In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Britain used sea control, peripheral campaigns, and alliances to defeat Nazi Germany during WWII. She then applies this framework to today, arguing that Russia and China are similarly constrained by their geography, making them vulnerable in any conflict with maritime powers (like the U.S. and its allies).Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Sponsors* Labelbox partners with researchers to scope, generate, and deliver the exact data frontier models need, no matter the domain. Whether that’s multi-turn audio, SOTA robotics data, advanced STEM problem sets, or even novel RL environments, Labelbox delivers high-quality data, fast. Learn more at labelbox.com/dwarkesh* Warp is the best interface I’ve found for coding with agents. It makes building custom tools easy: Warp’s UI helps you understand agent behavior and its in-line text editor is great for making tweaks. You can try Warp for free, or, for a limited time, use code DWARKESH to get Warp’s Pro Plan for only $5. Go to warp.dev/dwarkeshTo sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.Timestamps00:00:00 – How WW1 shaped WW200:15:10 – Hitler and Churchill’s battle to command the Atlantic00:30:10 – Peripheral theaters leading up to Normandy00:37:13 – The Eastern front00:48:04 – Russia’s & China’s geographic prisons01:00:28 – Hitler’s blunders & America’s industrial might01:15:03 – Bismarck’s limited wars vs Hitler’s total war Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
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.
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