Buying Peace?

 As another round of talks start up to try to negotiate an end to the war sparked by Putin's invasion of Ukraine, President Zelensky of Ukraine has continued to warn about the risks inherent in trying to buy Putin off by offering him pieces of another country's territory. It is "a big mistake to allow the aggressor to take something," he reportedly put it. 

I was reminded of something I was just reading in Montesquieu's Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline. He says that the Western Roman Empire, in its waning days, sometimes made overtures "to appease with money the peoples threatening invasion." 

"But," he warns, "peace cannot be bought, because the seller is then in a better position to compel it to be bought again." (Lowenthal trans.)

We all know this. It is nothing other than the lesson on Munich. As Arthur Koestler wrote in the 1950s: the generation that saw the failures of appeasing Hitler should have had no difficulty seeing the problem with trying to buy off Stalin's aggression by letting him keep parts of Eastern Europe. And yet, in many ways, they made the same mistake. 

So too, today: it should be obvious to everyone that Putin will not simply stop his career of violence and conquest once he has acquired the Donbas. After all, we've already seen what happened when he was allowed to seize Crimea. He didn't rest satisfied there—to the contrary, he was encouraged by the ease with which he had illegally hived it off. 

Putin's invasion of Crimea—and the rest of the globe's willingness to largely shrug and look the other way—left Putin in a "better position to compel" Ukraine to accept the next, even worse deal—in precisely the dynamic Montesquieu describes. 

And the same would happen if he is allowed to walk away from the present round of negotiations with the Donbas. 

I admit that I did not see this so clearly at the outset of this war. With my generally pacific inclinations, I thought: well, surely a strip of land called the Donbas is not worth sacrificing human lives for, on either side. 

It took me some years of watching Putin's conduct before I realized that human lives in the Donbas would be sacrificed quite as fully if Putin is allowed to permanently occupy the area and terrorize its inhabitants. When being annexed by Putin's Russia means having your children forcibly abducted and yourself confined to a prison camp—the choice is no longer so obvious. 

And more fundamentally, there is this old problem of appeasement to be considered. Sacrificing the Donbas does not merely mean losing the Donbas alone. It means encouraging a tyrant in a campaign of conquest with no ultimate terminus. 

As Koestler described the cynical calculus behind the West's betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich: "The sacrifice of this small nation will buy the safety of bigger ones—or so it is hoped." Koestler's point was that this concession to "expediency" was not only morally wrong—but entirely mistaken in the event. 

It did not in fact save anyone else from Hitler's aggression, but merely egged him on. 

A.L. Rowse—a relentless critic of Chamberlain's appeasement policy—reflects in his book on Auden (which incidentally surveys his own political history in the 1930s and after) on the seemingly invincible "credulity" and "stupidity" of people who "vot[ed] for appeasing Hitler, and then [were] no less surprised when it led them into war." 

He confesses he has no sympathy for people who were so willfully blind to such an obvious consequence of their own actions. 

With the Trump administration showing all signs of wanting to buy a temporary peace at the expense of Ukraine's people and territory, we are seeing the same absurd "credulity"—if not a deeper cynicism and malice, which actually wants to see Putin win or simply does not care (as Trump and Vance have said in the past) what he does to other nations. 

Of course, some people are well aware of the Munich analogy. One of the Trump administration officials involved in an earlier round of talks, Keith Kellogg, was reading an old book by Michael Foot and others that denounced the policy of appeasement, called "Guilty Men." "I refuse to be a guilty man," he reportedly said. 

Concerningly—Kellogg has since been completely sidelined in the talks. And the Trump goons who have taken his place show no signs of either his historic awareness or his sense of moral responsibility.