Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…When Germany and the Soviet Union split up Poland, there's this 2000-kilometer border from the Baltics to the Black Sea that they've signed themselves up for, sharing it with the other largest army that has ever been assembled. Did the Soviet Union think that in the long run that this was a sustainable proposition? Or did they just think that we could wait Hitler out? Or in the long run they’d be in a better position to wage war against him? Did people think that this was a sustainable arrangement? I don't think Hitler was about sustaining any arrangement. He was about taking over Lebensraum in Slavic lands, Russia. But flip it the other way, which is what the Soviet Union is thinking: “It'll be great when the Germans go after the British. What's not to like about that one?” It's the pounce and absorb. They will weaken each other that will open opportunities for Russia. That would be the plan. Then he's looking at it and I don't know the details of what his timeline is, whether he thinks it's just a delaying act. I have not gone into the archives to read what Stalin was up to in great detail, but I think it's basically that one. He’s thinking that the British and the Germans could go at it. Also the Russians had tried to work out some deal with the British prior to all of this. With the British, the communists had been trying to destabilize them ever since the Bolshevik revolution, and they didn't get just how lethal the fascists were in Germany. They didn’t get that they weren't just run of the mill authoritarians, they had this whole genocide component that went with them. The British are thinking the real threat is the communists in Russia. They're right, long term they are the real threat. But in the more medium term it's the Germans. It takes blitzkrieg for the British to go, uh oh. Then they're willing to team up with Russians. Russia's willing to team up with them. When German invasion transforms what had been primary enemies, he takes that role being primary enemies for both Britain and Russia. Then you're gonna glue another alliance. That's the trick in our own day. You do not wanna do things that make the United States the primary enemy of those two, of Xi Jinping and Putin. Currently we're not. It's Taiwan or India or Vietnam. Whatever Xi Jinping's gonna steal currently, that's his primary problem. It's definitely Ukraine for Putin. You want to keep that all divided up to the extent that you're able to do that. A lot of things aren't feasible. These are high stakes things. This is where just not thinking about your foreign policy… It takes a lot of experts and a lot of people to game out what is your best course of action. What is your least bad option? That's usually what foreign policy is. It's not what the great option is, there are none of those. It's what the least bad one is. It takes a lot of thought and gutting the State Department will not get you there. It's profoundly dangerous. You described Hitler's strategy as pursuing a continental strategy and that was his undoing. But it seems like there's many other wars where a more reasonable person can pursue a continental strategy and do just fine. Bismarck does multiple continental wars—Franco-Prussian War, Austro-Prussian War—and achieves his objectives. Hitler is just freaking crazy. He continuously does things. He knows going to war with Poland in 1939 that France and Britain will join. He's like, "I will fight both of them for Poland for some reason."…

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