Dwarkesh

That's quite a bromance, right?

You know, there's no risk of North Korea and China going to a war.

I mean, North Korea relies heavily on China.

It's not draining China in any way.

In 1931, when Japan attacks Manchuria, Japan commandeers the Chinese Eastern Railway, which the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 said that it was supposed to be under Russia's purview.

And the people in the Politburo are telling Stalin, look, we've got to be aggressive against this.

And Stalin says, look, I don't want to raise tensions against another great power.

Let's just let this slide.

Let's keep tensions low.

And this is actually quite similar to what happens with splitting up Poland in 1939 and then Barbarossa, where in both theaters, he makes this calculation that I'm going to let certain things slide so that I don't have to face off against this great powers on my border.

I don't want to go to war with them.

In the case of Japan, it works because Japan decides to attack China and not Russia.

In the case of, obviously, Germany, it doesn't work.

So it's interesting to see, like, oh, it kind of makes sense why he thought it would work.

Because otherwise, his failure to anticipate Operation Barbarossa.

So, you know, when he's getting information that the Germans are lining up millions of men along this huge border, he's like, this is British disinformation.

And he uses the exact same logic, right?

when Japan is invading Manchuria, that like the idea that we had to fight Japan is British information, disinformation, sorry.

So even though obviously it was a mistake, it helps us understand why he thought this way.

An interesting connection to make between World War II and this Russo-Chinese relationship is that the way that we used Russia as basically this, um, reservoir of, uh, uh,