This explains so much, thank you. We spent all that American blood to take Eastern Europe from one dictator only to give it to an even murderous dictator. Then we drew a line in the sand and told the new dictator, You can't cross this line, spending trillions to keep that policy in force for years. Question......why didn't we just do that with Hitler? Much of the central and eastern European countries were his allies. We simply could have warned him to stay out of western Europe, which he really had no designes on to begin with. Central Europe could then have been a buffer between western Europe and the USSR, the far greater menace