The current round of “Munich” warnings is sprouting around the Trump Administration’s bungling and incompetent approach to negotiations over the Russia-Ukraine War. This summary from the left-leaning British columnist Owen Jones has a worthwhile discussion of this week’s diplomatic development on the Russia-Ukraine War: (1)
That segment was done before the news of the last few days about Trump’s Ukraine negotiations and J.D. Vance’s Opus Dei speech at the Munich Security Conference that was mainly a campaign pitch for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the upcoming German Bundestag election and also for other Orbán-type authoritarian parties in the EU. This week may be remembered as a major marker of a new security environment for western and central Europe.
But Owen makes a good point that Trump with his demand for Ukraine’s “rare earth” minerals is essentially demanding reparations from Ukraine. Although “tribute” would probably be more accurate.
Historian Timothy Snyder in a recent presentation in Vienna noted that wars typically do not end with elaborate peace agreements that restructure conditions to make a more secure world. They more typically end like the Korean War did, with a ceasefire. As he notes, that war is technically still going on, there was never a formal peace settlement. (2)
The gets to the reason that I find it unlikely in the extreme that a scattered character like Donald Trump will ever be able to negotiate complicated agreements – not in Ukraine and not in the Middle East – that set up a lasting structure for a new and less risky future, like the post-1989 negotiations over the end of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union or (arguably) the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements from the Second World War. Anyone expecting that would be well-advised to adopt a version of one of Jerry Brown’s quirky slogans from the 1970s: “Lower your expectations.”
At first glance, the new Trump position on Ukraine seems to be that Russia gets to keep as much of Ukrainian territory as it wants and that there will be no substantive security guarantee by the US or Europe for rump-Ukraine. This new turn is already being hashed over by the foreign policy wonks. But in retrospect, failing some agreement to diffuse the situation before the Russians’ February 2022 invasion, the best moment to negotiate a substantive peace arrangement or ceasefire would have been late 2022, after the Ukrainians had successfully pushed back the initial Russian advance.
But that’s water under the bridge, now.
The Munich Analogy
Unfortunately, Snyder in his comment also gave in to the chronic temptation to invoke the “Munich” analogy to try to clarify the current situation of the Russia- Ukraine War. “The symmetry between Germany-Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Russia-Ukraine in 2022 is uncanny, and pausing for a moment on the resemblances might help us to take a broader view of today.” (3)
We can’t seem to have any major international negotiation or military crisis without being bombarded with often-functionally-illiterate references to “Munich,” i.e., the Munich Agreement of 1938. The Munich Analogy has almost certainly done more damage to the world than any other foreign policy truism.
Snyder explains that while Hitler was preparing for war on Czechoslovakia in 1938, “Britain and France, together with Germany and Italy, decided in Munich on September 30th that Czechoslovakia should cede crucial border territories to Germany.” He then spins a fantasy about how if Britain and France had gone to war then, the Americans would have cheerfully jumped in and together the Western powers would have walloped Hitler without even having to get any help from those nasty Soviets.
But he does add a qualifier: “To be sure, we cannot say in detail what might have been.” This after imaginative alt-history suggestion about how the Western powers could obviously have whupped Germany right then and there.
I wish every who works or aspires to work on anything related to foreign policy, from the diplomatic corps to the press corps and everything in between, would read these two books by longtime Air War College professor Jeffrey Record (4):
Record does not argue that policymakers should ignore historical precedents. On the contrary, his argument is that policymakers need to look carefully and realistically at relevant precedents. But stereotyping can be distorting, and no two similar events are ever entirely comparable. As he put it in a 1998 paper:
Two historical events in particular have influenced US use-of-force decisions since 1945: the infamous Munich Conference of 1938, and the lost American war in Vietnam. The power of these two analogies has been such as to merit the definition “syndrome,” or the political analog to a set of signs and symptoms that together indicate the presence of a disease or abnormal conditions. Decision-makers have regarded Munich and Vietnam as disastrous events whose repetition on any scale is to be avoided at any cost. Indeed, it was the perceived lessons of Munich and its corollary domino theory that perhaps more than any other non-domestic political factor propelled the United States into Vietnam. And it was America’s calamitous experience in Vietnam that in turn continues to exert a no less profound hold on the present generation of American decision-makers. Munich promoted a propensity to use force against what was held to be insatiable aggression by totalitarian states. In contrast, Vietnam has served, within the Congress and Pentagon if not the White House, to discourage and constrain, if not prohibit, non-mandatory uses of force1 in all but the most exceptionally favorable political and operational circumstances. Indeed, some observers have bemoaned what they believe is Vietnam’s endowment of geopolitical timidity. “The legacy of Munich,” wrote [leading neoconservative] Norman Podhoretz in 1982, “had been a disposition, even a great readiness, to resist, by force if necessary, the expansion of totalitarianism; the legacy of Vietnam would obversely be a reluctance, even a refusal, to resist, especially if resistance required the use of force.” [my emphasis] (5)He summarizes in that paper why the policy of “appeasement” (compromise) by Britain and France in 1938 worked out badly:
Clearly, appeasement of Germany at Munich encouraged Hitler to believe that he could grab even more territory in Europe with little risk of provoking war, just as the Rhineland and Anschluss had encouraged him to believe that he could get away with the Sudetenland. Appeasement also made the terms of war with Germany, when war finally came, much less favorable to the democracies. The military price of stopping Hitler in 1938 was much cheaper than it was even just a year later, when a Nazi Germany now aligned with Stalin’s Russia gobbled up a Poland that neither Britain nor France was in any position to assist militarily, notwithstanding pledges to do so. The price was dwarfed by the cost of the much wider war that followed. By the end of 1940, Hitler had crushed France and had marginalized British military power in Europe. Britain could not even hope to overturn Nazi control of Europe absent the entrance into the war of both the United States and the Soviet Union, a condition fulfilled in 1941 by Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June and utterly gratuitous declaration of war on the United States in December. [my emphasis]Record argues that a basic problem with the Anglo-British approach to Hitler at that time was that Hitler was committed to war. That was his intention, and the Nazi ideology was fully militarist and imperialist. War was Hitler’s policy, particularly a war of conquest in the east. Record argues that Hitler was not appeasable through substantive compromise, nor was he deterrable.
But the hawkish stereotype of “Munich” is that Hitler and Chamberlain had a testosterone contest at Munich and Chamberlain lost. To borrow a notorious metaphor from a later crisis, they were eyeball to eyeball and Chamberlain blinked. He wimped out. So that convinced Hitler he should go to war.
Far more important was the fact that France had a mutual defense treaty with Czechoslovakia and Britain had one with France. And Chamberlain’s government was committed to going to war together with France if they went to war under the defensive treaty with Czechoslovakia. But their military strategy did not match their political strategy. They were not militarily prepared to wage a defensive war in Czechoslovakia against Germany. Their military strategy concentrated on preparing to stop a German attack in the west.
Implementing a defensive strategy with Czechoslovakia would also have meant cooperating with the Soviet Union in a British-French military action against a German invasion, if they were able to arrange such a deal. But that could have resulted in Soviet control of Czechoslovakia, and Britain and France didn’t want to facilitate anything like that, either.
Because of later polemics between the USSR and Western powers, it has become a bit touchy to mention that Britain and France were very mindful of the possibility that Germany and the Soviet Union would go to war with each other and that both would massively weaken themselves in the process. Everyone involved knew they were playing for high stakes and weren’t inclined to have sentimental scruples against acting on cold-blooded calculations. As was dramatically shown in 1939 with the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact.
There was also a very non-testosterone factor in play. Taking the portion of Czechoslovakia that Hitler did mean the Germans were in control of the massive Skoda arms works there. And it gave a spectacular boost to Germany armaments effort during the following year. This was a huge advantage for Germany, and probably should have been a much stronger consideration in their decision-making.
Threat inflation
A huge problem with over-reliance on the Munich analogy in particular is that it can easily lead to threat inflation. Because not every enemy is Hitler. But from the rhetoric from government officials and commentators, it often seems like the US never fights anyone but “Hitler”. After the Second World War, Stalin was “Hitler”, Ho Chi Minh was “Hitler”, Saddam Hussein was “Hitler”, Osama bin Laden was “Hitler” - to use a short list. And – of course! – Vladimir Putin is the current “Hitler”. Oh, and Hamas, too.
That can and does lead to over-reaction to real or perceived threats. As Record puts it:
Two analogies have dominated the foreign policy discourse over the past half century: Munich, shorthand for the consequences of the democracies' appeasement of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan in the 1930s; and Vietnam, shorthand for the dangers of intervening in a foreign civil war. The Munich analogy teaches that the only way to deal with aggressor states is through early and decisive use of force either to deter them from future aggression or to destroy them altogether. Appeasement simply whets an aggressor state's appetite for more and postpones inevitable war while raising its ultimate cost. (6)And he notes, “The Munich analogy permeates the entire neoconservative critique of post- Cold War U.S. foreign policy.” (p. 79) But that view blithely ignores the radical difference between Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden with the actual Hitler:
Hitler presided over the most powerful industrial state in Europe, and he re-created a German army that was operationally superior to that of any of his enemies, including the United States. In the end, it took the combined might of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire to bring him down, and even then only after four years of bloody military operations on a scale not witnessed before or since. (p. 81)Timothy Snyder in his essay takes the Munich Analogy to speculate that Ukraine is the only thing standing between NATO and World War 3. And that’s the problem with trying to squeeze contemporary foreign policy situations into the narrow frame of the “Munich” testosterone contest. Doing that turns them into imminent world war, for which immediate escalation by the US and its allies is the only possible solution.
If the Munich Analogy actually predicts reality in the current situation, we should expect that a year from now the Russians will have doubled their available armaments and will be invading Poland before mid-2026. Taking that as the most likely scenario would require gigantic crash armaments program for the EU nations.
As Record writes, “War is the province of miscalculation.” (7) The point is that countries need to evaluate threats as realistically as possible. Exaggerating a threat can lead to disastrous decisions just as underestimating or ignoring real threat can.
The Guardian has offered up a whole set of articles on this week’s public diplomacy over the Russia-Ukraine War, including:
Roth, Andrew (2025): The heartlessness of the deal: how Trump’s ‘America first’ stance sold out Ukraine. The Guardian 02/13/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/13/trump-europe-ukraine-russia> (Accessed: 14-02-2025).
Editorial (2025): The Guardian view on Trump and Putin: Ukraine’s future must not be decided without it. The Guardian 02/13/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/13/the-guardian-view-on-trump-and-putin-ukraines-future-must-not-be-decided-without-it> (Accessed: 14-02-2025).
Wintour, Patrick (2025): EU failed to Trump-proof Europe and now faces humiliation over Ukraine. The Guardian 02/13/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/13/eu-failed-trump-proof-europe-humiliation-ukraine> (Accessed: 14-02-2025).
Chao-Fong, Léonie (2025): Trump says he believes Putin ‘wants peace’ with Ukraine as Zelenskyy warns not to trust Russian leader’s claims – as it happened. The Guardian 02/13/2025. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/feb/13/ukraine-nato-hegseth-trump-putin-zelenskyy-europe-news-live> (Accessed: 14-02-2025).
Notes:
(1) Ukraine's Defeat And The FALL OF THE WEST. Owen Jones YouTube channel 02/13/2025. <https://youtu.be/RqrHVoJXH6c?si=1A0_TzFMc1-YHT9x> (Accessed: 14-02-2025).
(2) IVAN KRASTEV, TIMOTHY SNYDER: Making Sense of an Unsettling World. IMWVienna YouTube channel 02/13/2025. <https://www.youtube.com/live/Bc6hZqBEb4Y?si=-bMkB0hGGIxYUp9W> (Accessed: 14-02-2025).
(3) Snyder, Timothy (2025): Appeasement at Munich: World Wars, Past and Possible. Thinking About... (Substack). <https://snyder.substack.com/p/appeasement-at-munich> (Accessed: 2025-14-02).
(4) Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002). Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.
The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007). Washington: Potomac Books.
See also: Record, Jeffrey (2005): Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s. US Army Strategic Studies Institute. <chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/14277/Appeasement%20Reconsidered.pdf> (Accessed: 14-02-2025).
(5) Record, Jeffrey (1998): Perils of Reasoning by Historical Analogy Munich, Vietnam and American use of Force Since 1945. Air War College, March 1998, 1. <chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA425519.pdf> (Accessed: 14-02-2025).
(6) Record, Jeffrey (2004): Dark Victory: America’s Second War Against Iraq, 78. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.
(7) Record 2007, 74.
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