Sarah Paine: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, that's actually one of the questions I eventually wanted to ask you. In World War II, we see that many of the countries had really well coordinated and apportioned budgets spread between their different branches. And in the case of Japan, they didn't. Is democracy the answer for why the U.S. and Britain were better coordinated? Part of it. And I think part of it is a different issue. If you think about who the strategic leaders of World War II were, they were the conscripts of World War I. Think about people slightly younger than you, maybe your age as well, if they survive to come off that front, then they come back and they want to start families. It's the Great Depression. It's terribly difficult. And when they get to the age where they're going to be strategic leaders, they have the harm of sending their own children in. So they thought deeply about what had gone wrong in World War I. This is in the West, particularly Britain and the United States. And their answer was institution building on a massive scale and integrating all elements of national power. This is when you've had the National Security Act passed in the United States, setting up all kinds of organizations like the National Security Council, United Nations, NATO and all manner of things. A lot of it is coming off of the horrific war that was World War I and then doing a better job in World War II. You would think that the victors of a war would be the ones whose perception of reality is the most inflated, whereas the losers are the ones who have to come to terms with why they lost, whereas we see the opposite. The U.S. had such good leadership like Patton and Curtis LeMay and there are so many great generals that came out of that time. Whereas in Germany, Hitler himself fought in World War I so it's hard to explain why he made so many mistakes.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.