It Isn’t Always 1939

The Trump-Putin summit in Alaska isn’t a WWII retread.

Did you know that things are just like they were in 1939? The experts tell us so. It’s just like the run-up to the war. You know the one. With the Guy, the mustache. And you can’t forget the lesson we learned at Munich the year before. It’s just like that. You have to join the fight! You can’t appease your way out of it! You know what happens if we don’t. The worst things happen after 1939. So, they say, constantly. All the time. About everything happening presently. 

We should all be preparing ourselves for a deluge of these analogies in the days to come. After all, Donald Trump is meeting with Vladimir Putin to discuss some kind of possible settlement to the Ukraine War. On one side you have a belligerent dictator, bargaining for territorial expansion. On the other, an elected leader, an Anglo, who is reticent about committing his nation and his resources to oppose the dictator. Any headlines about peace will be met with yelps about Chamberlain’s fateful declaration of “peace in our time.” 

We’ve seen this plenty of late. A column on the Ukraine war from a director of Harvard’s Kennedy School, “The Meaning of Munich, Then and Now,” asks “Does Putin, like Adolf Hitler beforehand, view his current war as just one part of larger territorial expansion in Europe?" At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas and French President Emmanuel Macron invoked the idea of capitulation, and many commentators interpreted that as an urgent need to avoid a “second Munich agreement.” Hundreds of commentators, it seems, have relied on their World War II analogy to predict that the minute the West makes a deal to end the war in Ukraine, Putin will pocket whatever territorial expansion he gets and then immediately proceed to gamble for much more territorial expansion in aggressive wars. 

Of course, we faced this before. In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States faced a “Munich moment” as it decided how to respond to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Obama cowardly asked for a vote from Congress on whether to intervene in Syria, and they cowardly declined to endorse one against the cowardly opinion of the American isolationist public, who were against it by roughly 70-30%. Assad, emboldened by our appeasement, swiftly conquered the entire region and initiated a thousand year reign. 

Donald Rumsfeld warned in August 2002 that “giving Saddam Hussein a free rein, much as Europe had done with Hitler in 1938.” Bush also invoked “the lessons of history” and urged the international community to prevent another “1939 moment.” 

President Nixon wrote in his memoirs that “what had been true of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938 was no less true of the betrayal of South Vietnam to the communists advocated by many in 1965.” 

Curtis LeMay also upbraided President John F. Kennedy for his refusal to accept that total war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. “This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” General Douglas MacArthur used 1939 constantly to argue for total war with North Korea and their Chinese allies. Truman rejected the argument.  

You might think that it’s only war that reliably brings politicians and commentators to think of 1939. You’d be wrong. Trump held rallies before his election. You know who else held rallies? “Hillary Clinton and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz are among those comparing Sunday’s rally for Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden to an infamous 1939 pro-Nazi gathering in the same venue.” And then there are the tariffs. They’re going up. Just like they did before World War II, says the Atlantic. Even Eric Cantor’s defeat in a 2014 Congressional election caused Bill Kristol to ask if someone would stand up and “Speak for America,” as Leo Amery, a conservative backbencher in the House of Commons, did in 1939, rebuking Labour’s “Speak for England!”  

Searches for “the lessons of history” in the news almost invariably turn up just this one: that the American public is too isolationist and parochial, that appeasing a hostile power never works, that one territorial expansion is only a prelude to many more.

Of course, this is all nonsense. The persistence of the Munich analogies is not a testament to learning lessons from history, but our ignorance of it. For the last 900 years, Europe has been at war more than at peace, with some estimates saying that between 50 and 75% of the years between 1100 and 1945 were characterized by at least one war in Europe. Surely, there is more than one lesson to be learned. 

One could be that appeasement is done and proposed all the time, we just don’t call it that when we like the result. The Good Friday Agreement appeased the Provisional Irish Republican Army, releasing its members held in prisons and promising its political representative, modern-day Sinn Féin, that the six counties of Northern Ireland would transfer to the Republic of Ireland from the United Kingdom the moment a democratic majority wills it so. The removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza under Ariel Sharon was appeasement. All proposals for a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians include some level of appeasement. The 1955 Austrian State Treaty involved removing Soviet troops in exchange for Austria agreeing to neutrality. This concession for peace was never seriously tested. Surviving the Cuban Missile Crisis required a secret concession, the withdrawal of missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet withdrawal from Cuba. 

We also have the persistence of these analogies because they take political and strategic judgements and pad them out with extreme moralism. In an era of declined religiosity, Hitler and Hitlerism are the primary subjects in our moral discourse about good and evil. Hitler has rhetorically replaced Napoleon and the Biblical Pharaoh as the paradigmatic evil ruler and shorthand for unspeakable tyranny. 

I hate to be that guy who reduces every question down to “Who benefits?,” but it’s not a surprise that the only common “lesson from history” legitimates the current power arrangement in Washington, in which foreign policy power has leaked to the executive and a giant court of know-nothing intellectuals in think tanks and non-governmental agencies. It’s not a surprise that the main moral to draw from this pat story is that the American people are too closed-minded and immoral to exercise their constitutionally assigned control of America’s war-making power through the House of Representatives. 

The promiscuous misuse of analogies to the run-up to World War II should be discrediting and dissuasive to others. They are not just a cliche, but their very ubiquity as a cliche marks the user out as a probable naïf. But I expect many people won’t be able to restrain themselves this week, as Donald Trump meets Vladimir Putin in a summit in Alaska. 

The fact is that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 is nothing like the run-up to World War II. Those years involved large states deciding the fate of small ones. Russia’s move into Ukraine has been costly, slow, and difficult. It has nothing of the quality of Hitlerian Anschluss with Austria, in which the dictator was gathering strength. Years later it is obvious that any attempt by Russia to swallow Western Ukraine will be a nasty and costly occupation that drains resources and will rather than redoubling them. 

Beyond that our understanding of the run-up to World War II in the West has clear moralisms but is a little fuzzy on strategy. The so-called appeaser Chamberlain knew this country was not yet ready for war, not in a material sense or moral one. By the time Britain did enter, its swift and humiliating retreat from the continent proved that it was not yet up to the task. France and Britain did almost nothing to practically assist Poland, and the entire time period is known as the Phony War for a reason. 

Perhaps the far more frightening analogy would be to the years in the run-up to World War I, which were marked like our eras with a certain skepticism that great power conflict would return soon, and faith that free trade and globalization were making the world too interdependent to go to war. The logic of conflict in that day was also marked by a series of alliances in which Great Powers allowed little states and actors on the periphery to draw them into a global conflict and disaster.

But that analogy would only offering sobering lessons about the limits of our self-knowledge, caution us against putting our hopes in organized violence, and nudge us toward triaging the best possible outcomes through diplomacy rather than total war. Where’s the preening moral satisfaction in that?