Sarah Paine

Chiang Kai-shek had been fighting since the 1920s and forever and ever and ever, and he fought the Japanese.

They're brutal.

The United States had trouble fighting the Japanese, and Chiang Kai-shek fought them alone for a long time before we joined the war.

And yet...

He loses a battle in 48 in Manchuria, and that's it.

The rest of the country wraps up.

So what was going on there?

Or the South Vietnamese, they've been fighting forever.

And then the whole place just wraps up.

And the same thing with Japan in World War II, that they've been fighting all over the place forever, fighting us brutally.

And then in 1945, we don't even have to invade the home islands.

Think how unusual that is.

The Germans fought every street on the way to Berlin.

The Japanese quit.

And this is about disintegrating the enemy and why it happens.

But what you can say in all those three cases is the warfare had been going on for an incredibly long time and it was ruinous and the places in question were ruined.

So don't expect that to happen too fast.

And of course, Mao's big contribution are his three stages of people's war.

And Mao presents them as sequential.

You go from one to two to three and ta-da, you win.