America's Doomed Alliance with China, 1971 to 2021: Nixon to Biden.

the united states and china
have never been overt enemies at any time between world war ii and 2021 when joe biden initiated current hostilities the breakdown of the strategic relationship hot take all right within that span of time believe it or not the chinese army and the american army directly fired bullets at one another in what we now call the korean war i don't know why we can't call it the korean civil war but the war that created the division between north korea and south korea all right they fired live ammunition at one another nevertheless they were not enemies the generation of political and military leaders in china still very much alive at that time during the korean war they were veterans of world war ii what they call the sino-japanese war and they carried with them the memory of the military assistance financial systems and cooperation provided by the americans to the chinese communists they have memories stretching from the east coast of china all the way to yunnan all right and that sense of gratitude connection and collaboration it ran deep did the overt military alliance between the united states and china begin what am i referring to what most people remember as the nixon kissinger pact i guess that's what people call it in as much as anyone ever talks about this uh i i have a real question for you if we did a poll how many americans are even aware that president nixon met mao zedong and formed a military alliance with them look that that very basic fact it's one of the most important things to know with history of the 20th century that is still influential is still crucially important now in the 21st century it it began in 1971. and the flashpoint the conflict at that time was not vietnam was not cambodia was not the division between north and south korea it is a surreal fact that the conflict that drew china and the united states to work together was in india it was the war in 1971 between india and pakistan a war that directly impacted the lives of more than 100 million people all right really it could be about 200 million people when i say directly impacted the lives i mean they were physically there they were in areas where bullets were being fired bombs were being dropped it was a brief war the 1971 war okay but it was not a counter-terrorism operation right it was not a police action of the military it was a war that involved all three branches of the formal military units of like six different countries three branches meaning the air force was involved there were airplanes dropping bombs the navy was involved there were naval battles and the land armies of india and pakistan were involved russia the soviet union sent naval vessels to fight on the same side as india against pakistan this was something of much greater symbolic value than it was strategic value now look i'm 42 years old i feel i have a balanced and mature view of richard nixon i don't regard him as a vampire i don't regard him as a psychopath i don't regard him as insane and i can actually tell you about some things nixon did that were uniquely morally positive look into his record with first nations people indigenous americans good luck finding any other president in this united states who even cared okay and he cared he really tried to get positively involved as their languages were going extinct and to question the whole history of what america had done to its indigenous peoples and what america ought to do next nixon cared nixon really tried to make a difference however nixon was an alcoholic he was not terribly intelligent he was not very well educated especially not about places like india and pakistan nixon very fundamentally misjudged the situation he believed profoundly that india was now in a pro-communist alliance with the soviet union with russia that india was now going to carry the flag of communism and specifically russian-aligned communism throughout the third world that india was going to be this you know today the population is a billion at that time i don't know this this nation of 800 million or whatever it was backing and expanding the the soviet front throughout africa throughout southeast asia that worldwide this was a massive domino that had just fallen in russia's favor and that was not true at all fundamentally in 1971 india was committed to parliamentary democracy and they still are in 2021. they were committed to parliamentary democracy and they needed someone to sell them aircraft and tanks and they got into the bed with the russians to do that because the british weren't going to do it they weren't going to be armed by the british the germans at that time weren't going to talk about west germany they're not going to do it the french weren't going to do it and the united states of america at least under nixon wasn't going to do it they needed the military hardware and to a very limited extent they got into bed with the russians now it's easy to misjudge that mao zedong [Laughter] i can't make the kind of balanced statement about mao zedong that i made about nixon right at best mao zedong was a very childish very shallow man i still don't feel i've come to a definitive answer like i don't feel i've answered the question to my own satisfaction of how crazy mal was i've seen a lot of contradictory evidence even looking at the guy's handwriting if you've seen handwritten statements in chinese from mao there's some times when i see his handwriting and i think this guy was completely insane he was some bad man and there but there have been other times when i saw his writing he looks perfectly rational in control i think well you see how misleading these things can be you look at one snippet of a man's life out of context okay um mao zedong was intensely jealous of the aircraft that russia had provided to india whether or not it is a real fact that mao had been asking russia for these aircrafts these are these really sexy looking what am i going to say really fancy looking jet fighters of that era fighter bombers produced by the soviet union in reality history has shown they are they are really not very effective aircraft compared to what the americans could offer but they look very impressive on the runway this beautiful sleek modern geometric design so this is what's remembered as the mig series event aircraft mig so mig 17 mig 21 fighter bombers okay whether or not mao zedong felt he had been competing for russia to provide these aircraft okay mao's perspective on the korean war or the korean civil war is that the chinese army committed a huge number of men to korea and they lost and they died because they didn't have the russian air force backing them because russia didn't commit the aircraft to make it happen for the communist side in korea okay now he's he's partly correct and by the way it's not the case that there were zero russian aircraft involved in the korean war but that's that's not a completely insane perspective on this group very briefly mal committed an enormous number of men chinese men to fight on the north korean side and he thought he would win by overwhelming numbers that's not the way it works in the 20th century and the more men you have the more mouths you have to feed and a lot of those men starved the most common anecdote to hear from the chinese side about what it was like fighting in the korean war was that they ate toothpaste they ended up eating the toothpaste they brought with them to brush their teeth they ate cats they ate dogs that starvation was a problem so he deployed a huge number of men the american side didn't have a huge number of men they had some really good pilots that's some really good aircraft and yeah it was a bloodbath unbelievably terrible brutal war that today outside of korea nobody remembers and take 2021 i think fewer and fewer people in korea even you know remember what happened okay so yeah apart from the aesthetics or the symbolic value of having support from the russian side in terms of receiving these aircraft that china should be receiving these aircraft not india not their enemy india to put a little bit of emphasis on it because he now felt correctly or incorrectly that india was his rival and was his enemy already at this at this early stage um in case you didn't know mao zedong's eldest son and he had another son who was mentally handicapped but his eldest son who many people presume would have inherited political power would become an important person in chinese politics and it was you know his good son his important son it was groomed for leadership and so on his elder son died in the korean war in the north versus south korea and it is plausible that he blamed the situation with military aircraft for his sons hot take hot tape what would have happened in the vietnam war if the russians had committed aircraft okay the whole the whole history people get so used to this they forget how weird it is the whole history of what happened in vietnam the whole history of what happened in laos the history what happened in cambodia the americans keep sending these aircraft and doing saturation bombing they're not having dog fights there aren't big russian fighters dog fighting with them sorry that's the slang term in english for it since world war one we've said dogma there aren't aircraft from the other side fighting back and preventing them right the americans have bombers and they have helicopters that just have unchallenged free reign over the skies of laos cambodia vietnam why because the russians didn't commit aircraft on the other side not my opinion this is not my interpretation of what happened in vietnam however this was a perspective and i believe it was one of the most important aspects of mao zedong's perspective on what happened and what went wrong in the you know what what really was world war three in vietnam because it wasn't just the vietnam war it was the vietnamese american chinese russian war i mean the russians were crucially involved and anyone could step back and say well well the russians they kind of i mean they had an embassy the russians did very little and that's why the history of unfolding was possible at all if the russians had put their foot down from the very start and said no they deployed the aircraft if they deployed the men right none of this could have happened and you know obviously a really big contrast here is the cuban missile crisis why didn't the americans do in cuba what they did in vietnam because they couldn't the russians drew orlando said no the russians would not allow the americans to conquer cuba or even just kind of mess around militarily right thus the cuban missile so someone in mao zedong's position would be sensitive to that like oh okay i see how it is so cuban lives matter but vietnamese lives don't matter right so what about why don't korean lives matter why don't chinese lives matter and now and now you come to find out you're this crazy dictator mao zedong and you come to find out the russians are giving aircraft to the indians that russia is going to support your enemy and your rival india in precisely the way they didn't support you and why for reasons that from a chinese perspective make no sense or don't matter russia is arming india russia is shining signing a special friendship and cooperation agreement with india so that india can fight a war to partition pakistan into two different countries instead of being one country now from a chinese perspective that just doesn't make sense okay i this is my hypothesis mao zedong was furious and the beginning the beginning of the american chinese strategic alliance that sentimentally began in world war ii sure the memory of americans and chinese fighting together against the japanese and a kind of special friendship and connection that endured and endured for mao personally and for the whole elite of the communist party and the military there that endured despite the korean war experience okay in 1971 the chinese and the americans find themselves on the same side against india and that was a fundamentally irrational ridiculous alliance that continued from 1971 to 2021. any 10 year old kid you explain politics you sit down with a 10 year old and explain what the situation was on planet earth back when bill clinton was president united states well yeah there's this evil communist dictatorship called china um but america is on their side and they're friends oh and um india they're a democracy they have freedom of speech they have a parliament they have elections they have newspapers they'll have to criticize the government oh yeah yeah yeah they're good in those ways but there are enemies um america is instead in an alliance with china and pakistan why pakistan because pakistan's an enemy of india oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and there's this there's this other country russia they used to be a communist decision but now they're not i mean when you're talking about the bill clinton era that's all over they're now a democracy too whether or not you had optimism back at that time about how democratic russia would be oh yeah but there but there are still our enemies because we're we're allied with with china that's like the that's this top priority for the united states of america all the way from 1971 to 2021. it was a fundamentally irrational stupid decision made by one [ __ ] one alcoholic by nixon the same guy who bungled the vietnam war so badly and bungled cambodian bungled laos did so many other terrible things at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives i don't want to estimate how many dead bodies really we can attribute to the nixon interesting topic for another video how many deaths can we blame nixon for maybe it's only tens of thousands i should i should watch my words but in case you know this guy made this one bad decision that has had so many long-term consulates now if you were explaining the world to a ten-year-old when bill clinton was a power the ten-year-old might say back to you that's stupid that doesn't make any sense why isn't america part of a pro-democracy alliance where they are fundamentally allied with japan and india against china wouldn't that make more sense and it was not until the year 2021 when joe biden asked that question came up with a new answer and now now the whole world is going to change how bad is it going to get what are the chinese willing to do in terms of infiltration information warfare sabotage espionage including industrial espionage industrial sabotage unfair economic competition in terms of what their navy is going to do what their air force can do how about state-sponsored terrorism what are the chinese capable of what are they willing to do if america is their overt enemy the answer is we don't know because since world war ii despite the vicissitudes of foreign policy that have come and gone since world war ii there has never been a period of time when china and the united states were overt enemies when they were not to some extent on the same side