hotel-rwanda.com

Chapter 125: Munich and the "Off-Ramp": The Illusion of a Negotiated Peace

Heston Aerodrome, London - September 30, 1938. The propeller of the Lockheed Electra sputters to a halt, its silver fuselage gleaming in the weak autumn sun. A frail, elderly man, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, emerges from the aircraft door, his face a mask of weary, almost beatific, triumph. He holds aloft a single sheet of paper, a joint Anglo-German declaration he had persuaded Adolf Hitler to sign just hours before in Munich. The crowd of journalists, dignitaries, and ordinary citizens strains to hear his reedy, upper-class voice. "My good friends," he says, the words cracking with a mixture of emotion and fatigue, "...the settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem, which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace."

He is radiating a desperate, infectious hope. He holds up the paper again, waving it for the newsreel cameras. "This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler... and it is the symbol of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again." Later that day, from the rain-slicked steps of 10 Downing Street, he will deliver the fatal, unforgettable phrase to a cheering London crowd: "I believe it is peace for our time." He is a good, honorable man, a man who has looked into the eyes of a tyrant and seen, through the powerful filter of his own hopes, a man who could be reasoned with, a man who would, for the price of a small country, choose peace.

On that very same day, in a small town in the Sudetenland, the German-speaking, heavily fortified border region of Czechoslovakia that has just been handed to Hitler without a single Czech representative present at the table, a family of known Czech patriots huddles around their crackling radio. The father, a schoolteacher who had publicly defied the local Nazi party, listens in stunned silence to the translated BBC report. As Chamberlain’s hopeful words about "peace for our time" echo through their small living room, his wife begins to weep, not with relief, but with the quiet, bitter tears of utter betrayal. He reaches over and turns off the radio, plunging the room into a heavy silence. "He is celebrating peace," the teacher says to his two frightened children, his voice a dead, hollow thing, devoid of all emotion. "He is celebrating our funeral." They know what is coming. The knock on the door in the middle of the night, the Gestapo lists, the cattle cars, the camps. They know, with the terrible clarity of the abandoned, that the great democracies of the West, the guarantors of their country's existence, have just sacrificed them in the vain hope of placating a crocodile, hoping it will eat them last.

Élysée Palace, Paris - May 2022. The scene shifts to a series of conversations in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In a gilded hall, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, is speaking to journalists. While forcefully condemning the Russian invasion, he strikes a now-familiar note of cautious "realism." "We must not humiliate Russia," he insists, his words echoing across the world's capitals. He argues that a face-saving diplomatic "off-ramp" must be provided to Vladimir Putin to allow him to de-escalate without losing face, a path back to a negotiated settlement. In Berlin, the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is under immense pressure to explain his country's years of failed Russia policy. He defends the 2015 Minsk II Agreement—a deal that, like the Munich Agreement, was brokered by France and Germany and which bought a temporary, illusory peace at the price of Ukraine's sovereignty in the Donbas. In Rome and in Washington, the same tired whispers are heard in the off-the-record conversations in the halls of power: "What is Putin's off-ramp? What can we give him to make this stop? Can we offer him Crimea for good? The Donbas? Neutrality?" The desperate, well-intentioned hope of Neville Chamberlain is reborn, reincarnated in the modern, fearful lexicon of de-escalation and conflict management. And the inexorable logic leads to the same fatal conclusion: the path to "peace" lies not in defeating the aggressor, but in pressuring the victim to sacrifice a piece of itself to satisfy the crocodile's appetite, at least for a little while.

The Discourse 125: The Narcotic of Negotiation

This chapter analyzes the recurring and disastrous diplomatic strategy of appeasement, arguing that the modern Western search for a face-saving "off-ramp" for Vladimir Putin is a direct intellectual and psychological descendant of the failed logic of the 1938 Munich Agreement. It is a strategy rooted in a profound misreading of the adversary's intent and a desperate hope that transactional concessions can satisfy an absolutist, ideological ambition.

Sacrificing the Sovereignty of the Victim is the foundational, immoral transaction at the heart of both diplomatic endeavors. At the Munich Conference, the leaders of Britain and France, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier, unilaterally agreed to the dismemberment of a sovereign, democratic nation, Czechoslovakia, ceding its heavily fortified Sudetenland region to Nazi Germany. They did this without the consent, or even the presence, of the Czechoslovakian government, a brutal act of great-power betrayal. In the modern era, a similar, if slower and more convoluted, logic has prevailed. The 2015 Minsk II agreement, brokered by France and Germany in the wake of Russia's first invasion, was a flawed and ultimately unimplemented deal that most in Ukraine saw as an attempt to force them to cede de facto political and military control of the Donbas to Russia. Similarly, the frequent, well-intentioned calls by some Western politicians and academics for Ukraine to find a "realistic" negotiated settlement are almost always a thinly veiled suggestion that Ukraine should formally trade parts of its sovereign territory—Crimea, the Donbas—in exchange for a ceasefire. In both the 1930s and the 2020s, the great powers, in their overwhelming desire to avoid direct conflict with a seemingly irrational and risk-acceptant aggressor, have sought to achieve "peace" at the direct expense of the victim's territorial integrity and national sovereignty.

The Fundamental Misinterpretation of "Peace" lies at the heart of this generational strategic failure. Western leaders in both eras have consistently projected their own definition of peace onto their totalitarian adversaries, a classic case of mirror-imaging. For Chamberlain, and for modern proponents of providing Putin an "off-ramp," the word "peace" means the absence of armed conflict, a return to stability, and the resumption of normal diplomatic and economic relations. Peace is seen as a desirable, steady-state condition. For Hitler, and for Putin, "peace" meant something entirely different: the temporary absence of opposition to their expansionist goals. The signing of a piece of paper, the promise to "go no further," was never an end state. It was a tactic. It was a tool to lull their risk-averse, commercially-minded democratic adversaries into a false sense of security, to divide their alliances, and to buy time for the next, more ambitious phase of their aggression.

The "Settlement" as a Strategic Pause is how the aggressor views these deals. Far from being a genuine, good-faith resolution of a dispute, they are seen as an invaluable strategic gift. The Munich Agreement did not satiate Hitler's appetite; it merely confirmed his belief in the West's weakness and gave him a critical, unopposed strategic victory. It gave him almost a year to absorb the formidable industrial and military resources of Czechoslovakia, fortify his new borders, and methodically prepare his armies for the subsequent, and now much easier, invasion of Poland. For Putin, the eight years of the so-called "frozen conflict" established by the Minsk agreements were a strategic blessing. The "peace" it provided was an illusion that allowed much of Europe to fall back into a comfortable slumber of economic dependency on Russia. For the Kremlin, this period was not one of peace, but one of methodical preparation. It allowed Moscow to consolidate its illegal hold on Crimea and the Donbas, to slowly strangle the Ukrainian economy, to continue a relentless campaign of political subversion and information warfare inside Ukraine, and, most importantly, to re-arm and reorganize its military for the eventual, full-scale invasion of 2022. Appeasement does not buy peace. It buys time—for the aggressor, at the victim's expense.

Page updated

Report abuse