I think Americans need to worry about overextension; any country has to worry about overextension. We have finite resources. Also, you're talking about sending your fellow Americans to get themselves killed—that's quite something to ask someone to make that kind of sacrifice; it had better be worth it. There are 300 million Americans while the world's got 8 billion, so be cautious.

What's key on this maritime order, the big insurance policy of it all, is our allies and institutions. This is the great gift of the "Greatest Generation"—having created the UN, which has saved millions of lives through polio vaccines and other initiatives. Do not dismiss these organizations; they've done a lot. Or the EU—work through these things and listen to your allies; they will have insights, and there is power in allies. Tell me who China's allies are: the "crazy man" in Korea who can't even feed people in the 21st century, although he certainly feeds himself. Who are China's friends? I mean, Iran—a theocracy. Who does theocracies anymore? But the Iranians, okay, good on them.

After World War II, the Soviets were giving the Communists in China tremendous amounts of leftover weapons from the Japanese. At the same time, Truman actualized an arms embargo on Chiang Kai-shek in 1946. The Marshall Plan for Europe was 13 billion dollars to help build up defenses against communist appeal; at the same time, Truman had to be forced in 1948 by Congress to give a couple hundred million to China—literally 1/100th of what was given to Europe. By that time, it was too late for Chiang Kai-shek.

It's really important to distinguish between "nation building" and "nation rebuilding." If you're rebuilding, which is what happened in Japan and Germany, they already had full-up institutions and modern economies before the war. They had no problems with educational, judicial, or police institutions. When you give Germans or Japanese some cash, they know exactly how to recreate things and rapidly produce modern institutions. In China, they never had these institutions; there was no indigenous expertise. And by the way, look at the literacy rate in China compared to Japan—no one reads in China while everyone reads in Japan. We've had this problem in Iraq and Afghanistan: we decide to do the de-Ba'athification thing and think the police are still going to show up and work, but that's not how it works if they haven't got those institutions. A Marshall Plan in China would not have worked.

We had really competent Foreign Service officers in China in this period—many were the children of missionaries, so they spoke fluent Chinese and had a deep understanding of China. They were saying it's hopeless; there was no way Chiang Kai-shek was going to win because he was hated by the peasantry. The Communists were giving them land and educating them, whereas Chiang was busy drouning them into his armies. These missionaries were later caught up in the McCarthy purges and ruined, only to be exonerated decades later.

This is called making a "net assessment"—not of what you want it to be, but an accurate one. They believed it was not feasible even in 1945 or 1946. You're talking about hundreds of millions of people; we can't even deal with Afghanistan today with 20 million. At the end of World War II, American GIs were sick of it, as were their parents. They weren't going to fly back into another war.

The mistake, and this is a common one that Americans make, is not looking at warring parties to understand that if they are primary adversaries, there is no way you're going to make them "make nice." If you have parties that want to exterminate each other, the idea of getting them to cooperate in a coalition government is a non-starter. The United States was a very isolationist country and didn't have the attitude of a great power until after World War II, when we felt dragged into these horrible wars and realized we had to rethink that whole proposition.