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

Dwarkesh Patel opens the interview by introducing Sarah Paine, a professor of strategy and policy at the Naval War College, and then asks whether grand strategy makes sense as a concept at all. His worry is that decisions are made by individuals with personal ambitions, internal politics and factions to appease, so it may be misleading to speak of countries having strategies. Paine first states that her views are her own and do not represent the US government, the Navy department or the Naval War College.

Paine defines grand strategy as the integration of all relevant instruments of national power in pursuit of national objectives. Her illustration is the modern Western cabinet: each cabinet portfolio stands for a different instrument of national power, and she asks whether anyone could run foreign policy without those people at the table, coordinating. Her test case for failure is Japan. In World War Two the military was Japan's main instrument of national power and it did not coordinate with civilians; it assassinated them and got "into deep, dark trouble." Japan also ignored its finance minister, who told the leadership the war was unaffordable. She contrasts this with the earlier Meiji Restoration period and concludes that those who do not coordinate pay for it.

Patel presses the point by citing a previous guest, Richard Rhodes, who described how the military branches competed after the war for funding and for access to nuclear weapons. If history keeps showing competing parts of government, as in Japan's choice to invade China rather than follow a maritime strategy, he asks, why not talk about factions and individuals instead of national strategy? Paine's answer is that strategy is what individuals argue for. She draws on her time in the Eisenhower archives, where the former Allied Commander and President brought in all relevant parties, had them recommend courses of action with arguments and counter-arguments, and then had them hash out a combination or a single choice.

But the notion that you’re going to streamline it and not have disagreements, that’s what dictators do and they have problems.

For Paine, the debate is a strength of democracy, because leaders must hear the counter-argument or lose the election. Dictators avoid disagreement, and the result she names is that they "double down on bad decisions."

Patel observes that in World War II many countries had well-coordinated budgets across their branches, while Japan did not, and asks whether democracy explains why the US and Britain coordinated better. Paine says democracy is part of the answer, and adds a generational explanation. The strategic leaders of World War II were the conscripts of World War I. They returned, started families during the Great Depression, and by the time they held senior roles they risked sending their own children to war. In the West, particularly Britain and the United States, they thought hard about what had gone wrong and answered with institution building on a massive scale, integrating all elements of national power. She lists the National Security Act and the organizations it created, such as the National Security Council, along with the United Nations and NATO.

Patel then raises a puzzle: one might expect victors to have the most inflated view of reality and losers to be forced to reckon with defeat, yet the US produced leaders like Patton and Curtis LeMay while Hitler, a World War I veteran himself, made so many mistakes. Paine says Hitler initially did incredibly well, and that if he had stopped with the Anschluss and Czechoslovakia, presenting himself as uniting the German people, Germans would probably have considered him a brilliant leader. She attributes the overreach to hubris: the Blitzkrieg worked even though his generals said it could not, and he went further and overextended.

Paine also cautions against crediting great Western generals alone. Their success depended on many others: the British and Poles who helped break the Enigma codes, Henry Ford turning his cars into tanks, the builders of the Liberty ships, the scientists on the Manhattan Project, and a mobilization in which Americans and the British were all on board. Patton, she says, had a whole civilian architecture behind him, and people tend to personify it in the general when it was everybody.

Patel asks for the latest point at which Hitler could have stopped and consolidated the largest possible empire. He offers options: after 1939, with Poland taken jointly with the Soviet Union and no invasion of Russia or declaration of war on the United States; a negotiated peace with Britain; or a stop after the fall of France. Paine says she does not know, but thinks Hitler could have sold the claim that he was a continuation of Bismarck fighting limited wars and uniting the German people, and might have quit after the Anschluss. Once he moved to genocide against the Poles, she says, "we are off to a different race," because Poland is why Britain entered the war.

When Patel asks whether a world where Hitler simply controls Europe was possible, for instance if Britain without Churchill had let him have it, Paine rejects the premise. In her view it is not who Hitler was: he wrote in Mein Kampf what he wanted to do, and he carried a genocidal program with him. She adds a structural reason that taking too much fails. The Poles went through three partitions and the Polish identity never disappeared. A dominated population that hates domination means unstable borders, and it is easy for others to fund insurgencies.

Patel proposes that Hitler might have stopped before Stalingrad, when he controlled roughly 30% of the Soviet Union, and asks whether Germany under another leader could have held that part of Eurasia. Paine replies that Hitler would never hold it and "will choke on his acquisitions." She then turns the argument around, pointing to Ukraine today as an example of territorial conquest: mass killing and wealth destruction at a rapid pace. Since the Industrial Revolution in the West, she says, a consensus has grown that this is not the way, and that countries do better by crafting international institutions, laws and treaties, signing the parts they want and adhering to them, so that they can run commercial transactions around the world without being killed.

She calls territorial expansion a throwback to a pre-Industrial Revolution way of managing national security, the way traditional continental empires always operated. Compounding economic growth offers a different alternative: compound wealth through rules everyone can adhere to, and run commerce on that basis. The people making the money since the Industrial Revolution, she says, are those who buy into that system.

Patel asks why Russia pushed back so robustly against Germany: it lost tens of millions of soldiers yet its government did not collapse as the Tsars' did in World War I, and a communist country produced advanced tanks in large and reliable numbers, despite Stalin having killed so many of his own people. Paine reframes the question by asking what the Germans did. She invokes the concept of death ground from Samuel Griffith's translation of Sun Tzu: when an enemy puts you on death ground, they are going to kill you, you have no choice but to fight, and even if the odds are poor, fighting is the only way out.

Her evidence is Ukraine. Ukrainians initially welcomed the Germans because Stalin and associates had imposed the terrible famine of the early 1930s on them, and they could not imagine anything worse until they met the Nazis, who had them dig their own mass graves. Paine says that if you do this to people, "you will conjure a formidable enemy." She sees the same process now: before the 2014 invasion of Crimea, Ukraine had a corrupt government and people were at sixes and sevens over whether to do Ukrainian things or Russian things, but Russians now blowing away the people most loyal to them and leveling apartment buildings lead Ukrainians to conclude that coexisting with these people is over.

Paine notes the irony that Putin is forging Ukrainian national identity, and says wars often do this. The thirteen American colonies were very different from one another, and the Revolutionary War began to forge a national identity; by the end of the Civil War, northern soldiers who had been all over the country had a real sense of nation.

Patel closes this section with a challenge to the death-ground idea. The US pursued unconditional surrender against Germany and Japan, and against the South in the Civil War, and he notes that the US did not commit genocide. He asks whether that differs from the total, unlimited objectives Germany had in Ukraine or Japan had in China, and why unconditional surrender, which also puts one's back against the wall, did not produce the same kind of morale. The question is left open in this section.

Answering Patel's challenge about unconditional surrender, Paine says the United States did not put the people of Germany and Japan on death ground; the leadership put itself there. Her example is Tojo Hideki: if he backed down on anything he would be out of office and did not know what would follow, and he thought, as the US was planning, that he would be executed at the end of the war. The Japanese people eventually figured out that they were not on death ground, and by then they were so exhausted that, in her words, the society shattered. She adds that the US was never going to massacre the German people the way the Russians and Germans massacred Poles, which she links to the eight or nine million Polish deaths in World War II.

Patel objects that the firebombing of Tokyo, Dresden and Berlin was also terrible, citing 84,000 deaths in one night in Tokyo, and asks why it did not produce a total death-ground mindset. Paine says she does not know, but offers context. Japan had been at war in China since 1931, sending hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Manchuria while the Chinese did not give up, so by 1945 the war had lasted a long time. Japanese forces had also committed atrocities in China that they knew about, and in one case commanders had wounded Japanese soldiers executed so that cripples would not go home or be picked up by the Allies. She asks the listener to imagine how Japanese soldiers felt about that.