The Munich moment

 After a year of wildly oscillating statements from President Trump regarding the Russia-Ukraine War, Trump, acting through his personal envoy Steve Witkoff, has definitely emerged as the Neville Chamberlain of our time.  It's time to review the historical parallel.

In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles took significant territory away from Germany and awarded it to Poland, while other treaties left the German-speaking regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a new vastly reduced Austria and in the new state of Czechoslovakia, which was dominated by the Czechs, its largest ethnic group.  In the wake of the treaty France attempted to play the role that the US played in Europe beginning in 1948--it signed alliances with Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia in an attempt to contain the new Germany within its new borders.  Great Britain held aloof from those alliances.  It took 14 years for a new German government, Hitler's, to embark upon the mission of undoing the Versailles treaty borders.  After five years of rearmament, Hitler managed to bring Austria into the Third Reich through political pressure.  He then demanded better treatment for the German minority in Czechoslovakia--a pretext to create a conflict with the Czech government that would allow him to attack and destroy that nation and bring both the German and Czech-inhabited parts of it into Germany.

France, sadly, knew that they could not fight on behalf of Czechoslovakia without Britain.  Neville Chamberlain had taken over as British Prime Minister in 1937.  He desperately wanted to avoid another European or world war, and by the end of that year he had made clear to Hitler that he would allow changes in frontiers to prevent one.  He sent a British cabinet member to mediate between the Czech government and its German minority, but Hitler had ordered the Sudeten German leader to keep raising his demands so that they could not be satisfied.  With  Europe on the brink of war in September 1938, Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and agreed to the German annexation of the border territories inhabited by Germans.  Chamberlain then persuaded the French and the Czechs to agree to this as well.  Two more meetings at Bad Godesberg and then Munich--where Hitler met with Chamberlain, Mussolini, and the French Premier--led to that result.  The border territory also included the Czech fortifications and what was left of Czechoslovakia was defenseless. Six months later, Slovakia seceded and Hitler took over and annexed the rest of what is now Czechia.  That territory sat out the Second World War, and when the Allies won, a restored Czech government expelled its three million Germans into Germany.

The peaceful defeat of the USSR in 1991 corresponds to the defeat of Germany in 1918.  The USSR gave way to a much-reduced Russia, shorn of the Baltic States, Belarus, the Caucasus and Central Asian republics, and most of all, Ukraine, which surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees, but never managed to join NATO.  Russia, like Germany after 1919, suffered very severely economically from its defeat and the collapse of its regime, and it took just 8 years, not 14, for Vladimir Putin, a man dedicated to restoring Russia's former greatness, to take power.  Putin began, we have learned, by staging a fake terrorist attack that killed dozens of Russians as a pretext for resuming the war against Chechnya.  He managed to turn Belarus into a satellite and briefly bring a pro-Russian leader to power in Ukraine.  That government, however, fell, and in 2014 he simply annexed Crimea--an excellent parallel, it now occurs to me, to Hitler's Anschluss with Austria.  He also started a rebellion in eastern Ukraine, and in 2022 he invaded Ukraine without warning.  At that moment I suggested here that NATO should seriously consider getting into the war then and there.  I am not aware of a single other person to make that suggestion, but NATO, led by the United States, provided Ukraine with critical economic and military aid, and Finland and  Sweden joined NATO.  Ukraine quickly rolled back the initial Russian gains but could not mount a successful counterattack and now is very slowly giving ground in a war of attrition.  An invasion of Russian territory around Kursk--an excellent strategy--unfortunately had to be abandoned.

As peace has been discussed, the key issue has become clear: will Ukraine remain an independent nation?  Russia insists that it must not--and the deal that Witkoff has drafted gives into that demand.  The deal gives Russia all the territory that it has occupied, and more.  It would require Ukraine to change its constitution so as to renounce NATO membership and forbid NATO troops from entering Ukraine.  It will severely limit the size of the Ukrainian army.  Like the Munich agreement, it includes only the vaguest security guarantees for what will be left of Ukraine.  If Ukraine accepts it, it will take only a few years for Russia to destabilize its government and proclaim the need for Russian troops to restore order, as Hitler did in what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

Donald Trump, playing the role of Chamberlain, has given Ukraine one week to accept the deal.  The rest of NATO finds itself in the role of France in 1938.  If it tells Ukraine to fight on, as the Baltic States and Poland, at the very least, certainly want to do, it will have to assume the responsibility of providing all necessary assistance, which will not be easy.  They will also have to assume the risk of war with Russia.  Whatever decision the British, French and Germans make, this is a turning point in modern European history.  There is no longer a United States government across the Atlantic willing to help with their defense.  

An odd mixture of people, it seems, will support the 28-point plan to end Ukrainian independence.  Here is historian Niall Ferguson, drawing the ire of former chess champion and activist Gary Kasparaov:

"The best is the enemy of the good. Contrary to recent press speculation, the draft 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine is in fact a reasonable basis for negotiations. Journalists can gripe about it as they griped about the 20-point Gaza plan. But wars are not ended by op-eds."

This is not too surprising.  Ferguson bizarrely established his reputation as an historian with his book The Pity of War, which argued that Britain in 1914 should have allowed Germany to win the First World War.  A lifelong resident of different parts of Oceana, he now seems willing to share the world with Eurasia and Eastasia and abandon the 1945 dream of a world of truly independent states.  That is also the policy of the current government of the United States, which has no respect for sovereignty within our own hemisphere.

Ukraine, unlike Czechoslovakia in 1938, has made it clear for four years that it has what it takes to defend its independence, and has fought heroically under very impressive leadership.  Russia also lacks a quick path to victory, as long as Ukraine gets enough assistance.  Sadly, the United States has abandoned the role that it played for a century.  This is a danger and an opportunity for the great nations of Europe.