Postwar order

Jiang frames the lecture's central question as why Chinese society still gravitates toward America and what Putin can do about that dependence, then says the answer requires going back to the post-World War II order.

Because Israel has nuclear weapons and cannot be destroyed, Jiang says Saudi Arabia’s goal is to negotiate peace after the war and potentially split the Middle East between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

He says postwar America told Europe that fascism came from closed nationalism and that an open, multicultural immigrant society was the path to peace and prosperity.

Jiang argues that Marx was right in a broader sense because after World War II industrial societies made workers and unions central to social order and political reform.

Jiang says Bretton Woods originally tied the reserve-currency role of the dollar to a promise that dollars would remain convertible into gold.

Jiang argues that if peace came tomorrow and the Donbas went to Russia, the remaining Ukrainian state would survive only as a European-supported rump welfare state.

Jiang says postwar Europe spent fifty years teaching that nationalism is evil and promoting open borders, anti-racism, and multiculturalism to block another twentieth-century calamity.