The Munich Pact and the Ukraine
Looking at the current situation concerning Russia and Ukraine, it is easy to make the comparison to the Munich Pact of 1938 between Hitler and the Western Powers.
The Pact is a classic example of appeasement that destroyed Czechoslovakia, backfired on France and Britain, and led to World War II.
But there was much more that caused the Munich mess than simple Western stupidity.
On September 30th, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the deal with Adolf Hitler that was supposed to mean “peace in our time.”
The agreement allowed Hitler to keep the so called “Sudetenland”, Basically all of Western Czechoslovakia, in hopes that giving such a concession would lower tensions and prevent war.
As everyone knows, the agreement failed to secure a lasting peace. Two weeks after the agreement was signed, Hitler rolled tanks into the country and took the rest of Czechoslovakia.
While all of this was going on, Hitler was rearming Germany building his war machine.
That is the danger of a bad deal with a bad regime. If the Britain, France, and the other western powers had simply gone to war earlier, World War II would have likely ended sooner, with fewer casualties.
Also, Hitler’s final solution of eradicating the Jewish people would not have stretched as wide as it did, and millions of lives would have been saved.
The Munich Pact should serve as a warning to us as to just how bad things can get if the US and our NATO allies back down and let Putin take Ukraine.
Europeans knew that Hitler had never once told the truth and was already murdering German citizens who were Jews, communists and all political opponents. But Europeans did not care all that much.
Instead, the Western world was thrilled with the idea of appeasing Hitler.
Having seen 38 million casualties in World War I, Europeans would do anything to avoid even a small confrontation — even if such appeasement all but ensured a far greater bloodbath than the one that began in 1914.
Many people think that Hitler‘s military was strong and the democracies were weak.
However, at the time of the Munich Pact, the combined French and British militaries were far larger than Hitler‘s.
French tanks and British Spitfire fighters were as good as, or superior to, their German counterparts.
Also, Czechoslovakia had formidable defenses and an impressive arms industry. Poland and even the Soviet Union were ready to join a coalition to stop Hitler from dissolving the Czech state and allowing the Nazi’s to occupy eastern Europe.
Likewise today, the combined forces of the US and our NATO allies are far stronger than the Russian military.
Another factor of the Munich Pact is that many of Hitler’s top generals did not want war. One has to wonder if Putin has the backing within his own regime to willing risk a world conflict.
Still, each time Hitler successfully called the Allies’ bluff, the west folded.
Hitler had already withdrawn from the League of Nations, denounced the Treaty of Versailles, re-armed, and re-occupied the Rhineland. The Allies did nothing.
The Munich Pact immediately doomed millions of Czechs to Nazi control and put Poland next on the target list of the Third Reich.
It is interesting to note that France had signed a secret agreement with the Czechs that they would come to the aid of Czechoslovakia if Germany invaded them. The Czechs agreed to do the same for France.
But guess who besides the British signed the deal with Hitler? Yep, France, who gladly threw Czechoslovakia under the bus.
Today, France will once again play a key role in the decision of whether or not Putin is allowed to take Ukraine.
Do you see now the parallels between the Munich Pact and the current Russia/Ukraine situation?
Munich was directly tied to the personal ego of Neville Chamberlain. In the first few weeks after Munich, Chamberlain loved being in the media limelight, posing as the humane savior of Western civilization.
President Biden would love to tell the world that he has saved western Europe from the evil Russian Empire.
For months prior to the Munich pact, Winston Churchill, warned everyone about Hitler, yet he was dismissed by the media and public as an old warmonger.
Hitler later called his Munich diplomatic partners “worms.” Hitler said of Chamberlain, “I’ll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the photographers.”
Is this what Putin thinks when he looks at talks with Biden?
The current negotiations with Russia have all the similarities of the Munich negotiations.
Will the threat of economic sanctions be enough to force Putin to back down?
As I said earlier, the United States and its NATO partners, just like the western powers prior to WWII, are far stronger than Russia in every measure of military and economic strength.
The Russian economy is struggling, its government is corrupt, and its conventional military is outdated.
Russia’s only chance of gaining strength is to show both its own population and the world, just like Hitler did, that the stronger Western powers will back down in fear when threatened.
Our recent Afghanistan withdrawal did nothing to help our cause.
Putin, like Nazi Germany, wants influence, power, and land, a new Soviet Union, just like the Third Reich.
The Munich Pact gave Hitler strategic territory and assets that allowed him to launch a war for world conquest a year later.
I don’t think Putin wants world conquest. I think he wants to set the clock back. He wants to put the band back together.
He wants to recreate the Soviet Union of old, with 15 member states, all subject to an all-powerful communist central government based in Moscow.
He wants a seat at the table when it comes to world power.
If Putin takes Ukraine, his next target will not be western Europe. Instead, he will go after Eastern Europe [Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
The former soviet state will be the biggest losers if the US and NATO back down.
The big question is. Do we care? No one cared as Hitler rose to power. The US considered it Europe’s problem.
Bear in mind, we didn’t enter WWII until 2 years after it started and that was brought on by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
By then, Hitler had become a force to reckon with.
The Washington Post
Ukraine carries the echoes of Sudetenland
March 10, 2014
Once again, we can look to our history to learn about our current situation. I am referring to the crisis in Ukraine and what it teaches us, not just about the future but also about the past. Vladimir Putin has turned us all into Neville Chamberlain.
Chamberlain is famous for the Munich Agreement of September 29th, 1938, and his statement that, by giving in to Hitler’s demands, he had brought Britain and Europe “peace for our time.”
He and the French gave Hitler the Sudetenland, which was the name applied to the substantially German areas of what was then Czechoslovakia.
The comparisons between then and what is happening now between Russia and Ukraine are amazing.
Hitler was a monster, but in this case his argument was Germans, ought to be in Germany.
Putin, is making the same argument that the Ukraine, having been a former state in the USSR, should be a part of Russia.
What complicates matters is that we now know that for Hitler the Sudetenland represented mere batting practice. He was soon to invade Poland and much of the rest of Europe, faltering only when he disregarded the bitter lesson Napoleon learned and plunged into Russia.
Putin is demanding for Crimea more or less what Hitler wanted for the Sudetenland: Russians ought to be in Russia.
The big problem today is that, as with Chamberlain in 1938, we are not sure with whom we are dealing. We soon found out who Hitler was. But what of Putin? Will he be happy with the eastern half of Ukraine, or does he have bigger plans that involve taking the entire country and establishing a puppet government?
If we agree with his argument that Russians should be part of Russia, where does it stop?
Almost 25 percent of Estonia is ethnic Russian. How about Latvia, which is about 27 percent Russian?
Hitler made things easy. We knew what we were dealing with. By 1938, he had already murdered the hierarchy of his brown shirts (The SA), instituted the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws, and, a bit more than a month after he signed the Munich Agreement, launched the purge known as Kristallnacht.
By then, too, he had ruthlessly suppressed all dissent, created the first of many concentration camps and lit the German night with bonfires of unacceptable books.
Putin is no angel, but he has concentrated power without widespread violence or murder. While the gulag remains mostly a memory, he has sent his opponents to labor camps, such as YaG-14, 3100 miles from Moscow in eastern Siberia where the winter drops to minus 40 degrees.
Putin is an autocrat, but he is not Hitler or Stalin. He follows the world news and sees the current political turmoil in the US. He sees Biden and his administration as weak.
So, we now have to ask, what will Putin do next?
To this respect, 1930s statesmen proved much more naïve than their 21st century colleagues.
At the time of the Munich agreement, the French prime minister Édouard Daladier privately admitted: “We cannot sacrifice ten million men in order to prevent three and a half million Sudetens from joining the Reich”.
Similarly, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wrote to Hitler: “I can’t believe you will take responsibility to start a European war for just a few days’ wait in the solution of this long-standing problem.”
They both completely missed the point, since Hitler’s objectives of course went far beyond reuniting all the German-speaking peoples under Berlin’s rule.
And while history will never be able to prove it, Germany was in all likelihood not yet ready for a global conflict, and Hitler might well have backed down if Britain and France had shown real firmness.
Putting it bluntly, Chamberlain and Daladier were simply outwitted by Hitler.
The central mistake of Munich was Neville Chamberlain’s apparent conviction that the scrap of paper signed by Hitler actually meant something.
Today, the Western dilemma is of a rather different nature: some people have argued that diplomatic and economic means are not enough to deter Putin over Ukraine, so Western diplomacy should include the threat of military action.
This clash of opinions exposes a fundamental paradox of international relations in the nuclear era. Nowadays, the threat of military retaliation has lost credibility, and diplomatic arm wrestling can only rely on the threat of economic warfare.
This can only be effective if a strong common front is built up internationally – but with so many private interests involved, that might be even more difficult to achieve than military action.
Bottom line, Germany is dependent on Russia for its oil and France does not want to enter into an armed conflict with Russia.
So this bring us to another item we keep hearing about the Nord Stream pipeline.
What is Nord Stream 2, and why does it matter?
The project, nearly complete, is a natural gas line from Russian fields to the German coast, spanning 764 miles under the Baltic Sea. The $11 billion line will double the capacity of the original 2011 Nord Stream, which runs parallel to the new project.
The line will supply gas to Germany — a nation heavily dependent on gas and oil imports — at a relatively low cost as the continent’s production capacity decreases.
The new pipeline is entirely owned by Russian energy company Gazprom, which is majority government-owned.
The company also owns 51 percent of the original Nord Stream pipeline. A group of European energy companies, including Shell and Wintershall, are paying half the $11 billion in construction costs.
Though proponents of the pipeline, including Germany and Russia, see it as a great business deal providing cheaper, cleaner energy, Nord Stream 2 has drawn outrage from many opponents.
U.S. leaders and lawmakers — both Democratic and Republican — fear that the Baltic pipeline would give Russia too much power over European gas supplies, handing Russian President Vladimir Putin a wider market and geopolitical power at a politically precarious time.
During his term, President Donald Trump unsuccessfully tried to torpedo the project, claiming that Nord Stream 2 would make Germany “a captive to Russia.”
President Biden has also shared these fears that Europe would become overly dependent on Russian energy supplies.
Ukraine and Poland vehemently oppose the pipeline. Ukraine has long been an energy middleman nation, with Russian companies feeding much of Europe’s gas supply through Ukrainian soil and paying it transit fees in the process.
Russia, in bypassing Ukraine with the new pipeline, can now isolate the nation.
Biden discussed the pipeline with German Chancellor Angela Merkel — a vigorous pipeline supporter — during her visit to Washington recently.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said at a news briefing that Biden “couldn’t have been any clearer” with Merkel on his continuous opposition to the pipeline.
“We view it as a Kremlin geopolitical project that is intended to expand Russia’s influence over Europe’s energy resources and to circumvent Ukraine,” Price said. “We have made no bones about the fact that it is a bad deal for Germany, it is a bad deal for Ukraine and for Europe more broadly.”
Now here is the current problem.
The United States previously imposed sanctions on entities and vessels connected with the pipeline, including on the Fortuna pipe-laying vessel, which was set to build one line of the link, in January.
But in a move that angered nations and lawmakers opposing the pipeline, the Biden administration waived those sanctions in May.
That’s right, Biden waived the sanctions. This allowed the construction of the pipeline to continue. Nordstream 2 is now finished and all they need to do is open the valves and set the oil flowing.
US sanctions now, will do nothing. The State Department explained that it was nonsensical to impose sanctions on allies for a nearly completed project.
In addition, the sanction waivers align with Biden’s commitment to rebuild relations with European allies, the spokesman said.
The waivers “created space for diplomacy” for the United States to address potential energy security risks with Germany, Ukraine and other European partners, he said.
I vaguely remember this waiver of sanctions on the pipeline making the news last May.
Like most national news today, it didn’t get hardly any attention.
Yet, here we are. A decision made last May, appeasing Russia and Germany, has now set the stage for Russia to take Ukraine and begin the reconstruction of the Soviet Empire.
Are we witnessing a modern day Munich Pact?