Sarah Paine

They haven't got these institutions.

And so it's not feasible.

A Marshall Plan in China would not have worked.

And also, we had really competent foreign service officers in China in this period.

Why?

They're the children of missionaries.

And so they spoke fluent Chinese and had a deep understanding of China.

And they were saying, it's hopeless, that there is no way Chiang Kai-shek is going to win this thing because he's hated by the peasantry.

which he was, because for the reasons I've told you, right, if he's busy dragooning them into his armies because he feels he has no choices, whereas the communists are giving them land and educating them, you better believe who the peasants are supporting.

And the missionaries, they were then caught up in the McCarthy purges and were just about ruined by

lost their jobs in the State Department and elsewhere, only to be exonerated, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years later when they've already lost their careers and who knows how they raise their families.

No, it was considered hopeless.

This is called making a net assessment of not what you want it to be, but an accurate one.

They believed it was not feasible.

You're talking hundreds of millions of people.

We can't even deal with Afghanistan today with, what, 20 million people?

It's not feasible.

It's at the end of World War II.

American GIs are sick of it, as are their parents, of fighting more wars.

We didn't have to send GIs, we just had to not cut off support.