Sarah Paine

It's a peninsula, which the US Navy cut off.

It's also cold.

So where are you going to flee if you want to do a base area?

I think it's up a mountain in South Korea, and that will get cold in the winter, and you'll probably freeze to death.

I believe Al-Qaeda means the base.

I believe that's the correct translation.

So if you're thinking about ISIS or whatever, or whatever's left of it, you can go back to Mao's ideas about base areas, that you need a particular kind of geography that's good for the defensive, got to have a big party organization, a lot of local support, you got to have military forces there.

Does al-Qaeda, well, it'd be ISIS or something, do they have all four of these things, or can you remove any one of them?

All right, another idea from Mao is luring the enemy in deep.

And Mao had done that very successfully in the first three encirclement campaigns, and then he was removed from command, so he wasn't doing that anymore.

And again,

In the final phases of the Chinese Civil War, the 45 to 49 event, Mao lures the nationalists deep into Manchuria.

And the nationalists are a South China phenomenon, right?

I showed you the map.

Chiang Kai-shek starts in the south and he goes way up north.

So he's weakest in the north.

But Mao lures him way up there in Manchuria.

And then he springs a trap and destroys Chiang Kai-shek's armies up there.

And then the entire Civil War rapidifies.

wraps up within a year of that.