John J. Mearsheimer

And the last thing you want is another country like the Soviet Union or now Russia invading your country.

And if you're Russia and you invade that country, what you're going to find is a significant amount of resistance.

And just think about the Soviet Union.

They had to put down a major insurrection in East Germany in 53.

They had to invade Hungary in 56.

They had to invade Czechoslovakia in 68.

They almost had to invade Poland three separate times.

Then they had to deal with the Albanians, the Yugoslavs, and the Romanians, right?

Been there, done that, did not work out very well.

got a lot out of its empire like was it worth it for them the soviet empire the the warsaw pact the eastern bloc was that worth having great question but let me just say i was actually an air force officer officer i was an enlisted man in the army before i went to west point but then i was an air force officer really yeah yeah but well you went to i went to west point

You want to remember that before 1947, that was when the National Security Act created the Air Force Academy, and created an independent Air Force, that the Air Force was actually the Army Air Corps.

So West Point provided officers to the Army and to the Air Force.

And when I graduated from West Point in 1970, there were a set of limited conditions under which you could go into the Air Force.

And I qualified, so I was in the Air Force rather than the Army.

The vast majority of my classmates went into the Army, but I went into the Air Force.

But I had been in the Army as an enlisted man before I went to West Point.

So I actually, including my West Point time, spent 10 years in the military.

But to go back to your excellent question about the Soviet Union and its experience in Eastern Europe, the reason that the Soviet Union ended up in Eastern Europe is because on June 22nd, 1941,

Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa for the express purpose of destroying the Soviet Union.

Thankfully, the Soviets won the war.