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Unknown A
I think Americans need to worry about overextension. Any country has to worry about overextension. We have finite resources. Also, you're talking about sending your fellow Americans go get themselves killed. That's quite something to ask someone to make that kind of sacrifice. See, it had better be worth it, right? There are 300 million Americans while the world's got 8 billion. Be cautious. And what's key on this maritime order, the big insurance policy of it all is our allies and institutions. This is the great gift of the greatest generation of having created the UN which is how many millions of lives have been saved from polio, vaccines and other things that come through the un. Do not dismiss these organizations. They've done a lot or the EU work through these things and listen to your allies. They will have insights. And there is power in allies. Tell me who China's allies are.
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Unknown A
The crazy man in Korea who can't even feed people in the 21st century, although he certainly feeds himself. But that's a whole. Yeah, I mean it's incredible. China's. Who are. Who are China's friends? I mean Iran, a theocracy. I mean, talk about passe. Who does theocracies anymore? Okay, the Iranians. Okay, good on them.
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Unknown B
So after World War II, the Soviets are giving the communists in China tremendous amounts of leftover weapons from the Japanese. At the same time, Truman does an actual arms embargo on Chiang kai Shek in 1946. The Marshall Plan for Europe is 13 billion to help build up defenses against communist appeal. At the same time, Truman has to be forced in 1948 by Congress to give a couple hundred million to China, literally 100th of what was given to Europe. And by that time it's too late for Chiang Kai Shek. If you just look at that record, it just seems like sort of we've abysmally messed up after World War II and Halo being the nationalist state in power. Right.
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Unknown A
Do not exaggerate the capabilities of any one country for openers. But I think it's really important to distinguish between nation building and nation rebuilding. If you're rebuilding, which is what happens in Japan and Germany, they already had full up institutions, modern economies before the war. They had no problems with educational institutions going all the way up, judicial institutions. They had competent police forces, they had parliaments and other things so that when you give Germans some cash and Japanese as well, they know exactly how to recreate things and rapidly produce modern institutions. Human. You're talking about China. They never had these institutions. There is no indigenous expertise. Oh, and by the way, what's the illiteracy rate in China compared to Japan? Whoa. No one reads in China and everyone reads in Japan. It's not quite that bad. And we've had this problem in Iraq and Afghanistan, so we decide we're doing the de Ba'athification thing, and then we think the police are going to still show up and work.
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Unknown A
Except, no, that's not how it works. They haven't got these institutions, and so it's not feasible. A Marshall Plan in China would not have worked. And also, we had really competent Foreign Service officers in China in this period. Why? They're the children of missionaries. And so they spoke fluent Chinese and had a deep understanding of China. And they were saying, it's hopeless, that there is no way Chiang Kai Shek's going to win this thing because he's hated by the peasantry, which he was, because, for the reasons I've told you, right? If he's busy dragooning them into his armies because he feels he has no choices, whereas the Communists are giving them land and educating them, you better believe who the peasants are supporting. And the missionaries, they were then caught up in the McCarthy purges and were just about ruined. Lost their jobs in the State Department and elsewhere, only to be exonerated.
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Unknown A
I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years later when they've already lost their careers and who knows how they raised their families.
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Unknown B
I thought it was a case that later on they realized it was hopeless and so then they stopped supporting Cheng.
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Unknown A
But at the time, different people realize it at different times, but the reason.
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Unknown B
They didn't support Cheng as much as they should have was because it was just thought that, like, Cheng is going to win and therefore we don't have to support him.
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Unknown A
No, no, no, no.
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Unknown B
They're constantly goading the Nationalists to form some sort of ceasefire, do some sort of coalition government, when in fact, what Xij done is like, no, you have to make sure that you keep China.
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Unknown A
No, it was considered hopeless. This is called making a net assessment of not what you want it to be, but an accurate one. They believed it was not feasible even.
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Unknown B
In, like, 1945, 46.
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Unknown A
You're talking hundreds of millions of people. We can't even deal with Afghanistan today with, what, 20 million people? It's not feasible. It's at the end of World War II. American GIs are sick of it and as are their parents.
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Unknown B
We didn't have to send gis. We just had to, like, not cut off support.
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Unknown A
Europe has been leveled and there's this absolute fear that, that the communists are gonna move into Europe, which actually counts. For Western economies in those days, the Italian and French communist parties were incredibly strong. So all the focus of limited resources is gonna make sure that Europe settles out. And we don't have infinite resources.
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Unknown B
I feel like you do better than 1/100 of the Marshall Plan to keep China from turning communist. And look what the consequences was. Vietnam, we had to fight Korea, we had to fight Cambodia, the genocide there.
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Unknown A
But you can't solve all these things. There are things that are not feasible. I'm gonna linger on this because you're an optimist. But anyway, maybe you're right. But anyway, you've got my take on it and you've got. I can't prove I'm right.
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Unknown B
I remember in your book there's a passage where you say there's so many sort of individual contingent things that led to the communists taking power. If any of these factors was off, the outcome might have been different.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
Of all these factors, the fact that American support or lack thereof was not one of them. It just seems like it was a super contingent thing. But also America not being as strong as it should have just didn't matter.
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Unknown A
I don't know that it may. It's just not politically feasible. I mean, talk about it. You want to go put yourself back in those days. You've already done a three year tour in World War II. Because in those days you started serving whenever it was in the war and you weren't coming home until the war was over. It was none of this nine month tour here and there, you're there for the duration. So you get home and then you're told go make nice to the Chinese and go get yourself killed there. How is that gonna fly in your family? Probably poorly.
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Unknown B
I mean again, you don't have to send the GIs there. You can just not do an arms embargo on them.
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Unknown A
I think it was so minor, by then it's too late. The great question is some people would argue that in 1946 when Marshall tells Chiang Kai Shek to stop halt his advance, this is when he's doing quite well. And when I mentioned that the terminal point of retreat for the communists was up and sipping Manchuria, some would argue that Marshall should never have done that. He should have let the Nationalists go all the way up and that would have changed the outcome of the Chinese civil war. You could make an argument that that might be true. Here's the counter argument. I don't know the answer if you look at a map of China or imagine one, Manchuria is way up, it's like a salient into communist territory cause it's bordering all the Soviet Union and then it's got quite, quite a coastline. But the Soviets had blockaded that, so nothing's getting in that way.
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Unknown A
The only way, given the Chinese railway system is literally one train line connects Manchuria to South China. So it means Chiang Kai Shek's movements are incredibly predictable. So one argument you could make, and people have, and I don't know the answer, none of us does, is that hey, that was the big error. So if that's the big error, the mistake, and this is a common one that Americans make, so this is worth talking about, is Americans often don't look at warring parties to understand if they are primary adversaries. There is no way you're going to make them make nice. So the United States had trouble for years trying to get Pakistanis and Indians to cooperate and it would want to give aid to both of them and just didn't get it. As long as they're primary adversaries you aid one infuriates the other and they're never going to cooperate, the two of them or I suspect what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Unknown A
So you want to have a democracy and you want to have all the parties represented. Well, if they all want to obliterate each other, the last thing they want to do is have representation of the other side. Right. So if you have parties that want to exterminate each other, the idea of getting them to cooperate is impossible. So don't try it. So that would be the lesson from this thing of the. We kept trying to do a coalition government with the communists, the Nationalists. It's a non starter. The United States was a very isolationist country and didn't have the attitude of a great power until after World War II. In World War I we felt dragged into it and these horrible wars and being quite irresponsible during the Great Depression and just ignoring everybody else's problems, didn't want to hear about it. And then we get a World War II out of that and then we rethink that whole proposition.