Between Fall Weiss (Poland - fall 1939) and Operation Barbarossa (USSR - summer 1941), the USSR and Nazi Germany were indeed the next best thing to allied. Of course, just three years earlier, the USSR had been allied to France... And indeed the USSR ended up fighting and defeating Nazi Germany (the British and American effort in the European theatre was... underwhelming, and France had been effectively knocked out in the fall of 1940).

So Kristol is technically correct when he says that there was a Soviet-German alliance in 1940. But incredibly disingenuous at the same time.

And calling it a Nazi-Soviet Axis is the next best thing to an outright lie. The Axis in Europe was the vertical line between Rome and Berlin (AFAIK, Mussolini was the first to use the term Rome-Berlin Axis publicly in a speech in (IIRC) 1937 - the idea was that all of Europe would "revolve around the Axis" between Berlin and Rome). Precisely how Japan got into the Axis is unclear to me, but it's probably a combination of the fact that they were in the Anti-Comintern Pact and the fact that they were "not in the Allies."

But of course, people like Kristol would probably really rather forget the Italian fascists, considering how much the Americans cooperated with them in the postwar years...

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.