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During the debate over the most recent Ukraine aid bill that Congress passed, Biden administration officials, legislators, and many in the media proclaimed that this was a Churchillian moment for the United States. Rep. Michael McCaul, for example, repeatedly stated from the House floor and elsewhere, that how you voted on the aid bill determined whether you were Churchill or Chamberlain (referring to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, one of the architects of appeasement in the 1930s). The pro-Ukraine aid forces have invoked the “lessons of Munich” to justify deeper involvement by the United States and NATO in the Ukraine War, but they would be wise to consider that the path they are following might end in what the British historian Niall Ferguson called “the pity of war.”
Pro-Ukraine aid forces repeatedly compare Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler and Russian aggression in Ukraine to Hitler’s aggression in Czechoslovakia. Britain and France capitulated to Hitler at Munich, thereby dooming Czechoslovakia and setting the stage for the invasion of Poland and the beginning of the European phase of the Second World War. The pro-Ukraine aid forces claim that if the United States negotiates a ceasefire in Ukraine rather than helping Ukraine to defeat Russia and win the war, it will be another Munich moment--and the Baltic States and Poland will be the next victims of Putin’s aggression.
This, of course, is not the first time U.S. political leaders and their media supporters have invoked the “lessons of Munich” to justify greater involvement in wars. President Truman and his advisers did it in Korea before deciding that it was “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” President Eisenhower’s "domino theory" in Southeast Asia was based on the lessons of Munich, but Eisenhower, unlike his immediate successors, knew better than to send massive numbers of American troops to the jungles of Vietnam. The 58,000 plus American men who died in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and early 1970s did so because our leaders were haunted by the lessons of Munich--they wanted to be Churchill, not Chamberlain.
History is rarely “clear” on these matters, but don’t tell that to professor Christine Adams of Maryland’s St. Mary’s College who wrote an essay in Time magazine entitled “History Makes Clear the Risks of Appeasing Putin,” complete with a photograph of Neville Chamberlain waving the Munich agreement to a crowd of supporters at Heston Airport. The message of her essay is quite simple (or should I say simplistic): Putin is Hitler, Ukraine is Czechoslovakia, and to use her own words: “Appeasement of Hitler didn’t work, and appeasement of Putin threatens the safety not only of Europe but of the world beyond.” What is at stake, therefore, in Ukraine, according to professor Adams, is the safety of the world. If that is so, why doesn’t she advocate sending American troops to Ukraine to fight alongside Ukrainians who are trying to save the world? Professor Adams then accused Republicans, “egged on by former President Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson,” who opposed the Ukraine aid bill as being “pro-Russian.” Winston Churchill, of course, never accused Neville Chamberlain of being pro-Nazi, but then Churchill understood the complexities of history, including the reasons men like Chamberlain sought to avoid a repeat of the slaughter of the First World War.
Instead of reflecting on the lessons of Munich and the lead-up to the Second World War, Western political leaders might benefit from reading Niall Ferguson’s provocative history of the First World War titled The Pity of War. Ferguson contended that German aims in the First World War were limited, and that even a German victory would not have imperiled the British Empire. He called the war and Britain’s participation in it “the greatest error of modern history.” Yet, just as we in the United States have invoked Munich to justify our involvement in wars, the statesmen of Britain in the lead-up to 1914 invoked memories of the “Napoleonic threat in Europe” to justify going to war against Wilhelmine Germany. One British diplomat as early as 1909 wrote that “The ultimate aims of Germany surely are, without doubt, to obtain the preponderance on the continent of Europe, and when she is strong enough, enter a contest with us for maritime supremacy.” Others warned that Germany aimed at the “hegemony of Europe.” In other words, Kaiser Wilhelm II was Napoleon, just as today Putin is Hitler.
But Ferguson argued in The Pity of War that Germany’s war aims--especially at the beginning of the conflict--were limited. There is no evidence, Ferguson writes, that the German government in 1914 had a Napoleonic vision of world domination. At most, Germany aimed at economic and political hegemony in Central and part of Eastern Europe, diminishing Russian power in the east but leaving the British Empire alone. Ferguson notes that both German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and German General Helmuth von Moltke (the younger) proposed guaranteeing the territorial integrity of France and Belgium in return for British neutrality. Ferguson concluded that “Germany’s European project was not one with which Britain, with her maritime empire intact, could not have lived.”
Britain, of course, did not remain neutral. Other powers, including the United States, entered the war. As the war ground on and the casualties multiplied and the devastation proliferated and the immense slaughter continued, calls for a ceasefire and negotiated peace fell on deaf ears. The economic and political consequences of the First World War constituted what George Kennan characterized as the “seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century. The unintended consequences of the war--there are always unintended consequences of war--included the rise to power of communism and fascism, a second and even more deadly war twenty years later, and a costly 45-year Cold War. There would have been no Munich without the First World War, and its “lessons” would not have been distorted later to justify other wars.
We don’t yet know what the unintended consequences of the Ukraine War will be. We can be sure, however, that if the war spreads to a general European or world conflagration, those consequences will be grave. Then, the so-called “lessons of Munich” will fade into the shadows and the “pity of war” will take center stage.
Francis P. Sempa writes the Best Defense column each month.
