How often have the Fleet Street sophists cried out that every adversary is the new Hitler and every compromise another Munich? Yet do they really understand what happened there? Chamberlain went to Munich with two objectives, the first necessary and the second noble. He sought to buy time for Britain to rearm and in this he was highly successful: the acceleration of aircraft production in 1938 and 1939 proved crucial to winning the Battle of Britain. At the same time, he gambled to give peace a chance and avoid repeating the carnage of the First World War. He lost that bet, but at the time no one could have been completely certain of Germany’s intentions. Had Hitler proven trustworthy, we would perhaps never have heard of Winston Churchill.

Unlike Chamberlain at Munich, Donald Trump is not trying to rearm for a looming conflict with Russia. He is trying to normalize relations with a nuclear-armed power. While Ukraine is important, so is Russia’s cooperation on many other issues, such as containing Iran’s nuclear program, stabilizing Syria, and shaping global energy markets. Above all, Trump is seeking to reverse the strategic own goal of driving Russia into the arms of China with ceaseless NATO expansion.

Nor is Trump trying to avoid a new war. He is trying to end one by stating obvious facts: Ukraine cannot win back lost territory without massive American assistance; the US is not going to go to war with Russia so that Ukraine can join NATO; and the longer the war goes on, the more territory Ukraine will lose. The terms of a negotiated settlement have been equally obvious for years. These are: a neutral Ukraine, a plebiscite to determine if Russian-speaking regions wish to remain part of Ukraine, and international assistance to rebuild the country. These terms will be easier to accept once Europe recognizes that while Russia started the war, it was provoked by NATO expansion. Just as the US could not tolerate Russian missiles in Cuba or Chinese control of the Panama Canal, Russia could not accept its only warm water naval base at Sevastopol being handed over to NATO and the US navy.

The “stench of appeasement” has not returned to Munich, as former defense minister Ben Wallace claimed in The Telegraph. The situation is better understood as a replay of the 1945 Yalta Conference, where Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt determined the political future of Europe and Ukraine’s current borders. In 1919, the victorious allies had transferred the Austrian city of Lemberg to Poland; at Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to transfer the renamed Polish city of Lvov to the Soviet Union, where it became the Ukrainian city of Lviv. On neither occasion were protests from the Austrians or Poles heeded, because in the real world, one can seldom win back at the conference table what has already been lost on the battlefield. If you wish to draw analogies, at least get them right: the war in Ukraine is probably going to end with Ukrainian borders being redrawn, just as they were at Yalta.

Nor are we watching the death of the transatlantic alliance. Europe is unlikely to choose a world order led by China. And the US is unlikely to abandon the most successful alliance in history. That is why Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called American security cooperation indispensable. And it’s why President Trump wants to quickly reach an Anglo-American trade deal. That does not sound like a dying relationship.

The transatlantic relationship does, however, need to change. The unipolar moment upon which the rules-based order rested is over. The US now faces serious rivals and can no longer play the benevolent global hegemon. In 1945, the US produced 28% of the world’s GDP. Today, it is still the single most powerful nation on earth, but its share of global GDP has fallen to 13%. The world has returned to a situation where several great powers have spheres of influence and compete with each other. Any student of history will acknowledge that this is simply a return to normalcy.

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In this changing world, the most significant threat to the US comes from China, not Russia. This requires America to pivot towards Asia. It means reducing America’s presence in Europe in order to increase deterrence in Asia, and it means building naval rather than land-based forces. America’s Asian allies, including Australia, Japan, and South Korea, understand this and have increased defense cooperation considerably. They appreciate that, far from encouraging China to attack Taiwan, America’s pivot towards Asia makes defending Taiwan more credible.

This shift in relative power will require changes in Europe. For too long the American horse has pulled the European security cart while smiling politicians rode along tossing coins to their voters. Now, they need to get down and start pushing. Russia is essentially a European problem. And given the EU has 10 times Russia’s GDP, there is no reason Europe cannot defend itself in any but a nuclear confrontation.

In this evolving landscape, Britain must choose whether to be a spectator or a participant. Americans recognize that Britain has contributed far more to collective security than other European nations. Vice President JD Vance’s comment about “random” countries that have not fought a war in 30 years was directed very accurately at other nations of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, not at Britain. Nevertheless, the entire British Army could not fill Wembley stadium. The Royal Navy, once the most formidable in the world, now has more admirals than war ships. While recent efforts to increase Britain’s defense budget are a good start, there is a long way to go. A flag and a national anthem will no longer guarantee any nation a place at the negotiating table.

In 1914, the lights went out in Britain in part due to a jingoistic press, which stoked widespread anti-German sentiment and demonized Kaiser William II. It would be a shame to repeat that mistake today, and Keir Starmer is trying not to. While many European leaders are acting like jilted lovers, Starmer grasps that America remains indispensable to European security. He is preparing his nation for greater effort — and in that sense he does resemble Churchill.

His words echo those of Germany’s minister of state for eastern Germany, who had just been to visit. Joining Burnham at the Conference of the North, Carsten Schneider said: “The goal of creating equal living conditions everywhere in Germany can even be found in our constitution. There are good reasons for it. If regions are drifting apart, it is bad for everyone. If a variety of regions flourish, the whole country will prosper.”

“When you visit Germany,” Burnham wrote, “you can see and feel the success of this policy wherever you go in the high standards of transport infrastructure and the public realm.” Obviously, Burnham has never taken Deutsche Bahn. Thanks to ageing infrastructure and a huge investment backlog, Germany’s railways just are no longer very punctual. An investigation by ARD in September, found the rail network was on the “brink of collapse”. And, as in the UK, it is a symbol of Germany’s failure to invest equally in all its regions.

The policy lionised by centre-Left politicians like Schneider and Burnham is the mammoth project known as Aufbau Ost, the rebuilding of the former communist East over the last 30 years. When the two were reunified, the West’s GDP was 50% higher than the East’s; visiting the latter when I was a teenager felt like travelling back in time to a vaguely dystopian past with tiny, sputtering plastic cars, the ubiquitous whiff of coal smoke, and a vast shortage of house paint and non-scratchy toilet paper. Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised “blossoming landscapes” in the East when the Berlin Wall fell. The opposite happened. Industrial production fell by 70%. A third of eastern factories were shuttered; many were sold for a pittance to westerners. Joblessness exploded. The investment flowing in couldn’t stem the haemorrhage. By 1995, the alarmed Kohl government had forged a plan to properly fund the Aufbau, which he named the Solidarpakt: the “solidarity pact”. The plan was designed to honour the constitutional clause vaunted by Burnham, which makes the federal government responsible for the “creation of equivalent living conditions” across the land.

What constitutes equivalent conditions is, of course, open to interpretation. Conservatives usually understand it to mean equality of public infrastructure — roads, railways, telecommunications. But the Left often stress that it should also mean similar wage and pension levels. Periodically, the state governments bicker over the details of the formulas, with suggestions of tweaks that would work in their favour. Nonetheless, the principle of federal redistribution has remained robust.

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After all, the Solidarpakt turbocharged a system that had actually been in place since 1949, when the Federal Republic was created under the watchful eyes of the occupying Allies. That system is known as the Länderfinanzausgleich (literally: “State Financial Equalisation”), and grew out of another article in the constitution, which states that “it shall be ensured by law… that the different financial strength of the Länder is adequately compensated for”. Essentially, it regulates the transfer of tax revenue from richer Länder (states) to poorer ones.

But in the Nineties, the Länderfinanzausgleich didn’t provide nearly enough money to prevent total economic meltdown in the East. For this, hundreds of billions were needed. A new temporary “solidarity surcharge” to fund the East appeared on wage slips as 7.5% of Germans’ income tax. Petrol taxes were raised. In addition, large special funds were set up to finance culture, police and infrastructure in Berlin, commensurate with the city’s status as the new-old capital of the reunified country. Additional hundreds of billions of euros flowed into the East, in the form of state pensions that recognised the working lives of easterners, even if they’d been working in a system that had collapsed and whose currency was almost worthless.

Nobody knows exactly how much reunification “cost”, because there are so many different ways of calculating it, but it’s certainly well over a trillion euros. Aufbau Ost was a huge burden on the economy, but it meant that the “new federal states” soon received smooth autobahns and glittering train stations. Town centres and castles from the Baltic to the Czech border were impeccably renovated. Gradually, the solidarity tax was lowered. Today, only high earners pay the surcharge.

Would the English ever accept such a burden? Despite complaints in the press, West Germans generally saw it as a duty towards their brethren who suffered under communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave the project an unprecedented historical urgency. There simply was no alternative. Can one really imagine London and the Home Countries taking one for the North? For as long as it really takes to make a difference?

And how inspired should we be by Germany anyway? Länderfinanzausgleich is complicated in a way that only Germany can do complicated: Sueddeutsche Zeitung once wrote that only a few dozen people actually understand how it works — which shouldn’t be the case in a democracy.

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And though the work of “levelling up” Germany has come a very long way, it is by no means finished. Many cities in the East — Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin — are more prosperous than some of their western equivalents. The country’s unemployment deadbeat is no longer the capital, but Bremen, in the North-West. But income levels in the East remain stubbornly lower: in 2020, the average gross salary, at €36,499, was still €7,440 lower than in the West.

Other vectors point to inequality as well. According to a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think tank linked to the centre-Left SPD, most rural areas in the East are in a “lasting structural crisis” — thanks to depopulation, low wages and not enough broadband. Many smaller Western cities also struggle with deindustrialisation and rising poverty — not unlike the North of England. Levelling up hasn’t prevented their decline. Nevertheless, most of the net recipients of Länderfinanzausgleich are still in the East.

Then there is the capital — that strange spawn of East and West — which, although it now displays above-average growth, still receives the largest helping out of the pot: €3.6 billion from a total of €17 billion in 2021. It receives additional billions, too, from a separate federal fund for troubled regions, because otherwise the city wouldn’t be able to service its €60 billion in debt. This has been met with grumbling in certain parts of the nation. Though Berlin has rebounded, it is still considered run-down, decrepit and lawless by the rest of the country. When, on New Year’s Eve, youths attacked and injured police and first responders with fireworks in war-like scenes on the streets of Berlin, Bavarian leaders railed against the “chaotic” capital. Once a poor rural kingdom populated by Lederhosen-wearing yokels, Bavaria was a net recipient of financial transfers until the late Eighties. Now, it leads Germany in everything from tourism to tech to education.

Why, Bavarians asked, should they fund the “failed state” of Berlin, which can’t even maintain order — and has to re-do a local election next month because of rampant irregularities?

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Has East Germany given up on the West?

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Likewise, when Berlin decided to become the first and only German state to offer free day-care a few years ago, the protest coming out of Munich was loud: why should we pay for something those loser Berliners, with their €60 billion in debt, can scarcely afford? On such occasions, politicians from richer states inevitably demand reform: a kind of anti-levelling-up. Last week Bavarian finance minister Albert Füracker said he no longer wanted to fund Berlin’s “feel-good programmes” and  announced Bavaria would challenge the Länderfinanzausgleich in the constitutional court. Should someone tell Andy Burnham?

Just like in Britain, Germany’s capital indubitably gets more than its fair share. Can we, then, really be holding the nation up as a model for levelling up? And, perhaps more to the point: is the Herculean challenge of grafting a bankrupt former communist country onto a modern capitalist economy in any way comparable to the task of tackling industrial decline and a lack of investment in regions like North Eastern England or Wales? Can Britain learn from Germany, or is the German solution too, well, German?

To fully answer this question, we need to look beyond the birth of the Länderfinanzausgleich to the history the policy grew out of. That history is radically different from England’s. Until Prussia bundled together most of the German-speaking lands into an empire (the Second Reich) in 1871, the place we call Germany comprised dozens of kingdoms and dukedoms. No single metropolis lorded over the rest. England, on the other hand, became a country in the year 927. The monarch’s government has been collecting tax from its perch in London for more than a millennium. Only with the Third Reich did Germany truly centralise power (and finances) in Berlin. We know how that went.

After the war, the country was purposefully re-crafted to have no strong centre. Although Berlin is beginning to flourish economically again — it attracts more start-up capital than any other German city — it will never be a London, generating the bulk of the nation’s wealth then distributing it like a whimsical king. To disrupt structures so deep-rooted takes a catastrophe, or else decades of slow change. German “devolution” was originally imposed by the force of a few words in a constitution, dictated by occupying powers, the country having been at the stage of some of the 20th century’s most harrowing dramas. The collapse of two dictatorships demanded drastic measures. England has not seen such severe upheavals in modern times.

An awareness of history and a deep desire for stability means the German state has been willing to take on huge tasks — and throw real money at them — in a way that might seem foreign and exaggerated to some in Westminster. I’m not sure Andy Burnham realises the scale of change required to transform England’s system into something like Germany’s. One might dream of transforming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland into a federation. Maybe that’s what it really takes to achieve more equality. But would London ever agree to such a radical move? Muddling through, having the provinces beg for crumbs, probably suits the capital just fine.

Instead, Abbas launched into a tirade about Israeli crimes, saying that Israel had committed not only “50 massacres” but, in fact, “50 Holocausts”. The visibly annoyed Scholz did not think on his feet quickly enough to contradict Abbas’s relativisation of the Holocaust. Somewhat surreally, after Abbas had finished the two men shook hands and walked off.

Outrage was quick to follow. Abbas backtracked on his statement, and Scholz publicly stated his anger at what Abbas had said. Some German commentators suggested that Germany should rethink its funding for the Palestinian Authority. That idea did not gain traction. After all, the Palestinian Authority governs over those dense population centres in the West Bank that Israel, the occupying power since 1967, does not wish to govern itself. Germany’s funding of the corrupt, inefficient, and undemocratic Palestinian Authority is in Israel’s interest. Ironically, yet largely unbeknown to the outraged German Twitterati, defunding Abbas is a demand that many of Israel’s strongest critics would happily get behind.

As much as it likes to claim the role of the peace-seeking outsider, Germany is deeply entrenched in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not only because of the importance of the Holocaust to the creation and self-understanding of the Jewish state. Germany played an important role in the conflict via its crucial economic, financial, and military support of Israel, especially before 1967. But the 1972 terrorist attacks, and Germany’s relationship with them even 50 years on, throw a spotlight on Germany’s true role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and its connected efforts to whitewash its barbaric past.

Munich was the second time Germany had been invited to host the Olympics. The first invitation came after the First World War, the follow-up after the Second. Both times, the idea was to symbolically welcome Germany back into the circle of “civilised” nations. When, in 1931, Germany was awarded the games to be held in 1936, the Olympic Committee did not envisage the imminent rise of Adolf Hitler to power. The infamous Nazi Olympics became a showcase for Nazi power and ideology. Jews were largely barred from participating.

In 1972, with Social Democrat and former Nazi opponent Willy Brandt in power, the danger of Germany backsliding into Nazism seemed remote. The Federal Republic appeared to be firmly entrenched in the Western bloc. It was also becoming a more autonomous player on the world stage via Brandt’s Russia-embracing Ostpolitik (itself a policy under much scrutiny these days). For West Germany, the 1972 Olympics were another milestone on the road to normalisation, and an occasion to show the world the friendly face of the “new” Germany.

There was, however, something schizophrenic about this effort. Twenty-seven years after the German defeat, most former Nazis and their legions of enablers were still alive. More than that, they were respected members of society. Post-war Germany had normalised its Nazis even before the world had normalised the new Germany. The bureaucrats, professors, diplomats, teachers, journalists, and captains of industry on which the West German state was founded all too often were compromised figures.

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And it could not have been otherwise. The main reason Western allies never saw denazification through was that getting rid of the Nazis would have meant crippling the German state to such a degree that it would have been unable to fulfil its function as a frontline state in the Cold War. The Cold War enabled the survival of the German state at the cost of letting most perpetrators go unpunished. Most recently, David De Jong’s new book Nazi Billionaires shows to what extent Germany’s tycoon families owe their wealth to their involvement in Nazi crimes. His study is the latest of historical efforts to show the extent to which the new Germany was built on the old.

Due to the manifold continuities of Nazism in the new republic — not least in terms of lingering antisemitic and racist attitudes and an only slowly-eroding authoritarian mindset — West Germany needed to signal to the outside world a democratic and civil character. While this was especially true of the immediate post-war years, virtue signalling to the outside world has long become part of the German foreign policy package (a tough pursuit of economic interest being the other and more important part).

And so, in 1972, the German hosts wanted to organise Games that were opposite in spirit to those of 1936. Instead of demonstrating the superiority of the master race, the Olympics were meant to showcase the newfound German pacifism. And this they did, uncompromisingly so. Die heiteren Spiele — the joyous games — went the official slogan. To ensure that nothing disturbed the joyousness, German security guards at the Olympic village were unarmed and dressed in light blue suits, the literal opposite of the black-clad and armed SS-men patrolling the grounds in 1936.

By today’s standards, the lack of security measures was baffling. About as baffling as passengers smoking on a plane, or, for that matter, smuggling guns onto a plane and hijacking it. After all, these were the Seventies, a golden age for anti-colonial and radical Left-wing terrorism. As archival research by journalists of German magazine Der Spiegel revealed, German security services were warned of potential terrorist plots on the Games. However, no effort was being made to increase security measures. Showcasing the peacefulness of the new Germany took priority over safety concerns for Israeli athletes.

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On the morning of September 5, eight members of Black September climbed the walls of the Olympic compound and proceeded to the quarters of the Israeli team. They killed two athletes and took nine Israelis hostage. The next day, after a catastrophically botched German rescue mission undeserving of its name, all Israelis had been killed by the terrorists. One German policeman was dead, as were five of the eight Palestinians. Zvi Zamir, chief of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, was present at the final shootout. “They didn’t make even a minimal effort to save lives,” an exasperated Zamir reported. Zamir was shocked to realise that the German priority had been to continue the Games with as little interruption as possible. Surprisingly and bizarrely, the “joyous Games” had remained uninterrupted almost throughout the whole hostage crisis. While the Israeli team left the Games, the rest of the world continued with the competition.

Two months later, Black September hijacked a Lufthansa plane in Beirut and blackmailed Germany into releasing the three surviving members of the Munich squad. Israel had warned Germany of such a scenario and had asked Bonn not to give in to terrorist demands. Germany did the opposite and expedited the three Palestinian prisoners to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, where they were given a hero’s welcome. Israel was furious. Germany, its crucial ally, had not only refused Israeli help and advice during the Munich hostage crisis but had acted against every principle of Israeli counterterrorism policy.

The attack by Black September was an attack not only on the Israeli team but implicitly also on the political rationale behind the games. Black September named its operation “Ikrit and Biram” after two Palestinian villages razed to the ground after the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and whose inhabitants were banned from returning. All of a sudden, Ikrit and Biram were violently forced into one historical equation with Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement, and nearby Dachau, the first concentration camp on German soil. This was a brutal collision of different historical events and logics. A terror attack rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took on a new meaning: Jews were murdered in what was meant to be the new Germany. And more than just a historical footnote in this context is the fact that Black September was aided in its preparations by a known German neo-Nazi. 

The Munich attacks and Israel’s uncompromising retaliation mission in its aftermath have been covered in academic writing, a Steven Spielberg movie, and the Oscar-winning 1999 documentary One Day in September. It is the stuff of Cold War spy thrillers. Less attention has been paid to the German role in the whole affair. One question is why Germany had been so insensitive to Israeli wishes and opinions throughout the crisis. Germany had widely been considered a key ally of Israel up to that point, and for good reason. However, wondering why Germany had acted irresponsibly towards Jewish lives on its soil misses the original point of West Germany’s pro-Israeli orientation. This point was explained by former chancellor Konrad Adenauer on primetime German television in 1966: “We had done to the Jews so much injustice, committed such crimes against them that somehow these had to be expiated or repaired if we were at all to regain our international standing… Furthermore, the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.”

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Here, as well as on other occasions, Adenauer stated clearly that the goal behind Germany’s support of Israel was rehabilitation — regaining international standing. That goal is then intertwined with a core idea of modern antisemitism: supposed Jewish influence over world affairs. To Adenauer, this was a natural thing to say to the German public as late as 1966. Rehabilitation, whitewashing the past, faking democracy — whatever you want to call it, the Federal Republic consistently prioritised its international reputation over domestic efforts at working through the past.

Belatedly, the German government is seeking to make amends for its 50-year old failure to protect its Israeli guests. Last week, a €28 million compensation deal was finally agreed with relatives of the Israeli victims. No amount of compensation, however, can undo history.

What Black September did in September 1972 was to crash a German party that was all about celebrating and showcasing a novel Germany to the world. And the German response to the terrorist attack was guided by one overarching desire: to throw the party crashers out the door and to continue the party. In the process, 11 Israeli athletes were killed. Perhaps, when the German journalist asked Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas whether he wanted to apologise for what happened in Munich 50 years ago, he should have addressed this question to Chancellor Scholz as well.

The example from history’s portmanteau of analogies which almost everyone has instinctively reached for has been – of course – the Munich Crisis of 1938. What else? No foreign policy drama is complete without a summoning of the ashen shade of Neville Chamberlain onto the stage, as essential to the plot as the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

Back in November last year, Stephen Blank, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, was already warning that “appeasement of Russia would deliver exactly the same outcome as the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich—dishonor and disaster”. The following month, Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, a Republican member of the US House Armed Services Committee, tweeted after a visit to Ukraine that “Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement allowed Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then France to fall to Nazi Germany…Biden risks taking the world down the same slippery slope.” Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post solemnly denounced the American President for “channeling his inner Neville Chamberlain” in the matter of Ukraine.

Allusions to Chamberlain’s appeasement are not restricted to one side of the Atlantic. UK defense secretary Ben Wallace detected back in February a “whiff of Munich” about western attempts to dissuade Putin from attacking Ukraine. But there does seem to be a particularly American obsession with routinely digging up the corpse of the Right Honourable Member for Birmingham Edgbaston for a ritual denunciation. Chamberlain himself would presumably be bewildered, as well as horrified if he knew that, 80 years after his death, he is not only well-remembered in a country he never visited during his lifetime, but that his name there has become a byword for catastrophic political failure.

Even a fogginess about the details of what happened at Munich has been no impediment to deploying it. Radio talk show host Kevin James compared President Obama with Chamberlain on MSNBC’s Hardball in 2008, but then had to admit that he had no idea what the former British Prime Minister did exactly in 1938. The magic of the word “Munich” was enough.

Invocations of “Munich”, “appeasement”, and “peace for our time” have accompanied every single American foreign policy crisis of the modern era, from Syria to North Korea to Iran to China. The debate in 2003 about the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq was peppered with sententious references to Chamberlain, Munich, and the “lessons of history” (which always, funnily enough, turn out to correspond to whatever the speaker wishes to argue at that given moment).

No American political party has a monopoly when it comes to rubbishing Neville Chamberlain. In a country deeply polarised by partisanship, there is one thing, at least, that everyone seems to be able to agree about: Munich is a dirty word, and appeasement is a strategy of cowards and fools.

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But what is it about that September 1938 conference — at which Chamberlain and his French counterpart Édouard Daladier agreed to defer war with Nazi Germany by an accord that ceded the German-speaking Czech Sudetenland to the Third Reich — that has kept people coming back to it?

Munich offers a superficially compelling nugget of wisdom from the past — that seeking any kind of negotiated settlement to a crisis, especially one involving some compromises or concessions to your diplomatic opponent, will only embolden it to make further aggressive demands. Appeasement never prevents conflict with an ambitious rival power; it merely postpones it. When it does break out, it will do so under conditions that have become more favourable to them than to you because of your naïve attempt to conciliate them. The only strategy that is respected in great power politics is uncompromising deterrence. Conceding even the slightest point, exercising even the slightest restraint, is an admission of weakness in a world that values only strength.

On the face of it, the historical Munich seems to provide a persuasive demonstration of just that truth. Chamberlain and Daladier did offer concessions to Hitler (without reference to the Czechs whose territory they were handing over) in the hope that this would represent a lasting settlement of European affairs. Hitler agreed, for his part, that he had no more territorial demands and that henceforth he would practice only peaceful diplomacy — then six months later, ripped up the treaty by annexing Bohemia and Moravia and threatening war with Poland over the fate of Danzig.

War was only postponed by a year, and some historians have argued (though the matter is far from clear) that Nazi Germany began fighting it in a far stronger position than in 1938. What otherwise would have been the relatively brief destruction of Hitlerism was made into a calamitous six-year conflict that killed perhaps 85 million people.

The Munich analogy does more than just lay out this seemingly unchallengeable insight. It also implies that the latest antagonist, whomsoever that might be — Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Vladimir Putin — is the new Hitler: a mad dog, insatiable in his murderous demands, representing an urgent existential threat to western life. It implies that anyone foolish and unworldly enough to try to meet such a monster half-way is the new Chamberlain, complete with grey hair, starched wing collars, and the look of a baffled, rather put-upon clerk. Perhaps most important of all, it implies that the speaker is the new Churchill – the indefatigable defender of liberal democracy who can see through the facile temptations of appeasement (never mind that the real-life Churchill had a rather mixed record when it came to seeking accommodation with dictators, from Mussolini to Stalin). The Munich analogy conveniently demonises, tarnishes, and flatters.

It also turns the story of Thirties appeasement into a trite morality tale rather than the complex story about the possibilities and limitations of great power politics in a democratic age that it actually was. What Chamberlain did at Munich was framed by his belief that Britain and France did not yet offer a credible deterrent to German military power, and that neither his country nor the empire it led was psychologically prepared in 1938 for a second brutal world war. Whether he was right or wrong about this is a matter for counterfactual speculation only. But it was a position that was endorsed by all the professional military advisors that he had to call on.

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Chamberlain did believe, wrongly, that he understood Hitler and that the Nazi leader was a fundamentally rational actor with limited goals – the former managing director possessed the conceit, not uncommon in businessmen who later turn to politics, that he was a master of the art of the deal. Chamberlain sincerely hoped that he had secured peace at Munich. But his fallback position was that, if Hitler continued to make demands, then Britain could turn to deterrence rather than appeasement once its rearmament program (which Chamberlain’s government had been spending vast amounts of money on since 1934) was sufficiently advanced. And if deterrence failed then it was necessary to exhaust every reasonable possibility of peace first. This was partly because that was inherently the right thing to do — a second war with Germany would unleash untold new horrors on the world, though Chamberlain expected, in the end, that Britain would win it.

More practically, though, it was vital to demonstrate to domestic and international audiences that Britain had truly been left with no alternative but to go to war. What appeasement did was not so much “buy time”, as is sometimes suggested, but buy legitimacy, particularly in the eyes of important neutral nations such as the United States. Had war broken out over the Sudetenland in 1938, many Americans would have regarded it as just another pointless European squabble that their country was well advised to keep out of. President Roosevelt, even if he had had the mind to do so, would have found it much more difficult to revise the Neutrality Acts to assist the Allies, a blow to the British and French war effort of which it is impossible to calculate the exact effects — but which certainly would have been serious.

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It’s interesting, that while allusions to Munich were flying thick and fast in America during the weeks leading up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, they are rather less in evidence now that the war is upon us. Probably this has something to do with the Republican Party’s schizophrenic attitude towards Putin, with its traditional neo-conservative hawks finding themselves outflanked on the populist right by Trumpian isolationists who see no reason to quarrel with the Russian leader.

But it might also be the case that the Munich analogy has finally collided with some cold hard facts about confrontation with a nuclear-armed state. Despite all the hyperbolic American rhetoric at the time about new Hitlers, it was possible to contemplate earlier wars with non-nuclear powers such as Iraq or Iran precisely because they didn’t represent an existential threat to the United States — any war with them would be, relatively speaking, low stakes.

Clearly that is not the case in Ukraine, given the hundreds of ICBMs Putin has pointing at the North American continent. The fact is that the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction means that escalation with such an opponent risks suicide. No amount of talk about “the lessons of history” will change that.

So either Ukraine represents a brief hiatus in the enduring popularity of the Munich analogy. Or it reflects a new consciousness that some opponents are simply too dangerous to forego entirely the idea of negotiation, compromise, and restraint — and even appeasement.