Sarah Paine

And there is a border war over territories, and in particular, this one island, Jambower-Demanski Island in the Amur River.

All right, here's how riverine borders work, international ones.

Under international law, the border is the Thalweg, which is the center of the main channel of whatever the river is.

And Russia had followed that with its European borders.

Not with China.

It claimed both banks of the Amur.

Well, the Chinese are fed up with that, and they take Jambau Island.

And the Russians are furious, and they come to the United States, and they say, "'Would it be okay if we nuked these people?'

And we're like, no.

So then the Russians scratch their head and they come back and they go, okay, would it be okay if we use conventional weapons to blow up their nuclear stuff?

And we go, no, still not okay.

And Mao gets it.

The one that wants to nuke you is your primary adversary.

So there's a reshuffling of the primary adversaries so that formerly the United States was a primary adversary of both China and Russia.

So that would be a reason for them to cooperate.

Well, now they're primary adversaries for each other and the United States can play the swing thing with all of this.

And for Russia, it's really devastating having China as an enemy because it's going to have to deploy mechanized nuclear-armed troops all along its really long Chinese border, Central Asia, the works.

And it's already doing this with its European borders and occupying Eastern Europe, which garrison costs are significant.

Imagine if this country had to put those kinds of forces on our long Canadian and Mexican borders.

It'd be bankrupting, and their economy was and remains a fraction of ours.