Sarah Paine

Tell me precisely why I'm here getting killed.

The Russian soldiers had no buy-in.

And you can ask, what exactly did the Russians want there?

Apparently, there were some royal...

uh favorites who thought that they were going to get some lucrative timber concessions on the korean border okay let's go into logistics i've never heard there was a shortage of wood in european russia ever and then they're going to ship it all the way back

This is a non-performing economic model.

In addition, Nicholas II is an incompetent czar.

And he's hiring—the guy who's running the Navy is also incompetent.

Their Navy gets no training whatsoever.

So great, you have expensive ships, but no one's trained in how to use them, whereas the Japanese have.

And the Japanese, it's the value of the object, one of these concepts.

How valuable is it to win for Japan versus Russia?

Well, for Russia, it's already the biggest country in the planet, and there's nothing really that exciting out in Asia from their point of view.

Maybe for Nicholas, because he wants to be a great czar and add to the empire.

That would be a nice thing.

But when the Germans come after him in World War II, World War I, I think he's going to care about the other things more.

So that's one for the Japanese, rightly or wrongly, their government and educated people consider it existential.

And they're looking at China going, that's our future if we don't fix things.

And they're thinking the solution for Japan is empire because in those days, that seemed to be the way powerful countries ran things.

So it's a combination of,