John J. Mearsheimer

But to win the war, they had to drive across Eastern and Central Europe into Germany.

You remember, it was the Red Army that went into Berlin.

April of 45.

Exactly.

And that's when Hitler, of course, committed suicide.

And that war ended on May 8th, 1945.

And the Soviets ended up, needless to say, occupying

virtually all of Eastern Europe.

But what happens after that is that the Cold War breaks out, and you have the United States on the other side of what we came to call the Iron Curtain, called the intra-German border, and the Soviet Union on the other side.

And I think that there were two reasons that the Soviets had a vested interest and we had a vested interest in keeping that status quo.

One is we didn't trust each other.

And we were afraid if we got out, the Soviets would conquer more territory.

And they were afraid that if they got out, we would move eastward.

That was one reason.

But the other reason that we both stayed was the German problem.

You want to remember that World War I and World War II were both all about Germany.

Very important to understand that.

We forgot that in the Cold War because the Soviets defeated Germany.

Nevertheless, what happens after 1945 is that Germany is cut in half.

The Soviets take one side and we take the other side.