YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Paine

lines on the record: 145
first: 2025-01-16
most recent: 2025-01-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because the South Vietnamese would have voted for as well, we've just been fighting a massive war with Japan and Germany. There's no way we're going to let the Germans and Japanese decide anything initially. But what we did do for both Germany, West Germany and Japan, is we did our best to set up democratic institutions that within a cycle or two they're making their decisions whom they're electing. We are not choosing their leaders. And it was a very generous piece. It was realizing in World War I, ostracizing Germans, ostracizing Russians, it probably doesn't, you need to bring them back into the family of nations because they're on the planet. They're not leaving the planet. And the generous peace with Germany, look at them. They're the most wonderful allies, as are the Japanese. They're terrific.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, in Vietnam, we didn't want to push the South Vietnamese to hold elections because we knew Ho Chi Men would win. He was the only national figure in Vietnam. So the United States is all about free elections. The Vietnamese could have run a free election and Ho Chi Minh won won.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I need to think more about that because I think there are probably all sorts of things. And also, it's impossible to know the right thing to do. And then afterwards, when it pansy, you go, well, that was a mess. It's hard to know. But I think it was probably a terrible mistake when Eisenhower thought, here's the supreme command allied commander of World War II, who knows all about hot wars, doesn't want to do that, when the United States deposes Mozadec and Iran in 1954, I can see Eisenhower's view is, hey, we're just opposing one guy and we're going to avoid the Russians taking oil fields here, etc. And he thinks that's a better trade-off. Well, the Iranians have never forgotten that. They're furious to this day. Wouldn't you be if you're Iranian? Mosadek was democratically elected. Or another time...”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growth across the third world because there aren't these insurgencies just tearing up wealth. And then you could see recently, look at North Africa, it's a mess right now, right? It's both ISIS or whatever it is in there is doing its stuff. And then you have Wagner group or whatever they are in there. And then you have the Chinese further south and everybody's feeling everything. You got civil war all over the place. And then that means military age males want to get out. because people kill you, right? Or they'll either dragoon you into fighting where you don't want to fight or they'll just kill you outright. So they're all trying to get into boats to Europe, which is destabilizing. It's a mess. We're in the Second Cold War, and this is part of it.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't letting us stay. It was horrendous. I don't know the answer. In fact, my current project is a history of the Cold War, and I've read a lot of things, and I will compile a lot of tables on things like this, just putting the data together. It'll take a long time. But then when you get the table, it'll be a really quick skim. So if you've got a civil war turning somewhere in Latin America or somewhere in Africa, so no one's aiding it, fine. Then if you have Russia puts its finger on the scale, then of course we're going to put our finger on the scale. So that means the Russians are providing industrial age weapons. We're providing industrial age weapons. What happens? Casualties just go through the roof. And that's what went on through the Cold War. And then this magical inner Cold War period when all that stopped. And that's when you get this tremendous.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think you're going to talk about the Middle East, right? If it's going to be Middle East, it better be something like Arabic, Farsi, Turkic, Hebrew, and better yet if you're really going to be a serious Middle Eastern expert, try all four. I mean, that would be true expertise and where you could read books in the language and get what other people are thinking about things. So that would be my basic, is find people who aren't playing half court tennis all about Team America. Get to the other side of the net and try and figure out what other people are thinking. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them, but it means you are making the effort to see where they're coming from.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard. What I would say is give it a book the 30 second test. And what's that? If the book's about another part of the world flipped through the bibliography, which you can do on Amazon, and zinc through there for about 30 seconds and see, is there anything in the language of the country in question in the bibliography? Like how much? And if there is zip, I would toss it. How much? I'm curious, how many of you would be interested in reading a book that says it knows everything about the United States and there's not a single English source cited? I think you'd regard the book as garbage. And then Americans do this routinely, and it's a problem with political science degrees where it would be very easy to require anyone who's going to do a specialty in comparative politics, or IR, international relations, that, hey, you need to pass a language test and don't try Spanish.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm personally sick of writing about World War II. I've done enough of it. And so I'm personally not going in that direction. Yeah, it's endless. I think for a lot of the books of these narrative feel good histories, like I'll tell you about some regiment and all the heroic stuff they did. And it's nice, light airplane read, and a lot of people like that stuff. I personally like things where I learn things that are conceptual that I can then apply to other problems, which those books wouldn't help me, but that's just me.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Breaking off the alliance with India or like Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, India. I think at the time people felt we absolutely have to be able to cover everything. And I don't know the details of where they had their nuclear, this and that stored and things and all their testing areas. But I'm sure you needed to have the entire place covered. And so, yeah, it was very serious on these nuclear weapons. They can reach the United States. So we had better know what's going on.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You will get overextended if you intervene in everything under the planet. Also, there's a question of why the United States or anyone should be doing all of it. Shouldn't it be through the UN and other things? The really key thing was winning the Cold War. So Nixon absolutely did prioritize getting the mail through.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, the Cold War is a misnomer because the bloodshed in the third world was horrendous. And I will eventually compile the stats on this. Not that there are great stats, but it's obscene numbers. I think Congo had a civil war where literally over 10 million people died. And that's only just one of these things. So the United States cannot deal with all of these. And if you think about it, the time when the United States was really quite idealistic, the Iraq war goes in, think great democracy in this place. It's a massive civil war, and then we're blamed for it. So be careful about where you intervene because you may not be able to stop a thing and then you'll get blame for what's going on. So Bangladesh is horrible, but it is not our”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know win lose, but they have a much very low per capita standard of living. Do the math. You go, yeah, they've got a big economy because they're, I don't know, they're not a third of the world's population now, but it's huge and divide the 1.3 billion, whatever it is. You come up with a low number for per capita standard of living. And I think for human beings, that's the number that matters, right? What is your family income look like? They got a long way to go on that one.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, well, it's what Leningrad in those days. So people didn't realize. But yeah, we felt we were losing the Cold War. In fact, at the very end of the Cold War, because I was in the Bush archives. So Gorbachev's in and Bush Reagan and then Bush are thinking, well, he just looks like another one of these people. And we're not going to take the propaganda seriously. And then they sort of go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then it's in 88 where Bush is going, whoa, maybe it is going to end. And then the United States teams up with Helmut Kohl of Germany to do the fastest get the Russians out of Eastern Europe ever. But Gorbachev is the one who wants to cooperate with West. One thing you should know about warfare, you think the winners win it? No, actually, it's when the losers decide they've had enough. That's when a war ends. Otherwise, it doesn't end.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we always felt A, because the propaganda, right? Because they're all living beautifully. And then they're quite good. They're very good at propaganda. The United States had massive racial problems. Think about 1960s. Martin Luther King are pointing out hideous problems with this country. Civil rights demonstrations everywhere, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations everywhere. The women's movement, the environmental movement, there are loads of unhappy people pointing out all of these problems, which is a good thing because then the United States starts working on fixing some of these problems. Of course, they're not fixed, but there's improvement on them. Whereas in Russia, no one can travel, so you can't see how unbelievably poor they are. And so you go to Moscow and you think, well, this is a plausible city. Well, there is only one plausible city in the place, or maybe it's two, St. Petersburg.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the official alliance, I'm just defining I made up what an alliance is. So I would say it is the security pact that in Diragandhi signs in 1971.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the 1962 war made Nehru realize that non-alignment was a non-starter. And that's, for the reasons you're talking about, it's like, okay, we just got eaten alive by the Chinese. Okay, we need big friend and we probably need some big missiles eventually. And it's not immediately. The Indians don't come around that we absolutely need nuclear weapons until the Bangladesh war when China's become more of a threat.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next time you're New Delhi, go check out the museum. But when I was there, it was like 20 years ago. But I remember being pressed and go wow, there's all, and then when Gandhi was assassinated, this is Mahatma, not the Indira who's also assassinated, no relations, that the Chinese, the nationalists sense all sorts of condolences and different things. So, yeah, there could have been different outcome”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent the grand total of a week in India was a trip on the way back from Australia, and that was the amount of time we had. But we went into the Mahatma Gandhi Museum in New Delhi. And there's a whole piece of it where Shankai Sheikh is giving him things. And it became really clear that Shankai Sheikh had a really good relationship with India, deep respect for India. This shared desire of we want to be independent. We don't want Japanese running around our country. We don't want to Westerners running around. We share this with India. And so I think if you get Sheikh Ik winning the Chinese Civil War and things, you might have had them team up and had a much more productive relationship.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have like the Department of Agriculture culture has very fine analysts about agriculture the whole world so we have a tremendous amount of expertise The other thing that presidents get and also high level bureaucrats get are these daily reports, and they're very short because they have to be about what's going on everywhere in the world that people think is important for them to know. So there are tremendous number of smart, well-educated people trying to get information to presidents, secretaries of states and things. And then you have all these regional desks where there's, I don't know, I can't remember exactly. I don't know the organization chart of the State Department, but you can look at it by region of the world and people work there and provide this. So there are one.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do they have these matrices that you got up there? We have so many wonderful people working in the state department. I've met a number of them because they come students at the War College. You should be proud of all the people who work for the Department of State. They're all of these different experts, different parts of the world that get sent around hither and yon. Very thoughtful people. Also, I've read in the archives many CIA reports because I've gone to these presidential archives starting with the Truman administration all the way up to Bush Sr. As you get to the more recent stuff, less of it's been declassified. So I've written most of the CIA reports. I've read her for earlier periods where they've been declassified. It's impressive, the level of analysis. The analytical part of it, and then there's the Send People Out to Do we aren't even going to talk about, which is completely different, but they're very fine analysts.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You think they'd be grateful for that? No, no, he wanted to divide China. He's telling me, oh, stop at the Yangza, stop at the Yang. You need a breathing space there. And Ma And keeps on going”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it setting up the Second United Front and then the Japanese go ballistic? And that's when they invade all the down the coast and up the Yangza River. And that means the Chinese are fighting Japanese for you. The Japanese are not going to launch into Siberia. So that works for Stalin, but the Chinese realize this, and it's not appreciated.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, you can, but Russia and China have these territorial differences. And the issues I listed there of fighting to the last Chinese in the Korean War, Mao didn't really like that. There are a lot of Chinese who die in the Korean War, where the Russians sort of get them in there and then you're stuck. You have to, for prestige reasons, stay there. And the really big one I didn't discuss in any detail. So Stalin's really worried about a two-front war, Nazis in the West and Japanese in the East. And so he brokered the Second United Front between the Chinese National Center, Shanghai-shek and the Chinese communists under Mao at a place called Xi'an in late 1936. And so it's called the Xi'an Incident where Shankai-Sheikh was reputedly kidnapped and up there. But really what's going on.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is pay attention to what dictators say because they've got to communicate at some level to their own populations. They quite often tell you exactly what they want to do and you think that's insane. Who would do that? Well, hello, hello, right? So read what they have to say and read what others have to say. Then you need to read things in the Russian language. So I just, I read a lot of things. Just read broadly, read more broadly than whatever your topic is because it's the unknown unknowns is what you're after. What are the things that are truly important? I have no idea about. And the only way you get to those is archives or reading broadly where you bump into things and that turns out to be important.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what I did for my doctoral dissertation, so I wrote a history of the Sino, well, the Russo-Chinese border when it was figured out, which is between 1858 and 1924, this is when all this territory went. And what I did is, so most of this isn't Soviet, right? It's 17 to 24 is the Soviet part, but you go to archives in Russia, you see what they'll let you see. This is when you could go to those archives. They're closed now. And I went to Beijing, saw the archives you were allowed to see. And then in Nanjing, there were some other ones there. And then in Taiwan, the ones they would allow you to see, and then Japan, the ones they were allowed you to see. And they're all lying about different things or covering up different things. So it's a jigsaw puzzle. You sort of put it together that way. So that was how I did it. And also for the whole Kremlinology.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gorbachev was a true believer. He did not believe it was possible to take a U-turn on the road to communism so that when he was doing his reforms, it was to improve communism, make it better. So he absolutely believed in it.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's a really bad sign. And they had like what I would call a donut empire. Normally, when you think of an empire, Mother Central is the most developed part. And then there's the periphery where all the natural resources are taken away. It was an inverted empire. Russia was the donut. The rich places were places like Czechoslovakia and Poland had been much richer places. And so the Russians are like surfowners are sucking in all the wealth from these places. And I think that's another reason why the shattering of the Soviet Union when they lost all of their insurfed Eastern Europe, why it was such a mess for Russia, they did not realize, they still don't realize the degree to which they were living off the wealth produced in the European portions of Russia that since became independent.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Russia, well, there was tremendous rebuilding after World War II. There's another piece. It was so weird when we were in Russia in 88-89. Anything that was sold at the markets that came from somewhere else, they would market impurna, means imported. So the idea, and I remember thinking, this is really weird because normally you would say it's, I don't know, Hungarian, this and that or whatever. I thought, ooh, this means that anything from somewhere else is better than what we got.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think communists let you know those things, right? This is when for a lot of Russians, because we were, my husband and I were in the Soviet Union in the 1988-89 academic year, and that's early Gorbachev before everything totally falls apart and there's no food. So there wasn't much food, but there was some food. And it was just as the Russians were suddenly being able to read in a fairly free press about the things that had happened and they were appalled about what had gone on under Stalin and they just hadn't realized all of it.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you compare the seamy sides of some democracies that aren't doing that well and that to the public, the PR thing that the dictatorships are presenting. So you can picture Nero of his generation. He's sick of British, right? And so Fabian socialism, he's not for killing lots of people to impose socialism. He has a much lighter touch than Stalin.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And surely, this is the explanation. Now the technicalities of Marx's labor theory of value don't actually turn out to be accurate. It's not just labor that produces value. Like Silicon Valley, you understand what comes up here produces a tremendous amount of value. And Marxist theory doesn't recognize that. And so there are massive flaws in theory. And then when you put communism into practice, if you want to have equality, which is what they wanted, if you can have equality, you're not going to have any liberty, right? Because in order to make it equal, you just expropriate and then you divvy it out to everybody and there's no liberty in that, right? And another piece about democracies and even flawed ones, even if they have a semi-free press, a lot of the icky news bubbles up, but in dictatorships it doesn't.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like India? I think go back and put yourself as a generation of what your life experience was. If your life experience was World War I, the total butchery of it. So you're telling young men your age, go, ah, you're in a trench. I want you to go up and over the edge onto oncoming machine gun fire. We know what's going to happen when it happens, right? And they're literally in battles like the Somme. They're losing hundreds of thousands of people. I don't mean casualties. I mean, I mean dead dead. And so, and then you have the Great Depression afterwards. And then add to it, India's been colonized by a bunch of really opinionated white people, right? And transferring a lot of wealth out of India to England. And so you look at Marxism, and boy, it sounds plausible, right? It sounds like these evil capitalists, they're just wasting lives.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While we tried to choose India too, but yeah, we tried to do them simultaneously. But India's further south, right? And so for a long time before we got satellite imagery, you want to have listening posts and things up in Pakistan. So India just simply doesn't have the location for that. So that was the original reason for interest in Pakistan.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Else. And now for India's primary adversary is China, without a doubt, and the United States, I think, is looking that China poses the primary threat. And to the extent that both of them see it that way, that will make them align and Pakistan less so.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, our primary enemy was pretty much the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. I mean, China was a problem, but the Soviets were the big problem. And so Indian Pakistan never fit that bill. And so it had to do with whatever the problem of the day was. And Pakistan had a very critical location. And so we needed it for a whole bunch of things. You can see how that works. So while you need them, you pay a lot of money to them. And presumably the money's worth it for them, for the hassles of dealing with the difficult tenant. So that's how it worked. But nowadays, the relationship with India is changing. In fact, it has changed because their big buddy, Russia, is, well, after the end of the Cold War, instead of being the big friend, it was the big nuisance, not so much for India, but for”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if the smaller powers agree on what they're up to, then the big powers have to pay attention, and that's a positive thing.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you got your hunches on how you think this is, and then you should reassess early and often to see if your assumptions are correct. And don't worry about changing your mind. Reassessing is a sign of strength. It's like I got more information. I've changed my mind. Good thing. Don't double down on bad information. And then if you're looking into areas of the world that are ethnically diverse where people have been at odds for a long time, expect veto players and real difficulty in settling that matter out. And part of good strategy is recognizing some problems it's not feasible to solve. And then we all have scarce resources. do everything. Focus on those things where you think you can solve. But if the great powers align, things can happen. And the story is even better than that, sure, there are a few big powers, but the small and medium powers, if you add them all up, they are far the aggregate, their aggregate wealth exceeds any one great power.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of China, and in those days that benefited Russia, but these things can change over time as to who the beneficiary is. And then you can play this game and think about how it works in Palestine. And I'm no expert on that part of the world, but I think this frozen conflict veto player works, that there are these veto players who are vetoing peace very easily. All you have to do is send a certain number of package bombs and peace is not going to happen. Cutthroat billiards. What can you take away from all this? Well, common enemies cannot be conjured. So check out the alignments of who these common enemies are before you leave the parking lot and figure it out for all possible players who might want to crash the party. Like what's their primary objective? Who's their primary adversary? What primary theater are they truly interested?”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is people are becoming more and more bitter. The hatred just spike. The economic growth isn't happening. Poverty everywhere. And it makes these problems more intractable, not less. So when I think about these frozen conflicts are a number of ones that you know about besides Kashmir, there's Korea, there's Palestine. So if you look at Kashmir, if I've got it right, so you fund that thing. And then what's great from China's point of view, if Pakistan is doing that, India is frozen, that it can't do other things because it's constantly paying attention to what's going on in Kashmir as opposed to go, hmm, China. I don't know about this. Or in the Korean War back in the day, if things are all stirred up in Korea, China has to really pay attention to that and it delays the rise.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Immoral cards, right? They're not bearing any of the costs. They're pinning someone they don't particularly like. All the costs are borne by the local population who are suffering horrendous deaths, lack of economic growth, having warfare where you live. What a total disaster. So that's how it works. two complaint this game so the Indians accorded the Pakistanis have funded the Baloch Baloch people. They straddle Iran and Pakistan don't particularly like being told what to do so apparently India is supposed to have put its finger on that scale. The other thing the Pakistanis accuse Indians of doing is encouraging a Pashtun insurgency up north and that would be a way of diverting Pakistani attentions from Kashmir if they're totally busy with past tunes they can do less in Kashmir. But there was all of these things”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until 1979, when Deng Xiaoping calls it off, the Chinese are funding insurgencies of, let's see, the Mizos, the Manipuri, and the Naga people all don't like different aspects of Indian rule, and the Chinese are more than happy to stir that pot. And the really big pot are the Naxalites. It's huge. And while as long as the Pakistanis who've got East Pakistan, they can stir some of that up. And by the way, these NAXLites are still there in India. They have not gone away. It's a serious part of India where they are. And then, of course, Pakistan's location right next to Kashmir means they can stir that forever. The tragedy of these, what they become are frozen conflicts is the outside power if they are playing their cards right there.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buddy Buddy with China, not remotely with the United States wanted to happen. And then when the United States provides And this is done by the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan. Think if you've got a country that you don't like that has some minority people that want to secede. And so they're fighting there. Well, you can go fund that insurgency. And then the one you don't like is pinned because they're going to be paying attention to that insurgency. And while they're pinned there, they can't probably do things elsewhere that you might care about. So this is the logic of what's going on. So the United States belatedly decided, ah, let's help the Tibetans. And so the CIA is helping them between 57 and 61, but look at the dates. We did the road system. The road system in Tibet's completed by 1957. It's too late. So all you do is get these people killed because the Chinese have got the road system all set up in there. So that doesn't exactly work. But after the 62 war all the way...”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And angered both of them. Amazing. So, another instrument of national power is military aid. It is even more difficult to calibrate than the economic aid. So you can see with the Pactomania event where Eisenhower is building these bilateral relations and treaty organizations to contain the Russians, formerly there'd been no Cold War in South Asia. But once Eisenhower allies with Pakistan, all of a sudden the Russians are in there too. So that's a bit of a boomerang. Another one, so when the United States provides military aid to Pakistan, that just drives India to seeking an alliance with Russia, which isn't exactly what the United States wanted. And then when the United States helps India right after the 1962 war with China, that alienates the Pakistanis and they try to...”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want us ever to have to beg for food again. And she never did. So the United States got no gratitude for or enduring anything and a whole other piece of it is India's is not subject to famines anymore and part of it's from the Green Revolution and who does that? It's the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations who figure out the different strains of grains that you want to grow. And does the United States get any credit for that? No, zip. And here is Krishna Menon, who is Nehru's controversial advisor saying, look, we want to encourage a little competition between the donors. And they did. And India just, even Indira Gandhi, who hates Nixon, she's racking up the aid, your secretary of state, John Foster Dallas saying, look, concerning Indian Pakistan, it's difficult to help one without making the end of the other. And of course, the United States tried to help both.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“United States provided far more economic aid than either the Russians or the Chinese, but still both Pakistanis and Indians preferred China and Russia respectively. And some of this aid was really important during the Bihar famine in 1967. The United States sent 20% of its wheat crop to India. It was worth $1.5 billion. That's not something to be sneezed at for, I don't know, was it 90 million people? There's a lot of people who might have starved to death. And that didn't work out well at all because Johnson at that point, President Johnson at that point, was so mad at the Indians because from his point of view, they were cuddling up to the North Vietnamese and the Vietnam War wasn't going well for Johnson. So he was furious. So he pride divided the aid, but he did it always at the last minute, ship to mouth. And Indira Gandhi was furious. He said, I don't ever.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nehru, it's the 1956 Hungarian crisis where the Russians sent tanks into Hungary. The Indians don't say anything about that. There's a Berlin crisis in 1961 where the Russians are pretty rough, and the Indians don't say anything about that. In Dera Gandhi comes in, and when the Russians send tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Indians say nothing. And then when the Russians invade Afghanistan in 1979, again, the Indians say nothing. So this is one way that you make your allies feel better about things. Another thing is if you're one of the five veto holders at the UN Security Council, you can do your public support that way. And I've already mentioned these Russian vetoes on Kashmiri plebiscites that the Indians truly didn't want to have happen or short-circuiting the Indian offensive in Bangladesh. So this is what Russia did for India, and it was a very valuable thing for them. You can also put money where your mouth is, economic aid, and it's interesting.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in Mumbai, that didn't go anywhere because the Great Paris told the Indians and Pakistanis to just dial it back. All right, another thing you can do is to publicly support someone. And this is what goes on with Goa, which is a Portuguese colony. The Indians wanted it back. The Portuguese said, no way, you cannot have it back. And the Indians took it back, and the United States supported Portugal. Why? It's a NATO ally, and we have very important bases in Portugal. So we kept the bases, but we made the Indians really angry. And there are other areas of public support or are not criticizing people publicly. For instance, in the 1971 Bangladesh War when the United States refuses to support India by telling China, don't enter this place. But of course, it was December, so the road system would have been a little rough to even try that, but it made the Indians mad. Or if you think during the Cold War.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you think you're doing? And says, You're not coming in here until you admit that you crossed the line of control and then you need to get right back. And so he agrees to sign the Washington Agreement to go right back. But it's absolutely humiliating for the Pakistanis to go, oh yeah, we went south of the line of control. And then, well, that didn't work out. So now we have to go right back. He had gone to China already and pleaded his case to the Chinese. And they told him to get right back because there was a lot of nuclear saber rattling going on. And the Chinese were not interested in nuclear war over this. So Pakistan had the choice of, okay, fight India by your lonesome or cross back, so they cross back. And there were other cases in the inter-Cold War period when the Great Powers cooperated and tamped things down like terrorist incidents in New Delhi.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indians of Pakistanis all this aid, this will force them to be nice to us and be less nice to the communists. Wrong. Indian Pakistan are really astute and they get lots of aid from everybody. So when the great powers do align Russia, China, us, or at least two of those align, then you can actually get stuff done. So that's when you get the Tashkent Agreement for the 1965 war. There's the United States and Russia both want India and Pakistan to cease and desist and stop blowing each other off the map. And also in the Cargill conflict, when Pakistan is yet again trying to resolve Kashmir by invading and then gets itself into trouble. And this guy, Nawah Sharif, who is the head of Pakistan, he all of a sudden gets on a plane with his family, it looks like he's coming into exile, and he's trying to fly into the United States. The United States go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partition was brutal. So the British colonized, the Indian subcontinent, and then they left in 1947 and they left really rapidly. To set up any institutional framework. And also, you're talking millions of people. And so Pakistan is going to be one thing, and then India is going to be the other. And so Hindus are just flee and Sikhs are fleeing out of Pakistan. And Muslims are fleeing out of India, going back and forth, and millions are killed while this is going on. So this is the origin, at least the modern origin of why Pakistanis and Indians are so bitter. In addition, the United States thought, well, surely the China threat is going to make the Indians come around and realize this non-aligned stuff's nonsense. Not quite. When India aligns, it aligns with Russia, not the United States. So that doesn't remotely work out the way the United States wanted. And then the United States thought, well, hey, we in the West were rich.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source