Sarah Paine

Why would he think such thoughts?

This thing, the anti-common-term pact.

Common-term is short for Communist International.

It is the Soviet outreach program, and it's signed in 1936 between the Japanese and the Germans, and Stalin goes, uh-oh, they're after me.

And so he plays every one of his China cards, and he holds lots of them, because then this is also part, if you want to disintegrate the neighbors in order to delay their rise, well, then you fund all sides of their civil wars and any side in between, because you just want them to go at it.

So he plays every card he's got.

And what he wants are the nationalists to stop fighting the communists, vice versa, and unite to fight the Japanese.

And they're willing to do this provided Stalin provides conventional aid, which he does.

But they think he's also going to provide soldiers.

They don't get it.

Once they're in, Russia is out of this thing.

And Stalin's plan, his script for the Chinese and Japanese works beautifully.

Because when the nationalists unite in the second united front with the communists going back to the dark side, the Japanese are apoplectic.

And this is when they do the massive escalation in 1937.

And they are off to overextension into parts due south of Russia.

So this two-front Japanese-German war never materialized.

Stalin, very successful.

Chinese, less so, because the Chinese are fighting the Japanese so the Russians don't have to, and that comes at the price of millions of deaths, millions of refugees.

That does indeed derail China's rise yet again.

Next example, per the Yalta Agreement, Russia finally gets in the war in Asia, about time.