Dr Sarah Paine on the global threat of war, the collapse of the rules-based order, and what comes next
Steven Bartlett interviews Dr Sarah Paine, a historian specialising in Russia, China, and grand strategy, on the forces driving global instability in 2025.
Summary
Steven Bartlett speaks with Dr. Sarah Paine about the deteriorating state of the global order, the conflict in Iran, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the rise of what she calls "continentalist" powers. Dr. Paine argues that the US conflict with Iran is among the most strategically incompetent wars in history — destroying America's alliance system, tanking its economy, and incentivising nuclear proliferation in Iran. She contends that Vladimir Putin has made an irreversible pivotal error in Ukraine, that Russia will continue pushing westward unless stopped, and that the post-World War II rules-based order is collapsing in real time. She warns that the normalisation of lies — in Russia historically and in the United States now — corrodes the foundations of functioning societies, and that democratic nations must urgently rebuild institutions and support Ukraine before the conflict spreads further into Europe.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The long arc of history: continental versus maritime world orders
Steven Bartlett: Dr Sarah Paine, you might be one of the most knowledgeable people that I think I've ever spoken to on the subjects we're going to speak about today, and they are subjects that I think are incredibly timely based on everything that's going on in the world. What I see is war over here, war over here, conflict over here, Putin invading this place, Trump going into Iran. What I see on the streets of Paris, where we were yesterday, is rioting, and I see disorder. But I don't know where the first domino fell that caused everything we're seeing now, or what the background context is. So I'm going to ask you — where does this all start?
Dr Sarah Paine: Well, history doesn't start. It's a long continuum. But I'll try on some concepts that might be helpful. The way countries used to organise themselves — and often they were empires — was by land as a currency of power. So the continentalist world is all about taking territory from others, and when you're doing that, you're burning wealth. Then later an alternate possibility came. It originated from maritime powers, but ultimately it becomes a maritime world order, which is something different. Britain is a maritime power, but then you get to the industrial revolution where suddenly you can compound wealth, and that's a game-changer, because it changes the currency of power. In that continental world, it's all about land. The industrial revolution changes the currency of power to industry, commerce, and trade. If you do those things, you get compounded wealth, and with that you can buy your armies or do whatever you want.
The maritime order is about compounding wealth from having universal rules. You've been travelling all over — your little piece of plastic works everywhere. That's based on a rules-based order. You've got a small company and you operate in various countries — no one's taking you down for the money you're making, all your transactions are working across the world. This is the rules-based order. If it goes away, the billionaires who've been funnelling their money into the continentalists — their world will disappear too. They will become casualties of it.
And when I think about what's important on this planet, it would be you, the young. Please tell me what is more important than the generations that follow. Just tell me what it is. Nothing.
Steven Bartlett: Are you concerned about the next generation?
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah.
Steven Bartlett: Why?
Dr Sarah Paine: We're potentially barrelling our way into a world war. We have reckless people running some very large and important countries around the world. And as you've noticed, once wars start — easy to do that part. Really hard to end them. Why? Because whoever's losing doesn't want to lose. So they keep doubling down long after they've lost.
Steven Bartlett: You said you think we're sort of barrelling towards a world war. People have probably said that every year since World War II.
Dr Sarah Paine: Ah, do you have negative and positive objectives here? Here we go. A positive objective — if you make something happen, like I want to snatch Maduro and put him in a New York prison, we can verify that the guy's in a New York prison. You snatched him. That's a positive objective. A negative objective would be preventing something from happening. And how can you prove how many times a world war was avoided in the last however many years? You can't. And it's also controversial on deterrence, because you can say, "I've invested in whatever it is and this has deterred everybody," and then it's prove it. Well, you can't prove it.
The example I use as a parent: if you have a little kid, a lot of it's negative objectives — preventing the little kid from getting run over. You hold their hand on the street. If you're living in New York, how many times in a day just walking up the street did you save that child's life because you were hanging on to their hand before they took off in front of traffic? So negative objectives are incredibly important. And since I'm on this topic, governments, I believe, are primarily about negative objectives. Preventing disasters. Disaster number one would be foreign invasion. But also preventing bridges from collapsing — we inspect them. Preventing all kinds of malpractice across professions — we license people. Having everyone be illiterate — you have education. Governments don't actually get credit for what they do because on a normal day it's normal. So you think, well, my government hasn't done anything for me lately. Untrue.
And that applies here to the idea that people have probably through history said there was going to be a war a lot. So is there particular writing on the wall at this moment in the timeline?
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. What is the writing on the wall?
The Iran war: strategic incompetence and its global consequences
Dr Sarah Paine: Well, the Iran war is probably one of the most incompetent wars in human history.
Steven Bartlett: Was that a mistake?
Dr Sarah Paine: Well, yeah. Let's do some concepts of how to analyse that. In a war, if you're doing it right — if you really must have a war — you put all the costs on the person you're fighting and you minimise costs yourself. Well, this war has trashed the US economy. It has blown the US alliance system. Yes, Iran is hurting without a doubt, but it also has the collateral damage of taking down the world's economy. So this now transforms the United States from an annoyance to just about everyone's primary adversary for threatening their economies. That's breathtakingly incompetent.
Steven Bartlett: What was the misunderstanding?
Dr Sarah Paine: I'm not privy to the decision-making. So let's do another thing about assessment. When you do an assessment before you even do a war, you need to look at not just my strengths and your weaknesses — which clearly was part of the assessment, we're strong, we figured all that out — but also your strengths and my weaknesses. And all the other people who might be interested. And clearly that was absent. Or the people who should have been saying, "Hey, the first thing they're going to do is shut down Hormuz," weren't there. It's like a hot water bottle. If you cook that thing, it means anybody who lives there who doesn't have an alternate coastline cannot get things out by sea. Narrow seas in wartime are easy to shut down. Ukraine shut down the Black Sea. These places close down in wartime because between shore artillery and mines and other things, nothing moves.
So when the United States had its big naval base in Bahrain — how are we going to get to the naval base? We're going to have to go to Diego Garcia. That base would be 2,500 miles away, and that little base is in the middle of nowhere. That would be a mess.
Steven Bartlett: And this is why I asked the question about the misunderstanding, because you'd think lots of smart people at the White House would have figured that out.
Dr Sarah Paine: You're talking about the first Trump administration, when there was a guy named General Mattis around. We now have Major Pete. And Major Pete is really good at identifying Black people and women and firing them. And now they're doing testosterone testing. I kid you not. And I don't know if you remember when you're an adolescent and testosterone is peaking — if you think there's a correlation with that and your greatest reasoning powers, I don't know. Good luck with it, Major Pete. These people are historically unqualified for the job. That makes them profoundly dangerous. They've undermined the futures of their own children and they're undermining the prospects for the Republican Party, which they care about.
Steven Bartlett: What do you think they thought was going to happen?
Dr Sarah Paine: How do I know? I'll give you another thought about generics. What I call Type A and Type B American hubris. Type A American hubris: all decisions in the world that matter happen in the United States. Good luck with that one. And Type B American hubris, which applies to some of the tech bros: just because you're really good at something doesn't make you really good at everything. You need to have the humility to understand the limits of your expertise and when you need to listen to others. And another piece of it is listening to divergent opinion. I can't find my own blind spots, but maybe you can. It's really important to talk across political divides. But what's going on now is just straight-up yes-men. And they've committed pivotal errors. They have permanently damaged US national security.
Steven Bartlett: It's the first time in my life that I've heard of a US president start talking about taking other people's countries. Trump was talking about taking Venezuela.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. He's continentalist.
Steven Bartlett: He's a real estate guy.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. He sees real estate. He was saying he was going to take Canada, make it the 51st state. And then he thought Iran would be a walk in the park, that he would behead the leader, the people would rise up. I mean, this is what they said.
What's fascinating, if you study it — there's another one I call half-court tennis. Half-court tennis: you're only looking at your side of the net. And let's talk about football — I don't care whether it's American or European football, it works either way. Real football enthusiasts know not only about the home team, but about all the teams, all the major ones, all the players. This is a recreational sport. And then in foreign policy, you're not studying the other side.
I don't know if you've seen Iran's Lego videos. On the plane trip back, you need to look at Iran's Lego videos.
Steven Bartlett: Oh, where they're taking the piss out of America?
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah, they're taking these little Lego characters. What they demonstrate is that the Iranians have a deep understanding of Americans, whereas Americans don't know up from down on what's going on.
Here's another concept that might help. There are certain things that, as desirable as they are, are just not attainable. It would be great if everyone on the planet was a multi-millionaire — it's not feasible. And if you're going after an unfeasible objective, you're going to overextend yourself and it's going to have a very bad ending. A problem is something that maybe you can solve. The United States — the greatest generation — understood that the Soviet Union was a lethal threat, but you couldn't solve it. You try to solve that and it'll be the nuclear end to all of us. So what you're into is managing it. You use various elements of national power. One of them was sanctions, so that you're depressing Soviet growth. And then, unlike now where we're tariffing everybody in crazy land, what you're trying to do is maximise the growth within your alliance system. For those who behave, you want to maximise their growth. Those who can't behave, you want to minimise theirs, so that over time the relative threat diminishes. It doesn't solve it. And then you're also trying to get accurate information out — not propaganda, but accurate information — hoping that through generational change, maybe the other side reassesses.
If they don't, you're perfectly safe behind the castle walls and you're handling this thing at affordable costs, because the sanctions are really costing them much more than they're costing you.
A problem, if you can figure it out, by all means solve it. But we're trying to solve Iran. There are 90 million of them. To give you some data: Nazi Germany, with its extended borders including Austria and other territories, had a population of about 80 million. Iran has around 90 million. The occupation force after World War II, as best I can tell, was about 1.5 million just to occupy Germany. When you're talking about Iran — equivalent size — it's not feasible. And why would you want to do it? They're a bunch of Iranians. You want to contain the nuclear thing at affordable cost. That was the Obama deal — all the permanent members of the UN Security Council signed on to that, and the EU. They thought it was the best they could do. It had a really intrusive inspection system to get Iran to dial back its nuclear capabilities. Was it perfect? No. But it was feasible and it mitigated the threat to make it bearable.
Now, what's the lesson for Iran? What do you suppose the lesson is for everybody now? Get a nuke. With these wars, it's like: if you don't have one, you're toast. We have incentivised proliferation — Putin with his war initially, and then us with this Iran thing. It's profoundly self-defeating.
Pivotal errors: Ukraine, Russia, and the limits of unlimited objectives
Steven Bartlett: You referred to it as a pivotal error, which is another one of your concepts.
Dr Sarah Paine: Well, I think these concepts are worth doing because you can use them for other things. A pivotal error is: once you've made it, the choices that you had before are a lot better than the ones you have now, and you never get the old ones back. Think about Vladimir Putin — his invasion of Ukraine is a pivotal error. Russia has burned through its Cold War arsenal. Putin would have been doing much better if he'd just sat with the easy walking of his little green men into Crimea and Donbas and slowly destabilised Ukraine over a number of years. Instead, he has massively contributed to Ukrainian national identity. National identities often come out of wars. Britain massively contributed to the development of the US national identity during the American Revolution, because it was all these separate colonies that by the time the revolution was over had a much more cohesive sense of nation. You see Ukraine doing that as well.
And for us on the Iran war — we've lost our alliance system. Sure, someone else can reassess and we'll try to restore things, but we will never be the trusted partner ever again. It's done.
Steven Bartlett: You said the post-World War II world is collapsing and we are now going into a second Cold War that could end in nuclear war. What is it that's collapsing, Sarah?
Dr Sarah Paine: Well, the way systems work is by norms — we follow norms. The way I think about it is like traffic. Most of us, whatever side of the road you're supposed to drive on in whatever country you're in, you do that. There are stop lights and you do that. I get it that people speed and stuff, but mostly people are following the rules of the road, and there aren't nearly enough police to enforce it if everyone decided to just do whatever on a given day. It would just be mayhem. So the rules-based order was always based on norms of following them, and the US legal order was based on norms of everyone more or less following them.
Steven Bartlett: Give me an example of some of those norms.
Dr Sarah Paine: When you lose an election, you congratulate the other side and say, "I'll do better next time," instead of, "No, they cheated." Now the United States is pulling out of this order. The existential threat that this is posing has led to the most rapid institution-building in Europe. It's incredibly fast.
Steven Bartlett: Institution-building?
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. You've got the Baltic 8 — the Nordic countries: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark. That makes four. And then the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And then Iceland is part of this as well. They've been organising all sorts of security things together. There's remilitarisation going on. There's also work on space ports all over the place. Britain hasn't had space ports since the 60s. Norway and Sweden have them. Britain's going to build a new one up in the Shetland Islands, because you're all going to be launching your own satellite system. And I think also you're all sick of US credit card payment systems — you're going to do that locally. There's an app that's been put out where, if in Europe you want to buy something, the app will tell you immediately whether a product is American or not. So you don't have to buy that product. It's called the B-word — boycott — which is happening to America right now as a result of all of this. And you've seen Prime Minister Carney of Canada travelling everywhere, organising the middle powers. That'll be the new world order. It's unfolding. And the United States has gone rogue. We were on the right side of two world wars and made an incredibly positive contribution in many ways. What we're doing now is so negative, and it's profoundly negative for the futures of our children.
Steven Bartlett: What would you say to the people who say, "Sarah, we should stay out of these wars. We should stay out of the Ukraine situation"?
Dr Sarah Paine: By all means, do not send combat troops all over the place — which is what we were doing in the Middle East. You position people like Ukraine to succeed. You don't have to send any troops there, but give them what they need to solve this. That is the cheap thing to do. The uncheap thing is to blow our alliance system. So now people are boycotting us. There are all kinds of industries in the United States that are being hurt by this — Kentucky bourbon makers have had to shut down because the Canadians won't buy their booze. If you have a business and Canada is only 5 or 10% of your business, well, if they boycott you, that might be your profit margin. Canada is arranging to sell its energy to Europe and other places and trying to de-risk from us, and it's entirely our fault. We threatened them.
Steven Bartlett: People say, "We don't want to have to pay for someone else's war. We don't know how long it's going to last. It's going to cost so much money." What do you say to those people?
Dr Sarah Paine: It goes back to limited and unlimited objectives. An unlimited objective is regime change, and the most unlimited variant is genocide as well. Hitler had both. And Putin has a very unlimited variant, because he wants not only to take over Ukraine, but he also wants to shoot up a good part of the government down to small children — he was trying to execute the Zelensky family. What person does that sort of thing? In addition, he wants to eliminate the purveyors of Ukrainian culture. You kill them. And that's called genocide.
So you can have a whole continuum — the most unlimited thing of genocide plus regime change, and you come a little bit over and it's just regime change, and then the limited stuff means I only want half your country, all the way down to I don't know, I want you to be polite to me at football games, whatever it is.
This is where Russia comes in, I believe — and I could be wrong, and the key on being right or wrong is you should constantly reassess. Don't worry about being wrong. What you do when you realise you got it wrong is say, "I got new information and here's why I think differently." But I believe that Russia has unlimited objectives, that Putin wants to restore the old Soviet empire. There are many problems with that. One of them is: think about Russia. Russia has been the backwater of Europe forever under the Tsars. Can you think of one Russian product that you have ever wanted to buy?
Steven Bartlett: No comment.
Dr Sarah Paine: Let me give you a little hint. Smirnoff's is a British company — they don't even produce the vodka. So there are no manufactured goods. It's just basic primary goods. It has a failing economic model. Then during the Cold War, it's exporting communism everywhere, setting back living standards everywhere. When you do that, it involves a lot of deaths, because there are children who aren't getting vaccines and all kinds of things that are not happening when you're doing that. So that's what Russia's done. And now Putin thinks — based on his sheer legacy of incompetence — that he has the right to rule everyone else. What's really going on? He's a continentalist, so he wants to steal everyone else's stuff. Remember in the beginning of the Ukraine war, people were stealing washing machines. That would be a rather heavy item to steal. Who would do that? Someone without washing machines. And the Ukrainians don't want to live that way.
Steven Bartlett: Did he underestimate them?
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah, of course. That's typical. There's probably Russian Type A hubris — the Russian soul superior to all others, because they can't figure out what they're superior on, so they come up with something abstract like their soul. Well, prove it. Zelensky told me that when the Russian soldiers rolled in, he found that they had brought food for three to ten days. So they thought the war would be over in three to ten days. And also that they brought uniforms to celebrate — to do a victory parade — because they thought the war was going to be that easy.
Steven Bartlett: And what they were met with is Ukrainian civilians throwing Molotov cocktails at their tanks.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. It's again — we were just talking about underestimating Iran, but there is a hubris that's taken place with the Russians. They've underestimated the culture of the people.
Death ground. If you have an unlimited objective, what you're doing is putting the other side on death ground. What does that mean? It means if they don't fight, you're just going to come kill them. And so their only alternative is to fight, because you're going to kill them anyway. So if you have these unlimited objectives, expect one hell of a fight, and it can transform the most dysfunctional country into a lethal adversary — as Hitler discovered with the Soviet Union back in the day. Stalin had shot a lot of his officer corps. He created a famine in Ukraine, which is a breadbasket — which is exactly what Putin has done to Ukraine now. And what the United States is undoubtedly doing to Iran.
My understanding is that the Ayatollah who's gone was against having nukes. No one says whoever comes after him is against having nukes. If they're on death ground as long as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are in power, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to cause trouble until those two people are out of power. And so people who want to keep Netanyahu and Trump in power longer — just understand it's going to make Iran go on longer. And then I'm terrified that Trump will do something like drop a tactical nuke somewhere, and then things are really over. The United States will be forever this despicable country — the only country in the world that's ever dropped nukes on anyone. Twice on Japan, and then we're going to do a third on Iran.
Steven Bartlett: Do you think that's plausible?
Dr Sarah Paine: I have no idea. If you had told me ten years ago that where we're at was even remotely plausible, I would have said, "You're insane. What have you been smoking lately?" The United States was going to toss our alliances, tell Canada you're our 51st state, and then tell Greenland, "We're going to take Greenland from you, so behave yourselves." I would have thought that just ludicrous. Who would do that?
Steven Bartlett: What do you say to people who are experiencing their gas prices go up at the pump? They're seeing costs rise because of this war and because of the energy shock that's taken place, and they want it to end. So they're saying, "Vote."
Dr Sarah Paine: One third of Americans voted for where we're at now. One third voted for anything but this. And then one third couldn't get off their couch. Get off your couch and vote, because it matters for your children. Americans need to start talking to each other. "Only my party can win" — crazy. A two-party state is absolutely necessary, because how do you see blind spots? Also, you will watch Trump — you want your gas prices to go down. He's not going to reassess on this war. He's just going to keep on going. The way you reassess in democracies — since people are reluctant to say, "Gee, I got it wrong," and we all get it wrong — is you elect the other party.
Europe's disorder and the cost of inaction
Steven Bartlett: But I'm thinking about a particular friend who's been doing some tweets recently, and she's been tweeting that because the costs in the UK seem to be rising — petrol and other things — we should just let Russia take Ukraine, and then that'll mean that energy will be stabilised.
Dr Sarah Paine: I get it where she's coming from. I get it. But one of the war staples in war colleges is: the enemy gets a vote. Meaning that the Russians are going to come for you whether you like it or not.
Steven Bartlett: How do we know that?
Dr Sarah Paine: You don't know. But I can look at Russian history. They're continentalists. They go forward, forward, forward. And then I think you've got some kind of map that shows what Transnistria and all those places.
Steven Bartlett: Oh, this one.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. So these are the places that Putin has taken. Putin comes to power in the Second Chechen War, and Russians like that — that's how he rises. And then in 2008, he goes after Georgia and helps two places separate. But if you look at it, if you could draw a circle — continentalists are looking at their dashboard, and it's 360 degrees around their little spaceship on all those borders, and you want to extend outwards. So this is Plan A. And then after you get Plan A, they keep on going. It's been this way for a long time.
And for your friend — what evidence do you have that they're going to stop? Show it to me. What in their history gives you that? I understand that you wish it to end. This is another tragedy. We had the Cold War that ended on Western terms — Bush Senior and Helmut Kohl did a masterful job at war termination, truly masterful. And then we had the magical intercol war period — this is when you were growing up — the magical period where China and Russia turned inward and the United States was more or less following the rules, so you didn't have opposing sides funding opposing sides of insurgencies all over the world. War just torches wealth. Think about it — if Putin keeps any part of Ukraine, it's a glowing mess. It's been levelled. You're just destroying things.
Steven Bartlett: But they're going to continue to fight as well, aren't they? This is what Zelensky told me.
Dr Sarah Paine: They're going to go forever.
Steven Bartlett: He said something to me which I found quite illuminating and I don't think people consider. He said he had gone and found, just one example, a trench — what the Russian soldiers had left — where there were 500 tortured bodies. These bodies were tied up, of all ages. And he kind of implied that it's very naive to think that the families of those people in those ditches are just going to allow there to be a sudden stop to this, and that they're not going to continue to want revenge. And Zelensky said to me — he said it, he said, "I know I probably shouldn't say this, but he said that he wants revenge." He said, "If you see what I saw, you would want revenge too."
Dr Sarah Paine: The Russians — it's unspeakable what they've done. In most of my life, Germans wore the crown of infamy for what happened in World War II, where they just took heinous to a new level. Well, Vlad the Bad now owns that crown for Russians going in. Germans have reformed their educational system and there's no German now who has any responsibility for what happened back then. But there are lots of Russians who have responsibility for what's going on right now. And Russians go, "Oh, the Soviet Union has nothing to do with us. That was the Soviet Union." Excuse me. Russia is what ran the Soviet Union. It's yours. You own it. You think about the way the French use the word France — it includes all five republics, all the monarchies, Napoleon and everything. We all know it's France. It's just the Russians who are trying to say, "Oh, it's the Soviet Union, we had nothing to do with that." No, you had everything to do with that. You're unrepentant.
So for your friend, if you look at the long arc of Russian history, it's terrible. It used to be that under the Romanov dynasty, at least they aspired to have connections with Western Europe — although I think Nicholas II said, "Well, you know, we're 200 years behind, so we're going to do it our way." Once you get the communists, they want to overthrow the entire capitalist world order. And Putin hasn't changed. The continentalists are profoundly dangerous. What they want to do is divide the world into spheres of influence like the old empires of Eurasia, and so they're going to be fighting on the edges of these spheres of influence about who gets what.
Steven Bartlett: Who are the continentalists?
Dr Sarah Paine: Russia, China. Donald Trump. He's claiming Canadian territory. He's claiming Greenland. He's kidnapped a head of state. I get it — the guy's reprehensible. I'm no fan of Maduro. But look at the war. We've discussed all the problems from the war in Iran. You're talking about your friend in Britain who's being wrecked by the petrol prices. Whose fault is that?
Steven Bartlett: Trump's.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah, it is. What's fascinating, having studied foreign policy forever — it's really rare that you do a policy, put a new law into effect, and the consequences roll out immediately. Usually they roll out over years. So it's hard to say did this law exactly cause this outcome. Not in this war. Every time you load up at the pump, you have a weekly reminder that Donald Trump's war has done a number on you. It's not Biden.
Steven Bartlett: He would say, "We couldn't let Iran get nuclear weapons."
Dr Sarah Paine: It's much more likely now that they will get nuclear weapons — doing what he's done has incentivised them to get nuclear weapons. Here's my thing about Donald Trump. Is he known for providing accurate information? You know the answer to that question, as do all of your viewers. And here's the problem with normalising lies, which is what's going on in the United States. No one likes being lied to. The Soviet Union was a society that collapsed in large part because it was built on lies.
Here's how it worked. Since it's all run by a plan — this communist plan — so you're running your little operation, and you decide however many cameras you need for the new year and how many you've got in stock. You're going to exaggerate what you think you need, because you aren't sure the plan's going to give it to you, and you're going to understate what you have, again because you're not sure you're going to get things. So everyone's doing that across an economy. They're aggregating all that data — it's garbage. The further up the food chain you go, the more ludicrous the data is. But there in central Moscow, they're coming up with a plan that's going to allocate things. They are grossly misallocating capital and labour, and they don't notice that it's a disaster until it's metastasised and it shatters the place.
Another thing to give you: an economy doubles at different growth rates according to the following equation — the natural log of two over whatever that growth rate is. If your economy grows at 1% per annum, it'll double in about 69 or 70 years. If you grow at 3%, you'll double in 23 years. So if you do something foolish like tariff yourself, or you get into a war that's going to send prices up and mess things up, or if you're a little smarter and you sanction the other guy so only the other guy is experiencing this — you knock off 2% growth. Instead of waiting 23 years to double, you're going to wait 71. That's a long wait. These are the things that people aren't considering — the cumulative effects of making the kind of errors that we're making. Also the advantages of sanctions over wars: sanctions don't solve problems, but you're shrinking the opposing piggy bank, and if you cooperate with allies you're growing yourself. So it's a form of chemotherapy. You don't eliminate the tumour, but you try to shrink it back.
Russia's trajectory: what history tells us about what comes next
Steven Bartlett: You have a PhD in Russian history. What does Russian history tell us is likely to happen next as it relates to the Russia-Ukraine situation? And is it dependent on what other allies do, or do you think there's already a pivotal error that's been made by Putin?
Dr Sarah Paine: Oh, it's already done. He's just going to go forward.
Steven Bartlett: He's just going to go forward.
Dr Sarah Paine: He's just going to escalate and keep going forward. Yep.
Steven Bartlett: Because he can't go back. He doesn't strike me as —
Dr Sarah Paine: This is the problem with dictatorships. What's wonderful about elections? They throw you out of office, but no one kills you. No one takes your bank accounts away. It really takes a lot of the white-knuckle event out of it. And in Russia — under Stalin, when he's busy shooting everybody, he dies, and eventually you get Khrushchev as his successor. That successor generation decided they wanted to make it so you didn't get killed when you left office — they'd send you to your little dacha, your summer house in Russia. Putin's problem is this: there's no off-ramp where he's alive. What happens to Putin when he gets swapped out of power? If he just dies naturally, okay, that happens to all of us. But he's arranged it so there is no retirement plan except something really ugly.
Steven Bartlett: Why? How?
Dr Sarah Paine: Well, how would you ever replace Putin in Russia?
Steven Bartlett: Couldn't he just step down and go off to his mansion and chill out?
Dr Sarah Paine: Probably not, because there will be people who will come kill him — his immediate entourage. He's the whole protection racket that's running things.
Steven Bartlett: Is it possible for him to be overthrown by the Russian people?
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah, it is possible.
Steven Bartlett: It just seems like he's got such a tight grip on —
Dr Sarah Paine: Oh, well, that's the thing about dictatorships — they seem eternal until the day they shatter, and then it's impossible to predict.
Steven Bartlett: How do they shatter?
Dr Sarah Paine: The Romanov dynasty. Nicholas II, like Vlad the Bad, decided to get into a recreational war he didn't have to — the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905. And why does Russia need more territory? It is the largest country on the planet. They have tons of resources. Their problem is they have no economic model to develop it, because they refuse to go by the norms of having rules so people can start businesses — like a young person who can start a company and when they start doing well, they can actually keep their money. That's not what happens in Russia. You'll get shaken down.
So Nicholas II does that war, he loses it. But then there's another concept: opportunity cost. If you spend all of your money fighting that war, what are you not doing? You're not building a railway system in the western part of Russia. So come World War I, Nicholas can't deploy his troops very well. He's got no way in for his allies to supply him, because Russia's main ports for getting things by sea are the Baltic or the Black Sea — and those things shut down in wartime. So if Nicholas hadn't done his foolishness and had built railways, he might have had a different outcome. And why does he get overthrown? Because there are food riots in St. Petersburg, which was the capital in those days. Better railways, you would have delivered the bread better. Also, you might have gotten food aid from other places. These opportunity costs are huge.
Now, Vlad the Bad has done his magic here. Who's supporting him? China is providing what's vital for him right now.
Steven Bartlett: Why are they supporting Vladimir Putin? Why?
Dr Sarah Paine: Why not? From their point of view, they want the United States just out of everyone's business. And they also don't particularly like Russia either. So if Russia's going to go weaken itself here, China will benefit from this. China needs their resources. My graduate dissertation was a history of the Russo-Chinese border, and Russia took territory from the Chinese sphere of influence greater than all of the US east of the Mississippi. You want to tell me the Chinese don't remember that?
Steven Bartlett: So China are supplying Russia with resources they need.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. To make missiles and things.
Steven Bartlett: They're charging them for that.
Dr Sarah Paine: Of course — they're making money from it, but they're also weakening Russia. Russia has been sanctioned on its energy and other things. So China is getting all these things at much reduced prices and driving a hard bargain. And the Russians in the past had all these nuclear weapons and other things to dissuade the Chinese from playing tough. Except Vladimir Putin has squandered all of that. He can't even deal with Ukraine, let alone China. So they've made a massive pivotal error. They're in real trouble. And they're not even having kids. So the long-term effects are getting worse and worse for them.
Steven Bartlett: Russia has the missiles to just flatten Ukraine, don't they?
Dr Sarah Paine: They have nuclear weapons. Yeah, they do. This is beyond my expertise. And in order to have them, you have to maintain them. And the Russians are consummate liars. Who knows? My understanding is that India and China have told Russia that would be a massive no-no if they do that. But when people get totally cornered, others have no influence over them. So I don't know the answer.
Steven Bartlett: So it sounds like from speaking to Zelensky, he will not yield an inch of Ukraine to Putin. And it sounds like Putin has to walk away looking like he got a victory of sorts for his people and for his power — and really for the message to some of these other people he sits on a border with, and to NATO. The two things can't both be true.
Dr Sarah Paine: No, that's the problem with unleashing unlimited wars. World War II — yes, the Allies won, but at obscene cost. Tens of millions of Russians died. Millions of others died. What is it — 55 million people died in that thing. You want to do that over again? Really, these unlimited wars are ugly. It is not the way to handle things. It is far better to deploy your diplomats and lawyers to international institutions. Sure, the deal isn't perfect for what you wish you had gotten, but the wealth will compound if you have people your age going to start their businesses, with laws that allow them to do it, instead of trying to poach everyone's stuff. That is the way to do things.
So yes, of course Ukraine won't give up, and we should support Ukraine because they're doing the heavy lifting for all of us. That's the answer to your friend. You want to be fighting on the front lines? No. So help them. Morals matter in this world. They matter. Honesty matters. Civility matters. All these things matter.
And there's another piece I think matters. What do governments do? Primary things: protect your national security — that's number one. And protect your prosperity, try to increase your prosperity. Those are two. So for your friend — what is going to protect British national security? And that will involve Europe, because if Britain's alone, it's not going to do well without Western Europe being healthy as well.
Steven Bartlett: Has this somewhat fallen at an unfortunate time, because Europe is not doing the best economically at the moment and there are lots of internal conflicts taking place? I was in France yesterday and I left my hotel and the streets are on fire. At night time there are balaclava-clad people running into all the shops and smashing them to pieces. And then I think about the UK — I read a headline from the Sunday Times that reads, "Britain is going broke. It's just a matter of when. With three trillion in debt and interest of 110 billion a year, the new chancellor has little room to manoeuvre." This is the sentiment that is quite prevalent at the moment in Europe. So when you think about spending money on another nation, this is probably why there are a lot of people that are against it.
Dr Sarah Paine: Europe feels weak. And here's the story for your generation, because I'm going to age out of this mess, but you're going to have to live with it. Think about the generation at the end of World War II. Europe's levelled. Everyone's indebted right after that war. And that generation within ten years had set up the institutional architecture that held the peace in Europe for the next three generations. That is quite an achievement. And what's going on now is history's moving really fast. It's like the log jam's busted and we don't know which way it's going to go. And it's tremendously frightening. But on the other hand, it is a tremendous opportunity — before the concrete sets again — for people to get moving. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Get going and work on the next set of institutions that will help growth rates in Europe, which have not been great and need to be better.
Americans think all their problems are about immigrants coming across the border. I'm all for having legal immigration — people should have to follow rules. You don't have to be cruel at how you expel them. You can do that humanely. Being gratuitously mean — I don't see it. But people in Europe have identified that for the young, it's just hard to make it. There's a feeling that there are no opportunities and it's just hopeless. Okay, that's probably a correct identification of the problem. But in the United States, I suspect the answer is not immigrants. It's probably our tax code. The tax code is what sends money one way or the other. In the United States, you've got a handful of people who've become billionaires literally over the last fifteen years. You can't do that without the tax code.
And then there's another piece — monopolies. You own all of a particular industry and then you can set prices at what you sell stuff at. But then there's monopsony, which means you hire such a large percentage of the workforce in a particular area that you dictate wages. We've got problems with wages in the United States — they've been driven downwards. People are working forty-hour weeks and more and they can't make ends meet. What's going on? They're being underpaid, and the money is just being funnelled into a handful of families' coffers. In the United States, there are apparently a thousand families worth a billion or better. It's not actually very many people.
Steven Bartlett: Because the world is different now and there are digital assets — at least assets that you can move digitally. Is it harder to use the tax code as a tool for fixing inequality?
Dr Sarah Paine: You'd have to talk to tax specialists, but the US tax code that allows people to become hugely wealthy is an error. This is where there's a missing podcast in the United States — someone actually reading the tax code and breaking it down into pieces and then talking about the human connection of it all. There's a lot in there, but it hasn't been done. I guess it would be too boring to read it. I think actually there's a lot in there.
The midterms, democratic norms, and the Republican Party
Steven Bartlett: The midterms are coming up. For people that don't know what the midterms are, which is probably most of the world — what is the significance of the midterms and what are they?
Dr Sarah Paine: Well, you're electing a percentage of the US Senate and all of the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives — each term is two years. Senators are six years, and the Senate seats are staggered. So you're doing a selection of them, and then you're doing governors as well.
Steven Bartlett: So let me repeat this back to you. Essentially in the midterms right now, Trump has power because he controls the House and the Senate.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yep.
Steven Bartlett: In terms of there being more Republicans than Democrats — and the Supreme Court.
Dr Sarah Paine: And the Supreme Court. But in the midterms, it's very likely that he will lose the Senate.
Steven Bartlett: That I don't know. There's much speculation — the polls originally suggested he might well lose the House, maybe the Senate. Now it looks like both. But then if he's going to be sending ICE agents to all the polling stations, and people are going to walk away with the voting machines —
Dr Sarah Paine: And he's offering people $5,000 if they vote for Republicans.
Steven Bartlett: Well, this is called the end of the norms. And if Americans — it's going to be a national IQ test for the United States, on how they vote. Because every time they go to the pump, they know why their prices have gone up. What's sad is people often identify with party. Parties come and go. The Republican Party today isn't remotely what it was with Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan. It's a different party. It's all about one guy. And you should identify around what your goals are. I recommend: protect national security, promote prosperity. You can look at this war and go — it's wrecked both. And whether you like the guy or don't, it's his fault. And it's the fault of the party that has enabled him at every point. Pete Hegseth, who's a major — it's an okay rank, but not to run the Pentagon. The Republican Party confirmed him. It was an act of supreme dereliction of duty. They could have demanded another General Mattis, and we might not be in Iran today.
Steven Bartlett: And if Trump loses, or the Republicans lose the midterms, essentially what it means is they are going to have to cooperate a lot with the Democrats.
Dr Sarah Paine: They're not going to cooperate. They've made clear they're not cooperating with Democrats.
Steven Bartlett: But to get things passed, that would be bipartisan.
Dr Sarah Paine: They've rejected being bipartisan. The old Republican Party — yeah.
Steven Bartlett: But how do they get things passed then?
Dr Sarah Paine: They won't.
Steven Bartlett: But Trump has executive power, so he can still sign executive orders.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. And this is another thing about norms. He just does things and changes facts on the ground. If it later turns out to be illegal, he's already done the thing. Like there's this golf course in Washington that he cares about — he's cut down all the legacy trees. Imagine Richmond Park in London. Imagine someone goes in there and just levels all the 800-year-old trees. There's no walking that back. That's what he does.
Who is the enemy? The democratic core versus the continentalists
Steven Bartlett: Does the West have an enemy? And if so, who is the enemy? Because we often think, oh, it's China. Oh, it's Russia.
Dr Sarah Paine: Let's forget about the West. Let's talk about the democratic core.
Steven Bartlett: What's the democratic core?
Dr Sarah Paine: The democratic core in my books are the democracies. So it's Western, it's through Central Europe, it would be Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, definitely Canada, the United States — no, I mean, we're threatening to invade Greenland. That does not make you the democratic core when you do that. We're threatening to make Canada our 51st state. Who the hell does that?
Steven Bartlett: Why do you think Trump is saying that?
Dr Sarah Paine: I have no idea. I'm not a psychiatrist. Well, you follow his recent speeches. Can you follow them?
Steven Bartlett: Well, I'm asking you because you've studied dictators.
Dr Sarah Paine: I've studied senile narcissists. The problem with, say, little Taiwan and China — it's like, why would you? Look at Taiwan. It's like 1/1250th the size of China. Give me a break. It's a little tiny place. Why does China give a damn? They're a bunch of Taiwanese sitting there. Why would you care? It's because it's showing that you can have a vibrant democracy, and the predominant ethnic group of China is the Han, and their rather racist ideas were that democracy and the Han are mutually exclusive. Well, the Taiwanese have proven that that's nonsense. And for these dictators — why not hold a fair election? Because they wouldn't be elected. That's why. If there were fair elections, Xi Jinping would no more be the head of China than Vladimir Putin would be the head of Russia. And they regard that as the existential threat.
On the other hand, what sorts of societies produce massive wealth? The democracies. Why? Because we tolerate each other. We give each other legal protections. We allow people to start their businesses and keep the fruits of what they make. Whereas these other folks — when China became wealthy, it's when it joined the maritime rules-based order and when it was following the rules. Now, it can keep compounding wealth, but not if it's going to be launching wars. That'll be it.
Steven Bartlett: China seems to stay out of wars.
Dr Sarah Paine: What about Vietnam? It's been a while, but China is created over a succession of wars. Basically, the Qing dynasty falls in 1911, 1912, and then you have what's called the warlord period where all the different provincial leaders are duking it out with each other, and eventually that coalesces into a bilateral communist-nationalist fight circa 1927. So all that's going on in the background. And then you have the United States in its infinite wisdom — the first America Firsters in 1930, in response to the Great Depression — deciding they're going to put huge tariffs up. And the economists come to President Hoover and say, "Buddy, don't do it, because everyone else is going to respond in kind." And he does it anyway. And then we're into a massive trade war. America puts up tariffs — what do you suppose everyone's going to do? Put up their tariffs. And then you're tanking economies globally. It deepens the Great Depression.
So here's trade-dependent Japan going, "Now what? We always cooperated with these people and now they've shut us off." So they decide that the only solution is they need an empire large enough to become self-sufficient. So they move into Manchuria in 1931. The reason why the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor later on is because the United States is sending aid to China and the Japanese want us to stop. So they attack Pearl Harbor — which in those days Hawaii is not a state, it doesn't become a state until 1959, and it looks like a US colony. They thought we'd wise up and quit. But no, we double down. We come after Japan.
So think about it: massive warfare tearing China apart starting right after 1911, 1912, continuing all the way through 1945. Then you have the Chinese Civil War that does not end until 1949. And then you have all of Mao's political campaigns. You have the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. And Deng Xiaoping does his number on Vietnam — it's costly, short, and quick. And before then there's the 1962 border war with India where the Chinese trounce India and turn India into a permanent enemy. That was a mistake. Then you have anti-right campaigns, the Cultural Revolution where Mao is churning things so that he remains in power. And while all that's going on, you have the Great Famine, which is created by his Great Leap Forward — he keeps exporting food because that's where he gets his pocket change, and people are starving. So after that, you think the Chinese want any more wars? They want to chill out for a while. But basically, all those people who did all that fighting and might have a sense that maybe you don't want to do any more of that — they're all dead.
The nuclear question and the trajectory toward World War
Steven Bartlett: If we continue on in the direction of travel we're on now, what does the future look like?
Dr Sarah Paine: It looks like World War II. Back to the negative objectives — you've got to prevent these things from breaking out, because once they break out, look at Iran. Is Donald Trump going to want to back down? No. He's going to want to show that somehow he's won.
Steven Bartlett: This is a chart showing how many nuclear warheads each country has. When you say that World War II could be next if we continue on this trajectory, my rebuttal is: but we now live in a nuclear-powered world where if any one of these players gets into a serious situation, they could basically wipe out life for everybody on planet Earth. So does this keep us safe to some degree? Mutually assured destruction?
Dr Sarah Paine: No. Putin has already taken that little thing and flipped it over when he's threatening NATO countries. He's been violating airspace — just in the last few days sending drones into the territorial waters of Bulgaria and Romania, and they were shot down there. At some point you're into Article 5 territory. The Europeans don't want to do it because it'll be an ever-loving mess.
Steven Bartlett: Article 5 being — then you all have to go to war together.
Dr Sarah Paine: That's part of NATO's treaty to defend. Well, that was the strength of it — while the generation who remembered World War II lived, they were really careful not to trigger that. And that's not true of who we've got now.
Steven Bartlett: If Putin invaded Poland, do you think World War III would begin?
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah.
Steven Bartlett: You think so. And what would World War III look like?
Dr Sarah Paine: I have no idea. But you can get on a nice computer program and pick your megatonnage of your nuclear weapon and then put it over a city of your choice and look at how many people die. It's obscene. And this is the problem with having these dark personalities running countries like Putin. He doesn't care how many people he kills. There's a problem when people like that reach those positions. We human beings have real trouble identifying dark personalities until they become Adolf Hitler and we go, "Oh, whoops. There are concentration camps going on here." And I think it's because most of us can't imagine wanting to inflict that kind of obscene pain on other people. But you can see the consequences of putting them in power. It's really ugly.
Trump's not going to back out of Iran. It doesn't sound like Putin's going to back out of Ukraine.
Steven Bartlett: There is a solution for the United States — with the next Congress, impeach and convict him and then say, "Sweetheart, you're retired."
Dr Sarah Paine: Someone else is going to have to then step into his shoes. This is the problem with the pivotal error. Whoever does it will back out on really bad terms. And I think the Republicans want the Democrats to do that, because then you can go blame the Democrats and say, "No, it's your war." In fact, on wars — look for those who start them. Those are the ones you want to blame, not those who end them.
Steven Bartlett: How do you think history is going to remember Zelensky?
Dr Sarah Paine: He's a hero for all time. He's a great statesman. There are very few of them. He's one of them. Think of him — he could have left Ukraine.
Steven Bartlett: He told me Biden called him and offered him a ride.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. What was the famous — I don't want a ride. I want —
Steven Bartlett: I want ammunition.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. He's also a man who can really communicate. And I cannot believe that we're not supporting him. It is one of the most clear-cut wars of aggression you can possibly imagine. And then the brutality with which the Russians are treating people. And you've got to ask yourself — who are these people doing these sorts of things? There's something wrong with them. And you don't want them anywhere near the rest of Europe. I get it, it's really scary. But it's scary because of these people — the Russians. You need to get Ukraine totally on its feet and Russia to cease dropping ordnance on everybody, and give them a massive time out from the middle powers that Carney and friends are busy organising even as we speak. They've done a lot of work in the last few years and they'll do more.
Steven Bartlett: Do you think the world is pulling away from the United States?
Dr Sarah Paine: They're fleeing. So the United States takes good old Maduro. What's everyone else doing? Well, when you have a heart attack — like the United States can just take your leader away — what would you do? You're going to counterbalance with China as the less lunatic option. So here's the United States wanting to proclaim this a US preserve. Well, what we've done is guaranteed that these folks are going to be incredibly welcoming to China.
Steven Bartlett: Isn't that a real paradox of strength — that the minute you use it, you kind of lose it in a weird way?
Dr Sarah Paine: Because the United States really flexing its power and threatening people and going into Iran and going into Venezuela has actually made everyone else feel less safe, and we've killed our power. So they've gone and partnered with each other.
Steven Bartlett: And actually — strength through peace, or something like that. Where everyone knows you're strong so you don't ever have to really prove it. And that's kind of what keeps up the illusion.
Dr Sarah Paine: If you look at global wars — what they are is a contest over the nature of the world order. Whether it's going to be these continentalists ruled by dictators — where if you lived in Russia and someone wants your business and they're connected, that's it, they take your business, and by the way you're going to be put on the front lines, you have no choice — or are we going to keep going with democracies? And democracies are the only ones with really high per capita standards of living. Democracies are the ones that are really capable of generating wealth. It's been wonderful.
And then there are many things I find appalling. The United States is picking on immigrants — they're worried about the one-off illegal who murders someone, and that's terrible, I get it. But I'm thinking about the tech billionaire immigrants who are now buying our elections. Elon Musk has put $160 million into the state of Texas. He's a dysfunctional South African. What right does he have to buy our elections? I used to live in Texas and they have a saying: don't mess with Texas. Really? So you want Elon to be messing with you in this way? Many of the tech billionaires — not all of them, but many — are foreign-born. No problem with that. No problem coming to the United States. Every problem when you're trying to take down our democracy, just so you don't have to pay higher taxes, just so you're afraid of people regulating your media platforms so that there's some way to slow down on the lies going through them. Americans miss who the dangerous immigrants are. There are a handful of them, and they're trying to buy our elections right now. How dare they?
Steven Bartlett: In recent weeks as well, America seemed to have turned against Zelensky and Ukraine.
Dr Sarah Paine: America didn't. Donald Trump did.
Steven Bartlett: Donald Trump has. Certainly.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. He's not America. He's himself. He's killed the US legacy. Isn't he a guy who goes through serial bankruptcies and because he's rich and has lawyers, he just leaves the trash behind him and moves forward?
Steven Bartlett: America did vote for him.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. A third of America voted for him, a third of America didn't, and the other third wouldn't get off the couch. They need to get off the couch. And reassessment — it's not a bad thing. Americans were correct that things aren't working for Americans. Therefore they voted for the guy who was going to throw over the chessboard. Well, it turns out that was worse than the alternatives. And the thing is not to double down on that. If I buy a lousy pizza, I thought it looked really good — I'm not going to go tell you it's a good pizza. I'll tell you it's really lousy. I bought it here. Don't ever touch it. You do something really consequential like you vote for someone who gets into a war that's tanked the economy, and then you're not going to reassess? Isn't life such that as you live, you learn things? At your age, do you think you've learned everything you're going to learn for the rest of your life?
Steven Bartlett: Of course not.
Dr Sarah Paine: And it'd be like death in a way if this is it. And so presumably as you keep going, you'll go, "Oh, I used to think this, but now I think that."
Steven Bartlett: Do you know, I'm 34 years old now. I've just turned 34. And I say that in part because when I sit here and I hear people like yourself who understand history better than I do tell me that there's a danger or a threat of a World War III, there is part of me that has grown up with such privileged order that just can't imagine it. I can't imagine bombs flying over my head. I've just never seen it before.
Dr Sarah Paine: Amen. Would you like President Zelensky's memories of the things he's had to look at?
Steven Bartlett: Yeah, he told me. Yeah, he started out like you. He hadn't seen any of this either, and then he doesn't have the pleasure of averting his eyes. What is your message for people like me that have grown up in very privileged Western lives, democratic societies, who are seeing all this stuff happen around the world now? And to some degree, I guess we're at risk of turning a blind eye because we don't know history that well, and our history is a short one and an orderly one, and things happen but they happen far away.
Dr Sarah Paine: Well, I feel like starting with an apology — that what my generation is leaving you is such a mess, and you're supposed to make it better for the people who come after. Not all — there are many who've made it better — but currently the United States is making it a lot worse. And I cannot tell you the sorrow I feel for the negative things that the United States is doing right now. For young people, I urge you to read and to keep learning throughout your life, to talk to other people, talk across these silos that divide us, be polite to each other, and vote. Get out there and vote. It's your civic duty. It isn't that hard. You can arrange your day so you can show up and vote.
Steven Bartlett: Do you not think there's just so much going on? I don't know whether this was always the case in history, but for young people these days, in part because we're so connected to the internet — we're seeing war over here in the Middle East, we're seeing war in Ukraine, we're seeing Iran, we're seeing the situation in Gaza, we're seeing this thing called AI coming in and they're telling us we're going to have no jobs. You've got global warming over here and they say everything's going to flood or burn and forest fires everywhere. It's a lot.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah, it is a lot. But here's the flip: when I meet people — and you've met many more people than I have with your job — there are many more wonderful people all over the world. The dark personality types are actually very few in number. And all the rest of us, if we all do what we can in our various spheres — because we all do different things — we will get through this. I'm a retired professor. What little can I do? I can give you concepts. Ah — go disinformation. That's what Putin does. And then when you believe it but don't know it's lies, you're spreading misinformation. So that's a problem.
Tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war — applied to politics
Steven Bartlett: What other concepts haven't we covered that are pertinent?
Dr Sarah Paine: Oh, I know what we haven't covered. Let's talk about the tactical level of war. The tactical level would be: I've got a tank. It has certain capabilities, certain range, certain armour, certain things can take it out. Then at the operational level, you're either going to fight a battle or a succession of battles, which is called a campaign. You're going to put together tank units and other different units, have an information campaign, whatever. And it's probably to take that hill or do whatever. But then there's a level that really counts — just this one — the strategic level. Like, why are you fighting in the first place? Hey, Donald, what are you doing in Iran? At the strategic level for politicians, it should be protecting our national security and promoting national prosperity. That's what it should be. And in the war in Iran, you're worried about non-proliferation. Except that war is incentivising proliferation in the worst possible way, and doing it in an incredibly costly way.
So here's the problem with the Republican Party — this war and the guy who's running it and his truly incompetent administration. They have enabled him to do all these things that have blown our alliance system. That's the alliance system that would protect their children and their grandchildren. It's bad for them.
Now we're going to apply this to politics. You can have tactics — which might be, since you were talking to President Zelensky, one tactic which I've described before: when Trump had him in that Oval Office interview where the two native English speakers, Trump and Vance, are going after Zelensky, who must have thought it was a routine photo op, and they're trying to humiliate him in public. You remember this? So that would be a tactic. Other tactics would be denying who won the election. Joe Biden won the election. The evidence is in on that. All the rest of it is lies.
At the political operational level, you've got to win the election. So that's where the Republicans are all focused. They're going, "If we dump the orange guy, we won't get re-elected." Maybe in fact, if you dump the orange guy in the first term, it would have been so much better for you. Or better yet, don't support him in the second term. It's so much better for you. You'd actually have a functioning Republican Party on your hands. Instead, you've killed the party and you've destroyed your children's futures. Who the hell does that? It's focusing on this operational level.
Officers love focusing on the operational level. They want to use this to kill a lot of people and go, "Ah, when I kill more of your guys than you kill of my guys, that must mean I won." Oh, really? Vietnam War? They took a multiple of our casualties. They won that thing. There's no South Vietnamese government left.
Steven Bartlett: You know, the people with this Ukraine-Russia situation that say, "Well, NATO promised it wouldn't encroach on Russia's borders and it came closer and closer and closer" — those people might say —
Dr Sarah Paine: They do say that. You're repeating Putin's propaganda points.
Steven Bartlett: Yes.
Dr Sarah Paine: All right, let's do the history of all of this. First of all, the United States didn't go around strong-arming everyone and say, "You must join NATO." Absolutely the opposite. These folks were stampeding to NATO's doors.
Steven Bartlett: Which folks?
Dr Sarah Paine: Everybody who was in the Soviet bloc. Germany used to be divided. You have Poland, Czechoslovakia used to be one thing, Austria was neutral, Hungary, Yugoslavia was bigger. Anyway, all those pieces — Romania, Bulgaria — at the end of the Cold War, all those people wanted NATO in the worst possible way. Why? Because they know Russia wants empire. And already what Russia was doing was bringing in all their cadres whom they trained during the war — Bulgarian communist expats, Romanians, Hungarians — putting them in place and then taking over the power ministries: the military, the department of war, whatever it's called, because that determines whom you can shoot. The interior ministry — in our country it would be the justice department, because that's who gets arrested and you control the courts. And then if there's an information ministry, you want to control who has access to information. And then also they wanted agriculture, because when you're going to collectivise and de-collectivise, that's going to determine patronage possibilities.
So the generals are writing back and going, "They're doing all this stuff and we can't stop them." And so they do it throughout Eastern Europe. They wind up doing massive purges of people who had run for other parties, murdering loads of them, murdering many leaders. They're murdering people. They're putting people in jail forever. And then they say, "You have to do this communist thing." And so they're stuck with it. And then there are Germans who aren't too happy with it, and the Russians are beating them up in 1953. And then you have Hungarians saying, "Look, we need to do some adjustments here because the communist thing isn't working." They're correct. Russians send tanks and they shoot their head of state even though they promised they wouldn't. And the Russians have never atoned for what they did and never acknowledged all of this.
And so now they've made up this story — that you're purveying, that you get from others — that, oh, it's NATO expansion that did all of this. And I think I've given you serious facts to tell you why people living in these countries were terrified of Russians. They're brutal when they come in. They're incompetent.
I was living in the Soviet Union when it still was — 1988, 1989. This is early Gorbachev, the supply systems falling apart. I went into one of their grocery stores and it had about a total of 77 items. I think that compares to, I don't know, a candy rack as you're exiting some convenience store. If you went by the meat counters, the smell from the rotting meat just about knocked you down and you just avoided all of that. And then occasionally they would have items called "import" — i.e., anything from anywhere else is better than what we've got, because you can sell it on the basis of calling it imported. I was eating rotting Hungarian apples because at least they could produce apples. I made applesauce. The Romanians made some pretty good canned tomatoes. It was just incredible what the Russians couldn't do.
So the reason these people want to be part of NATO is because of what Russia does. Russia looks at the entire world — I've talked about half-court tennis — and they look at it as everyone else picking on them, instead of: excuse me, have you ever threatened other people? Have you ever done anything vaguely naughty to anybody else? It's huge what they've done to other people. And then they have the nerve to say that these people are threatening them. Look how large Russia is. Why do you need more territory? Why can't you develop what you have?
A great example — talk about a lousy piece of real estate. Look at the Scandinavian countries. They aren't whining. And look what they've done with their resources. They're these fabulous functioning states. Russia could have done that. Instead, it's trying to steal things from others.
So for your friend — the further back you stop these people, the safer you are. Also, why should Ukrainians become the slaves of their murderers? Why? What's so privileged about you in Britain that you can just sort of go, "Oh, well, who cares?" Morals matter. And this is where the norms matter. Honesty matters.
What Americans have done is forgotten their core values, which are in a nasty document from your point of view — the Declaration of Independence. But in there it talks about the rights of life — not the right to take someone else's life, but to preserve your own. Liberty — not the liberty for me to tell you what to do, but the liberty for me to make my own choices. And pursuit of happiness — not as you define it, but as I define it.
Diesel prices, disinformation, and Trump's war
Steven Bartlett: It appears in the last week or two — because I think it was diesel prices in particular that have gone up at the pump to something like $6 — Trump has made a deal with Putin for diesel exports, in part because his war in Iran has caused this sort of global energy shock.
Dr Sarah Paine: Oh, this is disinformation. Russia has no capacity to export diesel in sufficient quantities to make any difference whatsoever. The correlation for when diesel prices go up is with the Iran war, and it has to do with who produces what grades of oil there and what kind of refineries they have in order to refine diesel. Refineries are apparently set up to produce certain grades of output. Yes, you can change a refinery to do a different grade output, but you're talking millions of dollars and a certain amount of time to redo your refinery. So the diesel stuff is absolutely Trump's war's fault. And he's trying to blame Ukraine. It's despicable. As usual, he's lying.
So, Americans — really, you want the liar-in-chief? How well has it worked for you? Are your grocery prices better or worse? Are they better in the last two years or have they gotten dramatically worse? I think it's pretty obvious. I was at the supermarket recently and oatmeal was like $10 for a little package of it. Mind-blowing. Thank you, Donald Trump. And then tariffing all this food imported from Mexico and Canada. I'm not making it up. I never used to be partisan. But I'm looking at the Republican Party and thinking, how can you do this? It's your children too. You're wrecking the United States, and you're doing it not temporarily, but for as long as anyone who's alive at this moment will remember it.
Ukraine's military capacity and the path forward
Steven Bartlett: Can Ukraine win against Russia?
Dr Sarah Paine: Sure. It is winning right now because it's able to defend itself. Ukrainians have developed all these different kinds of drones. And I get it — Starlink is messing up some of their interceptors, but they've been developing ballistic missiles that are going to happen rapidly. And the United States — by Musk doing the kill switch on Starlink — has made it so no one serious is going to be buying Starlink. India was thinking of it. It's like, no, not if in the middle of the war you're going to turn it off. And the shares for whatever the French alternate company is have gone way up in the last few days. People are looking at it and going, "Okay, so Elon — maybe short-term gain but long-time loss on all of this."
And then for US Patriot Missile Systems — if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been president during the Biden administration when the second phase of the Ukraine war kicked off, he would have gotten that company to mass-produce it, saying, "Look, you're not going to be making your money on unit cost. You're going to be making it on the quantity."
Steven Bartlett: But people are saying, with Trump turning his back on Zelensky and Putin being in bed with China and President Xi, Zelensky has no chance.
Dr Sarah Paine: No. That's bull. He's developing his own missile systems. Russia can't afford to replace all these refineries. It's based on Western tech.
Steven Bartlett: The oil refineries.
Dr Sarah Paine: Yeah. I can't remember what percentage of the refining capacity Russia's down to. I don't know whether it's less than half now, slightly more than half. You can Google and get the data. And the Ukrainians have gone after Yandex and whatever their equivalent of Google is, blowing away these things.
Steven Bartlett: Russia has lost up to 50% of its operating oil refinery capacity.
Dr Sarah Paine: I was telling you I didn't know because it varies — they start fixing it, then another one gets hit. And Ukraine is doing that on its lonesome. No Starlink involved in that, just because it's over Russian territory. And they're developing stuff more rapidly. And who's buying all these things? Because they're producing more than enough of some of these things. They're going to be the go-to defence supplier, because the stuff in the United States is way too expensive. And this Patriot stuff — this is why it's just breathtakingly incompetent. The fact that we have a shortage of these interceptors and this fighting has been going on for any number of years. Franklin Delano Roosevelt started telling people how many tens of thousands of airplanes he wanted, and people thought he was nuts. And he got the businessmen around the table. What do you need? You going to make it happen? It happened.
Steven Bartlett: Do you think if funding does dry up for Zelensky — external funding from Europe and from the United States?
Dr Sarah Paine: I don't think it will from Europe. Why? Because Europe — Russia will be coming for the rest of Europe. It will be coming. They are on death ground too with Putin's little model. If you think about how European attitudes on security changed on a dime because of the 2022 war, that hasn't changed. And there's tremendous disinformation that good old Vlad the Bad is putting out to get people thinking that he's winning. He's not. He's wrecking his country.
I have no idea whether his little friends will put something special in his breakfast some morning. Probably not. He's under enormous stress at 74. I wouldn't want to be living with his stress levels. And alternatively — at what point do the young men at the front lines riot? At what point do they take their guns and just go after their commanders?
Steven Bartlett: I mean, we saw that almost happen, didn't we, with Prigozhin?
Dr Sarah Paine: Prigozhin. Yeah. At what point does that happen? And also, when you think about these kids being sent to the front — they're only children. This is not Russia in Stalin's day, the pre-birth-control Russia. These are very special young men going to the front. They're the only ones. And at what point do their mothers put their foot down?
The economic cost of the war in Ukraine on Russia has been profound, shifting the nation's economy towards a high-risk war footing where record defence spending consuming roughly 40% of the national budget boosts artificial GDP numbers while draining funds from health, education, and civil infrastructure. The heavy state spending, coupled with acute labour shortages caused by military mobilisation and the immigration of hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals, triggered persistent inflation and forced the central bank of Russia to hike interest rates above 20%. Simultaneously, Russia lost its lucrative European energy export market, saw 300 billion in central bank reserves frozen by Western sanctions, and faced severe domestic fuel shortages following repeated long-range drone strikes to its oil refineries, which have caused oil refinery capacity to drop by up to 50%.
Steven Bartlett: So that's called winning a war? I don't think so.
Dr Sarah Paine: They can't go on like that forever. No, they can't. But as long as Vladimir Putin lives, he will keep doing it. And apparently his cronies want to go down with the ship. The off-ramp would be for the West, under the table, to offer them something like safe passage out with however many billions they need, in return for giving Vladimir Putin a retirement plan.
Who is the enemy, and what comes after Putin?
Steven Bartlett: Who is our enemy?
Dr Sarah Paine: The continentalists. China and Russia. Donald Trump — telling Canada we're going to take them over. It's either a really bad joke, which I don't think it is, or it's actually where Donald Trump lives. And we have a Republican Party that hasn't thrown him out of office for doing that.
What is it — I think it's apocryphal, but it's a pretty good one — Churchill said that democracy is the worst system of government except for all the alternatives. Because it's messy and you're arguing all the time, and people like Xi Jinping will think, "Oh no, we're superior because we've got this orderly thing." Except you guys double down on poor decisions and you keep doing the same thing, and the longer you do it, the worse it gets. And the young in China are not happy with the way things are. The much better thing is really a multi-party system — accept the outcome of elections, try harder the next time, and try to keep developing fairer and fairer laws and rules.
Steven Bartlett: Is it possible for Russia to have a democratic leader after Putin?
Dr Sarah Paine: Not anytime soon. I think the story is that Russians today are actually for the war. I've never heard that there are a bunch of Russians who think they shouldn't own Ukraine. I've never heard that Russians think the costs of the war — they don't like losing children in Ukraine — but I've never heard any of them think it's a bad idea to take Ukraine.
Steven Bartlett: So what happens when Putin dies? What is the system in Russia? Is there a democratic election?
Dr Sarah Paine: Give me a break. No, it's a free-for-all. Think about how you have a democratic election — you have all these institutions for how the votes are counted. Look at the United States. We're having trouble, and we have these deeply embedded democratic institutions. Russia's got none of that. They're — Putin's really good at doctoring his elections. So, he dies. Think of him like a family tree. There's Vlad the Bad up top, or he's sort of like a mafia don, and then he has his consiglieri underneath him, and then they've got their consiglieri underneath them. And so there's this whole network. When he dies, he's gone. And then it's which one of these guys — or is it someone from over here — who's going to take over? And you know what? They don't know either.
Steven Bartlett: And it's a massive free-for-all. And now we've got a lot of Russians with military training, which wasn't the case before. And whom are they going to line up with?
Dr Sarah Paine: So there might be a bit of a civil war in terms —
Steven Bartlett: Possible, unknown.
Dr Sarah Paine: But what it means is profound instability. And then it's a Humpty Dumpty situation. It takes a while to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. That's where I think, in terms of these dictatorships, depending how bad the shatter is, it'll take longer to put it together. I'm going to make up a number and say ten years. So the democratic core should have a plan for when various dictators die. It's why you have a war plan on the shelf — so that when the unexpected event finally happens on the day you never knew, you've got at least some previous thinking and then you have something to start with, like a first draft where you adjust it. But we ought to be thinking in these terms.
Steven Bartlett: Oh, you could have loose nukes. That was the fear at the break-up of the Soviet Union — all these loose nukes. And that was one of the reasons they were taken away from Ukraine. And Ukraine was willing to have them taken away because we promised to protect them. And we broke that promise. That's a problem, because if you want to be a big player on the block, if your promises mean nothing — this is where Trump's having trouble with leverage over Ukraine, since they know that he's sold them out and he's always going to sell them out. It means he has no leverage over them.
Dr Sarah Paine: It's over. It was back to your comment about power — the best strategies, the ones that really work, are win-win. So that you get something out of it, I get something out of it. So of course we'll do it. And that's why the maritime order is strong. If it's a win-win, everyone plays well together. And you look at Europe — each country has been ponying up to help Ukraine, one at a time and sometimes together.
The most important thing we haven't discussed: the maritime order and the Uyghurs
Steven Bartlett: What is the most important thing that's happening in the world at the moment that we haven't talked about?
Dr Sarah Paine: Wars are negative-sum. They destroy wealth incredibly rapidly. The only infinite game, positive-sum world order is a maritime one. It's maritime because what is it — 90% of the world's trade goes by these oceans. This is the world's original network that reaches everything. A container ship will take 21,000 containers, whereas a train — I don't know, 600 if you're lucky. This is the efficient way to get things around.
As flawed as international institutions are, they are the feasible thing that avoids this. If you get into a world war, it's all over. So better to build institutions, and if you can't reform the UN to make it better, then you create a parallel institution, and then your government gradually says, "Hey, we're no longer doing the office in New York City. We're moving to whatever this new one is."
All right. You care about the Uyghurs. This is the Chinese practising genocide. When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, by the next year he was summoning his experts on the Soviet Union and asking what happened. Because the last thing the Communist Party of China wanted was to go the way of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And what they told him is that the Soviet Union had been organised on the basis of ethnicity. The Russians had always had a Russian who ran each of these places and the ministries within them, but then the number two would be the token local. And they would sponsor all kinds of dictionaries in the local language, and you could do your folk dances and your embroidery and all that stuff. And while the Soviet Union was holding it together, it looked great. But when it shattered, it meant it was really easy for it to shatter on these ethnic lines.
And Xi Jinping — I suspect that explains his genocide of all the Muslims. What he's done with the Uyghurs is he's put the men into concentration camps, the children into what this country used to do to Native American children — it's terrible — putting them under these schools where you're creating cultural genocide. You're bringing them up to be like honorary Han. And then the women — I don't know, white slavery, whatever it is — because China's got a shortage of women of childbearing age.
Closing reflections: what makes Dr. Paine emotional
Steven Bartlett: You've written so many fantastic books. I've got several of them here. I'm going to link everybody to your lectures online — the full-length lectures online. So if you're listening right now, you can see a link below to Sarah's full-length lectures.
Dr Sarah Paine: There are nine total. They start with zero and then go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and then there's a finale. And you can see the logos on top — they have a particular look to them. It would be the Sarah Paine lecture series.
Steven Bartlett: What an interesting time to be someone who has your experience and education. How does that feel? You studied this for your whole life and now it's the topic of conversation.
Dr Sarah Paine: Well, when I was a little younger than you, I thought I want to learn about Russia and China. It'll take me a long time.
Steven Bartlett: Why did you choose that?
Dr Sarah Paine: Oh, because I'm born in 1957. That's the year Sputnik went up.
Steven Bartlett: Sputnik being —
Dr Sarah Paine: This satellite where the Russians put a little dog who was on a one-way trip. They sent Laika up there. And the United States was terrified because this meant that the Russians could eventually have ballistic missiles coming after us. We were behind on all of that. And that's when the Cold War — you could argue, you can pick your year when you think the height of the Cold War would be, but that might be one of them. So that's the year I'm born. And I grew up where everyone's talking about Russia being the evil empire, and I was curious about that. And growing up as a little kid during the Vietnam War and then watching that unfold poorly, I thought, well, I want to learn more about this.
Steven Bartlett: Dr Sarah Paine, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is: what makes you emotional?
Dr Sarah Paine: What makes me emotional? Sorrow. Watching sorrow. Watching other people suffering, watching children suffering. Why should they? We have adults that are willing to allow tremendous numbers of children to suffer. Go back to the Republicans — you need to make it better for children, for the generations that follow. So you lose the next election. Do the right thing. It's past due. Don't support continentalists. And I'll say it over and over again: what is more important than the generations that follow? Nothing. So do something for them instead of grifting.
Steven Bartlett: Dr Sarah Paine, thank you so much.
Dr Sarah Paine: Thank you for having me.