History teaches us that peace cannot and should not be achieved at any price. St. Augustine believed in the morally justified war, and if ever there was a justified war it was World War II. Hitler had to be stopped from destroying civilization and reducing humanity to a vast prison camp controlled by a ruthless master race.
So, given the grave situation today in Central and Eastern Europe, it is incumbent on us to recall how that threat began: the Munich Crisis of 1938 when Great Britain and France agreed to Hitler’s demand to absorb the German-speaking Sudetenland border region of Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich.
Not only did this act of appeasement sell out the Czechs by dismantling their national sovereignty and laying the ground for the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939; it began the slippery slope toward the Nazi plan to conquer Europe in its entirety. Upon his return to London from Munich on 30 September 1938, having signed an agreement that carved up Czechoslovakia, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously told the waiting crowd: “I believe it is peace for our time.” In the end it was only the German invasion of Poland that forced the Western powers finally to stand up to Hitler.
The same scenario of appeasement in the face of military aggression is now being played out with regard to U.S. President Donald Trump’s astonishing response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Whereas in the lead-up to World War II, Great Britain was the appeaser, now it is the United States. Trump’s desire for peace at all costs is not a sign of strength but of weakness that will have the inevitable effect of emboldening Russia to consolidate its territorial gains in eastern Ukraine and will also encourage it to threaten the independence of the Baltic states and perhaps Poland as well.
The similarities between the plights of the Czechoslovak state in 1938 and today’s Ukraine are indeed striking. Before the German invasion, British companies had participated in the mining and metallurgy industries of Czechoslovakia just as Trump has shown an interest in Ukraine’s rich mineral resources in recent weeks. Before the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, had played up false accusations of atrocities by the Czechs toward the Sudeten Germans and described Czechoslovakia as a monstrous creation of the Versailles Treaty– similar to the way Russian President Vladimir Putin has characterized Ukraine as a false creation of the post–Cold-War political landscape.
In fact, the ancient kingdom of Bohemia had been a unified entity for a thousand years, and Ukraine, with its capital Kyiv, had been the center of medieval Rus, not Moscow. These historical facts did not prevent Goebbels from presenting the new Czechoslovak state as subject to international “Jewification” in much the same way that Russia has exploited antisemitic sentiment in Russia toward the Ukrainian-Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Putin skillfully manipulated grievances among the Russian-speaking minority in eastern Ukraine to justify his invasion (described euphemistically as a “special military operation”) just as Hitler encouraged the separatist machinations of the Sudeten Germans led by the Nazi sympathizer Konrad Henlein.
A Perverse Role Reversal
Finally, just as Ukraine has been excluded from negotiations between Trump’s United States and Putin’s Russia, so was the Czechoslovak government absent from the negotiating table at Munich except for a couple of “observers” who had no negotiating powers. Britain, France, and Germany were essentially redrawing the political map of East-Central Europe. The British government characterized Czechoslovak President Edvard Benes as a bully for failing to grant more concessions to the Sudeten Germans, thereby providing a flimsy justification for the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland and the subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia. Similarly, Trump has described Zelenskiy as a dictator in what can only be described as a perverse role reversal that casts Putin as the victim and the Ukrainians as the aggressors.
Following the disastrous meeting between Zelenskiy and Trump in the Oval Office last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt eerily echoed Chamberlain’s notorious reference in 1938 “to a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we nothing” with the dismissive statement: “We are no longer going to just write blank checks to a war very far away without real lasting peace.”
The consequences of Trump’s policy of peace at any price are strongly reminiscent of Great Britain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938. It will have the similar effect of weakening America’s moral and political standing in the world just as Britain rapidly ceased to be a great power in the postwar era. It will also destabilize Europe by encouraging Putin to be more rather than less aggressive in his desire to resurrect the Soviet empire and expand Russian control of East-Central Europe. War in Europe will be the inevitable result.
Upon Chamberlain’s return from Munich, Winston Churchill rejoined: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” Ironically enough, Trump recently returned to the Oval Office a bust of Churchill which Joe Biden had removed. Perhaps he should have installed a bust of Neville Chamberlain instead.
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