Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake

**Sarah C. M. Paine** (0:00)
And this notion that Stalin personally is responsible for these millions of deaths, there were millions of people pulling millions of triggers for all these deaths. Initially, Hitler did incredibly well. I mean, his blitzkrieg, incredible. If he had quit right there, he would have gotten away with it and probably be considered a brilliant leader by Germans.
Putin, he's made a pivotal error.
He has no back down plan. He only has a double down plan. For the People's Republic to take Taiwan, I presume it's going to begin with an artillery barrage. I presume that's going to be leveling Taiwanese cities, right? Just watch how it goes in Ukraine. I can't imagine the Chinese being less brutal. You're going to say that's okay.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:41)
Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Sarah Paine. She is a professor of strategy and policy at the Naval War College. And she has written some of the best military history I've ever read. And we're going to get into history, strategy, all kinds of interesting topics today.
My first question, does grand strategy as a concept make sense? So you have these countries, but the people making these decisions are individuals, and they have so many individual ambitions and desires and constraints, from internal politics to, you know, factions they have to appease. Does it make sense to talk about countries having strategies?

**Sarah C. M. Paine** (1:20)
Before I get going, I have to make an obligatory disclaimer, which is what I'm about to say. In my views, they do not necessarily represent those of the US government, let alone the US. Navy Department, and much less the place where I work, which is the US. Naval War College. Okay, so now that that's over, on to grand strategy. Yeah, it is useful. I'm going to define grand strategy as the integration of all relevant instruments of national power in the pursuit of national objectives.
If you think about modern governments in the West, they have cabinets, right? And they sit before the president. Those cabinet portfolios represent the different instruments of national power. And can you imagine trying to run foreign policy without having those people at your table and coordinating?
And if you look at countries that have not coordinated all instruments, for instance, Japan in World War II versus Japan during the prior period of the Meiji Restoration, by the time the Japanese got into World War II, they're really prioritizing the Army and the Navy too, but the military as their main instrument of national power, they are not coordinating with civilians, right? They assassinate those people and they got into deep, dark trouble. They didn't listen to their finance minister who told them it was unaffordable. So, yes, grand strategy is absolutely necessary.
And the idea is you have national objectives. You want to increase security somewhere, you want to improve your own security. That would be your big objective. You want to improve trade, whatever.
And then you need to think about all of these different instruments of national power and how you're going to coordinate. Those who don't coordinate get into deep, dark trouble.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:01)
Right. So maybe having a coherent grand strategy is the ideal.

**Sarah C. M. Paine** (3:05)
Yes.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:05)
But if we want to understand history, you just mentioned the case of Japan, previous guest Richard Rhodes, who wrote The Making of the Atomic Bomb, talked about how after the war, the different branches of the military were competing with each other to see who would get more funding and who had access to nuclear weapons was a big part of that and how many. So if throughout history we look and we see lots of competition between the different parts of the government in ways that explain their choices, for example, in the case of Japan, why they invaded China instead of pursuing a maritime strategy, then isn't it more useful to just talk about the factions and the individuals rather than the strategy of the country?

**Sarah C. M. Paine** (3:46)
I think it's the individuals making their arguments for what they think the strategy should be. And I'll give you an excellent example of how the sausage is made.
So I was using the Eisenhower Archives a number of years ago. And so here's the allied commander from World War II, then president of the United States. And what he would do is bring in all the relevant parties to whatever the decision is. He would have them recommend various courses of action and they would differ arguments and counterarguments. And then they would hash it out and come up with some kind of combination of all or choosing one of them. But yeah, there's going to be a big debate. People are going to have all kinds of different ideas. In fact, this is one of the great strengths of democracy is you have to listen to the counterargument.