WAIT!! WTF!?!?: Phil Zelikow is a very smart and thoughtful guy—most of the time. But this!

Phil Zelikow: Confronting Another Axis? History, Humility, and Wishful Thinking: ‘Stalin was not naïve about Hitler. But, as Stalin explained to his colleagues at the time, he was coming to regard the Nazi leader as a strategic partner in a wider effort for the ‘have-nots’ to take down the great European powers, including the British Empire.… <tnsr.org/2024/05/confronting-another-ax…>

As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf: ‘German policy… must not be directed by cosmopolitan folkish drivel…. The right to possess soil can become a duty if without extension of its soil a great nation seems doomed to destruction. And most especially when not some little nigger nation or other is involved, but the Germanic mother of life, which has given the present-day world its cultural picture. Germany will either be a world power or there will be no Germany…. And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last we break of the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future. If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states. Here Fate itself seems desirous of giving us a sign. By handing Russia to Bolshevism, it robbed the Russian nation of that intelligentsia which previously brought about and guaranteed its existence as a state. For the organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race… <ia801905.us.archive.org/6/items/mein-ka…>

Hitler did not see himself as leader of a “have-not” power that needed to take down the British Empire. Hitler saw himself as honor-bound to conquer all of Eastern Europe up to the Urals, divide the land among German farmers, and herd whoever survived of the Slavic population onto reservations.

In believing that Hitler could be a strategic partner, Stalin was mindbogglingly, extraordinarily naïve about what Hitler was.