Sarah Paine

So that would be a reason for them to cooperate.

Well, now they're primary adversaries for each other and the United States can play the swing thing with all of this.

And for Russia, it's really devastating having China as an enemy because it's going to have to deploy mechanized nuclear-armed troops all along its really long Chinese border, Central Asia, the works.

And it's already doing this with its European borders and occupying Eastern Europe, which garrison costs are significant.

Imagine if this country had to put those kinds of forces on our long Canadian and Mexican borders.

It'd be bankrupting, and their economy was and remains a fraction of ours.

But this breaking up of the earlier version of the bromance allows the United States to play the swing role, and then we cooperate.

Both Nixon and Mao think ganging up on Russia would be a good thing.

and overextending Russia financially by overextending it militarily with all these armaments and things.

So in addition, what's going as part of the China's rise are internal reforms under Deng Xiaoping when he abandoned certain communist principles of economic management and gets much more productive agricultural sector and industry and commerce.

And so China's running double digit growth rates for about 20 years with significant compounding effects.

Okay, that's the story of China's rise.

Now for this dystopian alternate universe of Russian decline.

You have pictured here on the left is Leonid Brezhnev, who apparently had a stroke in 1976 that permanently impaired his thinking, which his death in 1982 finished off.

And then...

He was replaced by Yuri Andropov, whose own health was pretty parlous, and he dies within two years.

And then Konstantin Chernenko barely makes it a year before he's dead.

I mean, it sort of sounds like us.

But anyway, it doesn't work well.

So if you look at Soviet growth statistics, they're really good right after the end of World War II.