Welcome to Munich

History never repeats with anything like exactness, but it echoes. Eighty-six years ago, the leaders of Britain and France put their names to the Munich agreement, partitioning Czechoslovakia at the demand of Nazi Germany. They chose not to make a stand against evil, at a time when a stand could still have been made at relatively little cost.

They, and the voters who supported them, chose to purchase ease and comfort in the short term at the expense of security – Czechoslovakia’s security, they thought, although even at the time it was easy to see that it would soon be their own as well. It was not that they failed to recognise evil or doubted their ability to defeat it (although no doubt some did), but they preferred not to make the effort. Resistance just seemed too hard.

Now America’s voters have made the same choice. They too have made their peace with evil, and I fear that the consequences will be the same: that conflict will have been not averted but merely postponed, with the result that it will ultimately be much more destructive. The warring tribes will not be reconciled; the Putins, the Netanyahus, the Modis and the rest will not disappear or be deterred. Their demands will escalate until one day they will have to be fought, at who knows what cost in blood and treasure.

There is nothing wrong with seeking peace; the impulse to avoid conflict, to believe the best rather than fear the worst, is a thoroughly praiseworthy one. But it needs to be tempered with realism, and that is what America – and particularly the grandees of the Republican Party, who must take the primary responsibility – have not done. Without it, disaster beckons.

The men of Munich were haunted by the First World War, then in the recent past. But in their haste not to repeat its carnage, they forgot its lessons. We have the opposite excuse, if it is an excuse at all: it is so long since the west had to fight for anything, much less its own survival, that we are unable to take the threat seriously. The 1860s and the 1930s have become ancient history; war and dictatorship have become something that happens to other people.

How this will play out cannot be foreseen. Authoritarians rarely keep faith among themselves (look at the twisting course of Nazi-Soviet relations in 1938-41), and Trump is perfectly capable of selling out both domestic supporters and foreign allies. But the moment, if it ever existed, when the authoritarian trend could be forestalled by mostly peaceful means seems to have passed.

America will one day come to its senses, just as Britain and France did after Munich. Resistance was ultimately successful and a better world – the world of democracy and prosperity that we now see unravelling before our eyes – was constructed on the ruins of the old. But the cost was all but unimaginable.

I realise that many readers will find this over-wrought, and think that I am exaggerating the danger. I very much hope they are right and that I am proved wrong. But the critics of Munich faced the same response; my fear is that we shall live, as they did, to see millions of young people sent to their deaths and the cities I love reduced to ashes. Let the most formidable of those critics have the last word:

[The people] should know the truth. They should know … that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”
And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year …