Dwarkesh Patel

But I wonder if the broader lesson is just like,

Nothing any U.S.

president did in terms of foreign policy.

That was all a sideshow.

This tête-à-tête competition for, you know, different third world countries.

We're going to get Brazil.

We're going to get Vietnam.

We're going to get Algeria, etc.

That just seems...

much less significant than the fact that liberal capitalism was more appealing and outproduced communism.

So even if some country, even if Brazil goes communist, this is not going to change the fundamental playing board here.

So there is this conundrum, and I genuinely don't know the answer to this, but in order to beat off these communist factions and guerrillas, we often, through the Cold War, had to support other dictators.

And I think probably in many cases they were...

better than the communist alternative.

It's just very hard to beat Pol Pot and Mao in terms of how terrible you can be.

But obviously, this was in its own way problematic.

And even if we didn't have to support dictators, we had to alienate

You had this previous lecture that you gave on the Indo-Pakistani chapter in history where we had to alienate India in order to fend off against the Soviet Union in this little episode.

So, I mean, I don't know what the solution to this is.

I mean, if you think that this theater mattered less, then you could say, well, we should have just kept our hands clean of these different...