Sarah Paine
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It turns out that the possibilities for maritime and continental powers are a little different.
Basically, a small subset of countries can defend themselves primarily at sea, and that opens certain possibilities, and others can't, and that opens and closes certain possibilities.
And I'm going to talk at this story from Britain's point of view, the country with the 360, you can't get me mode.
And it's an instructive case for the United States of the possibilities and the perils of having this sort of position.
So that is my game plan today.
And you can look at the great peninsula of Europe where Britain is located.
And you can see this northern coastline for Britain, where it's uncomfortably close to the continent, and its enemies are sitting there.
It's an interesting neighborhood.
So here's my plan.
I'm going to talk about these continental problems that Britain has been dealing with.
If you think about it, Britain was always fighting France, and then in 1871, Germany unifies, and then the problem's Germany.
And I'm going to pick up the story
in 1939 when things are really bad for Britain.
So I'm going to talk about first these continental problems.
And then I'm going to talk about how Britain tried to deal with it.
And first it has to do with getting sea control.
And then once you can do that, finding some peripheral theaters where you might be able to fight and deal with the continental problem.
And you probably need allies.
And so those are the first four topics.
Then, so that was then, and now is now.
The continental problems now are China and Russia, and to see of what this case study might reveal about the ongoing things.
All right, so here's Britain, uncomfortably close to the continent.
If it wants to get to Russia, which is its big ally in World War I and World War II, it's either got to go way up north around the Norwegian coastline,
and you get up into places like Murmansk and Archangel, or it's got to go way around through this very narrow sea, the Mediterranean, through the choke point of choke points, which is the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, into the Black Sea, and the main port back in the day was Odessa.
And then if you compare French and British access to the high seas, France has got a pretty good coastline that just gets it right into the oceans.
But Germany, if it wants to send merchant traffic or naval traffic, it's got to go through these narrow seas.
And then it's got to get by Britain, which is its big enemy in the two world wars, which is the dominant naval power.
So that's complicated.
For Britain, if it wants to get to its empire back in the day, it wants to go through the Suez Canal.
That requires the cooperation of Spain, France, Italy, and if it wants to get to Russia, Turkey as well.
Well, Turkey didn't cooperate very well in either war.
And if you think in World War II, well, fall of France, fascist sympathies of Spain, and then Italy as part of the access.
Britain is in real trouble.
And what do you do about this?
Britain has this big empire that it wants to protect.
It's got a massive basing system, more bases than anybody else does, in order to protect this empire from this, which is a very resentful Germany.
Doesn't much like the Versailles settlement of World War I.
It's a divided country in that a Polish corridor separates East Prussia.
And the Germans start trying to solve this problem.
Initially, they're taking Austria, the Sudeten-German parts of Czechoslovakia in 38.
Then they take all of Czechoslovakia in 39.
And they've already dealt with the Rhineland, which is supposed to be demilitarized per the terms of the Versailles Treaty.
Well, they ignored that, remilitarized in 36.
And this is important because there are a lot of industrial problems
resources and factories and things there.
It turns out that Hitler's plans require, it's not optional, it requires the resources not only of the Rhineland, but also Czechoslovakia and Poland and Romania, which is going to have the oil for them.
So when you get to 1939, when Russia and Germany are dividing up Poland between them, this is the part of the history that Russians don't like to talk about, but it's exactly what they were doing.
This triggers World War II because the French and the British honor their alliance with the Poles to help deal with this.
All right, so 1940, Britain's in a world of hurt.
It faces this massive blue problem, and then there's this growing green disaster.
It's facing two continental powers, Germany and Russia, that both have these expansive empires they want to create.
They want to divide Europe and then the rest of the world.
Bad news for Britain.
But 1941, when Hitler decides he needs Russia too,
And then Russia decides, ah, the one that's attacking me is probably the major problem, not the other one.
So Stalin is gonna swap sides and he's gonna be coordinating with Britain.
So that's better from Britain's point of view than having two continental powers trying to deal with it.
So now it's down to one.
So once the United States has gotten into the war, this is what the world looks like.
You have a big cancer in Europe.
from the British point of view.
But it's all surrounded by oceans that Britain can get to, and a lot of allies and neutral states.
So Britain has access to those places.
And then there's a separate cancer in Asia, where Japan's trying to work its magic.
And I say separate because the Axis never coordinated these two theaters.
So...
This is looking at the world from a maritime perspective.
What you're looking at is all the oceanic routes that connect everything.
So Britain's problem is how to leverage the miracle of sea transport that basically can access you the whole world versus in the logistical nightmare of land transport where you have to, you can only drive through countries that'll let you drive through.
The seas give you mobility.
They give you access to theaters, markets, resources, allies.
And they also give you sanctuary at home if you're surrounded by them.
It makes it harder for people to invade.
So Britain's trying to leverage all of that against the armies of the continental armies by it's going to try to strangle them economically, diplomatically, and militarily.
Now, the generation that led World War II in Britain, and not just Britain, but elsewhere, they were the conscripts of World War I, which was supposed to end all wars, and they knew full well as they're in the midst of World War II that it did not remotely achieve that promise.
And so they learned a whole series of lessons, and I'm going to do a comparison of what was done in World War I versus World War II.
And they are the greatest generation, not their children who claim the title.
Lesson number one is don't go beyond the culminating point of attack.
What's that?
The terminology comes from Clausewitz.
Carl von Clausewitz, who is a Western guru on conventional land warfare, which means is if you're attacking in a battle, if you go too far, you'll weaken yourself because the enemy will counterattack, send you further backwards than you would have otherwise.
In the case of World War I, you're sending young men over trenches into ongoing machine gun fire.
What do you suppose is going to happen to them?
And this profligate waste of life in these assaults out of trenches, maybe you took a little territory in the first two weeks, but after that, nothing.
These offensives will go on for months and months, racking up hundreds of thousands of deaths.
No more doing that in World War II.
And you can look the death figures for World War I and II.
So in World War I, the British army gets the multimillion-man army that they had coveted.
They deploy it on the main front from start to finish, and they chalk up twice as many deaths as they did in World War II when they have a peripheral strategy.
In World War II, they do make the mistake is they land the big army on the continent, opening move.
But it doesn't do well, and then they reassess, and they get that army off the continent immediately.
This is what the Dunkirk evacuation is, where the French are covering the British as they're decamping from the continent, saving the British army.
And this is why France has such large casualties.
It is doing this, even though France is in the war that long.
So it's going to be a long wait before the British get back on the continent again.
Long wait also for the United States to get in the war.
There's no more going beyond the culminating point of attack.
The way diplomacy is run is also completely different.
In World War I, there were exactly two conferences trying to coordinate things among the Entente powers.
And they're the December 1915 and November 1916 Chantilly conferences.
And all they are are the military heads of
Well, the Russian Romanov dynasty is overthrown in early 1917.
It is too late.
What happened in World War I is the Germans focused on the Western Front in 1914, Eastern Front 1915, back to the Western Front in 1916.
Well...
In World War II, the idea is you want to squeeze them simultaneously from all fronts so they can't divert people back and forth.
And if you look at the coordination, it begins even before the United States is in the war with the ABC staff talks and then the Atlantic Conference, which yields the Atlantic Charter, which is talking about what war objectives are, unconditional surrender of Germany, and also what the post-war situation is going to look like.
And there's coordination not only among countries,
military leaders, but civil and military leaders as well.
There's a combined command of U.S.
and British forces.
We have offices in each other's capitals, but we're also coordinating with the Russians so that you're setting up not only also war termination and what post-war institutions are going to be like to hold the peace.
It's a completely different event from World War I,
When Russia falls out of the Entente because there are bread riots in St.
Petersburg and Russia could not supply its troops with adequate armaments, well, that's not going to happen in World War II.
Russia comes with a really large army.
Germany has another large army.
You've got to have a big army to deal with Germany's army.
So in World War I,
There is no Len Lise.
No one would have thought of giving that much stuff to each other.
It's like everybody first, and it's like, okay, everybody last doing that one.
The railways had not been completed in World War I. The Trans-Siberian doesn't get completed until 1916, and the Murmansk Railway, you can see Murmansk up there, isn't completed until early 1917.
The Romanov dynasty is gone.
It's too late.
In World War II,
three-quarters of Lend-Lease aid would go over those completed railway systems.
Now, to the British credit, they did try to break the blockade on Russia.
The way to get into Russia in those days and hook in with the railway system would be to get into the Black Sea and Odessa.
Because Russia had all the men, but they didn't have all the war material to fight.
So this is where the Gallipoli campaign comes in.
You could argue about whether you think it is good strategy or not, but it was miserably executed.
So first of all, it wasn't a joint operation.
What's joint?
Joint means you're coordinating your different military services, in this case, Army and Navy.
So what goes on?
The British Navy tries to run the Dardanelles for two months.
That does not work well.
Do you suppose the Ottomans might think something was up?
Yeah.
And when you get up there on the Dardanelles, all the high point, it's a very steep place.
So the Ottomans are all busy sorting that all out, getting troops in place.
So two months later,
When the British, New Zealand, Australian, and French troops all land on a given day, the Ottoms are there with a welcome party, essentially.
And that invasion stalemates in three days.
But they keep at it for eight months, taking 190,000 casualties, 55,000 of whom are dead men.
Totally insane.
uh miserably executed and it comes with collateral damage as the british are trying to run the dardanelles with their navy this is when the ottomans are terrified of their christian subjects armenians and they're starting to round them up they're pulling them out of the army and then days before the landing the the turkish massacre of the armenians begin and between 1915 and 1923 1.5 million armenians are killed that's a lot of collateral damage all right
The Normandy landings are a completely different event in World War II.
This is another contested landing of trying to get armies in.
First of all, the buildup of war material goes on for years to get all the landing vessels in, the equipment, the forces, all ready to go in Britain.
And then the...
A disinformation campaign kept the Germans completely disinformed.
They were expecting the landing to be at the Pas de Calais, which is the shortest place, and it's way off in Normandy.
That worked.
So everybody lands on a day, and they're up and over and into places inland.
Another lesson learned.
The Royal Navy did not think that convoy duty was the manly thing to do.
They would convoy troop transports, but they wouldn't deal with the merchant marine until 1918.
Well, the Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of that stuff.
So the Navy is not thinking about the economic dimensions of warfare.
They're just focused on all the military things in World War I. In World War II, the British would be convoying even before they got in the war.
Another difference between the World War II and World War I, at the end of World War I, if you look at the disposition of German troops, they're abroad.
They're occupying Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of France.
Nobody's in Germany.
Yes, the Germans had really lousy meals during the war, but German civilians did not feel the full brunt of what their government had done.
And therefore, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt felt that it was really critical to have boots on the ground in Berlin to let the Germans know exactly what had happened to them and let them feel the war that they had inflicted on others in order to end it.
Even so, the Allies win this thing and they wreck the continental powers, but they almost wreck themselves in the process.
It's a pyrrhic victory for France and Britain.
It really weakens them.
So World War II is going to be a different event.
So that's the being in this continental situation and the lessons learned from the last time around.
and now for what the British did in World War II to deal with the continental problem.
The opening move of a maritime power in a really high-stakes war like this is typically blockade.
What you want to do is cut your enemy off from the oceans and force it to cannibalize its own resources and those of occupied areas.
And because of the geographic position of a maritime power, you can quite often do this to a continental power on narrow seas.
And Britons were well aware that Germany is a trading country.
Most of its trade goes by sea, and it's also on these narrow seas.
So geographically and economically, it's really vulnerable to blockade.
And I get it.
Germany gets alternate resources.
But they come in at much higher costs.
They're much more difficult.
And so that you're really putting a stress on the German economy and causing inflation and other things.
But if you blockade, a continental power can't blockade you back.
Why?
They're on the narrow seas, so they can't deploy a surface fleet.
You'll sink it.
And also, they can't...
easily blockade a coastline that faces the open seas, the high seas.
You can do other things on narrow seas, but it's pretty tough.
So what do you do if you cannot blockade ships in port?
Well, then what you're going to try to do is commerce raiding.
to try and sink things when they're out and about.
And that was what Germany did in World War II and why its occupation of France was so important.
Because once it took the French coastline, it then set up U-boat pens in Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux.
And they're going to be using these to fight the Battle of the Atlantic.
That's the game.
So maritime powers do blockade.
The response of continental power is commerce raiding.
And then the maritime response to that is you're going to convoy your merchant ships.
Okay, as the war begins in Europe, the United States is not in, but Roosevelt is coordinating with Latin America to set up a big neutrality zone all around the Americas, 300 nautical miles.
And then the Lend-Lease Act, also before U.S.
belligerency, there's pieces of it which say the United States is going to take over British bases in Iceland and set up bases in Greenland.
Why do we care about those locations?
They're really important if you're going to send convoys.
back and forth across the Atlantic, both to attack and to defend.
So that's what we're up to.
But even so, the Axis visits a real nightmare in the Battle of the Atlantic.
A lot of things are going down.
So how does that all work?
So before the United States gets in at the very beginning, these U-boats turn the North Sea into a kill zone, and then Britain is losing an awful lot of stuff off of its shores and also off the shores of Africa.
And the Germans get really good at commerce raiding really fast.
And there's also the fall of France, which is a mess, because prior to the fall of France, Britain is only convoying just beyond Ireland.
Once you get the fall of France and all of those submarines on French territory, then the
400 miles further west, and they've lost an awful lot of destroyers between the fall of Norway and then the Dunkirk evacuation.
So they haven't got enough ships to convoy properly.
And then the Germans are really creative.
Admiral Dunitz, who runs the submarine service at this point, he uses wolfpack tactics where you concentrate a whole bunch of submarines on a convoy, tack it at night, and bad things happen to the convoy overnight.
Also, the Germans have captured some of the British codes, so they have a sense of where the convoys are.
And they're sinking almost a terminal tonnage of this traffic.
850,000 tons of Allied shipping is going down.
So this is Hitler's happy time when he's sinking an awful lot of stuff.
Then there's a big Greenland gap.
This is where there's a lack of air cover.
And so you'll see a lot of things are going down in this Greenland gap.
But meanwhile, the British have gotten pretty good at espionage and they've captured a lot of Enigma machines.
Those are what the Germans are using to encrypt their messages.
Well, the British capture some machines, some rotors, some code books in 1940 and 41.
So by the summer of 1941,
through February 42, they can actually read the codes or some of them, decrypt them, so that within 36 hours, they can get the information out.
And this allows convoys to go, oh, Wolfpack there, we're going to do evasive routing of the convoys somewhere else.
And that may have saved up to 2 million tons of Allied shipping.
But meanwhile...
For the Germans, General Rommel is in North Africa, and he's having troubles because he's supplied across the Mediterranean, and the British and friends are sinking too many of his supplies.
So Admiral Dunitz is told to reroute some of the U-boats in the Atlantic to go help General Rommel up in North Africa.
The United States isn't in the war, so all quiet on the
on the eastern seaboard.
So it's looking like it might be okay for the British for a while, except Donitz thinks something's up.
And so they add a fourth rotor to the Enigma machine.
And so the British are then blind again for most of 1942 until they can capture a four-rotor Enigma machine, all the rotors plus the code books.
It takes a while.
So they're in a world of hurt.
The United States enters the war, which you think would be good for Britain, except it produces Hitler's second happy time.
Why?
Because Admiral King, like his Royal Navy predecessors in the previous war, doesn't think convoying is the manly thing for naval officers to be up to.
So he's not for convoying.
Also, Americans don't turn off the lights.
And therefore, as merchant ships are going up the east coast of the United States, the lighting is just highlighting their silhouettes, making them much easier to sync.
And oh, by the way, in those days, Louisiana, Texas oil, which is supplying the east coast where a lot of American industry is, is coming up by ships on the eastern seaboard, and particularly by Cape Hatteras shoals, which are like 30 miles wide, become a total kill zone.
So Admiral...
King rethinks it after losing more than a million tons of tonnage in the first three months of 1942 and goes, oh, gee whiz, maybe we should do convoys.
Yes.
And the United States does interlocking convoy system by May of 1942.
But then Dunitz just starts hunting things a little further south in the Caribbean.
So the Brits get their four-rotor Enigma machine, and they're able to decode things again.
But there's another problem.
The British think that there's something up with their admiralty codes in August of 1942, but they don't change them out until June of 1943.
There was something wrong.
The
So, you can see this back and forth in the Battle of the Atlantic.
But eventually, the air cover gap is closed.
This makes a tremendous difference.
There are new technologies that are introduced that ruin Admiral Dunnett's.
Here's what happens.
The United States had radar.
Germans never did.
American radar improved, so you can see through the fog.
The United States adds hedgehogs.
What are they?
Not the cute little critters.
It's rather, if you have a ship and you have hedgehogs, they deliver an elliptical spray of depth charges.
So anybody who's anywhere underneath you is in a world of hurt.
In addition, the United States introduces two new classes of ships.
one auxiliary aircraft carriers, little ones.
That means you're gonna have air cover for the entire journey, right?
When you get beyond land-based air, then these folks will take over.
In addition, small destroyer escorts were introduced instead of the big ones.
And these little ships,
They've had all sorts of fun things on board, sonar, radar, depth charges, hedgehogs.
And so they transform commerce rating into a low-life expectancy profession.
So that in May of 43, the Germans lose 41 U-boats.
That's unsustainable.
That's a massive percentage of what they have.
And in one of those encounters...
I think it's about 25 U-boats going after a convoy of 37 ships, sink nothing, lose three U-boats, plus another one damaged.
And on one of these U-boats is Admiral Dunitz's 19-year-old son, Peter, who dies in all of this.
So Dunitz, as a result, redeploys the U-boats out of the North Atlantic because it's unsustainable for Germany south of the Azores.
And yet there are problems going on with the Arctic convoy that takes a quarter of the Lend-Lease aid to Stalin.
And it gets called off for much of 42 and much of 43.
And I'll get into it.
But that problem gets solved.
And then you can see where all the kills are.
And the Germans are losing U-boats closer and closer to home shores.
So the Battle of the Atlantic is won by the Allies in part by reducing merchantman losses through convoys, evasive convoys, and also increasing U-boat losses through all these different technologies and also reading their mail, which helps to find them.
But one could argue even more important,
was the civilian side of it.
The United States' ability to just overwhelm Germany with the construction of U.S.
naval and merchantmen.
Here are the stats.
Look what happens with naval strength.
43, U.S.
Navy hulls and personnel are tripling.
That's quite a lot.
And then naval hulls are gonna double in the next year.
That's a lot of ships and a lot of people in the Navy.
Here's some more fun statistics.
So if you look in 1941 and go over,
That's a bumper year for U-boat construction, 1941.
Going to 1942, really ugly if you're a merchant-ran crew member because it's double the number of tonnage of merchant ships that are being sunk.
But then keep moving over.
Look at merchant hull construction, up by four times.
And the next year, that's going to double.
And oh, let's look over for 1943.
Look how many U-boats are being sunk.
It goes way up with all those new technologies that I've just told you about.
So even though the Germans produce a lot more U-boats, the kill rate is so high that there's hardly any net gain.
And then here's some more fun ways of looking at it.
So you look at new ships, as soon as the United States gets in the war, new ship rates go up, up and away.
But the losses are really high through mid-1943.
And then it's in mid-1943 that you can see the big divergence between construction and what's being destroyed.
And the Germans just can't keep up with this.
There is just way too much stuff out there for them to sink.
All right, so Admiral Dunitz did get one thing right.
His boss there, Admiral Rader, who's the head of the Navy, had said that pocket battleships were the thing to use for commerce raiding, and Dunitz proves him wrong, that U-boats are the way to go.
And Hitler agrees, so he cashiers Rader, makes Dunitz the head of the...
the Navy.
And then Sittler goes one step further.
He scraps his surface fleet because it's useless to him in this war.
You cannot deploy it in this kind of high stakes war, something that countries like China, surrounded by narrow seas, ought to think about.
All right.
So if you look at why the Battle of the Atlantic turned out the way it did, is Germany and Britain have very different geographies.
And arguably, Germany bought the wrong navy before the war.
It should have bought a lot of U-boats and forget the surface, minimize the surface boats that you're buying.
And so Britain could do things that Germany just plain couldn't.
That's just part of the geography.
So the effects of the blockade were really significant.
You're really straining the German economy.
But the German commerce rating was also very effective.
The Germans almost sank...
a terminal quantity of British trade.
It's close because Britain is dependent not only on oil imports, resources, but about half of its food supply.
So the Germans tried and came close.
And then you go, well, the counter-commerce rating strategy did work,
but there was touch and go back and forth, and it required a lot of things that had to be coordinated.
You needed the intelligence.
It really helps reading other people's mail.
You needed a whole set of new ship classes.
You need to be able to construct adequate quantities of naval hulls, merchant hulls.
You need to coordinate with allies.
You gotta get food and other things to Britain
There are a lot of things going on here.
You need air cover, the planes that are capable of doing it.
So there are a lot of things going on.
Remove any one of them and the outcome may have been different.
All right, so that's it on the commerce rating.
So once you command the Atlantic, which means that a sustainable amount of traffic is going to get through from the Allied powers, then you can start thinking about peripheral theaters.
Okay, what's a peripheral theater?
The main theater...
is Russia in this war.
Not what you think.
Why?
Because between two thirds and three quarters of German ground forces were always fighting Russia.
That means these other theaters, which are peripheral to the main theater,
take up between one quarter to one third of German forces.
That makes them peripheral.
Doesn't make them unimportant, but they're not the main theater.
And by the way, who would want to fight on the main theater if there are alternatives?
People die on droves in the main theater.
So this man, Sir Julian Corbett,
very fine naval theorists of Britain who was heartbroken in World War I that Britain ignored his naval strategy, which was don't do the continental commitment and run the war through these peripheral operations.
And it wrecked his health.
But here's what, according to Corbett, are the prerequisites for a theater that makes a really good one for a peripheral operation.
One, it has to be overseas so the enemy can't invade you or wreck your productive base.
Secondly, you need local sea control to get in there.
But that local sea access has got to be better than the land access because you want to have it easier for Britain to get in and out than it is for the enemy because then attrition rates will favor Britain.
Britain also should deploy a disposal force.
What's that?
It means those forces you have who are in excess of what's necessary for homeland defense.
It's not disposable force.
It's rather a force that if everything goes south, you won't ruin the homeland.
But you can afford to risk it on potentially very risky but potentially war-changing operations.
In addition, they've got to be joint operations.
Joint means cooperation of land and sea in this era.
And in order—you're going to come in by sea, you're going to supply by sea, but you'll be fighting on land.
You better coordinate all that.
And it's got to be combined operations.
What does that mean?
Coordinating with allies.
You need friendly locals who are going to help you do all of this.
And then you need to command your own forces.
Why?
Because you want to determine how they come in, how they go out.
If it all goes badly, you want to be able to leave, which is what they did at Dunkirk.
As much as the Continental Power might want to play this game, they cannot because they don't have the—
the requisite sea access to pull it off.
All right.
The war winds up with Britain and the United States going through four phases.
Well, Britain, all four are some of the later ones of four peripheral theaters.
First, the North Sea.
That's essential for British homeland defense.
And there are three keys to the North Sea, Scapa Flow, Strait of Dover, coast of Norway.
Britain always controlled the Strait of Dover and Scapa flow.
So Germany went after Norway to try and open things up that way.
And Norway is not an ideal peripheral theater for Britain because the Germans had better land and sea access to that theater.
They take Norway and then they set up sub bases at Bergen and Trondheim in addition to the ones they had at Kiel, Hamburg and the Heligoland.
archipelago.
And these are the things that are ruining those Arctic convoys.
So that one does not go so well for Britain.
It winds up facing a totally hostile continental Europe shoreline.
The Axis has it all.
All right.
In the Mediterranean, there are certain keys that Britain controlled.
Gibraltar, that's access to the Atlantic.
Suez Canal, access to the Red Sea.
Crete,
That's access to the Black Sea.
And then the British had a fallback position, a midway point at Malta if things went really bad.
So the Germans attacked the fallback position because they're trying to bail out the Italians and fighting in North Africa.
And so they're trying to take Malta because whoever's got planes there
can cause convoys all kinds of problems or they can protect their own things.
And so Malta is blockaded by the Germans.
It's not relieved until the end of 1942.
So that is not great for Britain.
It's threatening, well, its access to the empire.
And the problem for Britain is
is Italian belligerency.
Italians had been part of the Entente in World War I. Well, they're part of the Axis in World War II.
And three of these keys, Malta, Crete, and the Suez Canal, lie in the center of Italian admissions because they want an empire where they go down the Balkan coast and then they're going to go deep into Libya and Ethiopia to unify their empire around the Red Sea.
And so Mussolini kicks this thing off, except then he gets stuck in Greece.
And so the Germans have to come and bail them out.
They chase the British out of Greece.
The Britons are then on Crete, and then that falls to the Germans.
So the Britons are in a world of hurt.
The Suez Canal is under threat.
Think about it.
Fall of Norway, fall of France, blockade of Malta, fall of Crete.
It is really bad news.
However, when the United States gets into the war, the United States can help Britain retake some of these keys to the Mediterranean.
And this is what is going on in North Africa today.
So Admiral Dönitz had saved it initially, but after the United States is in with more assets, Dönitz's oil, the tanker supplying his oil, 60% of them are getting sunk because Malta holds and Malta is supplied and these tankers are getting bombed out of existence.
And so Rommel loses in North Africa, not because he's the inferior general, he's a better general, he's just not supplied.
And this is the key.
And once you take North Africa, that peripheral operation, it opens the opportunity to go into Sicily and then the rest of Italy.
And once you get that going, there's a possibility to do the Normandy landing.
So there's four different peripheral operations.
Some would argue that the air campaign over Germany was another peripheral campaign.
You're bringing the war home to Germans.
You're wrecking their productive base.
And also it's a major...
help to the Russians.
Why?
Because once the British start bombing Berlin, Hitler calls off air squadrons from the Eastern Front, and these anti-aircraft guns can be used against tanks or aircraft.
He pulls those back, and that means the Germans no longer own the skies of Russia, and you're no longer going to be taking hundreds of thousands of POWs.
Okay, so that's how the peripheral strategies worked out, but they're coordinated through allies, figuring out how to make all of them work.
And here are the stats on allies.
Alliances are additive.
right?
You should ideally add up all the complementary capabilities of you and your friends and then share them, divvy them out in an optimal way to deal with things.
Well, the Axis alliance was also additive in the sense that the Germans added to their GDP, the GDPs of all the places they occupied that pretty much accounted for GDP growth in Germany, except
That whole way of doing things involves big occupation forces, which are big overhead of these conquered places, and you've also damaged them in the conquest, whereas the Allies are all game to help each other.
And also, when Germany took over continental Europe,
It's taking the big petroleum deficit zone because Europe doesn't produce petroleum.
The North Sea oil, those things hadn't been discovered in those days.
Yes, Romania has oil.
Yes, Hitler takes Romania.
But Romanian pipelines ran to pre-war customers.
And it's very difficult to find the manpower and the steel to reroute all of your pipelines in wartime.
So that's a whole other part of Hitler's problems.
So as we're putting together these complementary capabilities, the Russians have a huge army.
Most of the fighting takes place between Russia and Germany.
The Russians wreck the German army.
You know, millions of Russians and Germans are dying here.
But if you look at Operation Barbarossa, which is Germany's initial invasion of the Soviet Union, they suffer a nearly 30% casualty rate.
That's called catastrophic success.
You have too many successes like that, it'll be catastrophic.
And here's the mathematics of the main front.
Only two countries have really big armies, Germany and Russia.
Once the Germans maximize their territorial conquest, they've reduced Russian population, because they've conquered all these areas, to less than that of the United States.
Yet, nevertheless, the Russians mobilize twice the army that the United States does.
And if you look at the mathematics of munitions, the Russians on their lonesome produced more munitions than did Germany.
Once the United States gets in the war, we produce a hundred billion and whatever dollars it wasn't on munitions.
And in that period, the Germans produced less than 40 billion.
So bad news for Germany on all of these numbers.
The trick is getting the munitions to the men, whereas in World War I, that wasn't feasible.
But now these railway lines have been completed, and it's pouring in.
And the lend-lease aid, you look at it, wow, Britain's getting a lot, Russia quite a bit, but less, China nothing.
What's going on there?
You can only get aid in if there are ports and railways.
Japan blockaded China.
Proof of concept.
It can be done.
The Japanese did it.
And you could not get stuff in.
So what the United States was trying to do, the British thought we were insane.
They're probably correct.
We were flying things in over the Himalayas called the hump.
Great.
So you're going to fly in the aviation fuel to land that's going to be the same aviation fuel that's going to get you back and however many other bombers that you can deal with in China.
It's not workable.
Okay.
And Russia, even though it got a lot less than Britain because it's not getting ships, but it's getting equally valuable, useful things.
For instance, Russia produces a lot of planes, but it didn't produce adequate high-octane aviation fuel.
The United States had loads of that.
The United States produced all kinds of vehicles, all kinds of rolling stock, locomotives.
And this is what Russia used to transport everything.
And the United States prevented Russia from going into a famine in the winter of 42, 43.
We fed them.
And this spam in a can, this is Hormel inner foods, contribution to the war.
Everyone had so much spam during the war, they never, it's canned pork.
No one ever wanted to see it again, but a little can of pork, it goes a long way and it doesn't spoil in a can.
And this lend-lease aid goes, a quarter of it goes up through Murmansk.
A lot of it gets sunk up there and not reliable.
A quarter of it goes through Persia, and then half of it goes over the Trans-Siberian.
And you go, well, what's this Axis alliance about?
Why aren't the Japanese sinking any of this, right?
Talk about a dysfunctional alliance.
All right.
So...
This is to tell you what happened with those Arctic convoys.
You can see in 42, a tremendous number of them were sunk.
And this is fully laden ships with scarce war material.
So we in the British called them off for most of 42 and most of 43.
And Stalin was beside himself.
And so in 43, he's sending out feelers to Hitler, trying to do a separate piece.
And luckily, Hitler was not interested.
Hitler wasn't wasting his time with targeting empty ships on the home voyage.
He was only going after the laden one.
Okay, so what is all this Lend-Lease-Aid support?
What does it add up to?
Well, in Barbarossa, you got 3 million plus Russians going after 3 million Germans.
That's a lot of people to supply and tie up.
And as you watch that go, the Axis is killing Russians or making them POWs by the millions, but it's suffering 15% losses of its forces.
And it's going to add up so that when you get to August 41, that's when the siege of Leningrad, St.
Petersburg begins.
By December, the Axis are within 25 miles of Moscow.
It is not looking good at all.
But once the United States is in the war,
you can start doing peripheral theaters like in North Africa.
And then these casualties, while they aren't as significant as what's going on on the main front, it's cumulative.
So Stalingrad, the largest battle, the war is going on.
You got North Africa.
And then when you have Kursk, which is the largest set piece battle, the war is big, big tank battle.
This is when Sicily is happening and moving up the Italian peninsula.
And you can see the cumulative effects of these sequential operations and adding up
both the main theater and the peripheral theater, so that when you get to Normandy, the Russians are tying up 228 Axis divisions.
There are only 58 Axis divisions all in Western Europe, Italy and everywhere.
So that's what makes Normandy possible, is the Russians really holding on to things.
But when you start looking at the main front, the peripheral operations in Italy and then Normandy, and then you have additional fronts in France and then the Balkans, this continental cancer is into remission, that the Germans just can't sustain it.
Okay, to summarize...
Before Britain had allies in this war, it was in a world of hurt.
It was just losing one thing after another.
But once you get the big continental buddy, don't dismiss the importance of a big continental buddy that is in the area where the fighting is taking place, not separated by the seas, but there with a big army.
That was essential.
And then once the United States gets in with its big productive base, then you can really start doing things.
Because if you can command the seas, that's what the Battle of the Atlantic is about, then you can connect the world and connect allies, theaters, resources.
So here are the operational effects of these peripheral operations.
You start with one where you can.
If you win there, it'll open up a menu of more promising locations, all the while you're attriting your enemy's forces.
And also if you're doing it right, you're relieving pressure on the main front for Russia, which is doing the heavy lifting.
The strategic effects, if you can do this successfully,
is you're going to control resources for yourself, deny them for people you don't like, and this will help put time on your side.
You're strengthening your alliance system because you're essential to each other's survival as you coordinate things, and you're dividing your enemy's attentions among yours.
multiple theaters overextending them.
So you start by trying to contain the problem.
And as things go on, you try to roll it back and then you go for regime change.
So you're producing cumulative effects from these sequential operations.
So that's how it works.
Churchill, the great wit, talked about the hassles of dealing with allies, right?
These are high-stakes discussions.
They don't always go pleasantly.
But his idea is there's only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that's fighting without them, because they'll be toast.
You need these complementary capabilities, different locations, and coordinating it to gang up on your continental problem.
Also, if you stick with it,
you can help establish precedence laws, institutions that'll hold the peace after the war.
So that's his take.
All right, so I've given you a big exposition on maritime solutions to continental problems, which are in a global war, which is blockade and then countering their commerce rating, peripheral operations, massive production, and then joint and combined operations.
So that was then.
How about now?
Okay, this is what NATO looks like.
And you can look at the United States with our western and eastern coasts that are unencumbered.
You wouldn't be able to blockade those.
The two narrow seas are the Sea of Labrador and the Caribbean.
But basically, hard to imagine that the United States Navy wouldn't be able to deploy in wartime.
And same thing true on the big peninsula of Europe.
Yeah, I get it.
Turkey may not be able to deploy, but Spain, France, and Norway, they're these unencumbered coastlines.
They'll probably get their navies out.
Eurasia is a completely different story.
This is where China and Russia live.
No one's done this to them.
This is just the way it is.
It's all of these narrow seas that become kill zones in wartime.
I've described it to you how it works.
And I get it, there's the Arctic up there, but there's no economic activity or population.
So being able to run things in the Arctic doesn't do you very good, do you very much good.
So nature naturally contains both Russia and China.
It's just the way it is.
So let's start with Putin here, Vlad the Bad, on his little Mongol pony, a continental mode of transport.
If you live there, what can you get out of it?
It's a long horse ride if you're going to do it that way.
So whom can he blockade?
Well...
He's got one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which has been under repair since 2018, a long time to be in the shop.
It required the largest dry dock that Russia has to repair it.
And then it flipped the dry dock, which then gashed the hull.
And there's been all sorts of charges of embezzlement, various fires on board.
It's not getting repaired anytime fast.
And it's just like an occupational hazard vehicle.
problem.
So that one's not doing him any good.
Putin has got two liquid playgrounds that he likes.
One's the Black Sea.
Before he got involved with Ukraine, in theory, he could have blockaded, I guess, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Georgia if he wanted to.
That was why he's so interested in the Kursh Strait, which would blockade the Sea of Azov, because he wanted to take Ukraine from east to west.
That was part of the plan.
Oh, yeah.
And he used to have—or maybe still does, unknown—
One overseas base, Tartus, Syria.
Talk about a garden spot.
And I guess if you want to go bomb civilians, that would be a location for you.
But now that Bashar al-Assad has moved to Moscow, it's unclear how that works.
But in any case, it's a useless base because in wartime, no one gets through the Dardanelles.
That place can be shut down with mines.
And the Ukrainians have shown that you don't even need a navy to stop a navy in narrow seas.
It should be a real wake-up call to anyone on a narrow sea that just by using drones and shore ordnance and planes and things that you can wreck navies.
And in fact, the Russian naval base used to be at Sevastopol on Crimea.
Putin's had to move it to Novorossiysk.
Great.
So he can't do too much there.
Have fun with that one.
So there are many fewer possibilities for him nowadays.
His second favorite liquid playground is the Baltic.
Kaliningrad is sovereign Russian territory.
So back in the day, I guess, if they wanted to blockade the Baltic states, they could try it.
But after the latest iteration of the Ukraine war, Sweden and Finland have ditched neutrality.
They're part of NATO.
Baltic states are also NATO.
So the Baltic is really a NATO lake.
There's not too much Putin can do there.
So his latest gig is cutting undersea cables.
That's about where he's at.
I mean, look at trying to leave the Baltic.
It doesn't happen in wartime.
You're stuck in there.
So it turns out that Putin, Russia is much more vulnerable to blockade than the other way around because it's very easy to close up the Baltic and Black Seas.
You look out on what's going on and...
They're hemmed in, and it's all way up north.
Russia has two really big naval bases, one on the Bering Sea and one on the Barents Sea.
But the problem is when they deploy out of those bases, they have to go by NATO territory.
So in the Barents Sea, you can see why Greenland and Iceland are so strategic, because for Russia to deploy, it's got to go in between those places.
And then on the Barents Sea,
The more promising one for Russia has to go by the United States.
But the problem is, how do you supply the thing on the Bering Sea?
It's just a long way from any industrial base.
So another part of Putin's sad story has to do with NATO.
So if you look at NATO, you can look at its accession in arcs.
Initially, in the Cold War, the early Cold War,
It's all of these smaller European nations.
And everybody's smaller than Russia.
It's by far the biggest country on the planet.
And why they need more territory remains a mystery.
But initially, it's the smaller places joining NATO to protect themselves.
And then at the implosion of the Soviet Union, it's all its former satellites fleeing at the first possible moment and saying, NATO, NATO, let me in.
And then with the Ukraine, 2022, part of the Ukraine war, Sweden and Finland, which long had preferred neutrality, said, oh, no, no, we're going to join NATO.
Now, the Russians look at this and they go, well, this is NATO coming at us in arcs.
They're ignoring their complicity in all of this.
If you occupy places and brutalize them for generations, this is what you get.
So here is Putin's muse, or I don't know if it's his muse, but it's a guy who expresses a lot of ideas like Putin's, Alexander Dugin.
Here's his view of how the world should be.
It's not over a universal rules-based order where we all trade with each other.
It's rather we're going to divide it up into these spheres of influence where each is a world into itself.
Dugin's worked it out for all of us.
But here are the places that Russia's actually taken lately.
At the end of the Cold War, it took Transnistria from Moldova.
In 2008, it took Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia.
And then 2014, it's taking Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk from Ukraine.
And then look how it really works.
This is a continental view.
You want to color it all in.
That's what the 2022 invasion of Ukraine is.
It's the way a continental power looks at territory.
All right.
The United States thinks that Putin is just all worried about us and NATO.
Actually, Putin's problem is China.
NATO doesn't want Russian territory.
Who would want it?
It's full of Russians.
Stay at home, please.
Just don't leave.
But China might.
And also Putin has said, you know, if you really feel deeply about a place, forget about boundary treaties, you should be able to take it.
Well, Tsarist Russia took a lot of places from China that the Chinese might feel deeply about that have precisely the resources that China needs, not only energy and all those sorts of things out in Siberia, but water.
Lake Baikal holds 20% of the world's surface freshwater, and China's been blowing through its water table in North China.
And that one, I think the topography works that you could do a fairly, you could pipe it all in.
So here's Putin dumping his ordinance on Ukraine that never wanted to invade while he's letting this problem mishastasize.
Oh, and speaking of the problem, here he is.
What are Xi Jinping's possibility?
You like the little natty upgraded mouse suit?
Here's his world.
Welcome to it.
And what he's got are 20 neighbors, 13 by land, seven by sea, many of which despise China for excellent reasons.
Not all of them, but some of them.
And if you look at it, it's all of these narrow seas.
If Xi Jinping wanted to blockade somebody, I guess you could try Korea.
because you've got the Yellow Sea and then the Sea of Japan, except Japan sits out there.
That's a complicating factor.
Better bets in the South China Sea, because Vietnam, Brunei, and Cambodia, they don't have alternate coastlines.
If they want to reach the open oceans, they've got to transit the South China Sea.
However...
Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan all have other coastlines that face the high seas.
And remember, I've just given you a whole discussion about the Battle of the Atlantic, where when people have a high seas access, it's really difficult to shut them down because China would have to go all the way around to be on the far side to shut everything down on the other side.
Or maybe they're just going to obliterate it.
I don't know.
But anyway, the South China Sea is such a legal mess.
No one knows who owns what.
And in any kind of war, you're going to have all these neutrals who might suddenly join sides if they don't like what's happening.
But you can get a sense of what the possibilities are there.
It's very difficult.
Usually...
In a war, we've already done narrow seas, right?
The North Sea, the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, they shut down in wartime to commercial traffic.
It simply can't make it through.
And surface fleets have great difficulty.
And if the neighbors, as Ukraine has shown, just buy the right drones and
since the sea's a little bigger, buy some submarines, some plain shore artillery.
That might be enough to just close down China's merchant marine, certainly the merchant marine, but also its navy.
So if you want to go the other way of, well, what about Xi Jinping doing a surprise visit on the West Coast?
There's a lot of open ocean.
Hawaii would be the nearest big island.
It's a long way away, and Hawaii's dependent on imports for everything.
It's not very useful.
But for the United States going the other way, the islands get bigger and better the closer to China that you get.
So I'll leave you with Alfred Thayer Mahan, captain and later admiral, by far the most famous person ever associated with the U.S.
Naval War College, where I spent my career.
Here are his prerequisites for playing the maritime game.
One, you need a moat.
You've got to have insulation from attack if you want to play this game.
You need a dense internal transportation grid to get the goods out in peacetime, reliable egress by sea to get the Navy out in wartime, a dense coastal population that's going to be running all the trade, commerce-driven economy, and then you need a government that's stable that is going to support
Funding a navy and supporting commerce.
Okay, let's line up Russia and China with these prerequisites.
Well, neither one's got a moat.
They got more neighbors than any two other countries on the planet.
So definitely not that.
Internal transportation grid.
Russia's remains lamentable.
China's is getting better.
Neither one has reliable egress by sea with these narrow seas.
Sure, Russia's got the Arctic, but there's nothing up there.
They're polar bears.
Great.
Go get bitten.
And as for dense coastal population, yes, China has a dense coastal population, but Russia doesn't way up north.
Russia has never had a commerce-driven economy.
China was more so under Deng Xiaoping, but under Xi Jinping, he is privileging the crony sector over the private sector, and neither one has stable government institutions.
The litmus test of that one is whether you have transparent, regular transfers of power, usually through elections, and dictator for life does not remotely exist.
So, sure, China and Russia remain continental problems, but I don't think they understand the maritime limitations of where they're at.
And, of course, peace would be the better thing.
Keep compounding growth.
And war, as the Ukrainian war shows daily, what a waste of Russian assets.
But sadly, the enemy gets a vote.
All right.
That's what I had to say for you this evening.
And thank you so much for coming and being such a wonderful audience.
Thank you.
It's both.
But I don't know that Germany ever blockading Britain.
It was more he was planning to invade Britain if he could.
And then he lost so many naval assets doing the Norway campaign, which he really needed to do.
that he doesn't have the naval assets that he had at the beginning of the war.
That's unlike World War I, where the Germans basically, they had their whole fleet, most of it, at the end of the war, and then it gets scuttled at the end of the war.
This time, Germany did the smart thing, which is to use that fleet, get something.
They get Norway, but then they don't have a fleet.
So I don't think invading...
It's difficult.
And then I think because he's in the big petroleum deficit zone, he's got to get moving.
I'm not clear that he had tons of choices, but he's got to go for resources, right?
The oceans have been shut off for him.
The whole proposition of what he's up to is questionable, right?
But it doesn't mean that it isn't a really bitter struggle and difficult struggle.
And even though you go, well, Germany's GMP, if you add it up compared to the totality of the Allies' axis, Allies have so much more stuff.
Yeah, I mean, you can go, I think the Allies are going to win this thing.
But after how many millions of losses?
And I showed you the Battle of the Atlantic.
It goes this way, it goes that way.
It goes this way, it goes that way.
A lot of people are dying of all this.
So, yeah, the Germans made errors.
The first one is, why even go to war?
If you want to dominate Europe...
and you have really great growth rates, which in World War I they did, they would have taken over Europe years ago by just growing, right?
Now, don't do either World War.
Just keep growing your economy, and then you're going to have all these good business relations.
So the error is even going to war for these things, but it doesn't mean these wars couldn't have gone the other way.
And you're right.
You look at blunders, but you call it a blunder now because it didn't work out.
At the time, you don't know, right?
A lot of people get away with really risky things, and then you say they're brilliant.
And then the ones who don't get away with the risky things, you say they're idiots.
But it's dicey.
Define win.
Right?
What is win?
If Germany's win means controlling the entire continent, plus Britain, plus Russia, you come up with one answer.
Right?
If Hitler had just done the Anschluss, right, that's Austria joins, and maybe done the Sudeten number, which is a large German population in Czechoslovakia, and quit, he'd be called Bismarck II, a genius.
Like, no losses gets to keep that bigger area.
But that's not who he is.
So you need to define what win is for both the Germans and then both for the Allies to determine what's feasible and what's not feasible.
Germany potentially can be invaded overland everywhere, whereas Britain can't.
And then Germany just cannot deploy a navy the way Britain can.
It's just geography.
And therefore, Germany should have bought a completely different navy, skipped the surface fleet, buy a lot more U-boats.
Maybe they would have zapped the British before the United States gets its act together in either world war.
Right?
Do it fast.
Do it.
All right, counter-argument.
Even for these maritime operations?
Well, A, they're not blockading Britain.
Britain's getting all its stuff out, but then they get sunk somewhere else.
Blockade is when you're actually keeping things in.
So Germany has exactly zero merchant marine going anywhere, right?
The stuff that you're talking about being sunk, they're naval ships, but a lot of it is merchant marine because the British are getting things out.
Tremendous amounts of it are getting out.
So that's just a difference.
And then you're correct about the importance of productive bases.
Britain's problem in World War II that's different from the Napoleonic Wars is when you change to oil as what's powering your ships and things, Britain doesn't have that at home.
Whereas coal, it does.
It has some A-list coal.
And so when you're doing Aegis sailing coal, the British are okay.
But then when you're changing energy sources, they're definitely not okay.
So there are other factors that are going in with them.
But you're right about the productive base.
But then there's another game to play, which I think is worth playing.
It's the game of takeaway.
So you're telling me there's this factor, which is economic size, and it's decisive, that this will determine the outcome of wars.
And you're absolutely right that it's important.
Air power enthusiasts will say, no, no, no, that's nonsense.
It's all about controlling the skies.
So when you control the air, you got air cover for your convoys.
That's what does it.
So let's talk about why the Battle of the Atlantic turns out the way it is.
If I take away cryptography, would it have turned out the same way?
Negative.
If I take away not just sheer amount of technology, but certain key pieces like radar and those things, what happens?
Does it change?
Yes, it does.
What happens if the United States just doesn't like alliances, that you don't coordinate things particularly well?
Does it change things?
Yes, it does.
You can go through...
A list of this, of different people are designing different types of ships and are also determining that you're going to share things with Britain.
Britain's providing a lot of free stuff.
So if you play, remove any one of these things, that Battle of the Atlantic turns out differently.
So the story is, it's probably a package of many things.
And this whole game of takeaway, when you have people who...
We'll come up with a monocausal explanation for you.
They'll go one cause.
And they'll probably be right that their one cause is really important.
But then they are just ignoring all these other things.
So that's the more important thing in strategy.
So your thing is, it's truly important.
Well, it depends whether the war is a war for limited or unlimited objectives, because you can play that game with the Russo-Japanese War.
Japan, all the data you talk about Japan, it's a fraction of Russia.
And Russia gets trounced in the Russo-Japanese War.
So there's something up what's going on, whereas Japan's having a very limited objective and Russia has other problems at home and is willing to bail.
That's one thing.
But there's another thing.
If Germany had simply never bought a surface fleet, if they'd been sensible...
Surface fleet, yeah, it's great Britain's got one, but it can always deploy that thing.
Germany will never deploy its surface fleet.
It'll get it sunk, which is what happened in the Norwegian campaign.
At least from the German point of view, they got Norway out of it.
But if they had simply bought U-boats instead, I don't know whether it would have... You'd have to do the math, and I haven't done that, of...
What their goal would need to be is to knock Britain out before the United States ever gets into the war.
Oh, definitely do not declare war on the United States because maybe if you can keep the commerce rating going for another six months, maybe Britain falls.
Maybe that's the pivotal error.
It has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
It's simply Hitler shouldn't have declared war.
Right.
I don't know, but there are many factors that go into these things.
And that's why it's a reason why you should listen to people who disagree with you, that they may see some of these other factors, right?
We all have blind spots, and we rely on other people to find them.
But then you have to be receptive to listening.
Oh, I don't think Hitler was about sustaining any arrangement.
He was about taking over Lebensraum in Slavic lands, Russia.
But flip it the other way, which is what the Soviet Union is thinking, is it'll be great when the Germans go after the British.
What's not to like about that one?
And then they will, it's the pounce and absorb, is that they will so weaken each other that will open opportunities for Russia.
So that would be the plan.
And then he's looking at it, and I don't know the details of what his timeline is on whether he thinks it's just a delaying act.
I have not gone into the archives to read what Stalin was up to in great detail.
But I think it's basically that one is thinking that the...
The British and the Germans can go at it.
Also, the Russians had tried to be working out some deal with the British prior to all of this.
And the British, because the communists had been trying to destabilize them ever since the Bolshevik Revolution, and they didn't get just how lethal the fascists were in Germany, that they weren't just run-of-the-mill authoritarians.
They had this whole genocide component that went with them.
And so the British are thinking, well, the real threat are the communists in Russia.
And they're right.
Long term, they are the real threat.
But in the more medium term, it's the Germans are.
And so it takes blitzkrieg for the British to go, uh-oh.
and then they're willing to team up with Russians.
And Russia's willing to team up with them, right?
When German invasion transforms what had been primary enemies, he takes that role, being primary enemies for both Britain and Russia, then you're going to glue another alliance.
So that's the trick in our own day.
You do not want to do things that the United States is the primary enemy of those two, of Xi Jinping and Putin.
Currently, we're not, right?
It's Taiwan or India or Vietnam, whatever Xi Jinping's going to steal currently.
That's his primary problem.
And it's definitely Ukraine for Putin.
And you want to keep that all divided up to the extent that you're able to do that, right?
A lot of things aren't feasible.
These are high stakes things.
But you do not want to... This is where...
being really just not thinking about your foreign policy.
It takes a lot of experts and a lot of people to guess, game out, what is your best course of action?
What is your least bad option?
That's usually what foreign policy is.
It's not what the great option is.
There are none of those.
It's what the least bad one is.
And it takes a lot of thought, and gutting the State Department will not get you there.
It's profoundly dangerous.
Resources, big resources.
Let's talk about Bismarck.
This is the difference between limited and unlimited objectives.
And these concepts, which I've tried to transmit in these lectures, I think are useful and you apply them to other things.
So an unlimited objective means the state in question is not going to exist at the end of the war.
And if it's really unlimited, and Hitler does the most unlimited variant, he's going to kill all the people.
It's Slavs.
He's going to literally butcher them all.
So that's one kind of war.
A limited war means you want maybe a hunk of territory, something less.
The opposing government's going to live.
So Bismarck runs three wars.
One is the Danish War.
Then there's the Austro-Prussian War.
And then there's the Franco-Prussian War.
In the Danish War, it's about a couple of provinces in the far south of Denmark that Bismarck covets because he wants to reunify, well, unify for the first time all these Germanic states.
And he trounces Denmark in that war.
Does he go for regime change in Copenhagen?
No way.
He just says, see this place that you shouldn't have had anyway because it's got a bunch of Germans in it.
And so if you think about, this is another concept, value of the object.
How much is victory worth to you versus the other guy?
For Denmark, of just making Bismarck go away, and this little state, the value of the object's lower to them, because they aren't thinking in terms of creating a greater Germany, which Bismarck is.
So you have two things going on.
You're giving the Danes, given how much the Prussians trounced them, a generous piece.
You're saying, just get rid of this Germanic part that you don't really much care about.
So he gets away with that one.
Then in the Austrian...
the war against Austria, he just slams them.
He's got this railway system that allows them to deploy where the Austrians can't.
And there are all these little Germanic states watching all this going on, and they're starting to confederate sort of with Prussia because they're scared of all of this.
And so...
Instead of doing regime change in Vienna, it's just saying, hey, let's cede a few more of these things to Germany.
And it was a big empire where you have pieces, you own pieces, you lose pieces, you lose pieces, you own pieces.
So for the Austrians, the value of the object, again, is much lower.
Given how they were slammed in the war, it seems to be a generous piece.
And then when he gets into the Franco-Prussian War, all these little Germanic states are joining with Prussia, and that's going to create unified Germany.
And then he takes a bite too far when he takes Alsace-Lorraine, which the French are totally upset about and they never give up on that one.
But all of these objectives are limited objectives.
He's not overthrowing the Danish government, the Austrian government, or the French government.
And the value for Prussians of unifying the Germanic states is far greater than the places that are losing these itty-bitty places.
Also, they don't get the big picture.
They don't see it till it's done that, whoops.
By doing all of this, Prussia has transformed itself from the weakest of the five great powers of Europe to second only to Britain.
And that's ex post facto.
And it's a real reason why you don't want royalty running stuff.
You want people who get their jobs based on merit rather than who their dad was.
Because it's in the world of Bismarck's dealing with is kings who are just clueless what they're up to.
Yes, yeah, he needed it because he had this big petroleum deficit zone.
And so when you say stupid to invade Russia, probably it's once you've done this number, you have to go into Russia because you've got to take those oil fields back.
Then you can go, buddy, don't go for Moscow.
Forget those people.
Just go straight for the oil fields.
Take that only.
That would be more of the blunder.
Dictators don't.
They just double down.
This is the beauty of elections.
I get it.
It's a mess with a multi-party system and with all the crazy politics that come and go with it.
But elections are a moment to reassess.
When the party in power sufficiently screws things up, where people finally go, ooh, this is a mess, the elections...
The party in power isn't reassessing.
The election is reassessing for them.
You know human beings.
We've all met many.
Most human beings don't like to change their mind.
I think it's a terrible mistake.
And that's why I like the argument, as you know, counter-argument structure to try to take some of the sting out of changing our minds.
Because doubling down on bad decisions, it's a mistake, but we human beings do it.
And then if you have a dictator, you're guaranteed.
Putin is not going to back down in Ukraine.
He's going to be going after it from now until doomsday.
And then if he wins there, he's going to then go after the Baltic states.
It's not going to end.
So sadly, the enemy gets a vote and you may go, well, these are idiot decisions.
Yeah, but they're very dangerous ones.
So you have to do things to counter them.
Well, the problem in that war—this is another thing that I think is really helpful to do—
is to the best of your abilities, write down primary adversary, secondary adversary, tertiary adversary.
So take all the powers in World War I and both sides and do their primary enemy, secondary, third, and you find out it is a mess.
Nothing aligns.
so that if you try to get out of that war, somebody's not going to like it because that's their primary objective.
And there's a lot of bad overlaps and who's going to get whatever parts of the Balkans they think at the end of this war.
And so in a way, you have World War I, you really have to sit down and look at it.
If I were doing a lecture on that, I have a whole other slides that would show you this, where they're fighting parallel wars.
And...
It's really not a good idea to either have royalty running the show or World War I is the war where militaries on all sides are running the show and civilians are doing the backseat saying, well, I don't really understand military operations.
We're going to let you boys do it.
Disaster.
That war sets communism and fascism.
It puts them on steroids.
And you can argue we've been dealing with that mismanagement in one way or another ever since because...
For most of my life, I thought we had put fascism back in its box, and so we were down to dealing with communism.
But now it seems that this very authoritarian vision, which seems to rhyme with fascism, and then you can get into a big argument, what precisely is fascism, and you try to define it.
But it seems like we've come full circle in the collective West, and it's...
toxic in a way dealing with all this.
So World War I is the absolutely mismanaged war.
And then the people who lived through that set up these institutions that have held the peace until the present day when irresponsible leaders across the globe are not cautious enough.
And here we are.
And then there's a price to pay if you have a bunch of reckless drivers on the road trying to play chicken with each other, how this will all end.
And I don't know the answer.
So anyway, that's my reason for doing lectures on strategies.
I'm going to give you...
concepts, some data to think about, because you're going to have to form your own opinions and your own conclusions, but try to make it evidence-based and think about things.
I recommend reading things more deeply.
Don't take what any one person has to say.
Come to your own terms.
That's the reason for doing all this.
We're living in really portentous times where people may make decisions where there's no going back.
I mean, if we blow our alliance system, we're going to be dealing with China alone.
That won't go well, particularly if we think we're going to corner them in some way, going to go corner a great power like China and think that'll go well for us.
It won't.
No, I just tried.
Maybe I wasn't clear.
I was just saying, OK, we saw how it all worked in World War II of people blockading or not blockading or doing peripheral operations or not.
So if you occupy Russia's position or China's position, it's not about who's going to win or who's going to lose.
It's going, well, both of them are much more vulnerable to blockade, period.
More concepts.
So I did limited, unlimited objectives, and I did value of the object, how much winning is worth to you.
Another one is, what is win?
So if you're talking about the United States invading China, insane.
Who would ever do that, right?
If you're thinking of whatever conflict you're imagining,
if you're thinking about, I don't know, is when China, I mean, tell me what this war is.
Who's going for what and what's when going to look like?
And then we can talk about what feasible is.
If you look at Taiwan, okay, maybe China can take it.
It may have to leave it a glowing embers.
That lovely chip foundry that everyone cares about, I imagine, would be the first casualty of that war.
That will be blown and be gone.
There's no way you'll capture that intact.
And then everybody else is going to be terrified of this.
And they're going to do the—it's not placate in our day.
It's rather sanctions of saying, okay, if you're not going to play nice, we're not going to trade with you.
You're going to have a massive timeout from the global order.
And China is very trade reliant.
And so, okay.
Oh, why?
I think the story is on...
sanctions they don't have to be leak proof all you're doing is if you can knock off one or two percentages uh points of chinese growth just because some people are sanctioning like war material that would be a very likely thing that after taiwan maybe you're trading with china but you're not doing certain categories of war material with them the cumulative effects of doing that to a country over generations is the difference between north and south korea
It adds right up.
And you can do the math better than I can.
If you knock off 2% growth per annum, I think the doubling time of an economy, I don't know, if you knock a couple of percentage points off, it goes from like 25 years to 75 years.
You will be able to do the math better than I can rapidly.
But it's very consequential.
And China's neighbors will be scared to death of this.
And also, you're right that trade patterns don't go overnight.
They go gradually over like a 10-year period in which China will find it's already happening is supply chains are moving out of China.
Slow.
Not today.
No one's centering around us right now because we're not playing nicely with allies right now.
But rather, I think you will find that there are so many countries that are eager to follow the Chinese model for development.
They have cheaper labor now, places like Vietnam.
And India has also been doing all sorts of things.
And my impression with India is it isn't one of India's problems.
It needs a better infrastructure and their investments going on in that.
So there are many other people in the world who are interested in making money and they've watched how China did it.
You can emulate that.
So I think if China is foolish enough to do Taiwan, these will be the long-term ramifications.
It's a mistake.
As annoying as other countries are, it's better to just argue with them at international institutions.
And China has a big presence at these international institutions and should be able to get others to go along with however it wants to change rules.
and do it that way.
If they're going to do it the Putin way, you can look at it.
It's negative sum.
And they will get a timeout from the global order.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution introduced compounded economic growth, this continental solution is a mistake.
It is much better to forget about invading territory, allow the free traffic of people, trade, goods, ideas, and then we'll all grow together.
Yeah.
Oh, the continental maritime.
I've just discussed geography because it's something I think most people don't think about.
And so and particularly what's hilarious about people who buy navies.
And I've read all these.
I've sadly had to read these naval theory books.
They never look at the geography.
I mean, they occasionally do, but it's sort of, I'm going to get a big Navy.
Well, it depends where you live.
So I've just finished and edited books about fleets and being just like, if you have a fleet, what does that foreclose for whoever's around you?
What does it open for you?
And then it makes really, it's not a great read, but I learn a lot from doing it.
It becomes really clear that, like, oh, you can see that map there.
You see Italy.
And you have in World War I, with that particular position, the Austro-Hungarian Empire has quite a good little submarine fleet.
Captain von Trapp, you know, Sound of Music?
He was a war hero.
He was a submarine captain.
And just by having that submarine fleet in there, it forced Britain to convoy the whole Mediterranean.
It doesn't mean Austro-Hungary wins the war, but a very simple investment prevents anyone from invading over its oceans, which is important, and it makes the British do very expensive convoy duty because Captain von Trapp is quite good at sinking naval ships of the British.
So...
That's the difference of your geographic position limits what you can do.
But now we have a whole rules-based order so that if you join the party, you have a massive alliance system.
That's why I look at China.
It doesn't have any allies.
It has itself.
And it likes to have bilateral relations.
But actually, these international institutions, for those who actually are serious about them, it's a de facto.
NATO is most certainly an alliance system.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's important.
It's just the Chinese also come with this little piece of baggage that we're big, you're small, so we get to tell you what to do.
Oh, they've literally said it over and over again.
They'll tell it to their neighbors like the Vietnamese, just basically shut up and color because we're a big country and you're little.
Vietnamese don't like it.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We've been really intrusive in other people's domestic politics, without a doubt.
Right.
And that is the American busybody gene that's gotten us into a lot of trouble.
So, oh yeah, no one's perfect in this world.
Far from it.
We all make horrendous errors and then do things we shouldn't do.
So I'm going to talk to you today about one of the two great generations in modern Japanese history.
And they are the Meiji generation, named after the Meiji emperor here.
And that generation transformed Japan into the first and the only non-Western modern power in that period.
And the second great generation of modern Japanese is, of course, the post-war generation that transformed their country into a global powerhouse.
And I'm going to ask a question, or try to both ask and answer it, is what caused the reversal of the balance of power in Asia in the period that I'm going to talk to you about it?
And it's a really consequential question about why these tectonic changes take place in the international system
Because historically, China had always been the dominant civilization in Asia from time immemorial.
And then upstart Japan winds up doing things, or China winds up doing things, and it reverses and has profound effects.
And it's a very relevant question in our own day when there's an ongoing reversal of the reversal, when China's on the comeback and threatening to put Japan back in its box.
So it's really interesting to ask why, how do these things happen?
So that's the background of what I'm talking about.
But if you think about China back in the day before Japan trounced China in the first Sino-Japanese War, Chinese believed that there's only one civilization.
theirs, naturally.
And they believed that, of course, it's the best because there's only one that makes it easier to be the best.
But in addition, if you think about all levels of human endeavor, Chinese institutions were imitated throughout the East.
It's the richest country on the planet for many, many years.
Incredible achievements in science, philosophy, you name it.
And also there was another assumption that people didn't make a U-turn on the path to civilization.
It's always forward towards Chinese civilization.
Well, Japan, by westernizing, is taking a U-turn on the road to civilization.
It's dumping Chinese civilization.
And so already we got at least two civilizations out there.
And then when it trances China in a war,
It suggests to the Chinese that they can't be better than the Japanese at the military things, at least.
And this effect on China was far more devastating than the opium wars.
The Chinese could write those off, the losses there.
A bunch of crazy Europeans, they're irrelevant to us.
But when Japan did this, it basically detonated the Confucian underpinnings of Chinese civilization.
And the Chinese have been trying to find a suitable replacement ever since.
For a while, they thought it was communism.
Maybe they still do.
So I'm going to ask a question.
Why did the Asian balance of power change?
And now, spoiler alert, I'm going to give the answer.
And I'm going to say clever decisions in Tokyo.
But I'm going to use a particular framework to answer this that I have found really useful.
And I learned it from teaching at the Naval War College where students are required to have a counterargument in papers.
And this is what I learned from doing this.
So I'm going to have an argument, which is a thesis, and then I'll have some data supporting it.
But then I'm not going to quit there.
I'm going to do...
find the second best argument, the counterargument, the absolutely best alternate explanation, but not one that I think is the best one.
I'm going to give you the best one.
That's my thesis.
And I'm going to go into that.
And it's incredibly valuable, particularly in our own fraught political times, where we need to hear each other out.
You need to hear out the counterargument of what the other side is saying.
And then what you'll often find out in a counterargument is that there are actually some very valid points in it.
And it leads you to think, oh, well, maybe I need to adjust my own argument.
So changing your mind's a good idea if the data comes in.
Also, it gets you away from monocausal explanations where you come up with one cause, you think that's it, time to quit.
And if you're thinking about the counterargument, you might get other causes as well.
Also, if you're going to do something like on a job,
and you have to recommend a course of action, your thesis, you had better anticipate what the counter argument is going to be.
And then the third part of this is the rebuttal, because you better come into that meeting your boss with a rebuttal in your back pocket so that you can deal with people who are saying you're wrong.
And the rebuttal cannot be a repetition of the original argument because you know what?
That's annoying.
Don't do that.
Really annoying.
The most effective ones are coming at the problem from a completely different direction from either argument or counter-argument that then shores up your argument.
And my other direction is I've got a Sino-Japanese problem and I'm going to come around with a Russian angle.
So this is my game plan of what I'm planning to do and the analytical reasons for doing it.
Okay, so I have a thesis, which I'm gonna give to you.
When in emails and written work and lectures like this one, you really help people if you explain exactly what you're up to and you do it succinctly at the very beginning.
So here it is.
The Japanese leaders westernized their institutions,
They integrated multiple instruments of national power into a coherent strategy.
And then in the Russo-Japanese War, they quit that one exactly at the culminating point of victory for maximum gains.
And together, these three things overturned the balance of power in their favor.
That's my thesis.
Short, sweet, you've got it.
Whether you agree with it or not, we will get there.
Okay, so now I'm going to go to the first point.
First points.
You should start with a topic sentence.
I'm going to start one.
Why am I doing this?
These are all signposts to orient you to my argument so that you can absorb it.
And also, if you don't like it, you can see very clearly the parts that you don't like, and we can get into a fun conversation.
So my topic sentence for the westernization part is...
Japanese leaders concluded that in order to parry the threat of the Industrial Revolution, of all these imperial powers coming at them, was they needed to westernize their institutions in order to protect their national interests, that this was step one.
So that's my topic sentence.
Okay, so what's going on?
The Industrial Revolution started in England, or Britain more generally,
in the late 18th century.
It spreads to the continent after the Napoleonic Wars die down at the beginning of the 19th century.
By the mid-19th century, it had reached Asia.
And it's profoundly disruptive to traditional societies whose traditional security paradigms no longer work when they're facing the weaponry of the industrialized age coming at them.
And what the Industrial Revolution does and why it's so revolutionary
is it produces compounded economic growth.
Traditional societies are pretty stable.
But when you do compounding economic growth, the difference in power and wealth becomes stark between those who do and those who don't.
And it's also based
not only on technological changes, right, whether you've got all these fancy armaments and railways and telegraphs, but it's also based on institutions.
What are institutions?
They're how we organize each other.
So when you think of institutions, you think of the buildings where people are, but that's not it.
It's the people in there who are working on a shared project together, whatever, a shared area of activity.
And this is one of the hallmarks of Western civilization.
This is what the Romans figured out of institutions and laws, that this is a way of really harnessing people, and it's profoundly powerful.
So I'll go into all of that.
So Japan's looking at the world with this incoming...
Industrial Revolution or the powers that have benefited from it.
And it's watching its neighbor, China, being defeated twice in war.
And they're horrified, not just appalled.
And...
So they're looking at it and going, you know what, maybe we'll be next.
And they're right.
The United States does unto Japan what Britain and France did unto China.
What's that?
The treaty port system.
What it meant is that trade in Japan and China would take place in designated treaty ports.
that the West would set tariffs on this trade and that Western citizens in China or Japan in these treaty ports would not be subjected to Chinese or Japanese law, but home country law.
And when Chinese and Japanese citizens were in Europe and the United States, they most certainly were not dealing with home country law.
They were dealing with U.S.
or Western law.
So it was not reciprocal in any way.
In addition, each one of these treaties had a most favored nation clause in it, which said the one who's negotiating this treaty, the most favored one, whatever they negotiate will be given to everybody else.
So it meant whatever one could negotiate accrued to them all.
It meant that China lost sovereignty and Japan lost their sovereignty when these treaties go in.
And so the Japanese, unlike China, which fights war after war with these Westerners trying to defeat them militarily and it's unsuccessful, the Japanese say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
we're going to assess what the nature of the problem is.
And they sent fact-finding mission after fact-finding mission to Europe primarily, but also the United States.
This is just the most famous one, the Iwakura Mission, which is off to the West and the United States as well in 1871.
And they're studying not only Western military institutions, but a whole array of political, economic, legal, social, educational, the works to understand the
the basis for Western power and the problem that is hitting them.
And they arrive in Europe at a really interesting time.
It's when Otto von Bismarck is just finishing up the third war of the unification of the Germanic states.
And the Japanese think, ooh, this might be quite a model for us.
Why?
Because Prussia transformed itself over a succession of three wars from the weakest of the five great European powers to second only to Great Britain.
And it did so in part by unifying the Germanic states into modern Germany.
And the Japanese are thinking, wow, this might be relevant to us because we're divided up into all these feudal domains that we have just tried to glue together.
And what are the lessons to be learned here?
And as they're thinking about this and watching what Bismarck is up to, they come upon the
thinking about institutions and technology.
And modernization, I'm going to use the words in the following sense.
Modernization means adopting the most state-of-the-art technology, whatever it is, not just military technology, but all manner of technology.
And westernization, the way I'm going to use it, means adopting westernized institutions.
And I don't mean just military institutions, I mean everything, from whether you westernize your educational institutions or political, whatever it is.
And the question is, can you have one without the other?
Can you modernize and have all the fancy gadgets and things without having the westernized institutions that the societies that created these things had?
And if you think about it, this dichotomy is still with us.
There are a lot of fighters in the Middle East and North Africa who are more than happy to use state-of-the-art technology.
But the last thing they want is westernized institutions.
And the Japanese, when they posed this question back in the day, asking whether you can have one without the other, they decided the answer was no.
They didn't particularly like Western culture, but they believed that in order to have, to not only use and import state-of-the-art technology, but become an independent producer of it, you've got to do some degree of Westernization.
So they got home, they set themselves a policy objective,
which is to protect Japanese national security and sovereignty in an age of accelerating imperialism.
And they come up with a two-phase grand strategy to do this.
It's going to be start with a domestic phase of westernization, westernize your institutions.
And then they're going to, when they're done with that, they're going to have a foreign policy phase, which is going to be about starting an empire.
Why do that?
Because they look at all the powers of their day and think, what's a great power look like in those days?
Well, it has an empire.
So they go, well,
We're going to have an empire.
All right.
This is the domestic phase.
These are known as the Meiji reforms in honor of the emperor who reigned in this period.
It's between 1869, 1890.
It's a whole generation.
And if you look at them, only two of them pertain to the military.
There's the draft and then creating the general staff.
And then if you look at the two that start it all, they start it...
at the top of the social pyramid with the feudal domains.
That's the power brokers of Japan, and they're getting rid of all of those.
And then they go right to the bottom of the social pyramid, which is children, and deciding that they need to have compulsory elementary education because they don't believe you can have a modern country, a strong country, without a literate population.
But if you look at the rest of these things, you're getting a Bank of Japan.
You're going to be having something running your currency and other things.
You've got a cabinet, a higher education.
You're going to have a professional civil service, constitution, a parliament.
You're going to have a court system that looks like a Western court system with laws that look an awful lot like Western laws.
As a result of doing all of this, the Westerners had no excuse left for having a treaty port system because this mirrors what's going on in the West.
So Britain, which is the precedent setter in these things, the superpower of its day, it renegotiates its treaties with Japan on the basis of juridical equality.
And the other powers follow suit and do it.
This happens in Japan a half century before China gets rid of its unequal treaties.
All right, so domestic phase is over the moment Japan signs that treaty with Britain.
The foreign policy phase has to do with Japan believes it needs an empire and its neighborhood is a mess.
China is imploding for various reasons, which I will get to.
And Korea is even worse.
And China, because it's having a massive civil wars throughout China, can no longer fulfill its Susan role to stabilize Korea.
And the Korean royal house is busy mailing package bombs to each other.
I kid you not, they're blowing each other up.
What Japan is terribly concerned about is that Russia might try to fill this power vacuum.
Why would Japan think that?
Well, it's the Trans-Siberian Railway that Russia decides in 1891 it's going to build a Trans-Siberian Railway to exactly what?
There is no Russian population out there.
And Japan understands exactly what it is.
It's a bid for empire in Asia because once Russia completes this thing, it's going to overturn the Asian balance of power because Russia is going to be able to deploy troops where nobody else can.
Therefore, treaty revision happens on the 16th of July, 1894.
That's when it's signed on the dotted line with Britain.
Nine days later, Japan fires the opening shots of the first Sino-Japanese War.
And the Japanese fight three wars of Russian containment.
I'm going to talk about the two that went well for them today.
The third one's a whole other topic.
The first one's the first Sino-Japanese War, when little Japan...
defeats the greatest land power of Asia, China.
Incredible.
The second one, which I'll get to a decade later, is the Russo-Japanese War, when the Japanese defeat, sorry, spoiler alert, Russia, the greatest land empire of Europe.
Amazing that they can do this.
And the third one does not go nearly as well.
That would be the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1931 to 1945 that morphs into World War II that ruins the Japanese, but it's a different topic.
First sign of Japanese war to let you know what happened in it.
It's comprised of two pairs of key battles.
There are other battles as well, but this is a good way to understand it.
The first battle is at Pyongyang.
The Japanese defeat the Chinese army, which takes off and retreats all the way over the border river, which is the Yalu, back into Chinese territory.
So Japan has actually achieved its war objective, which was to remove Korea from the Chinese sphere of influence.
Battle number one, they've already done it.
And the second battle occurs within the week, the same week in mid-September, 1894.
It's the Battle of the Yalu, where the Japanese Navy trounces the Chinese Navy, which, believe it or not, in this day, both countries had state-of-the-art navies.
And Japan trounces it and gets command of the sea.
That's terribly important for Japan.
For Japan to reach the theater here, it's got to cross the sea.
If there's a hostile Navy out and about, it can sink troop transport supplies and other things.
So it's very important to get rid of hostile Navy.
Well, the reason it gets command of the sea is because Chinese decide they're never gonna engage with the Japanese Navy ever again, and they duck into port.
And the Japanese are going to solve that problem for them.
There are a second pair of battles which are fought over the winter of 1894-95.
China only has one naval refitting station where you can actually fix large ships.
That's at Port Arthur.
And they will take it by land the same way they're going to take it in the Russo-Japanese War.
The Chinese fleet, what's left of it, flees to Weihaiwei, hang out in port.
Japan lands an army on the Shandong Peninsula there, and also it blockades with its navy.
And then the army turns the landward guns on the ships and port, and they sink them all.
And that is the end of that war.
Okay.
Here's what Japan got out of this war.
And what I got is a very simple framework, domestic, regional, international.
This is a way to help you remember what I'm going to tell you.
Three-part frameworks are helpful for getting information to other people.
Domestically,
This victory in this war validated a very controversial Westernization program.
All those Meiji reforms, which sound so great in retrospect, actually the Japanese population didn't like them.
Who wants their kids being sent to elementary school if they were working on the farm before?
And who wants this Westernized curriculum?
Who likes Westerners anyway?
And people are wearing all this Western clothing and stuff.
It's crazy land.
Why would anyone like that?
Once Japan wins this war and trounces China, a lot of Japanese have second thoughts about this.
They're quite proud of their achievements.
And it vastly increases the prestige of the military, particularly the army.
And this is going to have bad follow-on effects for civil-military relations because it's going to increase military power over civil power.
But it takes a while to...
play out.
Regionally, Japan's replacing China as the dominant power, and Japan's getting the beginnings of its empires, Taiwan and the Pescadores.
Internationally, Japan becomes a recognized great power.
And what's my proof?
It would be the 1902 Anglo-Japanese alliance, which is Britain's only long-term alliance between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, alliance with Japan.
However, this war gets the eye of Mordor turned on to them because Russia is going, whoa, rising power in Asia, potential two-front war problem for us with Europe in the West and whatever the Japanese think they're doing.
And that triggers a Russo-Japanese arms race and Russia, the eye of Mordor, turns from Europe to Asia.
And that's going to be problematic.
Now my transition sentence, I've done part number one.
Not only did Japan westernize its institutions in order to overturn the balance of power, but it also mastered grand strategy and integrated multiple instruments of national power.
And here we go on that one.
Marshal Yamagata, who was the writer of war plans for the very successful Sino-Japanese War, he predicted another war within the decade.
And the Russo-Japanese War came right on time.
And in the meantime, Japan prepared for war.
And it integrated such instruments of national power as diplomacy, intelligence, military, economics.
I'm going to go through each in turn.
starting with diplomacy.
Here you have Sun Tzu, who's China's big guru, art of war, who's talking about it's really important to disrupt alliances.
In modern terminology, that would be isolating the adversary, that that might be a good thing to do.
And that's the purpose of the Anglo-Japanese alliance.
How does that work?
What it says, its terms say that
If more than one European power comes to Asia to fight Japan, that means Russia plus one European buddy, then Britain is going to weigh in on Japan's side.
So Britain is the number one power in Europe.
So why would you ever want to help Russia out?
Because it won't go well with you if Britain is on Japan's side.
This alliance goes into effect from 1902 to 1907.
It's a five-year event, opening a window of opportunity for Japan to sort out its empire in Asia.
But the Trans-Siberian Railway, when it gets completed, is going to threaten to close that window.
And here's why.
The Trans-Siberian Railway in those days, it's not north of the Amur, it's actually straight through Manchuria, this Chinese Eastern Railway.
It's Russia's bid for empire of trying to control Manchuria.
And it was unfinished.
It hadn't been double-tracked, so that means you're always having to push trains off so other trains can pass them in the other direction.
It's missing its Lake Baikal link.
Don't think Lake, think Switzerland.
Lake Baikal is about the size of Switzerland.
And the Boxer Rebellion, the Al-Qaeda of their day, and I'll get to them, had destroyed much of the track, really upsetting the Russians.
As a result of all of this, at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, which begins in 1904, the carrying capacity of that railway was only 20,000 to 40,000 men per month to the front.
By the end of the war, the last battle,
It's 100,000 men per month.
If those numbers had been available at the beginning of the war, Japan would have faced numerically superior Russians from start to finish and would have been in a world of hurt.
So Japan has got a window of opportunity that it's worrying about sorting things out.
In addition, Japan engages in a really big military buildup.
It gets a really big indemnity from the first Sino-Japanese War, and it spends it, and that spending is finished in around 1901, meaning it's about ready to go to war.
At the time the war breaks out, Russian naval assets in Asia were about three-quarters, those of Japan.
Russia was scheduled to surpass Japan's naval assets by about 1905.
Again, you could see this window of opportunity threatening to shut.
So if you look at it, Japan's window of opportunity of getting its empire, if that's what it thinks it wants, you've got to have treaty vision in place.
You've got to isolate Russians, make sure that there's going to be no other power interfering in these things.
You've got to have your rearmament program completed.
But look, this window is very short.
It's going to close in 1905-ish.
And when you think of windows of opportunities, what they mean is whatever it is you plan to do has to be completed before it slams shut.
If you're on the wrong side of the window, which is what happens to Japan in the Second Sano-Japanese War, you are in a world of hurt.
In addition, what it means is actually time is on the side of your adversary.
It is a sign of weakness, not strength.
The Japanese are looking at the Russians who are procrastinating.
The Japanese are telling them, hey, we will trade recognition of your dominance of Manchuria if you'll recognize our dominance in Korea.
The Russians didn't want to do anything.
They're procrastinating and trying to go beyond this window.
And the Japanese are thinking, we got to sort it out before that happens.
So...
Another element of national power are psyops, as the U.S.
military likes to call them, psychological operations.
And the Japanese were engaged in a really wide array of them, both at the front in Russia and across the Russian Empire.
At the front, the Japanese were secreting in all kinds of postcards for the Russian recruits there, showing the great life of the POW and rather posh Japanese accommodations, as opposed to the really bad life of getting disabled or killed in the front.
Meanwhile,
Russia was the only, I think there are only three European countries, including Russia, that lacked a legislature in this period.
I think Montenegro is one of them, and maybe the Ottoman Empire might be the other one.
Japan had a legislature.
Russian population's sick of it.
The war wasn't going well, and they start hitting the streets in the Russian Revolution, and Japan wants to advertise that to the troops.
You want things to be stirred up in Russia so that Russia has to pull troops back into European Russia.
So they're doing all of that.
And then this gentleman, he was a colonel back in the day, Colonel Akashi, but he's a general by the time this picture is taken of him.
He's working in the Japanese legation in Stockholm, and he's busy cutting checks to Finnish and Polish revolutionaries who are part of the Russian empire and want out.
trying to stir things up there to have Russia have to be forced to pull the troops out of Asia.
And then the Japanese have this gentleman in there employing a lot of other people, Yuan Shikai.
He is key in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty and becomes China's first president.
But back in the day, he's running reconnaissance missions for the Japanese, telling them what the Russians are up to.
And when little detachments of Russian troops try to go out and about, these people are harassing them, which doesn't help Russian morale.
Also, the Japanese are being really good about purchases from Manchurians.
They aren't just taking things from people.
They're actually paying.
So they're triggering an economic boom in Manchuria, which means locals like them.
And then the Japanese also figure how to tap into Russian fleet communications so they know where the Russian fleet is most convenient.
So this is the information element of national power.
And then there's economics.
Two-fifths of this war...
for the Japanese side is paid for with loans.
So if they don't get the loans, they can't wage the war.
In fact, one of the reasons Russia has to call it quits at the end of the war is when it tries to raise a final loan, it failed, no one will pay for it.
But the Japanese loans depend on battlefield success as do interest rates.
So if you are successful in the field, the interest rates go down.
So Japan is doing quite well with all of this.
So if you sum it all up, you can go the Japanese use diplomacy to isolate their adversary with this UK alliance.
They use all these psychological operations to promote revolution and desertions.
They're using the military instrument to fund their rearmament.
And then they've got the economics going with all of these loans.
The US military is really partial to a Reagan era acronym of DIME, right?
You can see here that
D is for diplomacy.
I is for information.
M is for military.
E is economics.
Sounds like a bad, I don't know, cheerleading routine.
It's inadequate.
It may be a place to start.
It's cute and all that stuff.
But cute does not mean complete.
Think about it.
One of the most important factors in this war, bar none, certainly for Russia, is railways.
I don't see an R in there or anything.
So by all means, this is better than only looking at military factors, but it's incomplete.
So I've talked about Japan's westernization, and I've talked about its master of grand strategy, and now here's my third reason of how they...
how they overturn the balance of power.
And it has to do with pegging the culminating point of victory in the Russo-Japanese War.
And now for a commercial break, I'm going to give you some terminology, which are culminating point of attack, culminating point of victory.
They're different.
Culminating point of attack is an operational term.
If you do not reach your culminating point of attack,
it means you could have gone further.
And it applies, the culminating point of attack applies to a single battle or a set of battles, which would be called a campaign.
So if you don't go far enough in your battle, you could have taken more territory, whatever it was you were after, if you go too far.
So imagine you're going...
deep into whatever territory it is, your lines are ever more extended.
Your enemy's lines are probably being shortened.
Your supply problems are getting worse.
Theirs might be getting better.
If you go way too far, your enemy will launch a counterattack that will send you much further backwards than if you'd been a little more cautious about how far you went.
So that's an operational term.
The strategic term is culminating point of victory and it concerns the objective for which the war was fought.
Japan's fighting this war in order to protect its sovereignty.
They come a great power to do that.
If you don't go far enough and if you don't reach your culminating point, you could have gotten greater winnings.
If you go too far, typically what'll happen is you will trigger a third party intervention.
And what may have been feasible before that third party joined the party may no longer be.
So this is the point of the terminology.
Oh, commercial break is over and let's get going on the Russo-Japanese War.
Here's a nice map of it.
So it starts out with a Japanese surprise attack on Port Arthur, Lushun, modern name, I'm using a traditional name.
It's on the Liaodong Peninsula.
This is the main Russian base.
The Japanese have to get those ships in base and sink them even better because their supply lines are in danger if that navy's out and about.
Simultaneously, they land an army in Korea that's gonna go northwest into Manchuria.
And if you look at the railway line, it goes Port Arthur all the way to Harbin up there.
That's the east-west junction of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
In those days, that's the Chinese Eastern Railway.
And I've only listed a couple of the major battles, but basically, it's going up the railway system from Port Arthur upward.
And you got the Liaoyang and Mukden railway
And Japan has got only four armies until the very end of the war when it gets a fifth.
And one army, as long as Port Arthur has ships in it, it has to be stuck there, besieging it.
And Japan's theory of victory in this thing is to have an annihilating battle.
That's what Bismarck had done to the French in the Battle of Sudan.
And so the Japanese really need to get that army out of Port Arthur so that it can concentrate on these other battles.
What happens is Russia keeps losing the battles, but it has an orderly retreat moving ever further northward, extending Japanese lines.
So that's an overview of how the war goes.
So you can orient the rest of the conversation here.
If you look at the invasion routes that Japan uses in the first Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, they're remarkably similar because guess what?
The geography hasn't changed.
And so if you want to send an army in to desired locations, it may well have to take similar routes.
And the British, the French, the Americans, Japanese had studied very carefully the first Sona Japanese War.
But apparently the Russians didn't waste their time on it because here's what's up.
If the Russians had studied it carefully, they would have known the Yalu River is lethal to send an army across that if there's an army waiting for it on the other side.
The Russians also would have realized that this Feng Shui Pass and the Mo Tian Pass, Mo Tian means literally scratch the skies,
that if you're prepared there, you're going to ruin an army coming through.
Of course, the Russians aren't prepared there.
And then they also would have known it, the Liaodong Peninsula, it has a very narrow neck.
If you cut the narrow neck, which is right where Dalny is, a big commercial port, you're going to get that port, which is connected to the railway, and you're going to be able to supply your armies going right up north.
In addition, it means you're probably going to get Port Arthur, the big naval base as well, because it's basically been turned into an island and you'll probably get that.
So the Russians should have figured out that they, but they didn't.
The Japanese literally blast through these locations.
And here's the key to reducing the fleet in Port Arthur.
Since the Russians wouldn't sortie, they're just sticking in harbor.
So the Japanese have to figure out a way to do it.
Here's how it works.
They have to get a bunch of these 11-inch howitzers in place.
Japan didn't own many of these.
They're really heavy.
It's really hard to transport them with horses and things.
They've got to put them behind the hills in Port Arthur, and then they've got to take the high point, which takes them a while to figure out that they need to do this, a 203-meter hill.
You put a spotter on 203-meter hill, this thing starts firing shots, and the spotter starts radioing in how you have to adjust the line of fire in order to hit the ships and harbor.
So that's
what's going on here.
Here, you can see the narrow neck there above Dalny.
You can see it's a big port where you put a lot of ships, but not a very protected port.
The star is where Port Arthur is, and that is a protected port where you want to put naval vessels.
And you can see it takes the Japanese two months to work their way down the Liaodong Peninsula to get themselves in position to blow away the ships in port.
Meanwhile, Japanese armies are having a hard time while this is going on.
It could be argued that maybe they even reached their culminating point in the battle of Liaoyang.
Who knows?
Liaoyang takes place less than halfway through the war.
It's in early September, 1904.
And Japanese munitions, numbers of officers, numbers of horses, it all goes critical.
They don't have enough.
They get away with it.
They win the battle, but the Russians have an organized retreat northward.
And at the Battle of Shaka, which happens next in October,
the Japanese supply system almost collapses, but they get away with it.
And so bad things are going on at land.
Japan doesn't have an infinite supply of soldiers.
So you can also look, they don't have an infinite supply of artillery, howitzers and things.
Here are their gun emplacements.
Notice the green ones are army guns emplacements around Port Arthur.
That makes sense.
What's all the purple?
They have so few guns, they're pulling them off ships.
in order to reduce Port Arthur, and all these things they really need up in Manchuria.
They need Nogi, General Nogi, who's running all of this, his army up in Manchuria.
And there you can see the circle is where 203-meter hill is, that they need to take that as well.
All right, so General Nogi, who is commanding the Third Army, which is in charge of the siege, he is really desperate to reduce the fortress as soon as possible.
And he runs four different really costly infantry assaults on a fortress where you're killing lots of Japanese young men.
And he tells them...
The first two occur right prior to major battles, Liaoyang and Shaha respectively, because he wants to win those battles, win Port Arthur, so then he can take his guns and troops to fight at Liaoyang and Shaha.
Well, it's not to be because he loses both of them.
the salts are insufficient.
And it's only after the second one that he realizes the importance of 203 meter hill.
The problem is Nogi gets 45,000 Japanese soldiers killed doing this.
45,000 soldiers in that day is an entire army.
And I've already pointed out that Japan only had foreign armies until the very end of the war when it tries to cobble together a fifth one.
Here's what 203-meter hill looks like from down below.
Here's what it looks like from up top, the kind of view you get.
When there was a truce in early December 1904, and there was some talking between Japanese and Russian officers, Russian officers said, you will never capture 203-meter hill, to which the Japanese officer replied, we'll purchase it in blood.
And they did.
And their gamble paid off because all these ships, you'll notice they're listing.
It's because they ain't sailing anywhere.
The 203-meter hill, they take it the end of November.
And within the week, they are now sinking all of these battleships.
And they're gone within a few days.
And the Russians...
give up at Port Arthur, and the Third Army is up and heading into Manchuria, where it'll be there for the Battle of Mukden, which is a huge battle.
It's got, what, 500,000 troops?
But even so, Russia can muster 125,000 more troops than Japan can.
Japan, in this battle, is just taking anybody, young boys, old people, whoever they can put into that army, they're putting into it.
And you could argue that they're well beyond their culminating point of attack.
But for incompetent Russian strategy, if the Russians had run one more battle against the Japanese, their Japanese supply lines would have collapsed.
And it's unclear how far down the Liaodong Peninsula they would have had to retreat.
So this is when Japan's war termination plan goes into effect.
The Japanese realized from the very beginning that they had a high risk, high reward strategy.
And in contrast to World War II, they had a really carefully prepared exit strategy.
So when Prime Minister Ito Hirabumi is convening the cabinet and they're gonna make the decision to fire the first shots in this war, he is already lining up a Harvard grad
I hear Viscount Caneco, who was an acquaintance of President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States, then president.
And what they want is to have Viscount Caneco work on getting Roosevelt ready to do mediation at the end of this war.
And the peace treaty is going to be held in, negotiations are going to be held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, negotiated by another Harvard alumnus, Baron Komura.
who's going to do all of that.
Meanwhile, Ito sends his son-in-law, who's a diet member, but also a graduate of Cambridge University, off to Britain to keep the Anglo-Japanese alliance solid.
So the Japanese are very aware that you've got to have a way out of this thing.
So...
It's in the Battle of Mukden that Field Marshal Yamagata decides it's time to call the American card at this moment.
He said, look, the enemy is never going to request peace unless we have invaded Moscow or St.
Petersburg, something he knows to be impossible.
And he doesn't assess me.
So look, the enemy still has powerful forces in its home country.
We have already exhausted ours.
Second, while the enemy still does not run out of officers, we have lost a great number since the opening of the war and cannot easily replace them.
At this moment, the Russian army was three times the size of the Japanese army.
And that army in theater was increasingly comprised of crack soldiers, not the kind of colonial kind of soldiers they'd started out with.
And so
Here's the field marshal, Yamagata, who in the first Sino-Japanese War, because the government in Tokyo was afraid he was going to march on Beijing and do regime change, they pulled him out of theater and gave him a sinecure to make sure he didn't do that.
This time, he's a wiser man.
He goes, we must now be prudent.
And here are other members of this brilliant Meiji generation, the chief of staff of the Manchurian army.
He said, look, if you start a fire, you've got to put it out.
And here is the field marshal Oyama, who is the commander of Manchurian forces.
But before he sets out to take command, he tells the Navy minister, I will care for fighting in Manchuria, but I'm counting you as the man to tell me when to quit.
So the Navy is going to be the fire department, apparently.
To tell you what the Navy was up to, they took Elliott Island to turn it into a cruiser base, and that's how they're running the blockade operations on Port Arthur of keeping the Russian fleet in until they can eventually sink it there.
In addition, the Imperial Japanese Navy is busy laying mines.
A lot of ships go down to mines.
So...
This is an interesting story.
So Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, doesn't much like it that his fleet is just sitting in port, not doing anything.
And so he sends Admiral Makarov out there to assume command.
And I've had the misfortune to read Makarov's major literary contribution, which is all about naval strategy.
And he's a real hero in Russia.
But then I read his book.
It's unbelievable.
It's
If you face a big ship, what do you do?
A more powerful ship, you attack.
If it's a smaller ship, what do you do?
You attack.
It's like, okay, one size fits all.
I mean, how unanalytical.
Here's what happens to him.
He comes in theater and within a month, another spoiler alert, he's dead.
How did that happen?
He followed his strategy.
That's how it happened.
What he does, he arrives.
Everyone's really excited because he's getting the guys out and thinking they're going to be doing things.
But on April 12th, the evening before he dies, there are a bunch of Japanese ships laying mines out of the harbor's entrance, and he mistakes them for Russian ships and tells his people, don't fire on them.
Oops.
And the next morning when he sorties with the whole fleet to be part of his, we're going to, it's always take the offensive.
Well, they didn't sweep the harbor insurance for mines.
His ship hits a mine and he goes down with a ship.
All right.
That is a tactical error.
And he's a dead man because of it.
However, there's a much more important strategic error that follows.
Two weeks later, Nicholas II decides to send his Baltic fleet, named for the Baltic, that's where it is, all the way around to come and relieve the siege at Port Arthur in order to avenge all of this thing.
Okay, what's the problem with that plan?
Well, that's the problem with that plan, right?
It's a long way to go.
There is no air conditioning for the sailors, right?
They come from northern climes.
By the time they arrive, they're mutinous.
Their ships are covered with barnacles, which means they don't move very fast.
Meanwhile, once Port Arthur has fallen,
the Japanese immediately refit their navy so they were good to go.
And so the way this blunder plays out, well, if you think about Britain, Britain will do these worldwide adventures, but they had a complete basing system across the globe so that their ships had coaling stations, they could refit, put more water on, give people some R&R time, relaxation and things.
And also the British were very careful to fight on their own terms whenever possible.
You don't wanna fight on the enemy's terms.
Well, guess what?
You're gonna be fighting right next to Japan, barnacle ships and mutinous crews.
That's not gonna go well for you.
And the Japanese know because now that Port Arthur falls while this expedition is taking place, so then the purpose of the expedition is no longer there.
They should have taken a U-turn and go home, but no, no, no, they're going to keep on going.
So there is only one other possible location for them, which is an inferior base up at Vladivostok.
So the Japanese know there are three ways to get to Vladivostok if you're coming up from the south.
You're either going to go the long, long way around through the Perus Strait, and it's awfully narrow, and it's the long way around.
You can go through the Sugaru Strait, which is a little wider, but it goes by a bunch of big Japanese army bases and also a very large port of Hakodate.
You want to do that, that's kind of risky.
So the short way is to go through the Korea Strait, which is broken in the middle by the Tsushima Islands.
And the Tsushima Strait is to the east.
It's 20 to 25 miles wide at its narrowest point.
And that's the short way, which is what the Russians take.
And guess what?
They have a welcoming party there of all these newly refitted Japanese ships that know exactly what they're up to.
And the Battle of Tsushima is one of the most...
lopsided naval battles in human history the Japanese just either sink or commandeer basically the entire fleet proving the Russians had no idea of how to do naval strategy that the Navy had been a product of a bunch of aristocrats who the one who ran it was a guy who was known for what was it fast women and slow ships it did not work out well for them
All right, while the negotiations are being held on whether to hold negotiations, President Roosevelt suggested to the Japanese that they try to take Sakhalin Island.
You can see the tip end of the Japanese home island, Hokkaido, and then there's Sakhalin.
Why?
Because it's much more valuable to the Russians than the Japanese, and it would be a good trade-back item in the peace negotiations.
Because for Japan, it's a nice fishing ground, but for Russia, it's sovereign Russian territory.
Horror is ceding that sovereign Russian territory to anyone, let alone an Asian power, given the prejudices of the day.
All right, to sum up what Japan got out of this war.
It got its immediate war objective, Russian troop withdrawal from Echaria.
That's what they wanted.
And they get this Japanese sphere of influence in Korea.
That's what they wanted.
But guess, remember at the very beginning, they wanted to trade Japanese predominance in Korea for Russian predominance
in Manchuria, whoa, well, so what they really got, they got the southern half of Sakhalin Island, Russian territory.
They got southern Manchuria, and it's actually arguably the valuable half, the southern half, because that has Port Arthur and Dalmy and all the railways that Russians had invested there.
And then it confirms the outcome of the first Sino-Japanese War, that Japan is indeed the dominant power of Asia.
So I rest my case.
Japan did it.
Smart decisions in Japan is what overturned the balance of power in Asia.
Okay, but I promised you a counter-argument.
What would a smart person say who disagrees with me?
And here's a perfectly good counter-argument, which would say,
Yeah, it's great you think the Japanese are so clever, but actually China faced a perfect storm of catastrophes.
And because China imploded, that's why it leaves Japan on top in Asia.
The primary factor is that China's falling apart.
And this perfect storm of problems, I'll go through three, it's always a good number, people can remember three things, talking about the civil wars afflicting China, that in an age of accelerating European imperialism, and also the Manchus who ran China, they're only 2% of the population, were suffering from all kinds of dynastic decline, which I will get into.
China had reached its pre-industrial limits to growth.
Its population kept on going up and up, but its agricultural predictivity just could not feed people.
And so people are trying to farm really marginal lands.
Either they're too vertical, they don't have reliable rainfall, and you're getting massive soil erosion doing these things, and you're also getting a lot of famines.
And famines are both the cause and the effect of civil wars.
And this map, you can just see, I've named some of the big rebellions on this one.
It's to give you a sense that these rebellions affect all of China, not just a little here and there, but a lot of everywhere.
And now I'm gonna give you a table
And this is a simplified table.
It only goes 1845 to 1895.
It's part of a much bigger table that would cover the entire 19th century.
And that table is an oversimplification.
So the point is, this is not business as usual.
In the red box, that is the height of these rebellions, 1851 to 1878.
The biggest rebellion in there is the Taipings.
It's estimated that 20 million people died in the Taiping rebellion.
to put that figure in perspective.
And people don't know how many people died in all these things.
China didn't know how many people they had, much less how many people they lost.
But to give you a sense of it, in World War II, it's estimated that 55 million people died.
So you're talking 20 million just in the Taipings, and I have no idea how all this adds up.
But it's huge.
The Chinese like to talk about these as being rebellions or uprisings.
Give me a break.
They're civil wars.
A whole bunch of them want to overthrow the dynasty in Beijing.
A whole other set of them want to secede from the empire, often these minority people who just want the Han, the predominant people to go away, or the Manchus in this era.
So some of these provinces are devastated for generations.
Okay, so that's point one, these civil wars.
Point two is
is this coincided with an era of accelerating European imperialism where Europeans and also Japan, Japanese are carving out massive spheres of influence for themselves.
So the Chinese are not gonna have sovereignty over their country, full sovereignty for a very, very long time.
And the story, the worst part gets even worse.
This happens to China because China loses a succession of regional wars.
It loses the First Opium War, the Second Opium War.
The Japanese snagged the Ryukyu Islands.
And then in the Sino-French War, China loses control over Indochina.
And then in the Sino-Japanese War, they're losing their tributary of Korea.
The Ili Crisis is up and Xinjiang goes a little better for them.
This is a mess.
This is not business as usual.
Think about one country being afflicted by this much trouble.
And then it comes at a time when the Manchus are in real trouble themselves.
They had ridden to power on these fabulous cavalries and in tremendous operational success for people who are only 2% of the population that they dominate, and they transformed China into the richest polity around China.
of the globe by the 18th century.
But here's the problem with their tremendous success in their military campaigns.
They're overextending China financially.
Inside the round circle there, that's China proper.
These are the core provinces of China that produce all the income.
But the Manchus came in from Manchuria up there, but they also take Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet.
The areas that cost not Manchuria so much, but the other ones, they cost a lot of garrisoning
It costs a lot of money to garrison these places.
And so it looks like a great success, but it's going to have problems later on.
And then here's what happens to the Manchu emperors.
They no longer ride at the head of their armies.
The Qianlong emperor who's considered to be ruled at the height of the dynasty, what's he spending his money on?
All sorts of interesting architectural programs.
And that's why people think he's great, builds beautiful things.
But these emperors are isolated.
They don't have command experience, expensive spending habits, and then it gets better.
So they got all these tributaries.
Some of their tributaries produce really high quality opium.
And the emperors decide they want to sample the goods.
And the people who are preparing it for them also want to sample the goods.
And then the Manchu banner forces that are the Praetorian guard of the Manchus are also sampling the goods.
And then you go, why are the last Qing emperors incapable of producing offspring or have hardly any?
Because they got huge harems.
So what's their problem?
Well,
Well, if you're really totally high on drugs, you can ruin yourself.
And so that is what goes on.
No wonder they're losing these wars if some of your key thinkers are not thinking very clearly.
So the counter-argument to my argument says, look, it's nonsense.
I mean, the Japanese may have been really clever, but this is the real big event.
It's this massive series of civil wars, European imperialism, and the collapse of Manchu minority rule.
That would be the real thing.
Now, if I leave my argument here, I've just shot myself in the foot because I've just decimated my original argument with a pretty good counter-argument, and that would be bad.
That would hurt.
So you need to do a rebuttal, and it's really good to come from an unexpected direction.
So I'm going to try my direction, which is going to be Russia, and say, look—
Russia is the catalyst.
It's taking advantage of the collapse of China.
And it's going to catalyze things in a way that Japan is going to leverage.
And it's going to be Japan leveraging these things that proves that smart decisions in Tokyo answers the question.
So what's going on with Russia?
Russia has always tries to expand its territory.
It is today the largest country on the planet.
Why they need more territory, nobody knows.
But that's what they're after.
And in these days, what they're taking are those two large areas.
And by the time the Bolsheviks finished working their magic, Russians have taken from the Chinese sphere of influence.
The Bolsheviks are beyond today, but it gives you a sense.
They took more territory today
from Chinese fear of influence than the United States east of the Mississippi.
There's a lot of territory.
But in this day, while the opium wars are going on, and while the Taiping and Nian rebellions, the two big ones, are happening simultaneously, the Russians go to the Qing and say, hey, we'll deal with those foreigners for you.
We'll be an intermediary, but just sign on the dotted line for these treaties, giving us all this land.
And the Chinese were vague on
geography and they didn't believe in treaties.
They thought they'd get it back later.
So Russia gets all this stuff, does exactly nothing because we know about the treaty port system and the British and French got all of it and Russia got this stuff too.
Once Russia gets this stuff, that's why they want the railway because they want to integrate it in there.
So the Trans-Siberian Railway is the blue thing, but understand that the blue part that's above the green part
That wasn't built until World War I. Russia builds the green part, which is the Chinese Eastern Railway, the name of it, in order to stake out its plans for empire.
And also notice it wants the warm water port, that's the orange part going down to Port Arthur, because Vladivostok, prior to the age of icebreakers, is frozen solid several months of the year.
So Russia's buildings, railways, save on construction costs is more direct going straight across Manchuria, contain Japan, stake out its claim to Manchuria.
The Japanese get it, right?
Well, that was earlier in this lecture.
They see this coming and they don't like it.
And then...
In addition, what's going on, the Chinese don't particularly like all the imperialists messing with their country.
And so the Boxers is another rebellion.
And these folks want all Westerners out of China and they want to kill any stragglers.
And they go into, they're all over China.
They go into Manchuria and the Russians send 100,000 troops, far more than any of the European powers or even Japan sends a lot.
to the rest of China to defeat the Boxers, which they do.
And then the other Westerners in Japan remove their troops.
Russia doesn't.
And this is the thing that gets Japan's attention because Russia's got 100,000 troops in Manchuria that won't leave.
And that's when Japan is sick of Russia procrastinating.
And we're going to wind up
getting into the Russo-Japanese War.
So guess what?
We're back to my original explanation, right?
The Japanese finessed all of this, and they wind up on top, and it's by being very thoughtful in their grand strategy that they reverse the balance of power.
So I'm going to end this thing with General Nogi.
General Nogi is the
one who oversaw the four assaults on Port Arthur.
He lost both of his sons in this war, one in the Battle of Nanshan, which is down the Latom Peninsula, and then his other, his favorite, under his command in Port Arthur.
When the war was over, he asked the Meiji Emperor if he could commit ritual suicide, and the emperor said no.
So when the Meiji emperor died, he and his wife did.
And this poem helps explain why.
Imperial troops, a million strong, conquered an arrogant enemy.
But siege and field warfare left a mountain of corpses.
Ashamed, what face can I show to old parents?
How many men have returned this day of triumphal song?
Wars bring much sorrow.
And so I'll leave you with that.
And thank you very much for your attention.
Well, one is the railway is a bottleneck.
Japan's starting the war deliberately while that bottleneck is bottled.
So that's one factor.
Russia has massive troops.
Also, the Russians are arrogant, right?
They think Japanese.
Initially, the Russians think they're going to do regime change in Tokyo.
That's their plan.
How they plan to get to Tokyo is a mystery, but never mind.
And so they don't realize what they need.
It's a fairly common problem in wars is gross underestimation of the other side, right?
That's what's going on in Ukraine right now.
Putin missed that one.
He's not the only one, right?
Hitler underestimated the Russians in World War II.
And then you go, well, why is everybody, what's going on with Japan now?
And it had a really, those Meiji reforms, they have an educated population.
Russian soldiers are a bunch of illiterates.
And the Russian soldiers are going, what?
Why are we fighting in Manchuria?
Tell me precisely why I'm here getting killed.
The Russian soldiers had no buy-in.
And you can ask, what exactly did the Russians want there?
Apparently, there were some royal...
uh favorites who thought that they were going to get some lucrative timber concessions on the korean border okay let's go into logistics i've never heard there was a shortage of wood in european russia ever and then they're going to ship it all the way back
This is a non-performing economic model.
In addition, Nicholas II is an incompetent czar.
And he's hiring—the guy who's running the Navy is also incompetent.
Their Navy gets no training whatsoever.
So great, you have expensive ships, but no one's trained in how to use them, whereas the Japanese have.
And the Japanese, it's the value of the object, one of these concepts.
How valuable is it to win for Japan versus Russia?
Well, for Russia, it's already the biggest country in the planet, and there's nothing really that exciting out in Asia from their point of view.
Maybe for Nicholas, because he wants to be a great czar and add to the empire.
That would be a nice thing.
But when the Germans come after him in World War II, World War I, I think he's going to care about the other things more.
So that's one for the Japanese, rightly or wrongly, their government and educated people consider it existential.
And they're looking at China going, that's our future if we don't fix things.
And they're thinking the solution for Japan is empire because in those days, that seemed to be the way powerful countries ran things.
So it's a combination of,
So legitimate logistical bottlenecks.
Japan, since they're going to be starting this thing, massive preparations.
The Russians aren't planning to fight this thing.
They're thinking that I determine whether wars begin or end.
Excuse me, they don't.
Tsar Nicholas might, but his population is fighting it.
This is the power of institutions.
Japan clearly can mobilize.
Boy, is it doing well with the loans and all sorts of things?
Right.
It's using these institutions.
Whereas Russia, remember, it doesn't have a legislature.
The czar doesn't have a cabinet in the sense he has ministers, but they don't ever show up at his house at the same time to sit around a table.
He's just doing them one at a time.
And then the Romanov family have lots of first cousins, right?
Everybody's having lots of kids, and so you've got a million first cousins.
And they are all deployed throughout the ministries, basically being the spy system for the Romanov family of what's going on.
Are any of these nice, rich boys particularly competent?
No.
Look at a map, and you'll see the railway grid is much more extensive in European Russia.
And this is where Count Sergei Vita, their finest minister of the late Tsarist period, he's the one who's trying to do his version of a Meiji Restoration in his purview, which is the finance ministry, financing all these railways.
So there are many more railways.
And this is where Russia's population is.
This is where their historical security threats come from.
And Russians can get on board with protecting European borders.
It's the part through Manchuria.
It's not the one that goes on their side of the boundary.
I don't know the answer, but I know Japanese, I mean, talk about a culture that's about detail, about hard work, about service to the emperor, right?
right?
I've done in your earlier podcast series, a whole series about Bushido, that they're imbued with service to the emperor and that if you go in wars, you win them.
And so that's part of their culture.
Now, Russians also don't like being messed with when people invade them, but this time they're invading other people in an irrelevant part of the empire.
And
And it's at a time when Russia is trying to industrialize itself, but they haven't put enough money into their education system.
So they have a bunch of illiterate troops running around.
And let's face it, how can you read any of the manuals or do anything?
Oh, yeah, and some of their generals.
One of them didn't know what a howitzer was, one of the guys who's planning stuff.
And he can't read maps.
The level of incompetence of having royal favorites in your officer corps, well, they make these decisions.
Also, there's split command in the Russo-Japanese War.
So there's General Kurapatkin, who is the professional, who's actually...
had fought in the Ottomans, but those are colonial wars, and he'd won some of those.
He's a professional.
But then Admiral Alexeyev, who's the illegitimate son of, I can't remember which czar, and a favorite uncle, I believe, of Nicholas II, he's out there, and no one knows who's actually in command except the royal favorite is probably the better bet.
And so Kurapotkin...
wants to not engage the Japanese until they're way inland because he wants to extend their lines and then clobber them.
And all these aristocrats don't know what they're talking about.
So, no, no, no, no, no, we're not going to let these racial inferiors do whatever.
We're going to take them on immediately.
Well, okay.
Try that.
Kirk Potkin's strategy probably would have worked.
Just bring them on inland and let them enjoy it.
Like Napoleon Bonaparte.
You want to get to Moscow?
Have at it.
Then try winter in Moscow.
Well, I'm going to give you a tangential answer.
Then you tell me what I'm missing.
The sorrow of Russia is here they have this incredible land, natural resources and the works.
And they're really hung up on empire, on having lots of territory.
And they live in a difficult neighborhood.
Vita is telling Nicholas, forget about the Asian adventures.
We need to build more railways in European Russia now.
And he was right, because if they could have mobilized better in World War I, you might get some different outcomes.
Also, you might have avoided the food riots in St.
Petersburg, which is what topples the Rolatov dynasty.
If you'd actually provided enough food to St.
Petersburg, maybe you don't have those riots because you have the railways running and things.
And so Russia is a story of misinvestment.
Look at it today.
If Putin had taken all of his oil money and invested it in the transportation grid, because believe it or not, Russia still just does things by train.
Its road systems are appallingly bad.
And if Russia actually cleaned up its legal system, which under the Tsars it hadn't done either, everything is always royal monopolies.
If they had cleaned up these things to allow individuals to make their own investments and make money, it'd be a completely different story.
But Tsars couldn't stand merchants.
Communists hated them even more.
And cultural differences.
And then the Russians aren't known for being meticulous and hardworking the way Japanese are.
Russians are known to be hard drinkers, right?
And they're also known for being brutal, right?
Unclear whether it's going to collapse.
That's a good argument.
He might be right.
This is why I think we'll never get definitive answers because you don't have to be in Nicholas II's brain, right?
It's an autocracy.
What he decides matters.
I dare say if he had been Peter the Great, the guy who tortured his only son to death...
and suffered numerous setbacks, I doubt that he would have had any problems dealing with rioting Russians.
He would have figured out who are loyal units and then just blow away whatever's getting in his way.
And he would have done his initial, his next battle.
And then when he won that battle, the Russian revolution would have gone away because they would have gone, see, we did it.
We got these people.
So, but it's, Kotkin's argument is a very good one.
But it's, to me, it's Nicholas Sassen's incompetent leadership is the bigger thing.
And then you're arguing about how important is the rebellion and how deep rooted it is.
And you'll never know, right, what this...
Kotkin could be absolutely right.
And I think this is a reason, one of the reasons I gave the counter-argument is to get used to understanding ambiguity and appreciating that other people could be right and you may not know.
So...
One of them is, in both cases, Japan's seeing a window of opportunity that I got to operate in this window and get it over with.
And it works out.
If you're doing that, that's a high-risk strategy to get away with it.
And so this is back to that they were just lucky argument.
Another thing is you can look at why certain wars turn out.
And another concept is a cooperative adversary.
What's a cooperative adversary?
It's not one that wants to cooperate with you, but it's one that doesn't play its cards remotely well.
And if you can think about
literally playing cards.
If you're playing a game with a little child, they're trying to win, right?
But they're a cooperative adversary because they just don't know how to play whatever the game is.
And you could argue that Nicholas II is a cooperative adversary, and that's required, and the United States is not remotely a cooperative adversary, and it goes really badly for Japan.
And then it's also, there's another piece, which is...
When you run one successful war, quite often you think it was easier than it actually was and less risky than it actually was.
Like this country does Gulf I, where the allies pay for the whole thing.
No Americans die, hardly at all.
Loads of Iraqis die.
They're out of Kuwait within days.
I mean, wow.
And then people are complaining we should have marched on to Baghdad.
Well, okay, we did that.
That didn't work out so well.
But then after you do one of these things and you think you're good to go, and in Japan's case, between the two, Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, it shifted the balance of civil and military power in Japan.
And people thought that it's the military officers that did the right thing and that the diplomats lost the peace.
In the Russo-Japanese War, they're saying we didn't get a big indemnity, like as we did in the last war.
Well,
You're getting the whole Russian railway system.
That's an indemnity in kind, but that's not what they're seeing.
So it shifts the balance of power.
And then in addition, this Meiji generation, the prime civil leader, Ito Hirabumi, is assassinated by a Korean revolutionary leader.
because the Koreans don't much like Japanese and their empire.
So he dies, oh gosh, it's a decade plus before Yamagata does.
And so that gives Yamagata and military friends another decade to insinuate the roots of military institutions and civil institutions are not being built.
And then you can go, well,
Look at the Japanese.
They're incompetent because their institution building was inadequate.
Well, in one generation, you can't do it all, right?
Institutions take generations to really sink roots.
So they did as much as they could in a generation.
But their leadership was bereft compared to them.
This is why the Meiji generation is truly a brilliant set of leaders.
And what comes after their children and grandchildren are not.
Yeah, individuals, trends, the whole thing matters.
And there's no saying, I mean, maybe if he'd stuck around it, everything would have been the same.
Since you can't rerun the experiment, this is where, again, counterarguments are useful on so many human endeavors.
You just don't have complete data.
And when you're doing things in the here and now, maybe the data will come in a little later or it just doesn't exist.
And yet you've got to make decisions.
And so if you're not willing to change your mind, you're just going to double down on bad decisions.
And it's incredible the number of people who don't want to change their minds.
And that's why I made a big to-do about giving the argument-counterargument-rebuttal framework because I think it helps get you out of the rut so that you can change your mind.
Like, you're going to tell me that Kotkin's got this thing and I'm wrong.
I'm gay.
Maybe he's right.
I don't care who's right.
I care what's right.
You're missing the whole war.
Their war is with China.
instead of isolating the adversary, they bring in a whole new slew of adversaries, right?
They're having trouble with China.
That's the second sign of Japanese war.
We get all excited when we're involved, but it starts in 1931, and their objective soon becomes an unlimited objective.
They eventually want to do regime change in China.
Whereas in the first Sino-Japanese War, Yamagata's thinking about doing regime change and the government pulls him out because it's, buddy, don't do that.
We're going to have all kinds of foreign powers intervening if you try.
And then in the Russo-Japanese War, they're not trying to do regime change in Russia.
But in the second Sino-Japanese War, they absolutely are trying to do regime change.
They get more and more frustrated.
Then their solution to that one is to attack all the colonial interest in Asia.
That's when Pearl Harbor happens.
And then they're bringing us, the British, and that brings the British Commonwealth.
So it's Australia and New Zealand that do significant fighting.
And then the Netherlands.
So it's a different event.
Russia has just a phenomenal illiteracy rate.
It's an empire, which I think gets in the way.
If you look at how many non-Russian people they're trying to dominate, it's like they're perennially overextended, right?
Because they're perennially occupying places that don't actually make them much money.
In fact, they probably cost them more money to hang on to.
And so they're perennially doing that.
I believe the Japanese are known to be incredibly hardworking.
I believe the Chinese are known to be very hardworking.
I have never heard anyone say the Russians are known to be hardworking.
Maybe I missed something.
I've heard they're like artists and they have the Russian, their soul.
Okay, great.
I mean, that's like a big excuse to say, well, you know, we may fail at everything, but our soul is superior.
So I think there are these other things that are at work.
And in Germany, it's the center of Europe.
It's a highly developed place.
It already has high levels of literacy.
There's a lot more to work with in Germany.
And it already has a better infrastructure for Russia.
It's huge when you're trying to build railway systems.
Just enormous.
And think about Trans-Siberian.
If you just took all that track, just lengthened, put it all over European Russia, you really have something there.
All right, well, first of all, he's the founding father of modern China.
It's one of the few things that the Taiwanese and the PRC agree on, that he's the founding father of modern China, and it's positive what they think about him.
Remember when I told you on the Russo-Japanese War how they're paying for everything in Manchuria?
that the Chinese actually thought that that one, that it would be a good thing.
Also understand when the Manchus lose, it's in Chinese, the war is called the Qing Japanese War, Manchu Japanese War.
So the Japanese are defeating the Manchus, who you may not particularly like if you're a Han nationalist.
So you can relate to that.
And the Japanese were not...
Well, they got in and out of that thing.
And so I think that's the key.
And the really, really, really ugly, brutal stuff is going to happen in the Second Sino-Japanese War, where the Japanese do things that are unforgivable.
The problem for...
The first Sino-Japanese War, it's detonating Confucianism.
And so what's it going to replace that with?
Sun Yat-sen is going to do nationalism and work it that way.
But I think that's the big answer.
But you're quite right that as things went on, as it sinks in, that Japan is the dominant player in Asia, because first you have a war and that's happened, but you're
focusing on all your civil wars and other stuff, and it hasn't sunk in that this is not an exception, it's going to go on for a century, I suspect that it's gradual for the Chinese to get really upset about Japanese in particular.
And it's what they do in the Second Sino-Japanese War.
It's unbelievable.
Because when they start losing, they get brutal.
Yeah.
Martial resources.
It is, but there's another piece.
China's not really a unified state in this period.
If you think about what people's loyalties are, it's to province and place.
It's not to the whole China.
I mean, they're all part of it, but it's to place.
I'll give you an example.
So China has...
three fleets.
And the ones that I've been talking about and use is the Northern Fleet.
And in the Sino-French War, the Southern Fujian Fleet or whatever it is, the Southern one that's fighting in, well, it's into China in those days.
It wants the Northern Fleet to come down and help them.
And the Northern Fleet says, hell no.
So in the Sino-Japanese War, when the Northern Fleet wants the Southern Fleet to come help it, the answer is hell no.
And it also has to do with how are these forces being financed?
Provincial governors are financing it.
And so they want to use these forces for province.
They don't want to send it out of province.
And in the traditional world, where China is just worrying about some barbarians on horses way often, wherever, that works well enough.
Because if they come riding in, you can probably eventually deal with it in province one.
And it'll eventually work.
But all of a sudden, these Western powers come.
And then the Chinese very foolishly fight in the treaty ports.
And what they should have done is said, hey, come on in 25 miles and see how you like it.
All right, let's try 50.
And the British would have had real trouble with that.
And it's a real failure of strategy that they can just own.
So they love to complain about the foreign Chinese today, about foreign imperialists, and they don't look at their own gross incompetence.
What is it?
This country, we're dealing with Britain.
Britain's a lot closer to us than it was to China.
Their population was larger than the American colonists.
And George Washington and friends gave them a run for their money.
right?
The Chinese, what's their problem?
They should have been able to deal with it.
But it's a case of lacking leadership, lacking institutions, that these things matter.
You even have all the resources in the world.
So this country needs to watch it.
We may have all the resources in the world, but if we don't organize ourselves appropriately, or if we do a whole bunch of own goals with our own leadership, it will cause problems.
constant warfare.
Under the Qing, local areas had to finance all of the government.
The central government didn't finance hardly anything, and that was always a problem.
And it led to massive corruption because if you don't have a budget, then you have to do some way of getting graft or something from people to pay for things.
So this is enduring.
And it's a different institutional setup of how you're going to run things.
Institutions matter.
They channel decision-making.
They channel how money can or can't be made.
It's consequential.
Because it's a gross underestimation of the enemy.
They're thinking, these people are a bunch of nobodies.
And then Nicholas II had an unfortunate incident in Japan.
Who knows whether this influenced him or not.
So he does the royal tour, right, while his dad's still alive.
And he goes all the way around, winds up in Japan, and a samurai there or somebody tries to assassinate him with a sword.
So Nicholas always has a scar up here.
And so I imagine that didn't leave happy memories of Tsarevich.
Yes, whatever.
Anyway, that's what happened to him.
But I think it's the feeling that there's no need, right?
And it goes back to grossly underestimating other people and the problem with racism.
You know, you think you're so special and other people are so unspecial.
Wrong.
And then the Japanese are amazing.
Think about it.
They're on the group of seven, right?
of major economies, right?
It's major economies and major democracies.
They're the only non-Western power there.
And they don't get there out of charity.
It's out of their own achievements.
So it's an enormous achievement.
And what's tragic about World War II
is if they hadn't done that, people will be looking at the Meiji reforms in order to model what they're going to do to get over the hump and develop.
And in fact, a lot of the things that Deng Xiaoping does in terms of investments and things rhymes with Meiji reforms.
And if you look at the, what is it, the four little tigers that originally Singapore, Hong Kong, and
was it Korea and Taiwan, whatever I'm missing, a lot of their development, it parallels in a lot of ways of what the Meiji reformers did.
Well, these are Japanese ideas, but they're not getting credit for them because of the brutality of World War II, where you're thinking of that and thinking, well, if I say nice things about Japan, it's I'm endorsing this other stuff.
No, they're two separate topics, different generations.
Yeah, you have to learn how to use it, right?
And you have to maintain it.
The Russians had this fancy fleet that their aristocrats wanted to buy, so they're good at cutting checks.
But they aren't doing any training on it.
If you do numbers of days, like days at sea for the Russians, it's laughable.
And also it's cold, so all winter no one's going anywhere, whereas the Japanese are constantly deploying their forces and they're doing all kinds of practice and things.
So you can imagine if you don't do any practice, it's not going to go very well for you.
But the counterargument to this technology is –
If the value of the object is high, and if you're like an intervening power messing in somebody else's country, it may not matter on the technology, or it matters, but that these people will never give up.
So in the American Revolution, the British had us on technology.
I mean, it's incredible.
They actually could supply, in an age of sale and horses, they could supply things by sailboats and keep it going.
But we were just totally obnoxious and we would never give up, right?
And this is the problem with the United States in Afghanistan.
Talk about a backwards place.
It does get more backwards.
Or Iraq is the locals just never gave up.
They may not have the technology, but it's like, it's our house.
We want you out of here.
We're never quitting.
And this would be Russia's problem in Ukraine.
It's going to go on.
So technology is important, but also the value of the object.
What is the relative value of whatever you think when is?
And if you look at...
If you're an Iraqi, it's a lot higher for you than it is for some American intervening there.
Or if you're looking for Japan and empire, it's a lot higher for Japanese who are looking at China and thinking that's going to be their fate.
And maybe they're misidentifying the cure.
That's a whole different matter.
But that's what they look at it.
Then for Russia, which is who even cares?
There's nothing this part of the world actually offers Russia other than bigger, more lines on a map that looks bigger.
At least one president gets one.
Different types of wars.
One's a war for unlimited objectives, which is what World War I eventually becomes.
We're trying to do regime change all over the place, which is... Whereas you're doing a limited war for Japan.
Japan, you also... You have to have a feasible objective.
If...
Japan had demanded more at those peace talks, Nicholas II would have gone back to war and he would have slaughtered them because he had all these crack troops that are just sitting there in theater and the Japanese literally don't have the men.
So that Russia, it's got three times the army now.
It's there and they can bring them in at 100,000 a month.
And we just saw the Mukden where the Russians had 125,000 more men than the Japanese.
Well, if they can ship in 100,000 a month, wait a few months, and then it's going to get really ugly.
So it wasn't feasible.
And there's another piece.
So you're going to go fight a war.
And then you lose a lot of people.
And that's why the Japanese are feeling they should have gotten more because you've got General Nogi who's committing suicide over this.
And the poem at the very beginning I showed you, the Meiji Emperor also has this feeling of sorrow, is that war, as you start losing, this is Putin's problem.
He's lost so many people.
He didn't feel sorrow, but he needs to get revenge that's equivalent
to make up for that.
So the longer these wars go on, the harder it is to stop them.
And so on Versailles, it's a different story because there is an unwillingness to enforce the peace, and there is also a feeling of, particularly in France and also Britain, to get really even with the Germans.
And then the United States is an irresponsible power in those days, where one of the reasons you get World War II has to do with the Great Depression, which is not strictly related to the Versailles peace term, term, terminating the war, that if you hadn't had the Great Depression, maybe the Versailles settlement would have been good enough.
We'll never know.
And one of the reasons the Great Depression gets so bad is because this country is
doesn't want to act as the lender of last resort, which is what Britain had done in the past, but it couldn't after World War I. It had been bankrupted, and our country's irresponsible.
These problems are on the other side of the sea, and we think, okay, America first and whatever.
And we're going to raise tariffs and things.
And all we do is tank the global system.
Whereas if you're the lender of last resort, you're going to put money into the system as it's collapsing to prevent it from collapsing so that it can rebound.
And that's why it's important to do that.
And yeah, it's expensive.
But boy, Great Depression is a lot more expensive.
So there are different problems.
Isn't that the problem?
Well, that's what the IMF and things are about.
But it used to be that this country was willing to take on these burdens of last resort in the area of nuclear weapons, nuclear shield, right?
And we're trying to shed these things right now.
And we shall see.
Well, at bare minimum, it'll make us the sort of the irrelevant power instead of the essential power because Europe is going to
reorganize itself.
And they have the institutions to do it.
And the United States used to be the leader of the West.
Well, it's going back home to Europe.
Europe's going to lead the West.
They invented it.
And they have an extensive set of institutions to do this.
And they're already starting to marginalize us by putting out feelers to set up trade agreements with Asian countries, with South American countries.
It'll take them a while to do this.
Once they do it, we will be on the outside of it if we don't change our minds.
and they're going to get stronger institutionally and um uh what is it churchill said something about allies the only thing worse than working with allies is working trying to survive without them that uh you that um you're better off with lots of friends going after bullies in the world than you are by yourselves and we'll find ourselves by ourselves and um
Other countries have tried to tangle with China all by themselves.
Japan did it when China was an undeveloped country.
It did not work well.
You want to have friends when you do this.
But we're making pivotal errors and we will pay for them.
That's fine.
I could be wrong.
Well, let me ask you a question.
Why isn't it that Argentina, which is a really big country, tremendous resources, why isn't it a great power?
Yeah, but why does its economy suck?
Excuse me.
Not my choice of words.
But that is...
Oh, okay.
Okay, but aren't we talking Peron is a populist leader.
Populists, by definition, aren't people who are institutionalists.
They're like me, I'm so special kind of person.
And so aren't you actually telling me that Argentina has inadequate domestic institutions and they failed?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like if you look at Russia, I mean, lousy institutions, that place should be rich.
I suspect that this crisis now, because it's existential with Putin, that it will force them to clean up these institutions.
It will take them time.
Maybe I'll be dead wrong.
Or maybe I'll be wrong, dead, who knows how that all works.
But I suspect, because usually an existential threat is clarifying.
And you can see Ukraine trying desperately to clean up its institutions.
That's a lot further to go than Europe does.
I suspect that Europeans are going to clean up some of this.
It'll take them time.
It'll take them time.
But they have to because the piggy bank here is no longer willing to fund their defense.
And so there's merit in the Europeans need to pick up the tab on their defense.
And they should have done it earlier.
Without a doubt, there's merit to that.
But the way we're doing it,
Where we're going to cut ourselves out of the action.
You want to put the screws on, but you want to also keep yourself part of it.
We're overdoing it in some fronts.
And also, you're doing it in such an insulting way.
I'll give you some Machiavelli on this one.
So he's the founding father of political science.
And he talked about motivating people with fear, love, and hate.
And he's talking about in The Prince, he's princes.
And he says...
He just says, forget about love because you can't make people like you, right?
You can do everything.
People still don't like you.
And he's a big man in saying, make them fear you because you can really motivate people.
But he says, don't make them hate you.
If they hate you, they will fight you.
Well, if you're running around serially spitting your allies in the face, they are going to hate you.
And it won't work out well.
It's just a bad strategy.
Don't do it.
The clickbait of insulting someone who comes to your house, that's very temporary.
But the hatred of it, and also other people viewing it and going, this is what qualifies as American diplomacy, those memories are long-term.
It's unwise.
Sure.
Anonymous.
Brave person.
It's allies and alliance systems.
And smaller powers have been tremendously influential in the rules-based order on how it's developed.
In fact, they've provided some of the really good ideas over the years.
So it's cooperate because if you have allies, this is what the United States doesn't get.
Yeah, we're big.
But if we're going after everybody else, they're bigger.
So if you're small, and this is how Europe is important, there are a lot of small countries or medium countries, but when they get together, they get powerful.
When they add in Japan, they got an equivalent GNP of us.
And then you start adding other people in and they're bigger.
And yes, it takes a long time to negotiate whatever the agreement is going to be, but once you agree, it's powerful.
And so that's the answer.
This is how we have as much of a rules-based order as we do, which allows everyone in the audience to take a little piece of plastic called a credit card, go to any country in the world, pretty much.
I wouldn't go to North Korea, but most countries.
And you use that credit card.
And if it says you have enough money to buy a Mercedes and there's a Mercedes in the shop, the chances are the credit card will go through and you can buy your Mercedes.
And it's just a piece of plastic, but this is the rules-based order that most of us are into.
And it's because we agree with each other on these things.
This is my guess, because who knows?
But I think China is suffering from the incredible success of its civilization.
It had been the dominant civilization of Asia forever and ever for excellent reasons.
I mean, if you look at
the achievements of China, they're amazing.
And for Japan, it had always been in China's shadow.
And the Japanese had always tried to learn from others.
The Chinese also learned from others.
A lot of their institutions come from the Manchus, right?
But they pretend that we sinify these people.
And so they're actually Han Chinese achievements.
Well, not so much, actually.
But the myth lives on that anything that's worth knowing emanates from China.
Well, hubris.
right?
This is a human condition.
And the Chinese get a fatal case.
And what I'm wondering about is whether this country has got a fatal case right now of, you know, we know everything, we can do everything.
We don't work out so well.
Daleks today are allies.
And start by apologizing to them.
That would be step one.
I can't see that ever happening.
But yeah, we have all these international organizations use them to
We're in the process of firing the State Department.
I believe when WikiLeaks leaked a lot of their memos and things and the New York Times was reporting on it, I believe what it revealed is incredibly accurate reporting of whatever place they were reporting.
assigned to and describing things in really accurate detail that would enable U.S.
policymakers then to make an accurate assessment and determine to do what's next.
But that's not what we're doing.
Well, I'm technically wasn't allowed to read them because they were classified and I was working for the Navy.
So I didn't go out of my way to read them, but I'm reading the New York Times and other things that's reporting on them.
And from what's there, you just see it's accurate.
And it's in-depth reporting.
And of course, we're angry that they're all out there because it's revealing who's talking to whom and whatever.
But what it showed is a very professional staff.
And I don't know why we got some ax to grind with the State Department.
It's also really tiny.
Working at the War College on student solutions to the world crisis.
world's problems they would always say quadruple the state department's budget because it's really tiny compared to the military budget because there's an understanding that um what much of the u.s government does if it's doing what it's supposed to is it's preventing catastrophes so if you're sending your state department out there you're trying to prevent oh like uh an indo-pakistani nuclear war and we've sent diplomats at different times to prevent that from happening
And who knows why it didn't happen?
Maybe it wasn't the State Department, but all over the world trying to prevent these things.
Or if you think about the government, it's about setting all these standards to prevent disasters.
Like I've talked to you offline, so this will be repetitive for you.
But like you immunize people to prevent disease.
Can I prove who didn't get what?
No, I can't.
I can talk about people who got bad reactions to it.
But then there's a failure to understand, yeah, there are some bad reactions, but let's look at the much greater number of people who are alive in our own day.
And earlier when President Roosevelt had polio and people were scared to death of getting polio, they understood about the importance of these things and everyone was lining up to get the polio vaccine when Dr. Salk invented it.
And there are other things like having enough meteorologists to predict storms and so you can get people out of summer camps when you need to get the people out of summer camps.
And having appropriate – spending the government funds to have the appropriate sirens and things.
And what people aren't looking – they're looking at the expense of doing these things and saying –
They're preventing disasters.
And people, it's the negative objectives.
So you can't measure the things that fail to happen.
But I assure you, averting a catastrophe, you're saving a lot, probably a lot more than whatever you're spending on the budget.
And I get it.
The U.S.
government needs to be much more efficient.
I get it.
But tearing the whole place down is going to be a mistake and we will get more catastrophes.
Oh, Elon?
Oh, lucky me.
Oh, well, that's a whole other thing.
Oh, okay.
Oh, yes.
Yes, the different varieties of American hubris.
Yes.
Well, one variant of hubris A is I'm an American, I don't need to consult any other country, and it's just whatever Washington does or doesn't do.
That determines how the world works.
It's half-court tennis, it ignores what the other team is doing, and it doesn't work out well.
And then there's the Silicon Valley or whatever it is.
It's a different variant.
It's what I call type two hubris.
I'm incredibly talented in one area, which he is,
incredibly talented or whatever.
He's made himself a household word.
Not everyone can do that.
But you're thinking, because I'm good at one thing, this is transferable to everything else.
Well, okay, I got news.
There's all kinds of expertise and it's important.
But if I take a really good hairdresser and make them an auto mechanic or the auto mechanic a hairdresser, it is not going to work out well.
So you have to line these things up correctly.
And this type two hubris is thinking, oh, I'm smart at one thing and therefore I can do everything.
And these people are making decisions in areas where they have no expertise and it will not work out well.
Yes.