Europe’s Munich moment

A disarmed and decadent continent faces a rapacious dictator. What could possibly go wrong?

Chamberlain brandishes an empty promise from Hitler, 1938

History buffs can have an uncanny nose for current affairs, particularly when the boundaries shift. Politics nerds, attuned to small movements within a narrow set of norms, are often unable to zoom out. The entire panel on The Rest is Politics’ US election-night live show confidently predicted a victory for Kamala Harris – except for Dominic Sandbrook, a guest from sister podcast The Rest is History, who caught a whiff of epochal change and called it for Donald Trump.

Politicians from small countries, or those bordering historically aggressive neighbours, also have a sense for latent danger. The leaders of Poland and the Baltic states were warning about Russian predation long before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine – often provoking eye-rolls from Western European leaders whose necks had never felt chill Soviet breath.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, is both a history buff and the former leader of a small country bordering Russia. When she invokes history, we should listen.

“Appeasement will always fail,” she said last week, after Trump held a one-on-one call with Putin about the fate of Ukraine and walked back several of NATO’s earlier negotiating lines. The reference, surely deliberate, was to the 1938 Munich Agreement at which Britain and France forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Hitler on the hope that he would stop there.

There’s a plausible alternate history where Hitler could have been contained or even defeated if the allies had shown a backbone at Munich. His war machine was not yet fully formed, the Czech forces were better prepared than the Poles were the following year, and the Sudetenland was mountainous and heavily fortified, eroding the German armour advantage. Determined resistance in the east, a second front in the west and a naval blockade to the north might well have turned German generals against Hitler, whose cult of personality was, at that stage, still dependent on strategic success.[1]

Comparing episodes of history to modern-day politics can often be glib, but in this case the similarities are strong. Like Germany in 1938, Russia today would struggle to defeat a coalition but benefits from its opponents’ reluctance to rearm. Like Czechoslovakia, Ukraine can’t survive alone and will be forced to accept bad terms if others abandon it – strengthening the aggressor’s rule and encouraging him to pursue further conquests.

Czechoslovakia didn’t survive long after Munich. Within six months of ceding the Sudetenland – along with all its defensive positions – it was forced to surrender entirely to Hitler. In a clear violation of the Munich Agreement that went unpunished, it was carved up and absorbed into the Axis powers under various bogus client states and protectorates.

Something similar could happen to Ukraine. It’s not clear that Ukrainian democracy can survive abandonment by its allies and a bad peace deal; and without the security guarantees of NATO membership, there’s little to stop Putin coming back for another bite a few months later. If that happens, the road to Warsaw is open.

From there, invading a NATO country would be a major escalation, but one that’s believable. Putin’s propagandists can fabricate claims to other countries with a history in the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire including, at a minimum, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. If Trump considers such claims to be reasonable, or at least not worth going to war over, Putin could feel emboldened to act.

You and what army?

Underlying all of this is European countries’ abject failure to maintain military forces that can operate independently of the US. Henry Kissinger once famously said that “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests,” but European countries refused to believe it, trusting that the US would be a friend in bad times as well as good.

European armed forces, and the defence industry that supports them, are not only underfunded: They’re fragmented and unable to operate together cohesively, each one resembling a toy combined-arms force with a handful of tanks and artillery pieces all of different types.

To fight a conventional war, you need to be able to create formations at division scale – each one typically between 10,000 and 30,000 soldiers, depending on equipment. The last time a European power deployed at this scale was in 2003, when Britain contributed a single division to the US invasion of Iraq. Subsequent experience of counter-insurgency operations is of little relevance in a continental war.

To understand the scale of conventional war, consider that Russia lost about 1,400 main battle tanks last year, four full divisions’ worth – or approximately the full strength of Poland, Germany and France combined. That’s not to mention the huge stocks of ammunition and spare parts required to keep an army fighting at full intensity.

Europe’s armed forces could be more efficiently scaled up if they were placed under a unified command and procurement structure. But with no real threats until recently, and the comfort of the American security umbrella, Europe’s top-heavy military establishments have preferred to wrap themselves in tradition and national pride rather than build sensible alliances to fend off common threats.

The only country to have really pushed to integrate Europe’s armed forces is France (and this probably on the tacit understanding that France would lead them). Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries are at least aware of the scale of the Russian threat, but their answer has been to huddle ever tighter under the American umbrella rather than trying to build something independent.

If Emmanuel Macron is Europe’s only living statesman, he cuts a diminished figure on the world stage because France is in turmoil. In another era Macron would probably have become a great man of history; today he’s burning through prime ministers trying to convince the French that a 30-year retirement is not in fact a universal human right. There’s no better image of Europe’s slide into decadence.

Meanwhile Russia’s factories are churning out tanks and drones, and its young men are flocking to martial arts gyms and dreaming of national glory. Who will stand against them?

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[1] I once produced this outcome in a game of Hearts of Iron IV, a detailed World War 2 simulator that’s as close to historical realism as video games can get. Playing as France, I stood by Czechoslovakia at Munich and persuaded Chamberlain to do the same. The Germans invaded anyway, but got bogged down in the Sudetenland’s snowy mountains while a scrappy Franco-British force cut their supplies and harassed them on the western front. By the end of winter the German generals were fed up and turned their guns on the Reichstag. Real history may – or may not – have turned out differently.