John Mearsheimer: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Well, and to say that they failed the Soviet Union, my grandfather fought for the Soviet Union, there was a lot of successes early on. So there’s poor military, I would say, strategic decisions along the way, but it caught Stalin off guard. Maybe you can correct me, but from my perspective, terrifyingly so, they could have been successful if certain different decisions were made from a military perspective. Yeah. I’ve always had the sense they came terrifyingly close to winning. You can make the opposite argument that they were doomed- You can make the opposite argument that they were doomed. But I’m not terribly comfortable making that argument. I think the Wehrmacht, by the summer of 1941, was a finely tuned instrument for war, and the Red Army was in quite terrible shape. Stalin had purged the Officer Corps, they had performed poorly in Finland, and there were all sorts of reasons to think that they were no match for the Wehrmacht. And if you look at what happened in the initial stages of the conflict, that proved to be the case. The Germans won a lot of significant tactical victories early on. And if they focused and went to Moscow as quickly as possible, again, terrifyingly, so could have been, basically topple Stalin. And one thing that’s-…

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