Sarah Paine

And then when it trances China in a war,

It suggests to the Chinese that they can't be better than the Japanese at the military things, at least.

And this effect on China was far more devastating than the opium wars.

The Chinese could write those off, the losses there.

A bunch of crazy Europeans, they're irrelevant to us.

But when Japan did this, it basically detonated the Confucian underpinnings of Chinese civilization.

And the Chinese have been trying to find a suitable replacement ever since.

For a while, they thought it was communism.

Maybe they still do.

So I'm going to ask a question.

Why did the Asian balance of power change?

And now, spoiler alert, I'm going to give the answer.

And I'm going to say clever decisions in Tokyo.

But I'm going to use a particular framework to answer this that I have found really useful.

And I learned it from teaching at the Naval War College where students are required to have a counterargument in papers.

And this is what I learned from doing this.

So I'm going to have an argument, which is a thesis, and then I'll have some data supporting it.

But then I'm not going to quit there.

I'm going to do...

find the second best argument, the counterargument, the absolutely best alternate explanation, but not one that I think is the best one.