threat.”  

If you look at it that way, that's one thing. Another concept to think about are primary enemies  

versus secondary enemy. If I ask you the question  for Germany to get what it wants in the world,  

who is its primary enemy? The answer would be  Russia, because that's where it wants to do its  

Lebensraum and stuff. You go, well, Italy, who  is its primary enemy to do its Roman Empire III  

or whatever number they're up to, and the primary  enemy would be Britain who would get in the way  

of those plans. Then you go, who's the primary  enemy of Japan? It's actually not us, it's China,  

because if they win, that's the prize to be taken. So then you flip it around and go, okay, primary  

enemy of Britain, Germany. Primary enemy of the  United States, Germany. It was never Japan. We  

deliberately understood that Japan would never  threaten us directly in the way that Germany  

ultimately would if it took over all of Europe.  Then you ask Russia, primary enemy? Germany. You  

know, kidding, we got three aligned on the primary  enemy. It's a very effective alliance. Get rid of  

Germany and it falls apart, which is actually  predictable. When you lose the primary enemy,  

which is Hitler, he's gone. All of a sudden,  we're back to Communist versus Capitalist. The  

Cold War is often running. People act like it's  a surprise. No, it's not. Primary enemy gone. 

Back to the question about the Meiji generation.  We see these sorts of industrializations across  

Southeast Asia. What happened many decades  later in Korea and Taiwan and China,  

did Japan just do that exact same thing earlier?  And how come in Korea and Taiwan, you have a sort  

of dictatorship or an authoritarian government  that leads this effort and then it transitions  

to democracy? Whereas in China and Japan, that  didn't happen. What explains the difference  

there? Is it just the power of the US? Well, A, if Japan hadn't gotten into World War II,  

who knows what would have happened. If  the West had not mismanaged the Great  

Depression, who knows what would have happened? If that didn't happen, do you think there's  

a chance Japan liberalizes in the 30s? Perhaps. It's conceivable. But there's also  

another thing about human beings. We human beings  require the absolutely scorching horrible lesson  

to suddenly realize, “You need to do these things.  You're going to be better off.” The searing lesson  

was World War I and that World War II generation  set up institutions that have held the peace in  

the industrialized world. Not the third world  where all the proxy wars were fought, but in the  

industrialized world till very recently. On the authoritarian regimes, communist  

systems that insist upon a monopoly of power  of the communist party are a separate problem.  

The places you're talking about in Asia, they  invested extensively in education, extensively  

in infrastructure, extensively in industry of all  types and allowed all kinds of private ownership. 

You can have a lot of government planning  and a lot of government ownership,  

and the economy works perfectly well.  You can look at different European  

countries with different percentages. When you go  to 100% government control, you kill your economy.  

Korea, Japan, etc. didn't do that. And so they get  educated people who then for 20 years really put  

themselves on the line, putting the pressure  on their own governments to democratize. 

Why was the strategy of the Soviet Union in  World War II so much better in Asia than it  

was in Europe? In Asia they're playing off  these different parties in China against  

each other, for example China against Japan.  In Europe, Stalin doesn't even see Barbarossa,  

or doesn't prepare for it adequately, why  were they so much more effective in Asia? 

I don't know. I would imagine cooperative  adversaries. China had been a failed state for  

such a long time. They're trying to glue Humpty  Dumpty back together again. So what works in Asia  

versus Europe where you have developed countries  with a whole cadre of experts, which is not the  

case in China? There are a lot more people in the  West who are re-assessing and they have robust  

institutions. It goes back to institutions.  Whereas China is trying to just build these  

the first time around. Difficult in China. Why doesn't China think like a continental  

power? They have a vast coastline where a  lot of their wealth is around that coastline.  

As far back as the 15th century, you have these  huge Navy’s. Wasn't it Zheng He that had a bigger  

navy and far bigger ships than Columbus. Yeah, they had a big navy. Different times. 

So why didn’t they think like a continental power? Having a continental location is not a choice,  

it's a fact of geography. If you look at China,  it has a huge land border. Sure, it’s got a huge  

coastline as well but historically, where have  China's national security threats come from?  

From the North, the Northwest. If you look  where the passes are of people coming on in  

or down straight through Manchuria, etc. China, in order to maintain its empire  

and just dominate China itself along  with keeping these other people out,  

has had to have a large standing army. When it  has built a large navy like Zheng He, is when it's  

got extra pocket change. If you have extra  money then you can go do this. But if that  

changes and you have trouble with people on your  borders, you've got to spend your money that way. 

It's very difficult to have a world-class navy and  a world-class army. If you think about Britain,  

it maintained the big navy and always had a tiny  army until they ramped it up in World War One,  

which was the beginning of the end for them,  as being the dominant power that they had been. 

What level of competence should we assign our  estimates of how well the PLA would function  

in a war, whereas at least the United States  military has had these practice rounds in Iraq and  

Afghanistan? We don't even know how the modern PLA  would actually function in a war. And obviously,  

as you were mentioning earlier, in authoritarian  systems, there's this lack of information and  

feedback that could lead to all kinds of  catastrophes where people are not prepared.  

What should we think of the PLA's competence? I don't know. But I think the people who are  

worried about that are the Vietnamese and  the Indians, the people who are likely to  

meet them. Back in ‘79, when the Chinese  tried to work their magic in Vietnam,  

they had massive casualties. The Vietnamese killed  more Chinese in a matter of weeks than all US  

losses in Afghanistan and in fact, all US losses  in Vietnam over however many years we were there. 

Do you think the Chinese would be good at  expeditionary warfare and sending these  

people anywhere? Think about where would you be  fighting them? It's great that they have got a big  

army. So where are they going to deploy them? Why have the wars in China been so deadly?  

You have millions of casualties sometimes. It's continental warfare. That's how it goes. 

It's the same reason Russia  has had so many Russians dying. 

I believe if you measure the number of locals who  died in Iraq and Afghanistan and then they've had  

the civil war on top of it, it's thousands and  thousands and thousands and thousands of people.  

We go, “Oh, it wasn't too bad for Americans.”  For those who live there, it was quite bad. 

The Taiping Rebellion, I guess another… Tens of millions. No one knows  

how many people died in that thing. I think one of the takeaways for you. if  

you look at Chinese history over the course of all  these different rebellions that go back hundreds  

of years, all these different wars they fought  and you look and go, “Wow, millions of Chinese  

killing each other.” A mark of good strategy is  not killing your own. So if the Chinese have been  

doing this for a long time, don't expect them to  be great strategists, which isn't a happy thing,  

actually. It might mean they do crazy, stupid  things that are so detrimental to themselves. 

Some final questions about  studying history in general. 

So I studied computer science and I talk to a lot  of people in these technical fields. Being around  

them, I think I have a sense of what it means  to understand a technical field well. What does  

it mean to understand history or strategy well? In history, you have to do tremendous amounts of  

reading. And it's over a career. Also, publishing  is really essential, not only do you give people  

the best ideas that you've encountered but  it also forces you to really come to terms  

with what you do think and why. I feel after every  book, whatever I was, I'm one-click better. You've  

probably got good eyesight, unlike me. If you go  in for an eye appointment, the guy will go click,  

click, and go, is this one better or is  this better? I feel like after a book,  

it's one better. Do I see 20-20 now? And after a year abroad, like I'm in England for a  

year, where I just get to think, read extensively,  try to be open-minded, try to look for the unknown  

unknowns. What is it I'm completely missing?  What is it that I'm totally wrong about? Being  

open to reassessing, “Ooh. I got that wrong.” So it has to do with reading extensively.  

If you're going to be studying other societies,  you better read the language. I'm not particularly  

good at any of these languages, but I do try  hard. And it's taken years for me to bungle my way  

through them as I do. But that's really essential. And too much of U.S. graduate education,  

particularly in political science, where they ask  you very important questions for international  

relations and politics, they don't require them to  have high-end linguistic skills. They should. And  

part of it is, if you learn a different language,  you do kind of a mind-meld. If you learn Japanese,  

you have to learn all of these formality things  and what's called Keigo. It's honorific Japanese.  

My Japanese is terrible, but learning as much as  I've learned makes you realize part of how this  

hierarchical society works and you get a sense of  how they think about things and they categorize  

stuff. So we're back at the opticians for this.  If you do the language, you get a few more clicks. 

And having to live there when  doing this archival research. 

Yeah. And then just asking people questions when I  live there of why this? Why that? And then what's  

funny is you come back home and it gives you a  new sense of what makes one's own country special.  

Because things that you just assume everyone does,  you go, “Well, everyone doesn't quite do this.” 

Have you come across something super shocking in  your archival research? I don't know if there's  

a story of something super shocking. One of  the things I'm remembering from your book,  

as you mentioned, that you had a speculation that  both the nationalists and the communists help  

the Russians cover up the rape of Manchuria  because they were both given hush payments. 

Well, no, they cut a deal. It didn't work. And  that's my interpretation. And if you have further  

archival evidence that I'm happy to reassess. But anything else? Maybe not exactly like that,  

but something you've dug up that nobody noticed. Well, I'm not a gotcha person, but working at  

the Naval War College. I started out  my career studying Russia and China.  

I did not realize it but I'm learning about two of  the greatest continental empires in human history.  

And it's fascinating learning about that. Then I  get a job. My husband and I go to the Naval War  

College. And suddenly I'm teaching about British  and US maritime strategy. What do I know about  

that? That's why my husband got me to do all  these co-edited books about naval topics just  

to learn more about it. And that's where I got  the idea about maritime and continental origin. 

I gave the Marshall lecture that was published in  General Military History. In it, I summarize my  

views on what the difference between a continental  and maritime power is. And that's one of my big  

career takeaways. It's a fundamentally  different way of looking at the world. 

Putin honestly looks at the world like, “If  I control territory, that's what makes me  

secure.” Maritime powers, start with Britain,  which is, “Hey, mine's secure if I can maximize  

money from commerce.” Because then I can buy a  Navy and buy allies with armies and stuff. And  

then eventually this order of organizing trade  by international law, and the Dutch Republic is  

instrumental in this with Hugo Grotius, who is the  founding father of international law. They want to  

run transactions by law, et cetera. This is an  international order that's win-win. You join it,  

you get security. You have input on how it  evolves because it's a work in progress. 

Whereas this continental thing is negative sum.  And you can see it in Ukraine. Putin wants more  

territory. Okay, he took Eastern Ukraine and  he took Crimea in 2014. But it's negative sum  

because he destroys whatever businesses had been  being run in Donbass and he absolutely kills most  

of the tourist industry. And then you can look  to today, it's so negative sum in Ukraine. He is  

destroying wealth at a really rapid clip.  It's really a stupid way to run things. 

If the PRC tries to take Taiwan,  it's a continental view. Somehow  

they think more territory is going to improve  their security. No, they'll level it and they'll  

hurt themselves. Whereas if they just ignore the  Taiwan thing and say, “Oh, they're so annoying,  

let them run their own place who wants them  anyway.” and then trade with them, they'll both  

make money. That's my biggest career takeaway. Political scientists love to talk about America,  

the hegemony. No other country in the world wants  an American hegemony. There may be some people in  

the United States who think that looks great,  but no one's going to buy into a world order  

in which the United States is the hegemony  who pushes everyone else around. I get it,  

we're big and we're influential, but other people  are influential too. This maritime order where,  

yeah we're an important part of it, but we  have many other people in it. It's a win-win. 

Biden is doing all of these meetings with  Europeans managing what's going to go on in  

Ukraine, et cetera. And it's based on agreement of  all these different countries chipping in big and  

small. Who's prosperous and who's not, may I ask? The Maritimes. 

Yeah, they're the ones who have massively  increased their standards of living since  

the Cold War. It was really the third world.  Except now we got Wagner or whatever's left of  

it and also China's now got these private military  things running roughshod over Africa. All that's  

going to do is tank African growth rates, which  for a while were going double-digit. So that's  

one of my big career takeaways. And I tried to put  it into the one lecture that I was asked to do and  

the one article, which is like a 20-page read. That's a super interesting way to think about  

things. A couple years back people were looking at  the growth rates in China and they were thinking  

that it's going to have the biggest economy  and be the leader of the global order. Does  

your analysis imply that because it's not  part of that maritime system, even if its  

economic growth picks up, it will still not  be the leader of the world in the same way? 

Doing what they're doing is all going to depress  growth. They could join the maritime order any  

day. That is what at the end of the Cold War,  everyone wanted them to do. Everyone wanted Putin  

to join it. If you think about all the money  Putin has spent on his crazy military stuff,  

imagine what would have happened if he'd spent  all that on the Russian road system, because  

their road system is deplorable. And imagine if  he had devoted his attention to trying to have a  

better legal system so that small businesses could  get bigger without having someone come to them for  

protection money. Think what Russia could have  been now. It would have been dramatically better. 

They have so much energy, so many raw resources. Oh, they have so many talented people, but the  

Russians don't see it that way. They see it in  this continental view, and they're the ones who  

have to come to terms with what they think. This is why containment is brilliant. In the  

meantime, those of us who joined the maritime  order need to work with each other and then we  

contain the problem by saying, “You cannot join  us on equal footing till you behave yourselves.”  

You get a timeout from the global order, but  we would welcome you back in. The problem with  

Putin is he's done so much damage to Ukraine,  there are going to be reparations involved,  

and the Russians won't want to pay those. What are the mistakes and biases that come  

about from self-studying history, as opposed  to formally studying it? In what ways is  

your understanding of strategy or history  most likely to be incomplete as a result? 

Let's do history. I think about my education  at Columbia. I had the most absentee landlord  

professors. They just didn't waste their time on  me. I just did a tremendous amount of reading,  

and while I was there, I did the equivalent of  two PhDs of coursework as a graduate student.  

Because going to graduate school is such an  expensive event. It costs time and money and  

everything else. So I just took massive  numbers of courses to read the reading  

list of what they had given me and having  some guided readings was tremendously helpful. 

On the strategy part, this is where the Naval War  College has been essential to my publications.  

In the strategy and policy department, what  we do and what civilian academia doesn't do,  

and it's tragic because they're better  positioned, is a big team-taught course,  

the strategy course. All the students at the War  College have to take the main strategy course, the  

main joint military operations course, the main  national security affairs course. It's a one-year  

MA. In that one trimester in which we have them,  our course is four-fifths of their coursework.  

And then there's a junior and a senior course,  so we do teach two trimesters out of three. 

Alright, so because it's team-taught and the  lectures are given by different faculty members,  

so I attend everybody else's lectures, or  I did originally, and I attend all the new  

ones. You learn so much from your colleagues  and then they learn from each other. You were  

asking me about Bismarck. Why would I know about  Bismarck? Because I had colleagues who actually  

knew something about him, which I don't, and  I listened intently and I did the readings.  

And then from teaching strategy, I learned all  these concepts and I've given you some of them,  

and they're tremendously useful for studying wars. I never would have learned about maritime powers  

without being at the Naval War College. It is the  only institution of higher education in the United  

States that focuses on the strategic prerequisites  for and possibilities of being a maritime power.  

It is essential to know this to practice U.S.  foreign policy. Why? Because unlike Ukraine,  

if you have a continental position, if someone  threatens you and invades on a given day,  

you have a choice on that given day, the  day they chose, either you're going to  

capitulate or you're going to fight. So they  determine when the war is going to begin. 

In our insulated position, unless we start  doing terrible things to the Mexicans and the  

Canadians. Mexico is our biggest trade partner,  and Canada must be not far behind. When there are  

wars that are important to our national security,  we decide, like in World War I and World War II,  

do we get in? If yes, when do we get in? In  Afghanistan, and in Iraq, do we get in? Do we not  

get in? We could have avoided Iraq altogether if  we wanted to, and I'm not a Middle Eastern expert,  

so you'd have to talk to those people about pros  and cons. Afghanistan, since we had been attacked,  

the chances were we were going to be in on  that one because of a direct attack on us. 

It is incredibly important to understand this  maritime position. That's why I've co-edited  

all these books with my husband, the ones  I mentioned to you about maritime things,  

which took us years to do. But if you want a short  course, you get half a dozen of these books and  

it’s actually a fast way of learning about what  the maritime instrument can and can't do for you.  

The strategy course was absolutely essential from  what I know about strategy. I have done my best  

in books to put what I have learned there. The  one I'm working on in the Cold War is going to  

be organized around these strategic concepts of  — How did each side try to manipulate the other?  

How did the medium powers try to wing in on the  game? And what are the strategies that they're  

using? The paradigms, etc. So I'm going to try  and pour as much of this in there. Because this  

is what education is. It's passing the baton from  one generation to another saying this is what I've  

learned over the course of my career. I'm really excited to read that. 

It'll take me years to finish it.  It's not happening any time soon. 

Final question. My audience probably is  overwhelmingly representative of technology  

and those kinds of worlds. What is  it that you especially want them  

to understand about history and strategy? What I want them on history and strategy is  

it's going to be a well informed person and read  broadly. But I think for them, in technology,  

they need to think broadly of these  technologies about which they have  

deep expertise. Do these technologies  privilege dictatorships or democracies?  

I do not know the answer. When you're creating  architectures for things like the Internet,  

etc. Think about these things. Think about  consequences. I suspect and I don't know this that  

when China does its Belt Road initiative, I would  have presumed it's also selling a nice little I.T.  

package to keep the dictator in power that if  you want to keep track of your population here,  

this is the I.T. thing you need to do to  firewall this, that and the other thing. 

The west is the part of the world that has  developed most of these technologies and continues  

to be at the forefront of it. Think very deeply  about whether you're going to ultimately privilege  

dictatorships over democracies because the reason  tech has been able to be so vibrant is because you  

live within the castle walls of this maritime  order where people follow the rules. You're  

protected on the outside. You have military  things, etc. If those walls are breached by  

dictatorship or by really stupid grand strategy..  Our countries have come perilously close in the  

last few years. Perilously close. If Trump had  been president at the time Ukraine was invaded,  

Ukraine would be no more. We would have Russian  armies right up to the Polish border now.  

These things are terribly consequential. And then another piece is — so you're well  

educated and you're in the growing part of the  United States where you talk to each other at all  

of these meetings. Think about organizing things.  For instance, we have tremendous problems with  

refugees or illegal immigrants coming over our  borders because we have basically failing states  

to the South of us. Is there anything that foreign  investment or anything can do over a 20 or 30 year  

period to help alleviate this because it will  improve our own national security. If instead  

of refugees pouring over our borders, you have  people making good t-shirts or eventually putting  

phones together. But that's the sort of thing that  people who are in your world, who you meet each  

other at these business meetings and talk to each  other and think about, “Okay, I got to hear now.”  

Maybe my charity work is to me thinking about  these other things. So in my line of work, what  

do I do for charity? I talk to anyone for free. And I really appreciate that. 

On the point about tech and whether it is  enabling democracies or dictatorships. Isn't  

it very difficult to tell in advance? I'm sure  that Gutenberg didn't think he was helping the  

Protestant Reformation or that the guy who made  the radio didn't realize what he was doing for  

Hitler. Even with AI the thing that it was  initially thought to help with, “It helps  

us collect information and congregate it.” But  we're seeing that China has been behind on these  

language models because it's really hard to align  them to not say anything bad about the PRC, or the  

CCP rather. Isn't it hard to tell in advance? It is hard. But the people you're talking  

about who are your prime audience are the bright  people who might have some insights into it. Well,  

what do you want to do in your life? I would think  one of the pieces would be contributing in some  

way that makes things a little better.  However you're going to define better. 

Awesome. I think that's an excellent place to  close this episode. Thank you so much for your  

time. And really, you’ve written the best books  on military history. I highly recommend them to  

better understand not only those periods of  history, but broader strategies and lessons  

and insights about our own time. Anyway, this was  a huge pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. 

Thank you for having me and asking all  the fun questions. It's been my pleasure.