David Roman on Munich and Ukraine

He offers contrarian views

Note: Two guests and I will be discussing Doyne Farmer’s book on chaos theory and economics on Friday at 2PM New York time. No charge, but registration required.

David Roman writes,

On this matter, the educated consensus opinion may be more wrong than on any other important question of our time. It’s not that Chamberlain was an OK guy whom people like to dunk on because of a bad spell in 1938. No: Chamberlain was absolutely brilliant, dealt with Hitler superbly and his critics are worse than ignorant, because they don’t understand the facts and still they are 100% sure of their stance.

He argues that in a counterfactual history in which Chamberlain encourages the Czechs to defy Hitler,

Isolated, surrounded by enemies on all sides, bitterly divided (Slovakia, the country’s eastern half, in real life declared independence from Czechoslovakia as soon as it could in 1939, like it later did in 1993) Czechoslovakia had no hope in hell to survive the onslaught. It had pretty decent weaponry of its own, so let’s say it holds on until, say, early 1939. By then, Nazi Germany has occupied the country, while the UK and France watch from the sidelines like they did in 1939 and early 1940.

Now, we have the very anti-Semitic state of Poland having forged a friendship in arms with the Nazis. And, more importantly, we have a situation in which the Allies have lost the moral high ground, by denying Germans the right of ethnic self-determination they had given everyone else.

Winston Churchill, of course, took a very different view. He thought that the Czechs had strong fortresses and that it was Hitler who would have had difficulty obtaining buy-in from his military for an invasion. Churchill’s view, which became conventional, is that it was Hitler’s success at Munich, coming on the heels of his bold re-occupation of the Rhineland, that made secured his reputation in Germany as a strategic genius. Hence, internal opposition to Hitler evaporated, giving him a free hand to take the world to war.

The usual defense of Chamberlain is that Britain needed more time to prepare militarily, and that the Munich agreement bought time. But Germany also was building up its arms, so this is not a very persuasive argument.

Instead, Roman is saying that only when Hitler betrayed the Munich agreement was it possible to forge the coalition to fight him.

Elites in countries that later were key for the outcome of WW2, like Yugoslavia, Greece, even Sweden, would have left this fantasy scenario with less respect and support for a French-British tandem that by mid-1939 would have been left completely isolated by the defeat of Czechoslovakia and later of the Spanish Republic

I could argue otherwise, but leave that aside. Roman’s main point is that in the contemporary case of Ukraine, we would have been better off following Chamberlain’s playbook.

In the 1938 analogy, NATO would have accepted a Finlandization of Ukraine as a buffer state, as Vladimir Putin requested. And then it would have been clear — not least to China, NATO’s one true peer competitor — whether Russia was prepared to be a respectable member of the international community, playing by the rules supposed to bind everyone equally.

…all sorts of on-the-fence powers apart from China, like India, Saudi Arabia and Brazil have decisively supported the Russians one way or another, understanding that if Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, is treated like a bunch of Taliban interlopers over a dispute involving their core interests, then any of them can end up an outlaw for any reason as far as the NATO bloc is concerned.

Roman is implying that China does not view Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as aggressive, but if the West had a made a deal with Putin and Putin then invaded other countries, China would have seen the light and been less supportive of Putin.

I have never been a Ukraine hawk. Early on, I argued that we should be trying for a negotiated settlement. The human cost of the war seems unjustifiably high.

But I cannot agree with Roman’s view that there is strategic value in making concessions to a dictator now in order to achieve moral clarity with third parties. If other countries do not care about the dictator’s aggressive moves now, they will not change as a result of concessions made today.

I don’t believe that China and other countries would have reacted to an easy Russian victory in Ukraine by lowering their support for Russia. More likely such a victory would have inclined them to draw closer to Russia.

Contrarian views are always welcome. But in this case I do not find them persuasive, about either Munich or Ukraine.

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