Sarah Paine

Who does theocracies anymore?

Okay, the Iranians?

Okay, good on them.

Do not exaggerate the capabilities of any one country for openers.

But I think it's really important to distinguish between nation building and nation rebuilding.

If you're rebuilding, which is what happens in Japan and Germany, they already had full-up institutions, modern economies before the war.

They had no problems with educational institutions going all the way up, judicial institutions.

They had competent police forces, competent – they had parliaments and other things.

So that when you give Germans some cash –

And Japanese as well.

They know exactly how to recreate things and rapidly produce modern institutions.

You're talking about China.

They never had these institutions.

There is no indigenous expertise.

Oh, and by the way, what's the illiteracy rate in China compared to Japan?

Whoa.

No one reads in China, and everyone reads in Japan.

It's not quite that bad.

And we've had this problem in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So we decide we're going to do the debathification thing, and then we think the police are going to still show up and work, except no, that's not how it works.