Everybody, his brother and second cousin thrice removed have been drawing historical parallels, comparing the current round of negotiations about the Ukraine with Munich or alternatively Yalta.
I understand the temptation, but I’m not going to succumb to it. As an innately lazy man, I’m not going to draw parallels, seek analogies or make comparisons. I’ll just let historical facts do all the work for me.
The following are excerpts from Hitler’s speeches delivered in the immediate runup to the Munich Agreement, signed on 30 September, 1938.
In those speeches, Hitler laid out the reasons for his claims on the Czech territory, specifically the ethnically German Sudetenland. The governments of Britain and France found the claims valid, or at least pretended they did.
They agreed to twist Czechoslovakia’s arm into ceding the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for ironclad security guarantees issued by Germany herself, and also by Britain, France and Italy.
You know what happened next, but I’ve said enough for the moment. Now it’s Adolf Hitler’s turn to have his say:
“The Czechs had never been an independent nation until peace treaties raised them to a position of unmerited, artificial superiority over minorities more numerous than they themselves are. In the Middle Ages, Bohemia was a German Duchy. The first German university was founded in Prague two hundred years before Queen Elizabeth.”
“The creation of a multi-national Czechoslovakian republic after the war was sheer madness. She had no characteristic of a nation, from neither an ethnological nor linguistic nor economic nor political standpoint.”
“For some twenty years, all Germans, and also other various ethnic groups in Czechoslovakia, have had to suffer the worst possible treatment, torments, economic annihilation. Above all, they have been denied any chance of self-fulfilment and also the right to national self-determination. Every attempt of the oppressed to improve their lot has failed in the face of the Czech crude urge to destroy. In my Reichstag speech, I declared that the German Reich is taking initiative in putting an end to any further persecution of Germans.”
Europe was at the time still reeling from the devastation of the First World War. That’s why Britain and France agreed to let Germany have the Sudetenland – the part of Czechoslovakia where impenetrable fortifications had been built, stronger by some evaluations than the Maginot Line.
But, Herr Reichskantzler, this stops at the Sudetenland, doesn’t it? But of course, swears Hitler: “These are my last territorial demands.” All he cares about is the fate of the Sudeten Germans. He isn’t a conqueror; he is a “liberator” who only wants to correct “the injustice of the Versailles Treaty” and unite all Germans in the same Reich. “I have no interest in the Czechs.”
Sighs of relief all around. The Czechs are unhappy, especially because all those ruinously expensive fortifications in the Sudetenland will fall into Hitler’s hands without any shots fired and without Germany suffering any casualties.
But they can’t take Hitler on by themselves. The support of Britain and France is vital – and it isn’t just offered. It’s solemnly guaranteed. Britain and France promise that they “will issue international security guarantees for the new borders of Czechoslovakia against an unprovoked aggression.”
The Czechs winced. The deal smelled foul, but at least they could take solace in the promise issued by two great powers to defend Czechoslovakia, what’s left of it.
That ironclad security guarantee did its job – from 30 September, 1938, to 15 March, 1939, when the Nazis occupied the whole country. The Czech army, demoralised by Munich, didn’t put up any resistance. It could no longer count on the Sudeten fortifications to buy it enough time to set up a meaningful defence.
There’s no need for me to put in my penny’s worth, telling you, for example, that, mutatis mutandis, Putin says exactly the same things about the Ukraine as Hitler said about Czechoslovakia.
Nor do I have to remind you that Putin also claims he has no territorial designs on Europe; that the unoccupied part of Donbas the Russians demand is where Ukrainian fortifications are; that the US and Britain already issued security guarantees to the Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for the country giving up her nuclear weapons.
All those parallel lines have already been drawn by bare facts. What I find both worrying and amusing is how reticent NATO countries are about their possible plans for enforcing such guarantees.
A lifetime spent in the world of Anglophone realities has heightened my interest in specifics, while increasing my distrust of generalities. Thus, after the Alaska fiasco, US spokesmen hinted at the possibility of using American army contingents as a peacekeeping force.
When I read about that, I burst out laughing and couldn’t stop until the next day, when Donald Trump said no such development was on the cards. For once, he was being completely honest.
For Putin to accept the presence of Western troops on the border is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with an automatic. One of the key mendacious pretexts he cites for the brutal attack on the Ukraine is NATO’s eastward expansion. The presence of Western troops on Russia’s border would spell the country’s crashing defeat – and Putin’s premature death ‘of natural causes’.
What else? Another mooted possibility is NATO’s planes enforcing a no-fly zone over the Ukraine. Lovely. But let’s imagine – all purely hypothetical of course – that several Russian bombers penetrate the Ukraine’s airspace and start firing missiles at Kiev.
Will NATO pilots be ordered to intercept the bombers and shoot them down? If you can believe that, you haven’t been keeping track of NATO’s cowardly response to every aggression committed by Putin’s Russia, specifically against the Ukraine from 2014 onwards.
Are we supposed to expect that, having refused to supply the Ukraine with enough weapons to repel the aggression, next time around NATO will start shooting Russian planes out of the sky? No? Then what do those guarantees mean, specifically? What – excuse my tautology – do they actually guarantee?
As I suggested before, I’m tempted to say it’s Munich all over again, but I don’t have to. The facts have said it for me.