Sarah Paine

So there's no meeting of minds on all of this.

And so if you look at the alignments of primary adversaries, India and Pakistan, most of the time, are primary adversaries.

India is always Pakistan's primary enemy, but you could argue that with the 62 War, is it Pakistan or is it China who's the primary adversary of India?

And then when you get to the 1971 War, which I'll discuss a little more in a second,

where Bangladesh is broken off and then Pakistan has less than half the population, then you could argue that for India, China is the primary adversary.

And then if you look at that reshuffling, if you also look at the 1969 war that reshuffles the nuclear powers, so formally, Russia and China had shared the United States as their primary enemy, but after the 69 war, they're each other's primary enemy, and this gives the United States a swing position of team up with A or team up with B. And the United States teamed up with China

to overextend Russia and the Cold War because it always felt that the Soviets were the bigger threat in those days.

So anyway, as you're looking at alignments, you can apply this kind of framework to any country on the planet to try to figure out what's going on.

And think about how alliances work.

If I look at the World War II allies, probably one of the most effective alliances in world history, if you think about what people ultimately want, the British want an empire in which the sun never sets, the United States wants to decolonize everybody, and Joe Stalin wants a communist wonderland.

Those are mutually exclusive.

But to get there, you have to go through the common way station of getting rid of Hitler.

So the common existential threat can be a superglue of the most unlikely partners.

But let's look at the axis.

What they want at the end of the war are spheres of influence in different parts of the world.

So for Italy, it's empire in the Mediterranean, Japan in the Pacific, and then Hitler, it's all over Eurasia.

That's not mutually exclusive, but if you look who the primary enemy who stands in the way of those plans, it's Britain for Italy, it's Russia for the Germans, and for the Japanese, it's first China and then the United States.

None of it aligns, so they fight parallel wars and allow the allies to take them out in detail.

So when you're thinking about alliances in the world today, when you're wondering what's going on with Iran or whatever, figure out who's their real primary enemy.

Get it straight.