Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake
Dwarkesh Patel1 HN recommenders · 2023–2025
5.4M views · interview · evergreen · Uploaded 2023-10-04
Dwarkesh Patel interviews Sarah Paine, a Naval War College historian, about continental versus maritime powers and how that explains decisions by Xi and Putin. They also cover a possible Taiwan war, the fall of the British Empire, WW2 strategy and how to study history.
HN commenters use it as a source for Paine's continental-versus-maritime framework and her views on sanctions when discussing geopolitics.
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4 comments from Hacker News
> The value of the land in a long run tends towards infinity, especially if it is populated with taxable people and factories. The taxable people often end up dead and the factories destroyed. Since about the (Second) Industrial Revolution going after land really hasn't been a good way to gain wealth. Sarah Paine, Professor of History and Strategy at the US Naval War College has some interesting ideas in "The Geopolitics and History of Continental and Maritime Power": * [LINK] * [VIDEO]
I think the useful model for this is that currently there's a competition between the naval powers and the land powers, which is rapidly heating up. (Due to the last decades of very high rate of economic growth of China.) [VIDEO] Maritime order (basically a trade alliance, if you join you have more chance to influence it, win-win) and the continental order (buffer zone, extractive/authoritarian, negative-sum). Of course as the competition is getting fierce one seems to borrow from the other. (Russia is funding itself and its war from trade. And China sold market access in exchange for technology.) And the US is now transitioning from soft-power to pay up or you are out. (Balance of trade, NATO contributions, etc.)
There's no need to demonize people, soulless systems will do just fine. Game theory is pushing continental powers against maritime ones. [VIDEO]
> 25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like. Sanctions are a negative-rate compounding system. Sarah Paine from the US Naval War College: > People look at sanctions and go, “Oh, they don't work because you don't make whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing.” What they do is they suppress growth so that whoever's annoying you over time, you're stronger and they're weaker. And the example of the impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea. It's powerful over several generations. * [VIDEO] * [LINK]