1939 to 2022: Why the West Rebuked Appeasement to Save Ukraine
By Matthew Trunkey
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 the Central European nation was completely overrun in a little over one month. In that same amount of time, Russian troops failed to occupy more than 30% of Ukraine during the initial phase of their invasion while taking significantly higher casualties than expected. On paper both these military campaigns seem comparable: a larger and more powerful nation attacking a smaller neighbor, widespread international condemnation, and thousands of casualties. However, only one of these invasions successfully took control of their objective. Has modern European security effectively curbed a major European conflict?
Following Hitler’s rise to power and appointment as Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, he was quick to consolidate power and install himself as the sole ruler of the German state by the end of 1934. The beginning of World War II in Europe was defined by a series of diplomatic and military blunders by the Western Allies, namely France and the United Kingdom, that enabled Adolf Hitler to begin his campaign of conquest in Europe.
The first of these diplomatic missteps was the lack of response to the 1938 “Anschluss”, or the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. Hitler began pressuring Austrian Chancellor President Schuschnigg to join the German state early into his reign. By 1938 Schuschnigg had agreed on the date of March 13th to hold a nationwide referendum on Austria joining Germany. This would never happen, as Hitler directed the German military to move into Austria on March 12th, where they faced no resistance from the Austrian army. It took the Germans two days to occupy the country and force a referendum on annexation. The final vote was 99.7% in favor of the Anschluss, and Hitler’s first step in the expansion of Germany was complete.
The international community, for the most part still reeling from the tragic loss of life that was World War I, reacted with moderate contempt. The French Republic, Germany’s main continental rival, was engulfed in political turmoil after the Government of Prime Minister Camille Chautemps collapsed on March 10th and was unable to respond to the annexation. Without the support of France, the United Kingdom was unable to put up resistance to the annexation. In a speech to the House of Commons on March 14th, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke of the situation, objecting to the “use of coercion, backed by force, against an independent State in order to create a situation incompatible with its national independence”. In that same speech he stated, “The hard fact is… that nothing could have arrested this action by Germany unless we and others with us had been prepared to use force to prevent it.”
The lack of action by Britain in France in the face of clear aggression by Germany clearly emboldened Adolf Hitler’s resolve. He quickly turned his attention towards Czechoslovakia, specifically a region he called the “Sudetenland”, a small strip of land in Bohemia that held a majority German speaking population. His clear intentions on annexing the region from Czechoslovakia sparked an international crisis, as Britain and France rushed to avoid another World War. In September 1938 Chamberlain and new French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier flew to meet Hitler in Munich, with the hopes of coming to a diplomatic agreement that would avert war. The following agreement, known as the Munich Agreement, was signed on Hitler’s terms and the Sudetenland was ceded to Germany, without the consent of the Czechoslovak government. Chamberlain returned to London where he gave a speech outside of 10 Downing Street, uttering the infamous line “I believe it is peace for our time”. Hitler quickly violated the Munich Agreement in March 1939 when he invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and annexed it into Germany. The Allies failed to respond.
Many Czechs and Slovaks know the Munich Agreement by a different name – the Munich Betrayal. In 1925, in response to the Treaty of Trianon and fears of Hungarian revanchism, Czechoslovakia, along with Romania and Yugoslavia, signed alliances with France. When the French authorized the annexation of the Sudetenland in the Munich Agreement, they directly betrayed their ally to save their own nation from war. This betrayal would not be forgotten, with the Czech saying “O nás bez nás! (About us, without us!)” becoming popular throughout the war years.
The failure of the Munich Agreement proved, in Adolf Hitler’s mind, that the Western Allies were unwilling to fight a war over territory in Central and Eastern Europe. Emboldened by their apathy, he turned his eyes to the Free City of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. The Polish Corridor was a thin strip of land that separated the German heartland from the province of East Prussia by about 30 kilometers at the narrowest point. The territory was ceded to a newly created Poland as a part of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I and to the Nazi’s represented the unfair and humiliating nature of the treaty. Restoring the Polish Corridor and Danzig to the German state was seen as another step in restoring Germany’s prestige after the humiliating defeat in 1918.
In March 1939 Hitler demanded the return of Danzig and the Polish Corridor to Germany. In response both Britain and France declared that an invasion of Poland would mean war between the Western Allies and Germany. However, due to Western Allied failures to deter Germany during the Anschluss and the Sudeten Crisis, Hitler believed that the West was bluffing and ordered his Generals to plan an invasion for September. In Hitler’s mind the lack of force shown by both Britain and France and previous crises showed a lack of resolve and coordination that would inevitably leave Poland for the taking. This was not the case. World War II began on September 1st, 1939, when German troops crossed into the Polish Corridor.
The failure of the Western Allies to place military pressure on Germany in the lead up to the war directly led to Hitler believing he would face no resistance in the invasion of Europe. This policy by the British and French, especially under the British and Prime Minister Chamberlain was known as appeasement. Appeasement, or the act of giving up territorial concessions in the hope of avoiding a larger conflict, failed spectacularly and led to one of if not the single greatest loss of life in world history. Instead of satisfying Hitler’s desire for expansion as intended, appeasement emboldened the dictator and only led to more bloodshed. Chamberlain’s declaration that the Munich Agreement would bring “peace for our time” is today seen as a naïve and dangerous response to a clear expansionist and bloodthirsty regime.
The legacy of the failure of appeasement long outlived the men that put the practice into place in the interwar years. Neville Chamberlain died shortly after war broke out in 1940. Édouard Daladier would resign as Prime Minister of France after his failure to aid Finland during the Winter War. He was captured by the Nazis after the fall of France and would spend the rest of the war in concentration camps and prison. He would die in 1970.
The legacy of appeasement manifested itself in American foreign policy during the Cold War. President Truman used the failure of appeasement to justify sending American troops to Korea, stating in a July 1950 radio address to the American public that “free nations have learned the fateful lesson of the 1930's… Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war.” President Kennedy wrote his honors thesis on appeasement in Munich. Kennedy would later be criticized by his Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Cuban Missile Crisis for not launching an airstrike on Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba, which they compared to appeasement. This insult hit close to home, as Kennedy’s father was an outspoken supporter of appeasement during his time as the American Ambassador to the United Kingdom in the late 1930s.
This legacy, rather fear of appeasement, has continued to define international relations. President George H.W. Bush’s defense of Kuwait can be seen as a reaction to the failure of appeasement. It is the legacy of appeasement that we have to thank for the failure of Putin in Ukraine.
When Putin’s Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, the Western World faced the first major international crisis on European soil since the Yugoslav Wars. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine quickly became the largest interstate conflict in Europe since the end of World War II.
Much like Hitler, Putin spent much of his early reign consolidating power and bullying smaller nations into joining the Russian sphere of influence. For Hitler this was largely successful, with the annexation of Austria, the Sudetenland, and the installation of puppet regimes in Czechia and Slovakia. Additionally, he established close relations with other fascist and fascist sympathizing states, such as Italy and Hungary, and later Romania and Bulgaria. Putin’s attempts at ideological domination have gone differently. His transnational security organization, CSTO, is small with only the five ex-Soviet states of Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan being members alongside Russia. He has been successful in setting up a fiercely loyal pro-Russian regime in Belarus, and the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 established the puppet states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The unrecognized state of Transnistria in Moldova also holds Russian sympathy.
However, the initial Russian incursion into Ukraine in 2014 failed to coalesce into a substantial ideological victory for Putin. While the Russian military was successful in occupying all of Crimea and significant portions of Luhansk and Donetsk, the invasion failed to secure a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. More importantly, 2014 marked the first round of sanctions placed upon Russia by Western nations.
Placing sanctions on Russia is a direct rebuke of appeasement. While the appeasement policies of the 1930s aimed to deescalate the international scene through small concessions, sanctions aim to prevent states from harnessing their full military capacity by targeting finance and industry of an aggressor country. Well targeted sanctions have the potential to do real damage to a nation’s economy over the long-term, which, in theory, lessens their ability to fight a protracted war. However, sanctions have come under heavy criticism for their indiscriminate effects on civilian populations and disproportionately affecting low-income workers. The real difference between the response of the Allies in the 1930s and NATO in 2022 has been sending lethal military aid to invaded nations.
It is unlikely that Ukraine would still be fighting today, let alone at the same operational capacity they are currently employing, without the nearly $120 billion in military aid to the nation from the West. This figure, from March 2024, does not include the $60 billion allocated to Ukraine in the April 2024 Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, passed by the U.S. Congress. The importance of international military aid to Ukraine is clear when looking at remarks from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy has made numerous appeals for aid in the two years since the war began, most recently speaking at the National Governors Association in Salt Lake City in July. The Ukrainian President’s calls for military aid have mostly been answered (even if it took many months for the aid packages to pass through the United States’ Congress), with 40% of military aid coming from the United States.
Sending military aid to a nation under attack is not a new concept in international relations. The American government sent lethal aid to the Mujahideen during the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and has been funding large portions of the Israel Defense Forces for decades. However, it’s use in European security is relatively new.
During the Cold War, for the most part, the United States and the Soviet Union did not send military aid across the Iron Curtain. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Eisenhower administration refused to send military aid to the insurgents, essentially meaning the “Hungarian quest for liberation was suicidal”. Additionally, the United States refused to intervene militarily during the fall of the USSR in 1991, and the 1992 FREEDOM Support Act included no provisions regarding military aid. The Cold War adversaries had no hesitation in sending military aid to nations fighting their ideological enemy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but military aid in Europe remained strictly taboo.
This changed when Russian troops entered the Donbas in 2014. The United States supplied $1.5 billion worth of military aid to Ukraine between 2014-2019, directly in response to the War in the Donbas. As shown earlier, this number has soared since the 2022 full-scale invasion. In large part due to this aid, as of July 2024, the Ukrainian military has done what most thought impossible – halt the Russian advance and protect their independence.
While there are many political conflicts within NATO countries on sending aid to Ukraine, the West has, so far, proven that solidarity and collective action is an effective strategy for European security. Imagine an alternate reality, where instead of signing the Munich Agreement with Hitler in 1938, the governments of the United Kingdom and France initiated a response like that of NATO in 2022. While there is no way to tell if this would have effectively curbed the tragedy of World War II, it surely would have been a better response than the appeasement policy. Reflecting on the differences between World War II and the War in Ukraine, it is clear that appeasement was an unsuccessful reaction to the horrors of World War I and a hopeful, if not vain, attempt at creating world peace.
Between 1939-1945 tens of millions of innocent people died due to the selfishness and bloodlust of humanity. This deeply traumatic loss, which was enabled by appeasement, rightfully remains in the minds of western diplomats. Appeasement was proven to be a losing strategy, and NATO’s reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine reflects this.
