Appeasement?

 Everyone can agree at this point that the "Munich analogy" has been overplayed. Not only have Hitler/Nazi comparisons of all kinds come to be regarded as argumentative cheap shots (or worse, as relativizing the exceptionally evil in human history), but the Munich analogy in particular has been abused to the point of senselessness. Throughout much of the last century, it could serve as the final closing argument to support a maximalist position in just about any negotiation with rival powers, because the idea of conceding anything could be portrayed as "appeasement," hence "reminiscent of Munich," hence ultimately likely to trigger more, rather than less, war. 

But with all those caveats in place, Putin's expansionary gambits in Eastern Europe really do seem reminiscent of the events of 1938 in a more than usual fashion. This does not mean the Russian leader is bound to follow Hitler's genocidal and megalomaniacal path by some kind of inexorable teleology; nor does pointing out the similarity of his propaganda and tactics in this limited respect mean that he is like the Nazi dictator in all ways. But the particular manner in which he has gone about gradually enlarging the territory under Russia's effective control mirrors in an uncanny way the actions of Hitler leading up to the 1939 invasion of Poland. 

Back in 2014, the Russian dissident and former chess grand master Garry Kasparov already made this comparison explicit, likening Putin's annexation of Crimea (and occupation of South Ossetia and other regions) to an "Anschluss." If Crimea was akin to Austria, in this analogy, then Russia's present brinksmanship—once again concerning a region of Ukraine—must call to mind no less the Sudetenland crisis of 1938. 

With respect to the Sudentenland at the time, recall, Hitler could adopt a rhetorical and propagandistic position very similar to the one Putin has taken toward the Donbas. He doesn't have any expansionary ambitions, he could say; he was simply concerned about the rights and interests of the German-speaking minority that inhabited this region. It was not he, Hitler, who wanted to enlarge his domains and incorporate the Sudetenland, but rather the people of the region themselves who had called for annexation. Thus, ceding the territory to Germany could be portrayed not as conquest, but as a win for the "self-determination" of peoples. 

Putin could and has made very similar claims with respect to the two quasi-autonomous separatist republics in Eastern Ukraine which are now under effective Russian influence. In both, the majority of the population belongs to Ukraine's Russian-speaking ethnic bloc, and appeared for a time to favor incorporation into Russia (whether they do still is hard to say, as the break-away republics have become increasingly authoritarian and repressive, making any independent gauge of public opinion virtually impossible). Putin can, and does, say that he is merely defending the rights and self-determination of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, even as he winkingly unveils his larger ambitions in a 7,000-word article asserting the fundamental historical unity of Ukraine and Russia. 

And if Donbas in 2022 can be justly likened to the Sudetenland circa 1938, then the strategic and moral conclusions we take from it are supposed to be obvious. In short, the argument runs, conceding the Donbas to Russia would be akin to the Munich agreement, in which Chamberlain notoriously offered up the Sudetenland to Hitler while gaining little in return. And we know that the Munich agreement only ended up encouraging Hitler to try still bolder gambits to gain even more territory, abetting him in his megalomaniacal goals. Thus, it is concluded, the United States must continue to support Ukraine's efforts to retake the territory (even though they already agreed back in 2015 to relinquish it, yet have not done so). 

Those of us who favor de-escalation as a path to avoid further conflict can nevertheless see the force of this argument. We therefore tend to try to argue against the analogy itself. We search for ways in which the Donbas is not like the Sudetenland, or in which ceding it in accordance with the 2015 Minsk agreement would not be similar to how the Czech territory was ceded in 1938 per Munich. 

But suppose for a minute the analogy is valid, and it doesn't have the implications that people often attribute to it. What—that is to say—if we have been getting Munich wrong all these years? What if it was not the military and political blunder it has so often been portrayed as, and does not point to the lessons that are so often taken for granted? 

As much as "Munich" has become political shorthand for a terrible negotiating mistake that effectively doomed the world to further Nazi aggression, after all, historians have (perhaps unsurprisingly) always been rather more divided on its meaning. From the moment it was signed, analysts have split into different camps about whether or not it was a wise diplomatic maneuver, or at least the best of the options available to the Allies at the time. The "revisionist" perspective on Munich, which sees it as a more intelligent geopolitical move than has often been assumed, essentially takes two forms, one of which has aged far better than the other. 

The first of the "revisionist" arguments—what we might call the A.J.P. Taylor school—holds that Munich ultimately failed not because it was wrong to make any concessions to Hitler, but rather because subsequent agreements didn't go far enough in the direction of appeasement. According to this analysis, ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler was entirely proper, and the Allies should have done the same with Danzig the next year. It was only because they had sworn a pact to defend Poland against any outside incursion that Hitler's limited territorial ambitions in that country (as these authors would portray them) ended up "accidentally" and "haphazardly" triggering a global war. 

I don't think this view is remotely defensible at this stage of remove. Hitler was not in fact just an ordinary German statesman with a limited set of revanchist demands related to specific neighboring territories. To the contrary, he had made his theories of racial supremacy and the need for German "living space" explicit more than a decade before these events occurred, and to argue that he never intended to conquer the whole of Eastern Europe requires ignoring or writing off as insincere bombast (which Taylor willingly did) many of Hitler's own statements to his military subordinates at the time, as well as his subsequent actions. 

The Taylor school has therefore not aged well with regard to the facts; and it has always strayed dangerously close to being an apologia for the Nazi dictator. Taylor's position, recall, was that Germany in seeking to enlarge its territory and reclaim areas lost at Versailles was simply reasserting its "objective," "natural," and therefore "moral" rights as a Great Power. One is reminded today of the analysts who seem to think that Russia is somehow entitled to bully its nearest and smallest neighbors into submission simply because it can, or because it did so in the recent past. (This argument today usually takes the form of asserting that Russia has "vital interests" in Ukraine because it used to belong to Russia's "sphere of influence," as if this provided a kind of automatic override to the territorial sovereignty of other states.)

But there is another means of rehabilitating Munich that does not make these same mistakes, and that actually proceeds from the exact opposite set of assumptions about Hitler's motives and character. This school of thought (articulated here, for instance) holds that Hitler did in fact have expansionist ambitions from the start (as he clearly did), and did in fact desire a war of aggression and conquest that would allow him to wrest territory from neighboring states (and even ultimately to aim at world domination). And it was for this very reason that Munich was a diplomatic success, because it deprived Hitler of one of his favored pretexts to launch such a war. It thereby forced him to show his hand more openly, by engaging in even more naked aggression toward Poland. 

From this perspective, Munich was actually an enormous diplomatic defeat for Hitler; and in fact there is considerable evidence that he viewed it this way himself at the time. Think about it: Hitler had been propagandizing for months about how his only ambition with respect to the Czech lands was not conquest, but only to respect the majority will of the people of the Sudetenland region who wanted to break away and join Germany. What the Munich agreement essentially did was to call his bluff. It offered him the limited concession that he claimed to want, and thereby deprived him of any rationale or pretext for declaring war on Czechoslovakia. If he did so, he could no longer say it was for the limited purpose of supposedly "vindicating the self-determination" of the Sudetenland Germans. 

Hitler was thereby forced to wait, and war was effectively delayed. When Hitler did ultimately initiate the conflict, it came through an even more blatant form of aggression, against a sovereign state that he knew the Allies had sworn to defend in the event of a German attack. Of course the Allies were not ultimately able to arrest Hitler's advance at this stage—in large part because the Soviet Union was openly aligned with him at this point, and Stalin had become a co-conspirator in carving up Eastern Europe between them—but it is not clear that the Munich agreement can be blamed for this outcome. To the contrary, if the Allies had refused Hitler all concessions at Munich, it would have provided him with a more plausible pretext for war, resulting in a propaganda win as well as a military victory (whereas in the invasion of Poland as it ultimately played out, it was the military success alone that he had on his side). 

Can a similar logic be applied to present circumstances? Putin claims—at least in some contexts—that his only goal is to protect the Russian-speaking minority of Eastern Ukraine (even as, again, his own official publications attest to more sweeping ambitions). Suppose that the Western powers were to take him at his word? To be sure, the U.S. and other NATO powers should not be in the business of divvying up Ukraine and giving part of it to Russia, and at any rate, it is by no means clear that Russia even wants to formally incorporate the Ukrainian separatist blocs. But the U.S. could be doing much more to press its Ukrainian allies to uphold their end of the Minsk agreement, including by formally recognizing the autonomy of the Donbas region. 

Putin may be using the rights of the Donbas as a pretext, after all, but that doesn't make the pretext wholly unconvincing. Just as Hitler could point to widespread support among German speakers in the Sudetenland, Putin can accurately note that plausible majorities in the break-away republics favor closer ties to Russia. Nor is the Ukrainian government the ideal progressive democratic ally we might wish to set against such a line of argument; to the contrary, they represent one majoritarian ethnic bloc in a civil conflict that tends to divide along ethnic lines, and their cause from the Euromaidan on has attracted the support not only of local liberals, but also of a host of nasty characters including neo-fascists and white supremacists (whose support at least some Ukrainian nationalists do not seem to disown). Why should not the Donbas be granted autonomy from such a government? 

To be sure, Putin might not actually be satisfied with the mere autonomy of a couple Russian-speaking Eastern regions of Ukraine; just as Hitler in fact wanted more all along than merely the Sudetenland. But by granting this autonomy (which is, once again, nothing more than what they already agreed to do back in 2015), the Ukrainian government would deprive him of any plausible pretext for further incursions or any propaganda victory in the event he should try to pull such a stunt. If Putin truly desires a larger war beyond that, he would be forced to show his hand openly. He would have to engage in even more blatant aggression, and willfully bring an even larger conflict upon himself. 

In a recent piece, Anatol Lieven called for "golden bridge" diplomacy with Russia—namely, a strategic approach that would allow Putin to gracefully exit an escalating conflict with enough concessions to claim partial victory. I would dub my own—not entirely unrelated—proposal above as the "let the baby have his bottle" school of international relations. If Putin has been clamoring for years for greater autonomy for the Russian-speaking Donbas region, let it be granted to him. Let Putin get what he claims to want, and arrive thereby at "fulfillment's desolate attic," to borrow Larkin's phrase. Will it be enough for him? Probably not. But it would force him to declare as much, instead of hiding behind the moral ambiguities of the present situation.