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

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“The treaty, and no terrorist event or anything derailed it, so they signed it, and this treaty has been, it's been operating some of these dams ever since, to enormous benefit of both countries. Does the United States get any enduring gratitude from either one of doing this? No, zip. Okay, next one is the United States tried to exercise diplomacy and to convince the Pakistanis and Indians to settle their differences. And a total flop. Because if you're going to try to befriend both India and Pakistan, you wind up becoming the enemy of one or the other. And the United States diplomacy was based on certain false assumptions, which are, one, that India and Pakistan could be cajoled into settling their differences. And their idea is anyone who's so stupid as to think that is crazy. And if you're going, well, what are the origins of these differences?”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Players and teams and their problems with interacting, that's very difficult. Now for some of the plays and the instruments of national power, and here's the menu of choices, you can start with the light items, diplomacy, public support and denial of public support. You can move into more expensive things down the menu. Okay, one of the things you can do is help negotiate a really useful treaty, which the United States did. It brokered this Indus Water Treaty of 1960. It's the only time that I know of, maybe you all know of something, where India and Pakistan have signed an agreement to the massive benefit of both of them. What does this agreement do? You can see it's a really dense river system, both India and Pakistan need to irrigate to do that efficiently. You need dams, and both of them were poor and didn't have the dams. They were going to cost a billion dollars. The United States was willing to kick in half that money if they would both sign.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Russia works a little better. For Russia and India, it's really quite a good relationship. What Russia offers to India, not only military and economic aid, but also very useful vetoes on the UN Security Council. India does not want plebiscites in Kashmir that it might lose, so it gets the Soviet Union to veto those things so there are no plebiscites. And then as India is trouncing Pakistan in the 1974, and the United States wants them to halt, India, no way. India wants to finish the job. So it gets the Soviet Union to veto that one, and India does indeed finish the job. And meanwhile, for Russia, India is really useful. It's a good counterbalance for China. So theirs is rather a beautiful relationship. They're very cordial relations. Okay, so I think I've now covered the playing field, right? And I've covered the playing field.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With China India's gone, okay, I think we need nuclear weapons because then we'll be able to protect ourselves against China. And after that war, when Pakistan's lost over half its population has to deal with Indian population and territorial just overwhelming superiority, the Pakistanis go, I think we need nuclear weapons in order to solve this problem. So it has to be proliferation all over the place. But as a result of the 1971 war where the Pakistan tries to overturn the elections, here you have an Indian defense analyst, Sumani, saying, the Pakistani decision to overturn its elections by deploying the Army to East Pakistan gave India an opportunity, the like of which will never come again. And what they did is they armed insurgents in East Pakistan, then sent the conventional army in. And that was it for Pakistan in East Pakistan over.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, the United States is going India and Pakistan is better. And it makes really bad trend lines for India because in the 1962 war the United States supported India. In the 1965 war, it's neutral. In the 1971 war, it supports Pakistan. That's not great. And then India's own very heavy-handed treatment of solutions to the insurgency of Kashmir doesn't make that thing go away. It just gets worse. So they have their own problems. China also has its problems with the interaction. It's complicated. So on the one hand, on the Sino-Indian war, absolutely. China gets the territory. But at what cost? You've got this permanent enemy forever as opposed to teaming up with them. They teamed up, they actually would have had incredible leverage for what the global order is going to look like. But that's just not to be. And moreover, if you look at the 1971 war, after the United States won't help,”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remains non aligned instead of supporting the United States because it's secular and democratic. And the Pakistanis are totally outraged because they're looking at this and go, okay, these Indians are non-aligned. We're aligned. We're taking these risks at Peshawar and stuff with the U-2s. And you're helping these people who are about to ally with the Soviet Union. Who are you kidding? So it's a total mess. So the Indians have their own self-inflicted blows. Nehru and his very controversial, but his devoted advisor, Krishna Menon and his daughter in Diragani, were really good at making these totally insulting remarks to American VIPs. Okay, it hits the target, without a doubt, but the ego that has just been hit is huge and like an elephant is not about to forget. And meanwhile, Pakistan, in contrast, is just being this welcoming host.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indian Pakistan are natural trade partners. So if you take all these wars and just add up all the costs and then think of the opportunity cost if Pakistan had been able to take this money and spend it on road systems, on education, and then all the lost trade, it gives you a sense of the real cost of all of this. Okay, well, those are Pakistan's problems. India has its own problems. Here you've got Indira Gandhi and Richard Nixon. They really didn't like each other. I mean, look at her. She looks as if she's just been fed bad fish and he looks like he served it up. And they cannot abide by each other. So in the 1940s, when Kashmir is erupting, Indir Gandhi thinks, well, no, it's Nehru her dad, thinks that the United States should be supporting India because it's secular and it's democracy. And the United States is appalled during the Korean War when India”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decision to basically toss all these proliferation human rights considerations for Pakistan and just arming them. No kidding because the Chinese are providing the nuclear spare parts. The United States isn't the only country to have trouble navigating this cutthroat billiards. The Pakistanis have their share of boomerangs. Just look how the wars work. So wars create incredible costs.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On that one, but it is going to have 9 11 follow on effects. And also, the Pakistani, the ISI is also taking some of that money and putting it into cashmere, which is going to have real problems for India later on. So there are real ramifications for all of this, of needing Pakistan, but actually what is happening anyway. And then throughout, there is the Pakistanis are getting closer and closer to billing the bomb. So when the Russians go piling into Afghanistan, here's Bigu Brzezinski Carter's national security advisor telling him our security policy cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy. Really? I thought that was our security policy. And the problem with proliferation is it tends to be a one-way street, whereas Afghanistan has been anything but. And then here Deng Xiaoping was in town, and he told Cardi, we applaud your...”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Pakistanis are really getting sick of being kicked around. So outgoing President Jimmy Carter offers them, I don't know, $400 million or something, this is Zia here going peanuts to the peanut farmer. And the incoming Reagan administration then upset to $3.2 billion. And that money gets funneled through the intervice intelligence directorate. It's like the CIA++ in Pakistan. And when you put that kind of money into that kind of bureaucracy, you're going to make them incredibly powerful. And then they're the ones who decide how they're going to allocate money to insurgents in Afghanistan. And I got it. There weren't any great choices, but they're arming some really anti-Western folks in there, probably some guy named Osama, last name bin Laden. But anyway, I'm not sure of the detail.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would cease being non aligned and aligned with the West. Oh, well, they cease being non aligned, all right. They sign a military pact with Russia over this. And then they upgrade their relationship with Vietnam, which totally upsets the United States. And it gets even better. They shut down Indians. They won't give scholars any visas to come to India to study India. So you wonder why U.S. universities didn't have any Indian studies programs? It's all about this. That explains what's going on with all of that. Total mass. Meanwhile, but for Pakistan, that's all this is going on, Shah Rand falls in, I think it's like February 1979, and then the Russians invade Afghanistan in December 1979 and suddenly Pakistan is totally essential once again.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get himself involved to Beijing so that he can talk to Mao about cooperating with the Chinese to over-extend the Soviets in the Cold War, which is ultimately what we do, and it's very important to win the Cold War. And this is integral to this. But everyone else is looking and going, what on earth is going on? So you have Nixon's doing the mediation in the background. We got refugees flying all over the place. India comes to the United States and says, look, you need to tell the Chinese not to intervene in this thing. And the Indians also say, you need to bring this up at the UN, the human rights stuff, because India is literally getting millions of refugees trying to flee this mess. And the United States won't do any of it and gets even better. The United States has the gall to blame the Indians for the war. Dream on. So Indira Gandhi is just furious at this one. And so the United States had wished that India”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bangladeshi War for Independence. So let me explain what that is to you. So Pakistan was holding presidential elections. The dominant ethnic group in Pakistan are Punjabis. Sometimes the Sindhis, like the Bhutto family, I think they're Sindhis. But anyway, generally speaking, particularly the army, the Punjabis dominate. Bengalis live in Bangladesh. They won the election. And the Punjabis are furious. So they send the army to start butchering people in East Pakistan to overturn the election. So there are refugees pouring into India. So this is the backdrop of what is going on there. And for anyone who wasn't in the know, the United States is saying nothing about this. There's this massive humanitarian crisis. The United States got nothing to say. The United States has something to say about everything, but it had to do with this is the moment that Nixon is trying”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at the United States having trouble negotiating all this so that whatever you do in the short term doesn't wreck you in the long term, but in order to get to the long term, of course, you've got to go through the short term. So after the U-2 crash in Russia or get shot down and the Pakistanis are having a heart attack about that, that's when the Pakistanis look to cultivating more better relations with China because the US relationship is just too potentially costly and the Americans cut off the military aid. And then when the Pakistanis are being very nice about delivering the mail for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to line up invitations in Beijing, the United States is ignoring a humanitarian nightmare because all of this, that coincides with the 1970s.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Geopolitics, this is his 1904 map. It's actually quite famous. And he talked about how Russia occupies the heartland, and his day was all these railway systems. He thought that was the prime piece of real estate in the world. And then it's surrounded by this intermarginal crescent. You look where Pakistan's located. It's right in the center there, right up by Russia. And it's a really crucial location before satellite imagery is available to put listening posts on Russia. Russia is huge. So you've got to have a bunch of listening posts.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A game in which every ball can be a cue ball and players can take turns, come, leave, do whatever at will. Sometimes they'll cooperate some of the time, but they don't necessarily want to pocket put the same ball in the same pocket. And so if that's the case, there's going to be no enduring cooperation. And understand that you want to have your goal is going to be the ultimate shot you want to take. But as you're taking the intervening shots, people are going to try to disrupt it. How on earth do you get through this, Gabe? So this is what the next section is all about. So if you look at this map and where Pakistan's located, it's this very strategic location in the center of, not quite center, but of Eurasia, the center of the Soviets' boundary there. And I'm going to give you a map. This is from Alfred McKinder. He's one of the most famous people to publish on.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to play. The United States has lousy cards because we don't share primary enemies with anybody, so it's a stalemate. You help India, the Pakistanis hate you. You help Pakistanis, the Indians hate you. It's no win. But if you look at India, Indian Russia share a China problem. That's good. They can cooperate on that. And then you have Pakistan and China. They share an India problem. They can make things happen over that. So there are cards for them to play in zero for the United States to play. It's just the way it is. The name of the game and strategy is to get the outcome that you want to have happen. And it's like, how do you play this game of five person and five country cutthroat billiards to get remotely what you want out of it? So for the English majors among you, I have a metaphor for the rest of you. You can just bear with us.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“United States, none of it aligns, so they fight parallel wars and allow the Allies to take them out in detail. So when you're thinking about alliances in the world today, when you're wondering what's going on with Iran or whatever, figure out who's their real primary enemy. Get it straight. Does that primary enemy is that an existential threat for them? So if you've got countries that line up on same primary enemy, existential threat for all around the most unlikely people will cooperate. On the other hand, people who are very likely to cooperate, maybe like the fascists, they all shared this basic ideology. But if they don't have the same primary enemy and the same theater of interest geographically, the same theater, they may not cooperate very well at all. So you can apply this to anything you want to apply to. So back to my game here. If you're looking at the cards people...”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alliances in world history. If you think about what people ultimately want, then the British want an empire in which the sun never sets. The United States wants to decolonize everybody, and Joe Stalin wants a communist wonderland. Those are mutually exclusive. But to get there, you have to go through the common waste station of getting rid of Hitler. The common existential threat can be a super glue of the most unlikely partners. But let's look at the access. What they want at the end of the war are series of influence in different parts of the world. So for Italy, it's empire in the Mediterranean, Japan, and the Pacific, and then Hitler, it's all over Eurasia. That's not mutually exclusive. But if you look who they're the primary enemy who stands in the way of those plans, it's Britain for Italy. It's Russia for the Germans. And for the Japanese, it's first China and then the”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Off and then Pakistan has less than half the population, then you could argue that for India, China is the primary adversary. And then if you look at that reshuffling, if you also look at the 1969 war that reshuffles the nuclear powers, so formally Russia and China had shared the United States as their primary enemy. But after the 69 war, they're each other's primary enemy. And this gives the United States a swing position of team up with A or team up with B. And the United States team up with China to overextend Russia and the Cold War because I had always felt that the Soviets were the bigger threat in those days. So anyway, as you're looking at alignments, you can apply this kind of framework to any country on the planet to try to figure out what's going on. And think about how alliances work. If I look at the World War II allies, probably one of the most effective.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By segregation. They knew exactly which end of the bus they'd be sitting on, so there are issues both ways. And in fact, Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi found the United States really impossible to work with. And they looked at capitalism as the way stationed imperialism and fascism, whereas Americans looked as at socialism as the way stationed to communism. So there's no meeting of minds on all of this. And so if you look at the alignments of primary adversaries, Indian-Pakistan most of the time are primary adversaries. India is always Pakistan's primary enemy, but you could argue that with the 62 war, is it Pakistan or is it China? It's a primary adversary of India. And then when you get to the 1971 war, which I'll discuss a little more in a second, where Bangladesh is broken.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leader of Pakistan telling the United States that the United States forgets that our security hazards and political liabilities have increased to a dangerous level due to this U-2 stuff. And we kept our part of the contract whilst the Americans betrayed us at every turn. They built up India against us. They failed to help us in the 65 war. And finally stopped military aid. They think that we exist for their convenience and that our freedom is negotiable. Dream on. lease came up for the listing post at Badabar in 1968 the Pakistanis canceled it. They're sick of it. Meanwhile, the Indians were too thrilled about the United States either. This is earlier when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. And here's Mahatma Gandhi telling Ham Allied support for freedom and democracy seems hollow so long as America has the Negro problem in her own home. Indians were appalled.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really important things for us during this period. So we're paying the Pakistanis a lot of money to get it, except there was one of these U2 planes gets shot down over the Soviet Union. They finally get so they can because they fly at really high altitudes. They shoot it down. And Khrushchev is furious. He hauls in the Pakistani ambassador in Moscow and he goes, Where is this place Peshawar? We've circled it on the map. And we're going to blow it off the map if you all don't wise up. And the Pakistani is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And so between these sort of threats in 1960 about the U-2 and then the United States freezing arms in the 1965 war.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ashkent declaration that ends this war. But Pakistan is worse off after this thing. And India has restored its reputation for knowing what it's doing on the battlefield. So for Pakistan, the United States is really problematic because we're interested in being nice to them when we want something out of them and then we're not so interested when we don't want something out of them because we don't share a primary enemy. So what we really wanted were listening bases. The technology of the day was such that if you want to surveil the Soviet Union, you want to send these big YouTube planes over and given their ranges and you're not supposed to be doing it. And so we had YouTube bases, I think Norway, West Germany, Turkey, Pakistan, and then Japan. And in addition, we had a listening base at Badabur.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing they really care about, which is Kashmir. And they do that. Well, the enemy gets the vote, and the Indians invaded straight through Lahore, which isn't remotely what the Pakistanis had in mind. And then the United States does a double arms embargo on both of them for doing this. And the problem is the Pakistanis are much more dependent on U.S. military aid. The Indians were more diversified, so they just didn't have enough spare parts to continue this thing. So it's a very unhappy event for them. They lose it. And what happens, neither the United States nor Russia wants either one of them fighting that war. The Russians are thinking, we want the military aid to go to India in order to counterbalance China, not to decimate the Pakistanis. And the United States doesn't want it either. So the United States is very happy that the Soviets brokered the”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“United States for maximum aid to use against the other, which is on starter for the United States, and then Pakistan really would like it if the United States would be nice with China as well, because Pakistan wants to have good relations with the United States and China. And that's a non-starter for the United States until 1971 when there are secret visits and things going. It's later on. Okay, so in 1962, India gets trounced in this war with China. They look like they're militarily feckless. And then in 1964, Nehru dies, right? He'd been the head of India since independence in 1947. He'd been there a long time. He's dead. 1965. He looks like a good year to settle border problems. And so what they do is first they invade through the south. You feel like way down at the bottom there, the Rana Kuch, and that seems to go pretty well. And then they decide they want to go for the...”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know there was supposed to be some mutual defense pact, maybe, and there's some other things going on. Anyway, you can imagine what it may or may not have been. Okay, in the case of Pakistan and China and Indian Russia, they had quite a good relationship because the Pakistanis and the Chinese shared India as air problem, and the Russians and the Indians shared China as their problem, and that worked pretty well. But the United States was just a disaster from both Indian and Pakistani point of view and vice versa, because the United States wanted to befriend both of them. But if you befriend one, the other is appalled. And so the United States winded up appalling everybody. And so what the United States wanted to have happen is for Indian Pakistan to put aside their differences and then combine against China and stop communism from spreading, Indian Pakistan want to use the”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's check out other possibilities. Once that happens to India, India is all of a sudden looking for Russia to counterbalance China. And you also have Pakistan wondering what to do and what the Pakistani notice after all this. Well, the Chinese are not going to be teaming up with India, right? They've just invaded the place. And so this is when Pakistan sees that China might have real possibilities as an ally. And Bhutto is going to play the China card for the nuclear chip trying to get Chinese help for all of that. And here's what happens. So you have the 62 war and then in 1963, Pakistan really inexplicably is ceding territory to China. Who does that? And there are various possibilities, but I'm surprising it's because it's going to help on nuclear development. That would explain why you would give a lot of territory.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I get it, the Chinese get the territory they want. That was the goal of that war. But what they have done is taken a country, India which had his leadership terribly idealistic, not interested in becoming militarized at all and making them angry forever. India immediately doubles the size of its army within the next 10 years to up to 750,000 people, creates 10 mountain divisions useful against China, and they've never ceased being so angry. And then if you think about this, what if, instead of playing this game this way, China and India had teamed up? I would suspect we would be in a completely very different world order now if that is what they'd done instead. But this is China's decision, not India's fault on this one. All right, so that wasn't great.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1960 on the Indians are voting to seat the People's Republic of China, not Taiwan, on the UN. Meanwhile, in the background, all this road building is going on. Those roads are being built between 1950 and 1957. And the Indians aren't going to figure out until 1958 that the roads are there. Meanwhile, roads completed. The Chinese want to complete their control over Tibet. And so they're going to send big armies up there. And Tibetan culture is much more, it's of Indian origin. It's not Chinese origin. So this repression of Tibetan culture just appalls the Indians. And then two days before the People's Liberation of Army is going to make it into Lhasa, which is the capital of Tibet, the Dalai Lama fleet. He's the spiritual leader of Tibet. He flees to India where he's remained ever since.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when the San Francisco Treaty, I think it signed 1951 in the United States ending the war with Japan, India refuses to sign because China and Russia aren't there to sign as well. And then to help China break out of its diplomatic isolation at the end of the Korean War, India signs a friendship treaty with China. And as part of that friendship treaty, it recognizes Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Under international law, contrary to what Vladimir Putin is doing lately, under international law, if you recognize someone's sovereignty over territory, that is permanent. You cannot back out of it legally under international law. The Chinese promise, I don't know, there's some like peaceful coexistence or whatever. They're promising the Indians, but that has no permanence under international law, whereas this thing does. And then from...”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nehru at all. He thought he was a lackey of British colonialism, but Khrushchev thought India was really important to counterbalance China. And here's Nehru thinking about it. We have to be on friendly terms with both Russia and America. But actually he felt much more in common with Russia. Why? Because he favored Fabian socialist economic policies that were much more akin to what's going on in Russia than it was in the United States. Moreover, the United States was segregated, which appalled Nehru. And in addition, the United States was cozying up to all the colonial powers. So Nehru thought the Russians were the better. But while all this is going on, the Indians were non-aligned and they treated the Chinese really generously. And I've got a whole list of generosity. So India immediately recognizes China in 1950. Countries like the United States didn't forever.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, prior to that moment, the United States is the primary adversary of both Russia and China. Now with this, their primary adversaries of each other, it causes a reshuffling of the Allies, and I'll get to that later. So, okay, I've done the playing field of these decisions that delimited it. But now I'm going to get to the Allies. And some allies are better than others. And here we got Mao and Krushchoff. Look at these love birds. Boy, when that divorce took place, boy, did it mess up the extended family. Never mind. And the point for my purposes tonight, I'm going to use the word alliance really loosely. If you sign a mutual defense pact for my purposes tonight, that makes you an alliance allies. And if you're a political scientist, you've got something that's much more complicated, but forget it. I just can't handle it. So we're going to do it this way. All right. So Stalin didn't think much of”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aid needs to come by train over China lest the United States sink at the good stuff if it goes by sea. So the Chinese feel obliged to let it go through, but they're just hassling the Russians all the whole time through. They take it apart, tear it apart, say there was from China, and the Russians are just apoplectic. So their relations are getting worse and worse and worse, and the squabbling is just incessant. So it's not surprising that the Sino-Soviet border war of 1969 breaks out during the Vietnam War. And while all this is going on, this is one of the river islands, the Amur River, forms much of their border, and this is one of the islands there. And there's much fighting over it. And the Russians come to us, Americans, and say, is it okay if we nuke these people in the United States says, no, there's no way it's okay to nuke these people? Mao figures it out. The one that wants to nuke you, that's the primary adversary.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the People's Republic's shores, and the Russians are appalled. They are not consulted, and yet they have a friendship treaty that obligates them to join a war under certain circumstances. And the Russians are going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There can be nuclear follow from this stuff. So the Russians then ask the Chinese if it's okay if they have a combined naval base on China's shores. And China says, forget it. The Russians say they go, okay, well, then we're not going to give you any of the plans for the atomic weapon. And it all devolves. So there's no love lost on either side. And then what exacerbates these tensions is the Vietnam War, where China wants influence over neighbor Vietnam. That is pretty typical. But Russia wants influence over Vietnam to do a pincer on China, which China doesn't like at all. Meanwhile, both of them want to prove their revolutionary credentials by aiding the Vietnamese, North Vietnamese. So Russia's”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Russians look around at the West and partly the United States and go, Wow, they got bases everywhere. The British have got bases everywhere. How come our allies won't give us bases? I mean, well, if you occupy Eastern Europe, the whole place is a base, but that's a different matter. So the Russians want the Chinese to let them keep a couple of remaining Tsarist treaty ports, essentially, and wants to expand them. And the Chinese say forget it. And in fact, after the Korean War, when the Chinese have troops all up in Manchuria, which is where these bases were located, and there's a succession struggle going on, Kostalin's just died. The Russians have to return the bases because there's just too much bad stuff happening where they live. And then what Mao does in 54 and 58, which just appalls the Russians, are these two Taiwanese straight crises. What's going on? Mao is lobbying all kinds of ordinance on these islands that are owned by Taiwan that are very close.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he has to keep his mouth shut. But once he detonates an atomic weapon, here's what he tells the Russians, and they just about lose it. There are too many places occupied by the Soviet Union. The Russians took everything they could. We have not yet presented an account of this list. Under the Tsars, the Russians took from the Chinese sphere of influence territory exceeding U.S. east of the Mississippi. Think the Chinese didn't notice? Yes, they noticed. So Mao all of a sudden is calling that. And the Russians are appalled. But Mao has other gripes against the Russians. Stalin in the lead up to World War II had made sure to set up the Chinese to fight Japan.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Afterwards, Eisenhower admitted it was perhaps the worst kind of plan and decision we could ever have made. It was a terrible era, but now we're stuck with it. Because what the United States is slowly discovering is that if you arm either India or Pakistan in this period, it's going to aim it at the other one. And so that pact poisoned U.S. relations with India for the duration of the Cold War and set up things in ways the United States ultimately wasn't happy with. Okay, those are two pivotal decisions. Now for a pivotal situation, it's really the devolving situation between Russia and China. Until Mao got atomic weapons in 1964, he really had to shut up. And because he needed Russian technological aid, he's been totally cut off from the West after the Korean War. He's been isolated. So he truly needs Soviet aid. And he also, if he wants nuclear weapons, he needs some of their aid to do that as well.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the Middle East. And the other thing you should look at this map before it goes away. Look where Pakistan's located, where you think it is, and then go to the east, and that's East Pakistan. In the 1971 war, there's going to be a civil war, and Pakistan's going to lose East Pakistan, which is Bangladesh today. So just keep that in mind. So as part of the sweetener for Pakistan to join the Baghdad Pact, the United States allied with Pakistan and gave them a big military aid treaty. And here's Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, and he is horrified. A military pact between Pakistan and the United States changes the whole balance of power in this part of the world, affects us most, especially the United States, most realize that the reaction of India is going to be you're arming the Pakistanis. Whom do you think they're going to shoot? It'll be us. And the Indians were just appalled that we did this.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one could really get in there. Now China's built road so it can get into places where India cannot deploy troops until it gets into the road races with the Chinese. And so it reduces the buffer zone between China and India to these small Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. So it changes things. So that's pivotal decision number one, decided to conquer Tibet. Pivotal decision number two is the United States in order to deal with the Soviet unions under Eisenhower did what the Wits back in the day called Pactomania. What is that? It's forming also to bilateral relations and also regional groupings in order to counter the Soviets institutionally and wall them in that way. And part of this was what was called the Northern Tier Strategy as seen in the Baghdad Pact, where you get Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan to form this thing, and it's to wall off the Soviet Union from the oil field.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Systems of South Asia, so that's difficult. So only the western route is the really good one, and it's really important for the Chinese, if you want to conquer Tibet, you truly want that one. All right, so if you look at this, that western route provides not only the ability to control Tibet, but it also provides a pincer onto Xinjiang if China wants to come in one way and the other way, it's a good way to get in. If you look on those two circles there, those are the disputed areas between China and India. The northern one is the Oxide Chin Plateau, which China has taken from India, and India still claims. And in the south is the Arunachal Pradesh, which India still owns, but China claims. So these are the areas that they're fighting over. There's all this Tibet.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at this map, the Han Chinese, the preponderant group of China, they inhabit, they dominate as far west as the Chongqing Basin and Sichuan. China has put large armies into Tibet exactly twice, once under the Chenlung Emperor in the late 18th century, and they didn't stay for very long, and then under Mao in 1950, and they have stayed forever and built roads so they could keep on sending more in. Between 1950 and 1957, China built a series of road systems through Tibet, and the western route there is the only one that provides year-round traffic. The problem with the other two is, well, check it out. They go through 14 or 15 mountain ranges. It means you go vertical up, vertical down, do that 14, 15 times. And then between monsoon rains and snow and mudslides are very difficult to maintain. And then the eastern one crosses the major river.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is the playing field that's delimited by these pivotal decisions. And then I'm going to look at the teams. Some allies were prime allies, others were subprime, and they mixed and matched over time. So they'll do teams. And then I'll do the game, the interaction. And then at the end, I'm going to do the plays, some of the techniques and things that you can do to play this game. Pivotal decision number one, when Mao won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, it didn't end, he also spent the next two years not only eliminating nationalist remnants, but also conquering Xinjiang and Tibet. Tibet had been autonomous since 1911 when the last dynasty had collapsed, and Mao decides that he is going to reconquer Tibet. Tibet's an interesting place. It contains, I think, about 40% of China's mineral resources, so there's a lot of money to be made in Tibet for those with the capital to invest in big mines.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About all the neighbors and anyone who might want to crash the party along with you. It's also a story of a series of limited wars. What's a limited war? It means it's for something less than regime change. So however it turns out, the governments that started that war are still in place. And two of them resulted in quick victories, the ideal in warfare. The first one was the Sino-Indian War of 1962, and the other one was the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971. And these wars changed things in many short-term, expected ways, and then in many long-term highly unexpected ways. So here's my game plan, and it's literally a game plan. I'm going to start out with the pivotal decisions made by different players that then once they're made, certain things are foreclosed and certain things are possible.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I need to start with a disclaimer because I work for the US government and they require you to do a disclaimer. So the ideas that you're about to hear are my ideas. They don't necessarily represent those of the US government, the US Navy Department, the US Department of Defense, let alone the Naval War College where I work. Are we all good on this? All right. So today I'm going to tell you a story of three protagonists. Russia, the United States, and China that all wanted to work their magic on India and Pakistan, which didn't exactly appreciate it. So two big topics. One is intervening in someone else's problems. A cottage industry for the United States. And also, before you do that, you really ought to check out The Alignments. Who's the primary adversary of whom? How long has it been that way? And also ask these questions.”
2025-01-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source