On Appeasement and the need to confront aggressors

Just who has been appeasing who in contemporary geopolitics and are we really the good guys?

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

There has been a lot of talk recently about getting ready for war against Russia. Bizarrely, when I have sounded off about the failure of diplomacy I have come up against the argument that talking with Russia rather than forever doubling down on aggression would be appeasement. Even more strangely, the most enthusiastic defenders of the aggressive stance towards Russia seem to be well educated and ethically decent members of the soft left. The likes of Neil Oliver and the UK Column on the alternative right can see right through it, along with George Galloway on the alternative left, so what gives with the soft left?  It would seem that the hidden persuaders of the deep state have really done a number on this demographic and the role of the Guardian and BBC in shaping such attitudes is probably key, along with podcasts like The Rest is Politics which are avidly followed by people who believe they are getting the real skinny on what's going on in the world, whilst being pushed into narrative frames that ensure they never even consider that we might actually be the bad guys.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the appeasement frame. According to this, coming to some sort of diplomatic agreement with Russia would be like Munich all over again, a cowardly and misguided caving on to aggression. So let's look at the context behind appeasement.  

Nazi Germany had made no secret of its plans to go to war with Russia. It was steadily moving Eastwards with this aim in mind. Munich has gone down in history as a travesty because we did a deal with a regime that had no intention of keeping to it. Nazi Germany had undermined the government of Austria and launched a coup before bringing the latter into its orbit as part of the Anschluss. It  remilitarised the Rhineland, in defiance of previous agreements and used violence in Czechoslovakia without anyone lifting a finger to stop them. 

According to the establishment line today, we, being the good guys in that war, learnt a lesson from the failure of appeasement and to ever do it again would be to invite disaster. But this overlooks the entire Cold War, where time and again diplomatic solutions and compromises were found which prevented us all being the victims of nuclear armageddon. From Yalta to Malta, deals were continuously struck which recognised both sides' interests. They did not result in the Soviet Union going on a thunder run across western Europe in the belief that we had shown our weakness by reaching terms. So why do we have this blind spot to the success of diplomacy in the Cold War? 

Likewise, we always blame diplomacy for the outbreak of WW2 but overlook the fact that it was failure to strive for diplomatic solutions that plunged us into WW1. In many ways, the current situation resembles the lead up to that war more than WW2. There seems to be an itching for war to start in the West, just as in WW1 Austria sent an impossible ultimatum to the Serbs, egged on by a Germany that wanted to get cracking before Russia industrialised. By the way, notice there is a bit of a theme emerging here of wars being caused by people itching to have a crack at Russia? In the same way, today, the western, US and dollar dominated economic system is near the point of collapse. For some in the western elites, it is imperative to get a war on with those who threaten their hegemony before it is too late.

Which leads me on to my next point - who are the aggressors and who are the appeasers? We presume we are once again the good guys but is that the case? To examine this, let's go back to the discussion above about the context behind appeasement.  Point one was that the Nazis made no secret of their desire for a war with Russia. Likewise, the US seems all too eager to drag Russia into a fight. See this article for example

The second point was about Hitler expanding military control over Eastern Europe to put himself within striking distance of his ultimate goal. Likewise, since the end of the Cold War, Nato has expanded even further, right into the former Soviet Union. This leads on to my third point on doing deals with people who have no intention of honouring them. Russia was assured that if they agreed to German unification there would be no eastward expansion of NATO

I don’t think we kept our side of that deal. 

Nevertheless, Putin still attempted to reach an agreement with the west over Ukraine. Germany was among the countries that signed the MInsk accords, but subsequently Angela Merkel has crowed about how it was all a ruse to get Ukraine a breathing space to rearm for its next offensive

 Who looks more like Chamberlain in this situation and who is more like Hitler? 

But Putin invaded Ukraine right? Indeed he did, eventually, just as Britain declared war on Germany, eventually, as a last resort having realised Germany was non agreement capable. Lets  drill down into events in Ukraine that led up to the invasion. The US and her allies had instigated a coup which removed the democratically elected government of UKraine and replaced it with a puppet government. This brought Ukraine firmly into the EU/NATO orbit, even if it was not actually allowed to become an official member of NATO (ensuring that it would be Ukrainians who would do the fighting and dying on our behalf if the plan worked out). This has more than a whiff of Anschluss about it. Not only did NATO expand into Eastern Europe, but it then started stationing missiles in the new member states and breaking international agreements on arms control effectively a contemporary remilitarisation of the Rhineland gambit.

To complete the set of parallels between the behaviour of the Nazis and that of the NATO powers we must consider the failure to resist acts of outright aggression. Hitler was not stopped when he attacked Czechoslovakia. The US and its allies were not stopped by outside powers and the international community when they went into Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, Lebanon 2006, Libya 2011, or when they armed the Saudi genocide in Yemen. Russian assistance to Bashar Assad when the US aided terrorist groups in an attempt to remove the government of Syria was perhaps the first sign that appeasement was coming to an end, that the world was not going to stand for any more of this unmitigated megalomaniacal aggression. The recent ICJ response to US ally Israel’s genocide in Gaza is perhaps another sign that appeasement is about to come to an end as the global community says no more.

To any reasonable mind the evidence is incontrovertible. If anybody has been appeased since the end of the Cold War it is the United States and its allies. If you genuinely do think there are lessons to be learned from Munich then it is Washington that needs to be stopped.