Sarah Paine

And it's really important for the Chinese.

If you want to conquer Tibet, you truly want that one.

All right, so if you look at this, that Western route provides not only the ability to control Tibet, but it also provides a pincer onto Xinjiang.

If China wants to come in one way and the other way, it's a good way to get in.

If you look on those two circles there, those are the disputed areas between China and India.

The northern one is the Aksai Chin Plateau, which China has taken from India, and India still claims.

And in the south is the Arunachal Pradesh, which India still owns, but China claims.

So these are the areas that they're fighting over.

But once China took Tibet...

Before, there had been a big buffer zone between China and India, right?

There's all this Tibet, and no one could really get in there.

Now China's built roads, so it can get into places where India cannot deploy troops until it gets into the road races with the Chinese.

And so it reduces the buffer zone between China and India to these small Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim.

So it changes things.

So that's pivotal decision number one, deciding to conquer Tibet.

Pivotal decision number two,

is the United States, in order to deal with the Soviet unions under Eisenhower, did what the wits back in the day called pactomania.

What is that?

It's forming all sorts of bilateral relations and also regional groupings in order to counter the Soviets institutionally and wall them in that way.

And part of this...