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Appeasement failed to stop World War II
In his excellent book, Appeasement, Tim Bouverie recounts the fear
of aerial bombardment Britons experienced even prior to the outbreak of World
War II, with Winston Churchill in 1934 warning of 30,000 or 40,000 people 'killed
or maimed' in the first 10 days of intensive bombing. While to Americans the
fear of such an attack seems remote, Harold Macmillan's later comparison puts
it in modern perspective: "we thought of air warfare [in the 1930s] ...
rather as people think of nuclear warfare today." (p. 40).
Ninety years later, the nuclear
analogy helps us better understand the visceral and real fear that was the emotional
core of appeasement - and also that
today we are in danger, this time by the fear of nuclear 'consequences' threatened
by Putin, of once again trying to appease a dictator, a strategy that, then as now, is more
likely to fail and lead to war than bring peace.
At each stage in the run up to
World War II, the democracies desire for peace led them to allow the dictators
to both advance and draw the conclusion, rightly, that they would not be
resisted in their ambitions. Mussolini in Ethiopia, the remilitarization of the
Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland and finally the rest of Czechoslovakia - at
each new step which ultimately led to war there was an opportunity for the
democracies to resist, but they failed to do so.
Weak, half-hearted and unreliable support for Ukraine is a new kind of modern appeasement
Today's democratic leaders, ever
conscious of the failure of appeasement, have belatedly come to support
Ukraine, having failed utterly to respond in any meaningful way to Putin's
takeover of Crimea in 2014 - like their forebears in the 1930s, ignoring the
warning signs of fascist aggression until it was too late to avoid war.
Having half-learned the lessons
of the failure of appeasement, they, especially the U.S., now engage in halfway
resistance to tyranny, dribbling out support for Ukraine at the bare minimum
needed to prevent total failure, while doing nothing that would risk actually
helping Ukraine win.
Putin's not-so-subtle nuclear
threats are alarming, and, as during the Cold War, should induce caution on the
democracies part. But the answer to fear is not cringing, conciliation and
cowardice, but courage, commitment and clarity. Putin must be made to understand
that he will never conquer Ukraine -
and the Western democracies must back that up with the military support needed
to enforce that message unambiguously.
Appeasement will fail today just as it did in World War II
Lack of clarity, and insufficient
support, is the modern equivalent of appeasement - trying in this case to not
make the dictator too angry - but it is doomed to failure now as it was in the
1930s because it does not understand the nature of the dictator and his
ambitions. Not only will it not work, it
is more likely to actually cause a wider, possibly nuclear conflict, because it
encourages and rewards aggression and signals that it will only be half-heartedly
resisted.
In the 1940s, despite the
terrible cost, the world survived total war, and so the decisions that led to
delaying the confrontation with fascism are justified by some, for example by
saying the West was not ready to confront Hitler in 1938 or earlier, or, more
plausibly, that public opinion was mostly isolationist or even pacifist and
would not support anything other than peace at almost any price.
To maintain peace, we must do the hard work of resisting dictators now, before it is too late
Today is different. The terrible
weapons at the disposal of both democracies and dictators mean we cannot
indulge our emotional preference for peace at the expense of doing the actual
hard work to maintain it. That means making the maximum effort now to deter, contain and stop dictators
like Putin before their aggression spirals the world into a conflict we have no
way of knowing if civilization, indeed our planet, can survive.
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