Ebook: The specter of Munich : reconsidering the lessons of appeasing Hitler

NO HISTORICAL EVENT has exerted more influence
on post-World War II U.S. presidential use-of-force decisions
than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany
that led to the outbreak of World War II. The great lesson
drawn from appeasement—namely, that capitulating to the
demands of territorially aggressive dictatorships simply
makes inevitable a later, larger war on less favorable terms—
has informed most major U.S. uses of force since the surrender
of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.1 From
the Truman administration’s 1950 decision to fight in Korea
to the George W. Bush administration’s 2003 decision
to invade Iraq, presidents repeatedly have relied on the
Munich analogy to determine what to do in a perceived security
crisis. They have also employed that analogy as a
tool for mobilizing public opinion for military action.?
It was of course at the Munich conference of September—
October 1938 that Britain and France bowed to Hitler’s
threat of war and ceded the German-speaking areas of
Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. In so doing, Britain and
France not only sacrificed eastern Europe’s only democracy
to Adolf Hitler but also earned the utter contempt of
the German dictator. Hitler subsequently invaded the rest
of Czechoslovakia.

As the United States approached its second war with
Iraq, neoconservatives and other war proponents cited the
consequences of the democracies’ appeasement of the burgeoning
Nazi menace during the 1930s and asserted that
war was necessary to remove Saddam Hussein before he
acquired the nuclear weapons with which he would threaten
and even attack the United States. Munich’s great lesson,
they argued, was to move early and decisively against rising
security threats. World War II could have been avoided had
the democracies been prepared to stop Hitler’s
remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 or to fight for
Czechoslovakia in 1938. Instead, they did nothing when a
mere three German army battalions crossed over to the
Rhine’s left bank, and they handed over vital chunks of
Czech territory. With each act of appeasement Hitler’s appetite
grew. Thus military action against a prenuclear
Saddam Hussein in 2003 would be much easier and less
risky than war with a nuclear Saddam later on. War with
Saddam, as with Hitler, was in any event inevitable, so it
was better to have it now on more favorable terms rather
than later on less favorable ones.