“England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war.”
Winston Churchill had a point when he denounced the Munich Agreement on October 3, 1938. Just days earlier, without even allowing the Czechs to represent themselves at the negotiations, Britain and France reached an accord with Nazi Germany about the partition of Czechoslovakia. The mountainous Sudetenland, home of three million ethnic Germans, would join the Third Reich in exchange for the end of German territorial conquest in Europe.
By any measure, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement was an unequivocal failure. Under threat of attack by Nazi Germany, the western democracies sacrificed the Austrians, Czechs, Spaniards, and Albanians to prevent a war that came anyway. In that vein, the lesson(s) of Munich seems clear: democracies must ardently oppose autocrats who bully and/or devour their neighbors lest weakness invite continued aggression. At minimum, this is what has passed for conventional foreign policy wisdom in the United States since 1945.
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