Hitler’s Long Shadow

How Hitler Ruins Peace In Europe, 80 years after his Death

[Pascal’s Note: I wrote this essay back in 2022 and made a short video out of it. I’m republishing the text here as a reminder of one of Europe’s largest ideological problems that has been standing in the way of peace negotiations]

In September 1938, the leaders of Britain, France, and Italy flew to Munich to meet with Adolf Hitler. The Fuhrer had demanded to receive the German speaking lands of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland. Hitler threatened war if his demands were not met. He wanted the other Great Powers—especially France, Czechoslovakia’s military ally—to pressure the Czech leaders. He got his way. Neville Chamberlin came back from Munich with a document signed by Hitler in which he infamously promised no further German expansion. Chamberlin believed he had reached “Peace for our time.” Only a few months later Hitler reneged on his promises, occupied all of Czechia, eradicating the sovereign state, and then moved on to invade Poland, starting WWII. “Munich 1938” has since become the go-to argument against so called appeasement: the idea of securing peace through concessions to an evil, expansionist power like Nazi Germany.

Inadvertently, Hitler has ruined peace negotiations for ever, as any demands for agreements with a militarily power for the sake of preventing its intervention will automatically trigger the “Munich 1938” argument from those who believe that only force can counter force in international relations. It’s what I call, Hitler’s Long shadow.

Putin is not Hitler

We see it playing out right now, as any and all voices calling for a negotiated settlement to the Russo-Ukraine war are decried immediately as appeasers, who forgot the lessons of Munich 1938. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler, Russia is Nazi Germany, Ukraine is Czechoslovakia. One cannot negotiate with Hitler, the atrocities and the war that would follow later will be so much greater than the sacrifice of fighting now. Or inversely, if you want to negotiate with Putin, would you also negotiate with Hitler? Would you sell out Europe again? It's a compelling argument. For who would or could agree to bargaining with Hitler?

However, I have two objections to this argument.

First, it relies entirely on the premise that Putin actually is Hitler. And that not true. One is a former German Chancellor who has been dead for 77 years, the other one is a very much alive Russian President, priding himself of leading the very nation that killed the Fuhrer—costing the lives of an estimated 27 million soviet citizens.

But much more the case of Ukraine is entirely different from that of Czechoslovakia. Putin has been calling for an end to NATO expansion not only since yesterday. It has been the Kremlin’s line at least since a 2007 speech by Putin—ironically also in Munich.

And by the way, that Russia will in all likelihood react militarily to NATO expansion at some point is not a Russian idea, it’s an American one. George Kennan, the greatest US Cold War diplomat and father of the “containment strategy” famously called NATO expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” Jack Matlock, the last US Ambassador to the Soviet Union equally predicted that NATO expansion up to the doorsteps of Russia would trigger confrontation at best and war at worst. Watch my interview with him back in February 2022, here.

What Great Powers Do

And yes, Russia should not have a “sphere of influence” over which it has something to say, I agree. But Great Powers just do that. Imagine the reaction of the United States if Mexico started allowing Chinese military basis on its territory. Or remember the US reaction to Cuba in 1962, wanting to station Soviet nukes on its territory. Those actions MUST be interpreted by Washington as potential mortal threats to its national security and must be counter acted. Even just a potentially unfriendly government—albeit democratically elected—in Chile in 1973 when the Socialist Salvador Allende came to power was enough for the US to support a coup against him by the dictatorial Agosto Pinochet. The US has no legal right to decide the sovereign fate of Cuba, Chile or other nations, yet it does. Russia has no legal right to decide the sovereign fate of Ukraine, yet it tries. We tried to outlaw spheres of influence through the United Nations Charter, but they never went away. They remained a staple of Great Power relations. Just think about the right the US claimed to have to invade Iraq in 2003 over the fabricated assertion the country had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Are spheres of influence fair? No. Are they a reality of international relations? Yes.

And this is where the Czechoslovakia analogy breaks. Putin only invaded Crimea in 2014 in reaction to the ousting of the pro-Russian, but democratically elected leader of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovic, when video footage emerged of the US Ambassador in Ukraine hand-picking the new leaders of the successor Government. Something that even today the Russians refer to as an illegal coup in Ukraine. Only then Russia broke its 1994 promise made in Budapest that they would respect the sovereign borders of Ukraine—once the threat of a Ukraine-NATO alliance became real. Before that, it was merely a potentiality that the Russians hated, but in 2014 NATO troops in Crimea became a real specter too hard for Moscow to ignore.

History Matters

Next, the war in the Donbas which also started in 2014 was approached by Putin for a long 8 years by trying to reach a settlement through the Minsk accords. Although Russia militarily supported the two break-away regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, Moscow did not recognize their claim of independence. For 8 years, Russia refrained from recognizing the two so-called “people’s republics” because the strategy was to keep them inside of Ukraine—albeit with more autonomy and veto powers over Ukrainian foreign policy. That would have been the best-case solution for Moscow as it would have all but guaranteed the future neutrality of Ukraine, that it could not join NATO and thereby become a hostile “anti-Russia” as Putin refers to it today. That was the goal, not annexation and enlargement. Had imperial conquest been the objective, Russia would have invaded back in 2014, when the Ukrainian army faltered to the point that not a single soldier died during the conquest of Crimea. There was no reason to stop with Crimea.

Or just look at Russia’s diplomacy toward the other former Soviet Republics and its Asian near-abroad. Russia is not trying to invade Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan. It’s not even trying to unduly meddle in Mongolian affairs. It is content with Mongolia being a convenient buffer zone with China. Alleging Putin is Hitler who only wants to enlarge his state and take over all of Europe utterly disregards Russia’s actions of the last 20 years. Time and again Russia has signaled that what it wants are negotiations for what it calls “indivisible security,” meaning a security architecture built on a balance of power and mutual recognition of near-abroad interests of all geopolitical players. Yes, that is a revisionist view of international relations, but again it's a fact of how Great Powers think and behave. It is the same behavior emanating from Washington when it calls any kind of Chinese economic or security agreements with smaller foreign states a “threat to peace and security”—with which it means its own security, of course.

Consequences

Secondly, I object to the “Munich 1938” argument because of its consequences. If Putin indeed is Hitler, despite all the differences in their strategic behavior, then imagine what this means. Hitler was not defeated by throwing Germany out of all the territories it invaded. Hitler was defeated by the Allies completely overtaking Germany and Soviet Forces raiding Berlin. Is this what we foresee for Russia? Is this how Russia must be dealt with? And what would such a strategy mean in the age of nuclear weapons? The sheer fact that in 2022, Nukes are part of the strategic equation must change the approach to Great Power negotiations. It must force negotiations because no state can win in an all-out nuclear war.

Even if we adjust the strategy to “only” helping Ukraine militarily to the point where it can regain all of its lands, including Crimea, and we just hope Russia will not escalate into the nuclear realm, that will still mean very long and very bloody continuation of the war and the people fighting it will be ordinary Russians and ordinary Ukrainians. For “bleeding out” Russia and opposing any kinds of victories for its belligerency comes with the strategy of what US Ambassador Chass Freeman so aptly called “fighting to the last Ukrainian” and that cannot be a humane strategy. Even if Ukraine wants to fight, even if the willingness of the population is there to defeat the enemy and take back the lands that rightfully belong to them, it comes at a horrible human cost.

Let’s use history again to explain this: Although the background was completely different in 1945, Japan, too, had people who argued passionately that the Empire must keep fighting even after the Atomic Bombs were dropped. Its generals envisioned “100 Million martyrs” for the sake of defending the motherland and fighting to the last Japanese (actually also to the last Korean, which they occupied at the time). It was the decision of the civilian leadership and the Emperor to not go down that route and instead surrender to the United States at the very real threat of losing everything, including the execution of the Emperor. It was surrender that saved Japan from becoming an Afghanistan well before Afghanistan.

Or take Vietnam: It was the military victory of the North and the and the capitulation of South Vietnam that ended that bloody catastrophe. Was that fair or just? No. Did it end the war and set the Vietnamese people for prosperity in the future? Yes. For the sake of humanity, sometimes an unjust peace is preferable to a just war. Even a just war kills. An unjust peace allows life to be lived.

I am not saying Ukraine cannot defend itself. Under the UN Charter and international law Ukraine has every right in the world to defend itself. I’m saying that if the prevention of bloodshed is the goal, then fighting harder will not achieve that goal. A negotiated settlement is a necessity and Russia has indicated dozens of times it is willing to negotiate. The Munich 1938 argument is what stands in the way of the West to take that offramp. Which means than 80 years after his death, Hitler’s long shadow is still ruining peace in Europe.