Yglesias on China and Russia

Yglesias � The Not-So-Great Game:

I would say that one of the major lessons of the past fifty years has to be that it’s extremely difficult to coercively dominate foreign populations who have nationalist objections to your rule. It’s not impossible, but it’s damn hard and the government of China would need to be pretty crazy to want to try to govern Kazakhstan. Crazy things do happen—look at Iraq—so I don’t think it’s totally safe to assume that the Chinese won’t ever do anything crazy. But part of the craziness of any course of action along these lines is that Russia would have any number of low-cost ways to make things difficult for China by sending supplies and weapons across the very long and hard to police Kazakh-Russian border.

Let's hope China has no leaders as crazy as ours were post 9/11