Doing the Chamberlain

It was eerie to read Robert Harris’ historical thriller Munich while the Trump-Putin debacle was unfolding in Helsinki, followed by the even more damaging debate over whether we would actually fight to defend a member of NATO (Montenegro, a “far away country of which we know nothing,” if ever there were one).

What motivates Donald Trump’s servility and cravenness toward Vladimir Putin remains in dispute, what motivated Neville Chamberlain’s 80 years ago toward Adolf Hitler is clearer—a dismal combination of wishful thinking, weakness, and plain old fear.

As Harris’ novel depicts him, the British prime minister was a decent, well-intentioned man whose primary mission at Munich was to prevent a war which many thought would end civilization as they knew it. The advent of aerial bombardment (“the bomber will always get through”) and poison gas would fulfill H.G. Wells’ prophecy in The Shape of Things to Come.

Those who so quickly ridicule Chamberlain’s appeasement policy would thus do well to understand the broader context in which it was implemented, including the fact that he felt he was operating from a position of grave weakness, with the British re-armament program having only just begun and little help coming from either the French (Edouard Daladier playing the role of potted plant throughout the negotiations) or a still viscerally isolationist America (FDR sent Chamberlain a telegram after the sellout with just two words, “good man”).

As such, the best argument that can probably be mustered on behalf of Chamberlain, with hindsight of the kind Harris uses, is that he bought some time for Britain to prepare for war and, by virtue of what followed after the ceding of the “Sudetenland,” left no mistake as to who the aggressor was when it came.

Still, even if history has treated him a bit more shabbily than deserved, there is no denying that Munich was an unmitigated disaster for the western democracies, in large part because Chamberlain so stubbornly resisted warnings of Hitler’s intentions and continued to believe his goals were constrained rather than open-ended.

Rather than “peace for our time,” Munich made war more likely by convincing Hitler of the weakness of his foes and reinforcing Stalin’s perception that the capitalists were trying to turn the menace toward him (hence the initiation of the secret negotiations that led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the joint attack upon Poland less than a year later).

As Harris makes abundantly clear, Hitler’s bloodless triumph at Munich also undercut whatever significant opposition existed to his rule inside Germany, especially within an officer corps that was prepared to depose him in the event the conference caused a war they felt ill-prepared for (the French army was still perceived as formidable, at least on paper).

The juxtaposition between Chamberlain’s appeasement diplomacy and Winston Churchill’s criticism of it has decisively favored the latter over time, most noticeably when telling the former, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”

If excuses can, if only barely, be found for Chamberlain’s “dishonor” at Munich, they are far more difficult to find for Trump’s behavior at Helsinki, where he presented an even more embarrassing spectacle than the fellow waving that piece of paper with “Herr Hitler’s” signature on it on the tarmac of the Heston Aerodrome.

Unlike Chamberlain, Trump wasn’t operating from a posture of weakness; quite the opposite given the tremendous disparity in power between America and its allies on the one hand and Russia on the other. Nor was it fear of war which motivated his servility— whereas memories of the Great War haunted Chamberlain, to the point of being tragically willing to surrender almost anything to prevent a replay, it is unlikely that Trump, with his staggering ignorance and lack of intellectual curiosity, knows anything at all about World War I. Or about World War II or even the Cold War with Russia that he lived through.

And there is even less excuse for his dangerous postHelsinki equivocation regarding NATO and Article 5, which commits America to the defense of member states and thereby serves as the basis of its deterrent.

Indeed, the idea that we would fail to fight on behalf of those “very aggressive” Montenegrins runs counter to the logic of deterrence itself—an alliance only works if every member is equally committed to the defense of every other member, and would-be aggressors (like Putin) perceive it that way. For the most powerful member to signal anything less than such a full commitment is to consequently encourage the very aggression NATO exists to prevent.

It is, within this context, better to disband NATO altogether, as some suggested back when the USSR collapsed, than to preserve it without commitment.

Wars are more often than not caused by weakness or lack of resolve, more precisely a perception on the part of would-be aggressors of weakness and lack of resolve in those who might resist them; which means that the best way to avoid having to fight for Montenegro is to commit ourselves without qualification to fighting for Montenegro.

We know that Trump doesn’t know much about foreign affairs, but surely he understands at least that much. Doesn’t he?