John Mearsheimer

And Stalin murdered more of his own people than he murdered people outside of the Soviet Union.

History is a multidimensional phenomenon.

We're talking about interstate relations here.

And realism is a theory about how states interact with each other.

And there are many other dimensions to international politics.

And if you're talking about someone like Adolf Hitler, right?

why did he start World War II is a very different question than why did he start the Holocaust or why did he push forward a Holocaust?

I mean, that's a different question.

And realism doesn't answer that question.

So I want to be very clear that I'm not someone who argues that realism answers every question about international politics.

but it does answer what is one of the big, if not the biggest questions that IR scholars care about, which is what causes security competition and what causes great power war.

Pros and cons to every decision.

The question is, did he think that he could win a quick and decisive victory?

And he did.

I mean, as did his generals.

It's very interesting.

I've spent a lot of time studying German decision-making in World War II.

If you look at the German decision to invade Poland on September 1st, 1939, and you look at the...

German decision made France on May 10th, 1940, and then the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941.

What you see is there was actually quite a bit of resistance to Hitler in 1938 at the time of Czechoslovakia, Munich.