Perspective: Helsinki 2018 and Munich 1938 have similarities and stark contrast for “peace for our time.”»
How should we interpret President Donald Trump’s shocking willingness to set aside Russia’s past and ongoing attacks on America’s democracy? His call, in his appearance with Russian President Vladimir Putin following their meeting in Helsinki, to “take a risk in pursuit of peace,” calls to mind another famous encounter, eighty years ago, in which a decision to appease an aggressor would have momentous consequences. It is now worth comparing Trump’s post Helsinki celebration of closer relations with Russia, to the similar stance taken by Neville Chamberlain after his 1938 discussions with Adolf Hitler at Munich.
On September 15 that year, British Prime Minister Chamberlain traveled to Munich to meet German Chancellor Hitler. Hitler had massed troops on the border of Czechoslovakia, threatening war if the Czechs failed to surrender part of its territory (the Sudetenland) to Germany. Two weeks later, Chamberlain (along with French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier) agreed to Hitler’s demands, proclaiming that he had achieved “peace for our time.” As France and England slept, Hitler prepared for war, launching his campaign to conquer Europe less than a year later.
Putin, who murders dissidents, is not a monster on the scale of Hitler, and unlike Hitler, lacks the means to conquer Europe militarily. On the other hand, the cyberage has presented new opportunities, brilliantly exploited by Putin, for weakening democracies without reliance on violence. If the truth, as Milton argued, will always prevail in a fair fight with falsehood, Putin has demonstrated how to make that fight unfair, applying hi-tech tools for spreading “big lies” that Hitler could not have imagined.
Hitler’s massive propaganda campaign during the 1930s would give way to reliance on overwhelming force, but that prospect still seemed unreal during the Sudetenland crisis, helping to sustain Chamberlain’s wishful thinking about the prospects for peace. By contrast, Trump arrived at Helsinki fully aware that Putin has already resorted to military conquest: in Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and continuing today in eastern Ukraine. In contrast to Chamberlain at Munich, the propensity for war of Trump’s negotiating partner already stared him in the face.
That points to a decisive difference between the pairings of Chamberlain/Hitler and Trump/ Putin. No account of Chamberlain’s failure to stand up to Hitler includes the charge, so clearly applicable to Trump, that he felt affinity for the nationalist extremism that devoured Europe in the 1930s and which threatens it today.
Driven by lessons learned from the 1930s, American isolationism was rejected in favor of reconstructing Europe’s democracies, strengthening them through Western economic integration, and protecting them through vigilant containment of Russian expansionism. It remains a mystery why Trump has turned against that hard-won liberal order, which provided him with safety and boundless opportunity. Yet he has done so with a vengeance, now capped by his post-Helsinki complicity in Putin’s denial of Russia’s 2016 attack on America.
That open collusion represents the clearest distinction between Munich and Helsinki. Trump did not travel to Helsinki agonizing — as did Chamberlain at Munich — over how to manage a possibly dangerous adversary. Instead, he arrived as Putin’s ally, as a co-supporter of right-wing nationalist parties throughout Europe, as a co-saboteur of Europe’s liberal democracies, dramatized by his relentless attacks on NATO and the European Union. Trump stopped short of open realignment with Russia against the Western democracies, but only from fear of unmanageable domestic opposition.
That calculation may well change. After all, popular allegiance to liberal values threatens the political survival of Trump no less than Putin. The secure foundation of their solidarity is their common need to weaken the liberal project in all of its manifestations, including the sanctity of the truth, the rule of law, and free and fair elections.
When Chamberlain gave in to Hitler’s demands at Munich, Winston Churchill offered a prescient analysis of the consequences: “Our loyal, brave people … should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged and that the terrible words have … been spoken against the Western Democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not suppose that this is the end. This is the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup …”
Eighty years later, we approach our own “awful milestone.” Trump, unlike Chamberlain, cannot be defended as naive about his negotiating partner, who has already attacked America for the purpose of securing Trump’s own election as president. On the heels of indictments of twelve Russian military officers who led one of its facets, Trump’s brazen openness to Putin’s proclamation of innocence represents a decisive test of America’s vulnerability to the power of the “big lie.”
Churchill’s insight after Munich sadly applies once more: The time for reckoning has arrived.
David Goldfischer is an associate professor in the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.