Appeasement

As the lesson of the 1938 Munich Agreement (in Czech, Mnichovská zrada, the Great Betrayal) shows, appeasement of bullies does not work. Recall the details. On 30 September 1938 the UK, France, the Third Reich and the Kingdom of Italy signed a pact agreeing to the annexation by Germany of the Sudetenland, the western margin of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia in which the majority of the population were German speakers. Territorial claims on other bits of Czechoslovakia by Hungary (in southern Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus) and Poland (in Spis and Oravia) immediately followed, and were successful. It was obvious to the Czechs that Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland was a preliminary to full-scale absorption of their country into the Third Reich, a fact that prompted the resignation of President Edvard Benes soon afterwards, in October of that fateful year.

Britain had been appeasing Hitler since 1935. The aim was noble: to preserve peace – but such an aim in the face of bullies is a hopeless one, because the inevitability is that the bullies will take every advantage they can from the peace-desirers’ weakness. In the months leading to Munich a state of war had de facto existed between Germany and Czechoslovakia, with fighting in the border regions; all portents were clear. The Munich Agreement drove a cart and horses through a number of treaties and agreements establishing Czechoslovakia’s borders and independence after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918.

In the full-scale German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 Hitler threatened to bomb Prague unless the Czech government capitulated to a complete take-over. The then Czech president, Emil Hacha, who had travelled to Berlin to meet Hitler in an effort to prevent the invasion, had a heart-attack in Hitler’s office when told that the invasion had already started. Within weeks of the invasion arrests of dissidents and Jews, and expulsion of Jewish students from schools, had begun.

Donald Trump’s notion of ‘making a deal’ – aggressive, domineering, focused solely on personally being the winner – rings alarm bells all the more loudly when one sees that the person he wishes to defeat is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He wants Zelenskyy to accept a Munich-style concession of territory to a bullying neighbour. He thus appeases Putin, while everyone else seeks to appease him. Sensible Americans know that Zelenskyy is right when he says that concessions to Putin – as the concessions to him over Georgia in 2008 and the Crimea in 2014 already show – only embolden him more. Perhaps Europeans are waking to the fact that appeasing Trump is likewise dangerously pointless. What happens in Donetsk is an emboldening of Trump in Panama – when Blackrock’s new financial involvement on the Canal provide an excuse to him to ‘protect’ American interests there with boots on the ground. The current anxieties of Bulgarians and Romanians anent Putin might soon be felt by Greenlanders anent Trump – it is no longer unimagineable. Poland and Finland are not waiting for the ‘peace’ that Trump says he wishes to establish in Europe, a ‘peace’ there that frees US money, troops and intentions for direction towards a bigger target in Trump’s eye: China. China itself, watching with lip-licking interest its friend Putin’s fortunes in Ukraine, has been increasing its war-game exercises around Taiwan, continuing with the militarisation of the South China Sea, increasing its ‘zones of interest’ version of empire in Africa where it is the world’s single largest donor of aid, and the dependency of countries like Australia on trade with it.

The threads are being plucked from the fabric of international arrangements which have, until Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, somewhat precariously maintained peace between larger powers in the world. Unconscionable strife, proxy wars, ‘quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing’ to quote Chamberlain on Czecheslovakia but now tragically applying to places like Sudan and the Congo, have – until 24 February 2022 – sequestered the infantile propensity of human beings to solve problems by killing each other to places where television news coverage is scanty.

But now the ground has shifted under our feet. Russia has brought war to Europe again, and Trump is determined to let him get away with it. One can hear the delighted sniggers in Moscow from here. Nothing could have served Putin better at this juncture than to have an ignorant petulant baby throwing its toys about in the Oval Office. Like Samson in the temple Trump is bringing not just the US but the world crashing down round our ears. With him as president there is now no way back; every pushback against him is an incitement for him to up the ante. It is beyond tragic that here in Europe, in our own day, too poorly prepared because for so long unwilling, the price has yet again to be paid for protecting ourselves from malignity and stupidity.