Sarah Paine

was what was called the Northern Tier Strategy, as seen in the Baghdad Pact, where you get Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan to form this thing, and it's to wall off the Soviet Union from the oil fields of the Middle East.

And the other thing you should look at this map before it goes away, look where Pakistan's located, where you think it is,

and then go to the east, and that's East Pakistan.

In the 1971 war, there's going to be a civil war, and Pakistan's going to lose East Pakistan, which is Bangladesh today.

So just keep that in mind.

So as part of the sweetener for Pakistan to join the Baghdad Pact, the United States allied with Pakistan and gave them a big military aid treaty.

And here's Nehru, the prime minister of India, and he is horrified.

A military pact between Pakistan and the United States changes the whole balance of power in this part of the world.

Especially the United States must realize that the reaction of India is going to be, you're arming the Pakistanis.

Whom do you think they're going to shoot?

It'll be us.

And the Indians were just appalled that we did this.

And afterwards, Eisenhower admitted it was perhaps the worst kind of plan and decision we could ever have made.

It was a terrible error, but now we're stuck with it.

Because what the United States is slowly discovering is that if you arm either India or Pakistan in this period, it's going to aim it at the other one.

And so that pact poisoned U.S.

relations with India for the duration of the Cold War and set up things in ways the United States ultimately wasn't happy with.

Okay, those are two pivotal decisions.

Now for a pivotal situation.

It's really the devolving situation between Russia and China.