Return to Munich?

 I spent the week leading up to Shavuot reading Robert Harris’s excellent novel, Munich, which I enjoyed very much and somehow hadn’t gotten to until now. (I usually read books made into movies before seeing the film, but made the mistake this time of reversing the order. The movie, starring Jeremy Irons, George McKay, and Jannis Niewöhner, was good enough—but I found the book to be far more compelling.) Nor was this an unusual choice for me: I’ve been a huge fan of Harris since his 1992 breakout bestseller, Fatherland, and have read all of his books published since then. I especially liked his “Cicero” trilogy (the books were published in the U.S. as Imperium, Conspirata, and Dictator), which books were and are the best and most exciting lawyer-novels I’ve read. But Harris’ several books that are set against the background of events leading up to or taking place during the Second World War (Fatherland, Enigma, Munich, and V-2) are in a class by themselves. I recommend them all.

I was drawn to read Munich specifically because of the parallel I am seeing increasingly clearly between the situation facing the world in 1938, when the Germans were about to go to war for the sole purpose of seizing the territory of a country—in this case Czechoslovakia—that it felt had no “real” right to exist, and the one facing us now in 2022, as Russia pursues a war of ruthless brutality against a neighboring country regarding which its leader feels similarly. Nor are those the only parallels: the fact that a serious portion of the Czechoslovak population in the region called the Sudetenland was made up of ethnic Germans who spoken German as their native tongue and who regarded Germany as their homeland gave Hitler the fig leaf he at that point still felt he needed to justify invasion as liberation, not at all unlike the way that Vladimir Putin has attempted to justify his invasion of Ukraine with reference to the 17.5% of the Ukrainian population that self-defines as ethnically Russian.

The world remembers Neville Chamberlain, British P.M. from 1937 to 1940, as the quintessential appeaser, as the man who famously signed over the territory of someone else’s country to the Germans for the sake of preserving “peace in our time,” words that have come to have—to say the very least—a hollow ring when spoken against the background of what was yet to come. (The Munich Conference of 1938 took place precisely so that France and the U.K. could feel good—or, at least, less bad—about stepping back from their unambiguous commitment to defend the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia so that the Germans wouldn’t need to start an actual war to seize the territory they wished to acquire.) The point of Harris’s novel is to provide some shading for that portrait of Chamberlain as a gun-shy coward who was prepared to do anything at all to keep Hitler from going to war, much less as a fool who lacked the insight to see through Hitler’s phony assurances that the transfer of the Sudetenland to German control constituted the sole territorial adjustment that Germany wished to make to the map of Europe.

The ”real” issue, Harris suggests, was the fact that there was no way imaginable that Britain could have won if war had broken out in 1938—at which time the Royal Air Force  had exactly twenty fighter planes “with working guns” to protect the entire nation—and that behind Chamberlain’s endlessly mocked decision to hand over a serous chunk of someone else’s to Germany was his need to stall for time so that Britain could be far more ready to fight before war actually did break out. And, indeed, it seems quite correct that the outcome of the Battle of Britain was as it was precisely because it began in the summer of 1940 instead of in 1938. When a nation is motivated by the almost certain knowledge that it is about to face a ruthless foe in all-out war, two years can be a long time!

I have been drawn to reading about Munich lately because I see a certain level of Ukraine-fatigue setting into our national approach to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. No longer a front-page issue unless a significant number of civilians are killed, the war has settled into our national consciousness as a bad thing happening to someone else’s country by an aggressor nation we hold no sympathy for…but who we also have zero interest in actually going to war against.

Nor am I intuiting this based on my own survey of the news: President Biden published an essay in the Times just last week in which he made that precise point unambiguously and plainly. The President started off by explaining that our goal in Ukraine is straightforward and clear: our nation wants, he wrote, “to see a democratic, independent, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine with the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression.” And then he went on to opine that, in his opinion, only a diplomatic solution will serve truly to end the conflict. Nor did the President look away from the fact that the Russians do not seem eager or even slightly inclined to resolve the conflict peacefully. Indeed, our commitment to continue to provide the Ukrainians with the kind of arms and rocket systems they will need to keep the Russians from winning the war is rooted, he wrote clearly, in the assumption that those negotiations will come about precisely when the Russians finally realize they have embarked on a war they simply cannot win.

And then the President got to his real point. “So long as the United States or our allies are not attacked,” he wrote unambiguously, “we will not be directly engaged in this conflict, either by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine or by attacking Russian forces. We are not enabling or encouraging Ukraine to strike beyond its borders. We do not want to prolong the war just to inflict pain on Russia.” So that was clear enough and the President’s principles were no less transparent. We want the Ukrainians to win. We will provide them with billions of dollars’ worth of arms. We will stand by them diplomatically and emotionally. But we will not enter this war. In other words, we’ll do what we can—but if the Ukrainians lose, they will have to live with the consequences of their own defeat. (To read the President’s essay in full, click here.)

Is Joe Biden our Neville Chamberlain? Or, to ask the same question in different words: is our decision to support Ukraine with money and guns but ultimately to leave the Ukrainians to their fate the moral equivalent of the decision of the French and British more than eighty years ago to denounce the German threat to invade Czechoslovakia but ultimately to leave the Czechs and Slovaks to theirs? The parallel is not exact. The Brits and the French specifically did not send massive amounts of money and arms to Czechoslovakia. The Germans specifically hadn’t invaded and were only threatening to—and the Munich Agreement actually did result in a peaceful transfer of territory without simultaneously plunging the world into war. But it also gave the Germans another year to prepare their offense and to stockpile their weapons so that when, a year later, Germany unilaterally invaded Poland (and without first asking the permission of the U.K. or France), their success in crushing the Poles was more or less guaranteed. Where things went from there, we all know—so the real question, the one that matters, is what would have happened if the Munich Conference had never taken place, if Germany launched a military invasion of Czechoslovakia, and if the U.K. and France had gone to war forcefully and aggressively in 1938. Would Germany have been defeated? Would the rest, including the Shoah, never have happened? If the French and the Brits had honored their commitment to Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity, would events have quickly led to regime change in Berlin? Would the U.S. have joined such a principled, just war against a ruthless aggressor state…or would FDR still have dithered until the Japanese finally forced our hand?

These are tantalizing questions that have no answers. Czechoslovakia’s so-called allies declined to honor their commitments and allowed themselves to feel good about betraying an ally by telling themselves that Hitler probably meant it when he insisted that his troops would only cross the border into another country this one single time. Putin too has indicated that he has no plan to occupy the countries of the former Soviet Union one by one, much less that he hopes to paste back together the old USSR and recast it as a new Russian Empire. Nor, of course, does the fact that Hitler betrayed his own pledge necessarily imply that Putin will. In the best-case scenario, Ukraine wins. In the second-best-case scenario, Ukraine loses and Putin honors his commitment to attack no other nations. Well worth noting is that no nation of the former Soviet Union is a member of NATO, so all Putin really has to do to avoid a World War with the West is to keep his hands off of Finland and Sweden, supposing they manage to join NATO. If the West wouldn’t intervene to save Ukraine, why would anyone expect it to intervene to save Latvia or Moldova? I suppose we all know the answer to that question. And so, of course, does Vladimir Putin.

Looking back, there are lessons to be learned. Of them, the simplest are that buying bullies off rarely works in the long run, that peace and appeasement are similar concepts only etymologically and not at all politically, and that fantasizing that giving in to a bully’s demands will somehow discourage that bully from making even more demands is folly. For the moment, the Ukrainians appear to be holding their own. But time is on the Russians’ side—and in a very big way. So the real question is what we will do if the tide turns dramatically and a Ukrainian defeat seems imminent. That is the question to which we, the people, should be demanding an answer and which the President specifically failed to address in his op-ed piece. We should be demanding the answer to that question now, long before we have actually come to that crossroads and have to make a game-time decision which path to take forward.