Sarah Paine

Oh, I think it was so minor.

By then, it's too late.

The great question is some people would argue that in 1946, when Marshall tells Chiang Kai-shek to stop, halt his advance.

This is when he's doing quite well.

And when I mentioned that the terminal point of retreat for the communists was up in Suping, Manchuria.

Some would argue that Marshall should never have done that.

He should have let the nationalists go all the way up, and that would have changed the outcome of the Chinese Civil War.

You could make an argument that that might be true.

Here's the counterargument.

I don't know the answer.

If you look at a map of China or imagine one, Manchuria is way up.

It's like a salient into communist territory because it's bordering all the Soviet Union.

And then it's got quite...

a coastline, but the Soviets had blockaded that, so nothing's getting in that way.

The only way, given the Chinese railway system, is literally one train line connects Manchuria to South China.

So it means Chiang Kai-shek's movements are incredibly predictable.

So one argument you could make, and people have, and I don't know the answer, none of us does, is that, hey, that was the big error.

So if that's the big error, the mistake, and this is a common one that Americans make, so this is worth talking about, is Americans often don't look at warring parties to understand if they are primary adversaries.

There is no way you're going to make them make nice.

So the United States had trouble for years trying to get Pakistanis and Indians to cooperate.