Sarah Paine Episode 1: The War For India (Lecture & Interview)
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
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I need to start with a disclaimer because I work for the US government, and they require you to do a disclaimer. So the ideas that you're about to hear are my ideas. They don't necessarily represent those of the US government, the US Navy department, the US Department of Defense, let alone the Naval War College where I work. Are we all good on this? Alright. So today, I'm gonna tell you a story of 3 protagonists, Russia, the United States, and China, that all wanted to work their magic on India and Pakistan, which didn't exactly appreciate it. So 2 big topics, one is intervening in someone els
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Oh, well, the pry our primary enemy was pretty much the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. I mean, China was a problem, but the Soviets were the big problem. And so, India and Pakistan never fit that bill. And so it's had it had to do with whatever the problem of the day was. And Pakistan had a very, critical location, and so we needed it for a whole bunch of things. And you can see how that works. So while you need them, you pay a lot of money to them. And, presumably, the money's worth it for them for the hassles of dealing with a difficult tenant. So that's how, it it it worked.
It sounds like at the time it was right to choose Pakistan as the main ally for the United States.
Well, we tried to choose India, too, but, yeah, we tried to do them simultaneously. But India's further south. Right? And so for a long time before we got satellite imagery, you wanna have listening posts and things up in Pakistan. So India just simply doesn't have the location for that. So that was the original reason for interest in Pakistan.
I want to better understand why the Soviet Union was such a charismatic example for countries that were decolonizing, like India.
I think go back and put yourself as a generation of what your life experience was. If your life experience was World War 1, the total butchery of it, so you're telling young men your age to go, you're in a trench. I want you go up and over the edge onto oncoming machine gun fire. We know what's gonna happen when that what happens. Right? And they're literally in battles like the Psalm. They're losing 100 of thousands of people. I don't mean casualties. I mean I mean dead dead. And so, and then you have the great depression afterwards, and then add to it, India has been colonized by a bunch of
thing I was thinking about while you were mentioning the the the Gandhi and Nehru had a big problem with American segregation Yeah. Is, at the same time in the fifties, by that point, over 10% of the Soviet population had, at some point, been in the Gulags or are currently in the Gulags. And segregation is very bad. Gulags are even worse, and it's the same proportion of the population that's been in the Gulags. Maybe people just didn't know about the Gulags back then.
I don't think communists let you know those things. Right? It this is one, for a lot of Russians because, we were, my husband and I were in the Soviet Unio
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