Appeasement Is Underrated

I’m opposed to censorship, but foreign-policy debates here in the United States would improve dramatically if politicians and pundits stopped defending their recommendations by constantly invoking Neville Chamberlain and the so-called “lessons of Munich.” Whenever somebody tells me that this one historical episode explains why the United States ought to do something today, I’m inclined to suspect that I’m being sold a bill of goods.

I assume you know what I’m talking about. Nearly 86 years ago, then-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with representatives of Nazi Germany in Munich because he supposedly believed that letting Germany acquire the Sudetenland (a portion of what was then Czechoslovakia that contained a large percentage of ethnic Germans) would satisfy Adolf Hitler’s revisionist ambitions and ensure “peace for our time.”

That’s not what happened: Hitler proceeded to seize the rest of Czechoslovakia and then went on to invade Poland in September 1939. The result was World War II, a vast conflagration in which millions of people died horrible deaths. Ever since, an endless stream of politicians and pundits have treated the failure to stop Hitler at Munich as perhaps the most instructive episode in world history, an error of statecraft that must never be repeated.

For these folks, the so-called lesson is that dictators are unalterably aggressive and that one should never, ever, try to appease them. On the contrary, their objectives must be firmly resisted, and any attempts to alter the status quo should be firmly deterred—and if necessary, soundly defeated. Former U.S. President Harry Truman invoked Munich to justify U.S. entry into the Korean War, and so did then-British Prime Minister Anthony Eden when he decided to attack Egypt during the 1956 Suez crisis. And it’s still very much in vogue today: In February, Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe wrote of the “stench of appeasement” permeating debates about Ukraine. And just last week, U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul urged colleagues preparing to vote on the latest aid package for Ukraine by saying, “You have to ask yourself this question: Am I Chamberlain or Churchill?”

To be clear: If I were a member of Congress—admittedly a scary thought—I would have supported providing more aid for the beleaguered Ukrainians. But not because I think Russian President Vladimir Putin is another Hitler who is hellbent on waging war across Europe the way that Nazi Germany did. What happened at Munich in 1938 is largely irrelevant to the issues facing us today, and invoking it is more likely to mislead than to inform. It’s a bumper sticker masquerading as Serious Analysis.

For starters, those who invoke Munich rarely understand what really took place back in 1938. Contrary to the subsequent mythology, Chamberlain was neither naive about Hitler nor unaware of the dangers posed by Nazi Germany. Among other things, he backed Britain’s efforts to rearm during the latter half of the 1930s. He did not think Britain was ready for war, however, and saw an agreement at Munich as a way to buy time for British rearmament to proceed. He hoped that the deal reached at Munich would satisfy Hitler and ensure peace in Europe, but if it didn’t work, Britain (and France) would be in a better position to fight when war eventually came.

He was correct: Britain and France had larger forces in the field than Germany did by the spring of 1940, and their rapid and unexpected defeat in the Battle of the Low Countries was due to failures of strategy and intelligence, not a lack of tanks, troops, or aircraft.

Furthermore, taking a harder line in 1938 would not have stopped Hitler from starting the war. We now know that Hitler himself was deeply disappointed by the outcome at Munich, as he had been hoping for a casus belli, and Chamberlain’s diplomacy denied him the opportunity that he craved to crush Czechoslovakia militarily. German officers opposed to the invasion might have ousted Hitler had he ordered an attack, but there is no guarantee that such a plot would have succeeded even if it had been tried. The uncomfortable truth is that Hitler was bent on going to war sooner or later, and a different outcome in 1938 would not have prevented World War II.

Second, the enduring obsession with Munich places far too much weight on one individual event, and it treats the compromises and agreements that have occurred between major powers as essentially irrelevant. It is hard to imagine a dumber way to use history: treating one episode as universally valid and studiously ignoring events that tell a different story. If you happened to have one tainted meal at a Chinese restaurant, you’d be foolish to conclude that all Chinese restaurants were bad and resolve never to eat in one again. But that’s how leaders and pundits use Munich, as if its lessons are the only ones that history provides.

To be more specific, repeatedly harping on Munich conveniently discards all the occasions when great powers made themselves more secure without war by reaching mutually beneficial accommodations with a rival. We tend to overlook the successful examples of accommodation because when the results are unremarkable, life goes on, and there isn’t a big war to grab our attention. Yet “nonevents” of this kind can be just as informative as the more dramatic situations where states failed to resolve their differences and went to war instead.

Looking for some examples of successful appeasement? How about the 1955 Austrian State Treaty, which removed Soviet troops from that country in exchange for a declaration of neutrality? Or consider the various arms control treaties negotiated between the United States and the Soviet Union, which helped stabilize the arms race and make nuclear war less likely. U.S. President John F. Kennedy appeased Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev when he agreed to remove Jupiter missiles in Turkey in exchange for Khrushchev withdrawing the nuclear-armed missiles he had tried to install in Cuba, and we may all be alive today because Kennedy acted as he did. U.S. President Richard Nixon and then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger did something similar when they agreed to the “One China” policy with Maoist China—a move that improved the U.S. position in the Cold War—even though Mao Zedong was a ruthless autocrat who was responsible for the deaths of millions.

And as historian Paul Kennedy argued many years ago, one reason that the British Empire lasted as long as it did was its leaders’ willingness to make limited concessions to potential challengers—i.e., to appease them—which reduced the number of opponents that they faced at any given time and spared them the burden of trying to defend every square inch of the empire simultaneously. Once we stop focusing on 1938 and look more broadly, the supposedly timeless lessons of Munich look far less compelling.

Third, the claim that Munich tells us how to deal with dictators contains a noteworthy contradiction. The costs of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust have rightly led us to view Hitler as one of history’s most evil figures. The good news is that leaders as depraved and reckless as Hitler are rare. If that is the case—and if Hitler’s combination of megalomania, racism, and suicidal willingness to take risks is largely responsible for World War II in Europe—then Munich should be seen not as a highly representative event with far-reaching implications, but as a highly unusual occurrence that says relatively little about most interactions among great powers. Instead of treating every dictator as if they were Hitler, we should be grateful that leaders like him are rare and focus on dealing intelligently with the ones we face today.

There is little reason to think that all autocrats are equally ambitious, aggressive, risk-acceptant, and dangerous. To be sure, a few dictators have been big-time troublemakers on the world stage—France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and Imperial Japan’s military leaders come to mind—but other prominent autocrats were less inclined to use force than their democratic counterparts.

The supposed lessons of Munich also rest on a simplistic view of what makes states act as they do. Those who invoke it assume that dictators are constantly looking for opportunities to start a war with some other country, and that the only thing that holds them back is other states’ (and especially the United States’) willingness to stand up to them. For most leaders, however, decisions to challenge the status quo with military force result from a much more complex assessment of threats, capabilities, opportunities, trends, domestic backing, and military options, and the probability that others will oppose them is but one item in their calculations.

The apparent lesson of Munich is that one should never appease a dictator, but the Biden administration made no effort to appease Putin in latter half of 2021, issuing an assortment of deterrent threats instead, and Putin went ahead with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine anyway. Similarly, the United States did not appease Japan in 1941; it kept ratcheting up pressure on Japan and refused to reconsider its demands. The lessons of Munich were followed to the letter, but the result was Pearl Harbor.

The obsession with Munich is not cost-free. Treating every dictator that the United States dislikes as if they were the reincarnation of Hitler makes it much harder to pursue intelligent compromises that might advance U.S. interests and reduce the risk of war. For example, viewing the Islamic Republic of Iran as a Shiite version of Nazi Germany helped undermine and eventually destroy the deal that had rolled back Iran’s nuclear program, and Iran is much closer to having the bomb today. Did that approach make the United States or its Middle East allies safer?

Similarly, viewing Putin as the reincarnation of Hitler and insisting that we must act like British Prime Minister Winston Churchill—Chamberlain’s successor—makes it harder to reach a diplomatic solution that would spare Ukraine further destruction and allow the United States to focus on other priorities. By making any form of diplomatic give-and-take seem like an invitation to aggression, the Munich analogy limits U.S. officials to making demands, issuing threats, sending arms, or joining the fighting themselves. Those options are sometimes necessary and useful, but why limit our toolkit in this way?

Is appeasement always a good idea? Of course not. Leaders should be especially wary of making concessions that significantly shift the balance of power in an opponent’s favor, because doing so would leave the opponent in a stronger position to demand future concessions. This sort of so-called appeasement should be avoided unless there is no alternative. Indeed, it was Churchill who pointed out in 1950 that “[a]ppeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circumstances. Appeasement from weakness and fear is alike futile and fatal. Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble, and might be the surest and only path to world peace.”

Given the United States’ considerable strengths and favorable location, U.S. foreign-policy officials should generally seek the “magnanimous and noble” path, seeking to resolve differences with adversaries via a carefully considered process of negotiation and mutual adjustment, even when dealing with dictators whose values and interests are at odds with their own.

This approach would be a lot easier if the foreign-policy community abandoned its peculiar obsession with Munich; I’d say the sooner the better.