Sarah Paine

And also, I think it's in our own day where we don't really want to absorb the bad news.

Like, I could be wrong, but I believe that Putin wants not only all of Ukraine, which he says he wants, but also he wants the Baltic states and he wants to keep on going.

And so this is profoundly bad news, because if that's the case, then it means for Europeans, at least, they're going to have to be diverting all kinds of resources to this problem, which is something they don't want to do, right?

Because like us, they're indebted too, and there are other things they would prefer to spend their money on.

And we don't like the bad news that actually this is where we're at.

And so you're going to make nasty trade-offs.

So Stalin tries to work the same magic.

Stalin thinks it's going to work for him, and he doesn't get it.

He becomes the menu item for Hitler.

And it just about wrecks him.

But it works beautifully against China.

Well, I think there's another concept that's useful as cooperative adversary.

And I've introduced this before.

It doesn't mean the adversary wants to cooperate with you, but they just don't play their cards particularly well.

So we're talking about China and

that has had all of those rebellions I told you about and civil wars and regional wars.

It doesn't have these strong government institutions.

So it is much easier to script-write a place like that, to have them do things that are antithetical to their interests.

So you've got a cooperative adversary.

Chinese aren't trying to cooperate.