Munich 1938 Versus Munich 2025?

How do you un-do a century-old mistake? Let’s revisit Churchill

If we look beyond the drama of last Friday’s Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, we should make out that President Trump is upending more than just Ukraine policy and our NATO commitment. Just as he is seeking to undo the Wilsonian legacy of the administrative state at home, he is also seeking to undo the legacy of Wilsonian internationalism, which has been the default position of both political parties ever since World War II, when Republicans abandoned their skepticism of internationalism and signed up for the Wilsonian vision. That disposition was central to winning the Cold War, but it has been all downhill ever since.

The key questions to ask are whether our Wilsonian internationalism should be regarded as historically contingent (chiefly to the Cold War); to what extent America’s dominant role in world affairs contributed to the enfeeblement of Europe; and whether the Ukraine War can become a turning point to rebalancing responsibility and capacity for Western civilization to survive the century.

Trump’s critics across the political spectrum are charging that his seeming deference to Putin and pressure on Ukraine amounts to the worst Western betrayal or moral failure since the infamous Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler without the Czechs being at the table. The lesson from Munich was simple: never again embrace appeasement. The specter of Munich loomed over Western statesmen ever since. Lyndon Johnson, for example, openly told his advisers that if he failed to stand firm in Vietnam it would be “another Munich.” George H.W. Bush thought much the same thing in 1991 in pursuing the first Iraq War.

One person who offers a dissent of sorts from the conventional lesson is Winston Churchill. Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons debate on October 5 blasting the Munich agreement is well known, and rightly celebrated as perhaps his greatest speech ever. It ended with the memorable peroration:

“We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat. . . [W]e have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; [the 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 for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance, and found wanting.’ And do not suppose this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year, unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

Perhaps something like this will yet be said of Trump’s startling about-face in American policy toward Ukraine and Russia. Already Churchill’s famous remark that “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else” is making the rounds.

And yet Churchill strikes a different note when he evaluated the Munich disaster in his World War II memoir, The Gathering Storm. As Churchill often did in his grand narratives, he paused to offer extended reflections on the wider meaning and applicability of the spectacle:

“It may be well here to set down some principles of morals and action which may be a guide in the future. No case of this kind can be judged apart from its circumstances. The facts may be unknown at the time, and estimates of them must be largely guesswork, coloured by the general feelings and aims of whoever is trying to pronounce. Those who are prone by temperament and character to seek sharp and clear-cut solutions of difficult and obscure problems, who are ready to fight whenever some challenges come from a foreign Power, have not always been right. On the other hand, those whose inclination is to bow their heads, to seek patiently and faithfully for peaceful compromise, are not always wrong. On the contrary, in the majority of instances they may be right, not only morally but from a practical standpoint. How many wars have been averted by patience and persisting good will! Religion and virtue alike lend their sanctions to meekness and humility, not only between men but between nations. How many wars have been precipitated by firebrands! How many misunderstandings which led to wars could have been removed by temporizing! . . . Final judgment upon [the choice for war or peace] can only be recorded by history in relation to the facts of the case as known to the parties at the time, and also as subsequently proved.”

Churchill goes on from here to argue that in the face of uncertainties, the decisive factor that should have tipped Britain and France against appeasement was not fear of weakness or rewarding threats of aggression, but honor; Britain and France should have honored their treaty commitments to Czechoslovakia: “Here, however, the moment came when Honour pointed the path of Duty, and when also the right judgment of the facts at the time would have reinforced its dictates.”

And here, we must say, America’s foreign policy leaders have not held up America’s honor as a factor in foreign policy decisions for decades. How honorable was it for America to encourage the Hungarians to revolt against Soviet rule in 1956, and then not lift a finger to help? Of course, President Eisenhower rightly feared any tangible assistance to the Hungarian rebels risked a nuclear confrontation with the USSR—just as President Trump says that further warfare in Ukraine steadily raises the risk of World War III today.

Needless to say, the word honor doesn’t belong in the same continent with President Biden’s disgraceful exit from Afghanistan in 2021—a dishonorable display that surely played a role in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine fully in 2022. For that matter, the United States pledged to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in 1995 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arms, but it wasn’t a formal treaty, and neither the George W. Bush nor Obama administrations felt duty bound to honor that agreement once Russia started gobbling up bits of Ukraine. (Trump rightly notes that Putin stood still during Trump’s first term.) The United States already had its Munich and Yalta moment with Ukraine, and somehow this is now Trump’s fault?

It was one thing for America to take the pre-eminent role in defending the West in the aftermath of World War II, when the American economy accounted for nearly 50 percent of the world’s total output, against a dangerous foe on the doorstep of prostrate Europe. But by degrees American presumptuousness and hubris abetted the enfeeblement of Europe, both by bigfooting independent European interests and cross-subsidizing their welfare states. When President Eisenhower compelled England, France, and Israel to abandon the assertion of their rights under international law over access to the Suez Canal (which compulsion included a direct U.S. Treasury attack on the British Pound), Europe got the message about who was boss, and the diminution of Britain and France was on. (Paul Johnson argued that Eisenhower’s anger at Britain, France, and Israel was mostly because they acted just weeks ahead of the American presidential election. And yes—note well that Britain and France were once comfortable with a direct alliance with Israel, in stark contrast with today, when the Israeli prime minister who is doing more to defend the West against barbarism than anyone since Churchill faces arrest and extradition to the loathsome International Criminal Court if he steps foot in Britain or France.) From the Suez humiliation at our hands it was a straight line to the 1990s, when Europe was powerless to stop a war in the Balkans, requiring American bombers to come to the rescue.

The grandiosity of America’s foreign policy pretensions have only grown with every passing year. The apotheosis of our foreign elite’s detachment from reality was the $700 million embassy we built in Kabul (the new Baghdad embassy compound cost over $1 billion), a clear indication that the State Department never intended to leave Afghanistan, or believed that a stable regime could take hold without its direct and close supervision. Exactly what long-term interest does America have in Afghanistan that justifies such an extravagant presence—one fecklessly abandoned at that?

It would be one thing if American foreign policy from Wilson to today had America’s honor, not to mention America’s self-interest, as its principal purpose. That view has long been stigmatized at “America First.” The best guide on this through line is the late Angelo Codevilla’s posthumously published final work, America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams. Don’t be fooled by the subtitle; although Codevilla takes his bearings from Adams (most famous for saying that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy; she is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all; she is the champion and vindicator only of her own”), the book is a wide-ranging survey of American foreign policy from the founding right up to the present day.

Codevilla reminds us that “Wilson said and believed that America exists for no other purpose than to serve mankind. . . Wilson had wanted to take America into the Great War for reasons that the American people did not share.” It is a straight line from Wilson’s utopian progressivism to George W. Bush’s declaration in his second inaugural address in 2005 that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” This is as unconservative an idea as is possible to contrive. It is how you get $700 million embassy compounds in Kabul, while America’s infrastructure lags.

The point is: for a century—or at least since World War II—it hasn’t been enough for America’s foreign policy architects to build robust alliances against armed foes like the Soviet Union, or China today. Instead we have sought to meddle in the affairs of other nations, “because,” Codevilla notes, “it gave them no small professional satisfaction and personal gain.”

Trump’s abrupt repudiation of the whole scene, with all of its defects and hazards, has accomplished overnight what decades of cajoling and ordinary diplomacy has failed to do: force Europeans to get serious about their own defense, and step up with their own plans to end the Ukraine War, rather that give grand speeches while implicitly saying, “Let America do it.”

You know who might approve of Trump’s wrenching reorientation of America foreign policy? Churchill. A little-known statement from Churchill, made to William Griffen, editor of the New York Enquirer in 1936, is one of the best repudiations of Wilson and his appalling legacy that one can imagine:

“America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.”*

Walter McDougall asks in a forthcoming book (Gems of American History), “What if the subsequent calamities [of the 20th century] really trace back to 1917 and the foolish American decision to enter the Great War?” McDougall goes on to say that “I predict the Trump phenomenon will be ephemeral because he will prove no more able than Barack Obama to break the spell cast by Woodrow Wilson one hundred years ago.”

Pehaps. But maybe getting out of the Ukraine War with some kind of deal that would be on par with the outcomes of both World Wars (both of which involved unwelcome border adjustments and movements of populations) is the cornerstone for a new era of European stability.

Trump is the anti-Wilson, in every way possible. He’s not into Hegelian historicism or Burkean prudence like Wilson. He is not a conservative; he is a radical. But we have perhaps come to the point where only a radical can deliver the necessary hammer blows to our corrupt and anti-constitutional administrative state as well as our corrupt and counter-productive foreign policy establishment.

This moment is not Munich all over again. It might be the Congress of Vienna, though—if we keep a light hand.

[* There’s a reason this quote is “little known”—its authenticity is disputed.]