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How Imperial Japan Overturned the Balance of Power in Asia: Sarah Paine on the Meiji Generation, Qing China, and Tsarist Russia

Dwarkesh Patel · ▶ 1:55:50 · 40 min read
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Overview

For most of recorded history, China was the dominant civilization in Asia. Within about a decade at the turn of the twentieth century, Japan defeated both Qing China and Tsarist Russia and became the region's leading power. Japan had a population of roughly 47 million. China had about 400 million and Russia about 130 million. In this lecture and the Q&A that follows, historian Sarah Paine asks what caused that reversal. Paine calls the question especially relevant now, because a "reversal of the reversal" is under way as China returns to prominence and threatens, in Paine's words, "to put Japan back in its box."

40 min read

Paine gives the answer at the start: clever decisions in Tokyo. The lecture then tests that thesis against the strongest opposing explanation Paine can find. The conversation afterward with host Dwarkesh ranges from the Russian Revolution of 1905 to Pearl Harbor, the fiscal structure of modern China, and American foreign policy today.

A framework: argument, counterargument, rebuttal

Paine explains the method first. It comes from teaching at the Naval War College, where students must include a counterargument in their papers. The structure has three parts.

  1. Thesis. State the argument and present supporting evidence.
  2. Counterargument. Present the best alternative explanation, one that is strong but that the author still judges second-best.
  3. Rebuttal. Answer the counterargument without simply repeating the thesis, which Paine calls "really annoying." The most effective rebuttals come at the problem from a different direction entirely.

Paine argues this matters beyond scholarship. Hearing out the other side often reveals valid points that should change one's own view. It guards against monocausal explanations. It also prepares anyone who has to recommend a course of action to a boss to anticipate objections. In this lecture, the problem is a Sino-Japanese one and the rebuttal will come from a Russian angle.

The thesis has three parts. Japanese leaders Westernized their institutions. They integrated multiple instruments of national power into a coherent grand strategy. And in the Russo-Japanese War they stopped exactly at the culminating point of victory for maximum gains. Paine argues these three together overturned the Asian balance of power.

Paine adds that Japan's victory over China hurt China far more than the Opium Wars did. China could dismiss losses to "a bunch of crazy Europeans." A defeat by Japan, a country that had abandoned Chinese civilization for Western models, "detonated the Confucian underpinnings of Chinese civilization." In Paine's account, China has been searching for a replacement ever since, and for a while thought it had found one in communism.

Why Japan chose Westernization

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the late eighteenth century, spread to the continent after the Napoleonic Wars, and reached Asia by the mid-nineteenth century. Paine stresses that it produced compounded economic growth. Traditional societies were relatively static, so the gap in wealth and power between industrializing and non-industrializing states became stark. The revolution rested on technology such as armaments, railways, and telegraphs. It also rested on institutions, which Paine defines not as buildings but as the ways people organize themselves to work on a shared project. Paine calls this a hallmark of Western civilization going back to the Romans.

Japan watched China lose two wars to Western powers and feared it would be next. It was right. The United States imposed on Japan the same treaty port system that Britain and France had imposed on China. Trade was confined to designated ports. Westerners set the tariffs. Western citizens in those ports were subject to their home countries' law rather than local law. No reciprocity existed for Chinese or Japanese people abroad. Each treaty also contained a most-favored-nation clause, so any concession one power won went to all of them. Both countries lost sovereignty.

Paine contrasts the two responses. China fought war after war and kept losing. Japan first tried to diagnose the problem. It sent fact-finding mission after fact-finding mission, most famously the Iwakura Mission of 1871 to Europe and the United States. The missions studied military institutions but also political, economic, legal, social, and educational ones.

The Iwakura Mission arrived as Bismarck was finishing the third war of German unification. Prussia had risen over three wars from the weakest of Europe's five great powers to second only to Britain, partly by unifying the German states. The Japanese, who had just glued together their own feudal domains, saw a possible model.

Paine separates two terms. Modernization means adopting state-of-the-art technology of all kinds. Westernization means adopting Western institutions. The question the Japanese faced was whether a country can have the first without the second. Paine notes that this dichotomy persists: many fighters in the Middle East and North Africa happily use modern technology but want nothing to do with Western institutions. The Japanese concluded the answer was no. They did not particularly like Western culture. They believed, however, that to use advanced technology, and especially to become an independent producer of it, they needed some degree of Westernization.

The Meiji reforms and a two-phase grand strategy

Japan's objective was to protect its national security and sovereignty in an age of accelerating imperialism. Paine describes a two-phase grand strategy for achieving it. First came a domestic phase of institutional Westernization. Then came a foreign-policy phase of building an empire, because every great power of the day seemed to have one.

The domestic phase is the Meiji reforms of roughly 1869–1890, a full generation. Paine points out that only two of them were military: the draft and the creation of a general staff. The reforms began at the top of the social pyramid by abolishing the feudal domains, which were Japan's power brokers. They then went to the very bottom with compulsory elementary education, since Meiji leaders did not believe a strong modern country could have an illiterate population. The rest included a Bank of Japan, a cabinet, higher education, a professional civil service, a constitution, a parliament, and Western-style courts and laws.

Once Japan's institutions mirrored the West's, Paine says, the West had no excuse left for the treaty ports. Britain, the superpower of the day, renegotiated its treaties with Japan on the basis of juridical equality, and the other powers followed. This happened half a century before China escaped its unequal treaties.

The treaty with Britain was signed on July 16, 1894, and it ended the domestic phase. Nine days later, Japan fired the opening shots of the First Sino-Japanese War. The motive, in Paine's telling, was Russia. China was consumed by civil wars and could no longer play its role as suzerain stabilizing Korea. Paine says Korea was even worse off, with members of its royal house "mailing package bombs to each other." Japan feared Russia would fill the vacuum. The Trans-Siberian Railway, begun in 1891, ran through a region with no Russian population. Japan read it as a bid for empire in Asia. Once finished, it would let Russia deploy troops where nobody else could.

Paine frames Japan's modern wars as three wars of Russian containment: the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1931–1945. The third merged into World War II and ruined Japan, and the lecture sets it aside.

The First Sino-Japanese War and what it won

Paine describes the war as two pairs of key battles. In mid-September 1894, Japan defeated the Chinese army at Pyongyang and drove it back across the Yalu River into China. That alone achieved Japan's war objective of removing Korea from China's sphere of influence. Within the same week, at the Battle of the Yalu, the Japanese navy defeated the Chinese navy. Paine notes that both countries had state-of-the-art navies at the time. Afterward the Chinese chose never to engage again and stayed in port, which gave Japan command of the sea it needed to move troops and supplies.

Over the winter of 1894–95, Japan took Port Arthur, China's only naval refitting station for large ships, by land. It would repeat that approach a decade later. The remnant of the Chinese fleet fled to Weihaiwei. Japan landed an army on the Shandong Peninsula, blockaded the port with its navy, turned the landward guns on the ships in harbor, and sank them.

Paine sums up the gains at three levels.

  • Domestically, victory validated a Westernization program that ordinary Japanese had not liked: children pulled off farms into schools, Western curricula, Western clothing. It also greatly raised the prestige of the military, especially the army. Paine warns this would slowly tilt civil-military relations toward the military.
  • Regionally, Japan replaced China as the dominant power and acquired the start of an empire in Taiwan and the Pescadores.
  • Internationally, Japan became a recognized great power. Paine's evidence is the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Britain's only long-term alliance between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I.

The war also turned "the eye of Mordor" on Japan. Russia now saw a rising Asian power and a possible two-front problem, and a Russo-Japanese arms race followed.

Grand strategy: isolating the adversary and a closing window

Field Marshal Yamagata, who wrote the war plans for the Sino-Japanese War, predicted another war within a decade. Paine says it "came right on time." Meanwhile Japan integrated its instruments of national power.

Diplomacy. Paine cites Sun Tzu on disrupting the enemy's alliances, which in modern terms means isolating the adversary. That was the purpose of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. If more than one European power fought Japan in Asia, meaning Russia plus any partner, Britain would join Japan's side. No one wanted to take on Britain, so Russia would fight alone.

The window of opportunity. The alliance ran from 1902 to 1907. That created a window for Japan to settle its imperial position. The Trans-Siberian Railway threatened to close it. The line then ran straight through Manchuria as the Chinese Eastern Railway. It was not yet double-tracked, so trains constantly had to pull aside to let others pass. It lacked its link around Lake Baikal, which Paine says is "about the size of Switzerland." The Boxers had destroyed much of the track. As a result, when the war began in 1904, the railway could move only 20,000–40,000 men a month to the front. By the war's last battle it moved 100,000 a month. Had that capacity existed at the start, Paine argues, Japan would have faced numerically superior Russian forces from start to finish.

Naval timing pointed the same way. Japan spent the large indemnity from the Sino-Japanese War on a military buildup that was finished around 1901. At the outbreak of war, Russian naval assets in Asia were about three-quarters of Japan's, but Russia was on track to surpass Japan by about 1905. Paine emphasizes that a closing window is a sign of weakness, not strength. It means time favors the adversary, and whatever you plan must be completed before the window shuts. Paine says Japan found itself on the wrong side of such a window in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Meanwhile Russia procrastinated. It ignored Japan's offer to trade recognition of Russian dominance in Manchuria for recognition of Japanese dominance in Korea.

Information, economics, and the limits of "DIME"

Japan ran extensive psychological operations. It smuggled postcards to Russian recruits at the front that showed comfortable Japanese POW accommodations, as a contrast to death or disability in battle. Russia, Paine believes, was one of only about three European countries without a legislature; Paine suggests Montenegro and perhaps the Ottoman Empire were the others. As the war went badly and Russians took to the streets in the Revolution of 1905, Japan publicized the unrest to Russian troops, hoping Russia would have to pull forces back to European Russia.

Colonel (later General) Akashi, working from the Japanese legation in Stockholm, funded Finnish and Polish revolutionaries inside the Russian Empire toward the same end. Yuan Shikai, later key to overthrowing the Qing and China's first president, ran reconnaissance for the Japanese. Locals harassed small Russian detachments. Japan paid Manchurians for what it took, which set off a local economic boom and won goodwill. Japan also tapped into Russian fleet communications.

Economics. Loans financed two-fifths of Japan's war. Their availability and interest rates depended on battlefield success, and Japan kept winning. One reason Russia eventually quit, Paine says, was that its attempt to raise a final loan failed.

Paine then criticizes the U.S. military's Reagan-era acronym DIME: diplomacy, information, military, economics. It is better than looking only at military factors, but "cute does not mean complete." One of the most important factors in this war, especially for Russia, was railways, and "I don't see an R in there."

Culminating points and the siege of Port Arthur

Paine separates two terms. The culminating point of attack is operational and applies to a battle or campaign. Stop short and you could have taken more. Push too far and your lines stretch while the enemy's shorten, and a counterattack can drive you back further than if you had been cautious. The culminating point of victory is strategic and concerns the objective of the war itself. Stop short and you leave winnings on the table. Go too far and you typically provoke a third-party intervention, after which your earlier aims may no longer be feasible.

The war began with a Japanese surprise attack on Port Arthur (modern Lüshun), the main Russian base on the Liaodong Peninsula. At the same time, an army landed in Korea and moved northwest into Manchuria, up the railway from Port Arthur toward Harbin, with major battles at Liaoyang and Mukden. Japan had only four armies until near the end, when it cobbled together a fifth. As long as Russian ships sat in Port Arthur, one army was tied down in the siege, while Japan's theory of victory required a single annihilating battle like Bismarck's at Sedan. Russia kept losing battles but retreated in good order northward, stretching Japanese lines.

Paine notes that Japan's invasion routes closely matched those of 1894 because the geography had not changed. Britain, France, the United States, and Japan had all studied the earlier war. Paine says the Russians apparently had not. Had they done so, they would have known the Yalu crossing was lethal if defended. They would have known the Fenghuangshan and Motien ("scratch the skies") passes could wreck an attacking army. And they would have known that cutting the Liaodong Peninsula's narrow neck at Dalny would yield a rail-connected commercial port and effectively turn Port Arthur into an island. The Japanese blasted through all of these.

Since the Russian fleet would not come out, Japan had to destroy it in harbor. That meant hauling heavy 11-inch howitzers, of which Japan had few, into position behind the hills. It also meant taking 203 Meter Hill, from which a spotter could direct fire onto the ships. It took two months just to work down the peninsula. Japan was so short of artillery that it pulled guns off its ships for the siege, and Paine's map shows naval gun emplacements alongside army ones.

Meanwhile, the field armies were struggling. At Liaoyang in early September 1904, less than halfway through the war, Japanese munitions, officers, and horses all ran critically short. Paine suggests Japan may have hit its culminating point of attack there. At Shaho in October, the Japanese supply system nearly collapsed. General Nogi, commanding the 3rd Army at Port Arthur, launched four costly infantry assaults. He timed the first two just before Liaoyang and Shaho so his guns and troops could join those battles, and both assaults failed. Only after the second did he grasp the importance of 203 Meter Hill. The siege cost about 45,000 Japanese dead, which Paine notes was the size of an entire army at the time.

During a truce in early December 1904, a Russian officer said the Japanese would never capture 203 Meter Hill. The Japanese officer replied, "We'll purchase it in blood." They took it at the end of November, and within about a week they had sunk the battleships in harbor. The 3rd Army then went north for Mukden, a battle involving some 500,000 troops, in which Russia still fielded 125,000 more men than Japan. Japan was conscripting young boys and old men. Paine argues Japan was then well beyond its culminating point of attack and was saved only by incompetent Russian strategy. One more Russian battle, Paine judges, would have collapsed Japanese supply lines, and it is unclear how far down the peninsula Japan would have had to retreat.

Makarov, the Baltic Fleet, and Tsushima

Nicholas II disliked having his fleet idle and sent Admiral Makarov to take command. Paine has read Makarov's book on naval strategy and summarizes it as follows: facing a more powerful ship, attack; facing a smaller one, attack. Paine calls this "one size fits all" and "unanalytical." On April 12, Makarov mistook Japanese ships laying mines at the harbor entrance for Russian ones and ordered his men not to fire. The next morning he sortied without sweeping for mines, his ship struck one, and he went down with it, within a month of arriving.

Paine calls that a tactical error. The strategic error came two weeks later, when Nicholas decided to send the Baltic Fleet around the world to relieve Port Arthur. The sailors came from northern climates, had no air conditioning, and arrived mutinous. Barnacles fouled the hulls and slowed the ships. Britain could sustain global operations because it had a worldwide network of coaling and refitting stations, and it tried to fight on its own terms. Russia would instead fight next to Japan with slow ships and mutinous crews. Port Arthur fell while the fleet was en route, which removed its purpose, but it pressed on toward Vladivostok, a far inferior base.

Japan knew there were three routes. La Pérouse Strait was long and narrow. Tsugaru Strait was wider but passed large Japanese army bases and the port of Hakodate. The short route ran through the Korea Strait, with the Tsushima Strait, 20–25 miles wide at its narrowest, on the eastern side. The Russians took the short route, and a newly refitted Japanese fleet was waiting. Paine calls Tsushima one of the most lopsided naval battles in history: Japan sank or captured essentially the entire Russian fleet. Paine attributes this to a navy run by aristocrats, led by a man known, as Paine recalls it, for "fast women and slow ships."

War termination and the gains of Portsmouth

In contrast to World War II, Paine says, Japan understood from the start that its strategy was high-risk and high-reward, and it prepared an exit. When Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi convened the cabinet to decide on war, he was already lining up Viscount Kaneko, a Harvard graduate and acquaintance of Theodore Roosevelt, to prepare Roosevelt to mediate. Another Harvard alumnus, Baron Komura, would negotiate at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Itō's son-in-law, a Diet member and Cambridge graduate, went to Britain to keep the alliance solid.

At Mukden, Yamagata decided to play "the American card." Yamagata reasoned that the enemy would never sue for peace unless Japan took Moscow or St. Petersburg, which was impossible. Russia still had powerful forces at home while Japan had exhausted its own, and Japan had lost officers it could not replace. The Russian army was now three times Japan's size and increasingly composed of crack troops. Paine notes that in 1894 Tokyo had pulled Yamagata out of the theater for fear he would march on Beijing and attempt regime change. This time he said, "We must now be prudent." The chief of staff of the Manchurian army put it as "if you start a fire, you've got to put it out." Field Marshal Ōyama, before taking command in Manchuria, told the navy minister, "I'm counting on you as the man to tell me when to quit."

While talks about holding talks were under way, Roosevelt suggested Japan seize Sakhalin. It meant little to Japan beyond fishing grounds, but as sovereign Russian territory it would be a valuable bargaining chip. Japan achieved its immediate aims: Russian withdrawal from Manchuria and a Japanese sphere in Korea. It also gained more than its prewar offer had sought: southern Sakhalin, and southern Manchuria, which Paine calls arguably the more valuable half because it contained Port Arthur, Dalny, and the Russian-built railways. The war confirmed Japan as Asia's dominant power. "I rest my case," Paine says.

The counterargument: China's perfect storm

The best counterargument, in Paine's view, is that Japan rose because China collapsed. Paine presents three parts of this "perfect storm."

Civil wars. China had reached its preindustrial limits to growth. Population kept rising while agricultural productivity could not keep up, so people farmed marginal land. That caused soil erosion and famines, which were both a cause and an effect of civil war. Paine's table of rebellions from 1845 to 1895 peaks between 1851 and 1878. The Taiping Rebellion alone is estimated to have killed 20 million people. Paine says the figures are uncertain because China did not know its own population, and compares the toll with the roughly 55 million estimated dead of World War II. Paine rejects the Chinese label of "rebellions": some aimed to overthrow the dynasty and others to secede, so "they're civil wars." Some provinces were devastated for generations.

Accelerating imperialism. Europeans and Japanese carved out spheres of influence after China lost a series of regional wars: two Opium Wars, the loss of the Ryukyus to Japan, the loss of Indochina in the Sino-French War, and the loss of Korea in 1894–95. The Ili crisis in Xinjiang went somewhat better.

Manchu dynastic decline. The Manchus, about 2% of the population, rose on superb cavalry and made China the richest polity in the world by the eighteenth century. Their conquests of Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, however, required expensive garrisons paid for by the core provinces. Later emperors no longer led armies. The Qianlong Emperor spent on architecture. Emperors grew isolated, lacked command experience, and spent heavily. Paine adds that opium from tributaries was consumed by emperors, their attendants, and the Manchu banner forces. Paine connects this to the last Qing emperors' failure to produce heirs despite large harems, and remarks that no wonder wars were lost when key decision-makers were not thinking clearly.

The rebuttal: Russia as catalyst, and Nogi's poem

Leaving the counterargument there, Paine says, would "shoot myself in the foot." The rebuttal comes from Russia. Russia exploited China's collapse, and Japan leveraged what Russia set in motion. During the Opium Wars and the simultaneous Taiping and Nian rebellions, Russia offered to act as intermediary with the Western powers if the Qing signed treaties ceding vast territory. Paine says the Qing were vague on geography, did not believe in treaties, and expected to recover the land. Russia then did nothing as intermediary while the British and French took what they wanted. Paine estimates that by the time the Bolsheviks finished, Russia had taken from the Chinese sphere more territory than the United States east of the Mississippi.

The railway was meant to integrate those gains. The Chinese Eastern Railway cut straight across Manchuria to save construction costs and stake a claim there, with a spur south to Port Arthur for a warm-water port, since Vladivostok froze for months before icebreakers. During the Boxer Rebellion, Russia sent 100,000 troops, more than any other power. When the other powers and Japan withdrew, Russia stayed in Manchuria. Paine identifies this as the point where Japan lost patience with Russian procrastination. In Paine's account, the Japanese finessed all of it, which returns the analysis to the original thesis.

Paine ends the lecture with General Nogi. He lost both sons in the war, one at Nanshan and his favorite under his own command at Port Arthur. He asked the Meiji Emperor for permission to commit ritual suicide, and the emperor refused. When the emperor died, Nogi and his wife took their own lives. Paine reads his poem: "Imperial troops, a million strong, conquered an arrogant enemy; but siege and field warfare left a mountain of corpses. Ashamed, what face can I show to old parents? How many men have returned this day of triumphal song?" Paine's closing line is "Wars bring much sorrow."

Q&A: Why didn't Russia bring its weight to bear?

Dwarkesh asks why Russia, with 130 million people to Japan's 47 million and a railway largely complete by 1905, didn't keep fighting with fresh troops. Paine gives several reasons. The railway was a genuine bottleneck, and Japan deliberately struck while it was constrained. Russians were arrogant and initially imagined regime change in Tokyo. Paine calls gross underestimation of the enemy a common failing, citing Putin in Ukraine and Hitler toward the Soviet Union. Meiji education gave Japan literate soldiers, while Russian soldiers were largely illiterate and had no buy-in. Paine says some royal favorites apparently hoped for timber concessions on the Korean border, which Paine calls "a non-performing economic model," since European Russia had no shortage of wood. The navy spent almost no time at sea. Above all, the value of the object differed. Japan's government and educated class saw the war as existential, looked at China, and saw their own possible future. For Russia, already the largest country on earth, Asia offered little.

Paine locates Russia's inability to mobilize in its institutions. It had no legislature and no cabinet in the Japanese sense; the tsar met ministers one at a time. Romanov relatives staffed the ministries as the family's informants. Some generals were startlingly incompetent: one reportedly did not know what a howitzer was, and a planner could not read maps. Command was split between General Kuropatkin, a professional, and Admiral Alekseyev, a royal favorite. Kuropatkin wanted to draw the Japanese inland and then strike, as Russia had done with Napoleon, but aristocrats insisted on engaging immediately. Paine thinks Kuropatkin's strategy would probably have worked. As for World War I, when Russia mobilized far more men, Paine points to the much denser rail network in European Russia, where the population lived and where Russians saw their historic threats.

Asked what specifically in the Meiji reforms produced mobilization, Paine says plainly, "I don't know the answer." Paine points to a Japanese culture of detail, hard work, and service to the emperor.

Was Russia on track to dominate Asia?

Dwarkesh suggests the real story may be that Russia, with roughly four times Japan's population, was on course to dominate Asia if its modernization had worked, and Japan acted early to prevent that. Paine answers "tangentially." Russia's tragedy is misinvestment. Sergei Witte, its finest late-tsarist minister, told Nicholas to forget Asian adventures and build railways in European Russia. Paine thinks Witte was right: better railways might have changed Russia's World War I performance and averted the St. Petersburg food riots that toppled the dynasty. Paine applies the same critique to Putin, who could have invested oil revenue in transportation and in a legal system that let individuals invest and profit. "Tsars couldn't stand merchants. Communists hated them even more."

Dwarkesh then offers a different explanation, drawing on a conversation with Stephen Kotkin while declining to attribute specific claims to Kotkin. On this view, the 1905 revolution was the decisive factor: peasant revolt, mass strikes, Bloody Sunday, and a government pushed to promise reforms. That would be luck rather than Japanese brilliance. Paine calls it a good argument that "might be right" and says it cannot be settled without being inside Nicholas II's head. Paine's own emphasis is on Nicholas's incompetence. A ruler like Peter the Great, Paine speculates, would have used loyal units to crush the unrest, won another battle, and watched the revolution fade. Paine notes that one purpose of the counterargument exercise is getting comfortable with ambiguity.

Port Arthur and Pearl Harbor

Dwarkesh proposes that 1904 helps explain why Japan thought Pearl Harbor could work. In both cases an adversary was about to gain decisive leverage: the finished railway in 1904, and in 1941 an American oil embargo after the invasion of French Indochina that left Japan one to two years of oil. Both wars opened with a surprise attack and relied on the hope of annihilating battles.

Paine agrees both were window-of-opportunity gambles, which are inherently high-risk. Paine adds the concept of a cooperative adversary, meaning not one that wants to help you but one that plays its cards badly, like a child playing a card game. Nicholas II was one. The United States was not. Paine also argues that one successful war makes the next seem easier and less risky than it is, and cites the Gulf War, followed by later complaints that the U.S. should have gone on to Baghdad: "We did that. That didn't work out so well."

In Japan, the two victories shifted power toward the military. The public came to believe officers had won the wars and diplomats had lost the peace. After Portsmouth, people complained about the lack of an indemnity, overlooking the Russian railway system, which Paine calls "an indemnity in kind." Itō, the leading civilian of the Meiji generation, was assassinated by a Korean revolutionary more than a decade before Yamagata died, which gave the military side another decade to entrench itself. Paine stresses that institutions take generations to sink roots and that the Meiji leaders' successors were not their equals. Paine treats the order of Itō's and Yamagata's deaths as a case of historical contingency: it need not have happened that way, and perhaps nothing would have changed, but "you can't rerun the experiment." Paine sums up the attitude: "I don't care who's right. I care what's right."

Dwarkesh suggests Japan misjudged American cohesion by expecting Russia-style internal destabilization. Paine reframes the question. Japan's real war was with China. By 1941 its aim there had become unlimited regime change, unlike in 1894, when Tokyo reined Yamagata in, or in 1904, when Japan never sought regime change in Russia. Frustrated in China, Japan attacked the colonial powers across Asia, bringing in the United States, Britain, the Commonwealth, and the Netherlands. Instead of isolating its adversary, it added new ones.

Witte, Sun Yat-sen, and the fragmentation of China

Dwarkesh notes that Witte, finance minister from 1892 to 1902, saw himself as Russia's Bismarck, and asks why top-down reform worked in Japan but not Russia. Paine cites Russia's very high illiteracy, the burden of a perpetually overextended empire occupying places that cost more than they yield, and a less favorable starting point than Germany, which was central, developed, literate, and better equipped with infrastructure. Russia's size made railway-building enormous. Paine also makes remarks about national work cultures, saying they have never heard Russians described as hardworking and dismissing appeals to the "Russian soul" as an excuse.

Dwarkesh quotes Sun Yat-sen: "We regarded the Russian defeat by Japan as a defeat of the West by the East. We regarded the Japanese victory as our own victory." Why did Chinese reformers admire Japan? Paine points to Japan's paying Manchurians for supplies, and to the fact that in China the 1894 war is called the Qing-Japanese War. Japan had defeated the Manchus, whom Han nationalists did not necessarily mind seeing beaten, and had gotten out quickly. Sun turned to nationalism to replace the Confucianism the war had shattered. Paine suspects Chinese hostility toward Japan grew gradually and was driven by the brutality of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Dwarkesh raises defense spending. By his account, China spent under 1% of output and Russia much less than Japan, which spent about 5% over the preceding decade and 10% in 1904. Paine adds that China was not truly unified. Loyalties were provincial, and provincial governors financed the fleets. The southern fleet asked the northern fleet for help in the Sino-French War and was refused. In 1894 the northern fleet asked the southern fleet for help and was likewise refused. That system worked against nomadic raids but not against Western powers. Paine argues China erred by fighting in the treaty ports rather than drawing the British inland, and compares the situation to George Washington's success against Britain. Paine calls this China's own failure of leadership and institutions. Paine says the United States should take the lesson that resources are not enough without good organization and leadership.

Dwarkesh connects this to modern China. By his figures, U.S. government spending splits about 50/50 between federal and state levels, while in China about 85% is local and 15% national. Local governments have financed much uneconomic construction. Paine agrees that under the Qing, localities financed nearly everything, which bred corruption because officials without budgets had to extract graft. Paine calls this an enduring institutional pattern.

Legacy, technology, and peace terms

Why did Russia reject the Manchuria-for-Korea deal? Paine points to gross underestimation and racism. Paine also mentions, without claiming it mattered, that Nicholas as tsarevich was attacked with a sword in Japan during his royal tour and carried a scar. Paine praises Japan's achievements, including its place as the only non-Western member of the G7. Paine argues that without World War II, the Meiji reforms would be studied as a development model, and that Deng Xiaoping's policies and the development of Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan "rhyme" with them. Japan does not get credit because of wartime brutality, but Paine insists these are "two separate topics, different generations."

On technology, Dwarkesh notes that both sides bought Western weapons. China had German battleships in 1894, and in 1904 Japan and Russia both had British ships, with Russia also buying French ones. Paine answers that weapons must be learned and maintained. Russia bought a fancy fleet but barely went to sea, while Japan constantly trained. Paine adds that when the value of the object is high, as for Americans against Britain, Iraqis and Afghans against the United States, or Ukrainians against Russia, technology may not decide the outcome.

Dwarkesh observes that Portsmouth left Japanese feeling cheated while Versailles left Germans aggrieved, so the lessons seem to point in opposite directions. Paine distinguishes limited from unlimited wars. Japan's objective also had to be feasible. Had Japan demanded more, Paine argues, Nicholas would have resumed the war with crack troops arriving at 100,000 a month. Heavy losses make people feel owed; Paine cites Nogi, the emperor's sorrow, and Putin's need for gains to justify his casualties. "The longer these wars go on, the harder it is to stop them." Versailles, in Paine's view, failed because of unwillingness to enforce it, the Anglo-French desire to get even, and the Great Depression. Paine argues the Depression worsened because the United States refused to act as lender of last resort, a role Britain could no longer play.

A disagreement over institutions, and the audience questions

Paine then turns to present-day American policy. Paine argues that retreating from roles like the nuclear shield will make the United States "an irrelevant power instead of an essential power," and that Europe, which "invented" the West and has the institutions, will reorganize and begin trading around the U.S. Paine quotes Churchill: "The only thing worse than working with allies is trying to survive without them."

Dwarkesh names what he calls a recurring crux. Paine centers institutions, while he looks more at economic and population size, and he doubts Europe can displace the United States. Paine asks why Argentina, large and resource-rich, isn't a great power. Dwarkesh says its economy is poor because of domestic mistakes under Peronism. Paine responds that populists are by definition not institutionalists, so that is an institutional failure. They settle on agreeing that institutions matter. Dwarkesh thinks Europe's weak growth shows its institutions are poor. Paine suspects the existential threat from Putin will force Europe to fix them, while acknowledging, "Maybe I'll be dead wrong." Paine grants merit to making Europe pay for its own defense but objects to the method. Paine cites Machiavelli: seek fear rather than love, but never make people hate you, because "if they hate you, they will fight you."

In the audience questions, an anonymous questioner asks about grand strategy for a status-quo minor power like South Korea. Paine's answer is alliances. Small and medium countries acting together become powerful, and they built much of the rules-based order, illustrated by a credit card that works almost anywhere in the world. Asked why Japan was more open to Western ideas than China, Paine offers a guess. China suffered from the success of its civilization and a myth that everything worth knowing came from China, while Japan, long in China's shadow, was used to learning from others. Paine wonders whether the United States now has "a fatal case" of the same hubris.

Asked where the U.S. should send delegates today, Paine says to its allies, starting with an apology, which Paine "can't see ever happening." Paine defends the State Department. Paine did not deliberately read the classified WikiLeaks cables, but as reported in the press they showed accurate, in-depth professional reporting. Paine also notes that War College students routinely proposed quadrupling the State Department's small budget. Much good government work prevents catastrophes that cannot be measured because they never happen. Paine's examples are diplomacy against Indo-Pakistani nuclear war, vaccines such as the polio vaccine, and meteorologists and sirens for storms.

Finally, anticipating a joint podcast with Elon Musk, Paine describes two types of American hubris. Type 1 is Washington's "half-court tennis," ignoring what other countries do. Type 2 is believing that talent in one field transfers to everything. Paine grants Musk is "incredibly talented" but offers the analogy that a good hairdresser does not become a good auto mechanic. People making decisions outside their expertise, Paine concludes, "will not work out well."

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