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.