Sarah C. M. Paine

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This world is not about the operational win of totally eliminating a problem. It's rather it's containing it at acceptable cost.

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Think about it. The bedrock principle of international law is sovereignty. If we're all going to be invading each other, what international law is there?

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But the maritime world is about negative objectives. It's preventing things from bad things from happening. And um you can never prove that you prevented anything.

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And their idea is we must hash out our different differences with diplomats and lawyers cuz when you send the soldiers in, it is uh whatever gains you think you're going going to get are going to be inferior to what you would have done with the diplomats.

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It was a miracle of your lifetimes. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The problem for the likes of Putin is that this wealth producing trade was not happening at his house, but the houses of those vested in the trading order, not in extortion.

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And also, for China, with its geographical setup as it is, uh the seas are going to be open to it only in peacetime. In wartime, this has nothing to do with anyone doing anything to them. It's just facts.

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Also, not only is it far cheaper to send things by sea, it is far more secure. If you're going to run the Belt Road thing, uh or it's it's the belt part of it, the land part, um you've got to control the whole thing end to end. You're going through some of the most unstable places there are.

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And then for those of you who are skeptical about international organizations, here's one you've never heard of. The International Organization for Standardization then standardized these container sizes to fit one if by truck, two if by railway cars, and thousands if by sea. And this just plummets transport costs.

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Well, once wealth is a function of of commerce, industry, and trade, it isn't land anymore. And this upends the world. If you think about the world today, who's rich, who's poor, who's powerful, who's not, it's often the degree to which the country is industrialized.

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Rule number five, a rule that Britain broke at great cost in World War I. Do not take on the enemy main force directly. You certainly do not do that as an opening move.

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So, rule number one is you keep the home economy growing. That is number one, because that's going to produce the money that's going to fund your military, fund your allies, allow you to do everything.

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They're the only uh power in Europe that doesn't need to maintain a large standing army because if Britain could maintain a competent navy, no army's going to reach British shores cuz they're going to be drowned at sea.

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And it turns out that there's been a tendency over the course of China's and Russia's long histories to overextend and this helps account for the implosions of various empires and dynasties.

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One, you're surrounding yourself by failing states. You can look at Russia and China and they're surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet and you go, "Gee whiz, are they unlucky or they complicit?"

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You set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising, you ingest the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between, and you await the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. This is Vladimir Putin's game.

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Whereas if you're a maritime power observing someone else being invaded cuz in theory it's pretty tough to invade you by sea, it's a major point of strategy as to whether you're going to intervene at all and if you are, what is the timing?

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So, the deaths for the the land powers are measured in uh millions, whereas the maritime powers, it's a hundreds of thousands, still not a great number.

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Purpose number one of an army in this world is you protect the ruling machine. So, if you think about the People's Liberation Army, it's uh goal number one, uh mission number one is to keep the Communist Party in power.

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And what's fascinating is today when China claims whatever its historical lands are, they either choose the Mongol Yuan Dynasty or the Manchu Qing Dynasty when the Han were subjugated people.

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And uh genocide is what happens to the losers in continental warfare. And apparently in our own day, the Uyghurs are slated for genocide.

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And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.

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So, China and Russia certainly have maritime ambitions, but I'm not clear they actually understand what goes into a full maritime paradigm.

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It turns out maritime powers are the exception and continental powers are the rule. Why? Cuz maritime powers, if need be, can defend themselves primarily at sea with their navies. Whereas, a continental power simply cannot.