In 1938, a Deal in Munich Paved the Way for World War. The US-Russia Talks in Riyadh Are Eerily Similar

On September 28, 1938, two days before Adolf Hitler’s orders to his army to march into Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia came into effect, Britain and France agreed to a meeting in Munich with Germany and Italy to resolve the crisis. The four-power conference excluded the Czechs, whose territory was being negotiated, as well as the most powerful power on the eastern European land mass, the Soviet Union. 

In the vain hope of avoiding another war, the war weary and tired democracies of France and Britain justified their dealmaking by asking – in the words of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain – why “we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” 

Hitler said in the meeting that Sudetenland was his last territorial demand in Europe. The western powers accepted this, and assumed that their act of appeasement had brought ‘peace for our time.’  

Catastrophic events gradually unfolded from that single act of cowardice.

The Soviet Union concluded that it needed to reach its own non-aggression pact with Germany, Hitler decided the British and French were too weak to confront him any more, and the western democracies lost their last chance to stop Hitler in Europe. Indeed, with that one act of signing away Czechoslovakia, the western democracies had “sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.”

The implications were clear, in the words of Winston Churchill in the House of Commons a week later: “We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude which has befallen Great Britain and France. Do not let us blind ourselves to that. It must now be accepted that all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe will make the best terms they can with the triumphant Nazi Power. The system of alliances in Central Europe upon which France has relied for her safety has been swept away, and I can see no means by which it can be reconstituted.” 

The appeasement and containment of Germany failed and the World War II broke out exactly 11 months after that. 

Why is what happened in Munich in 1938 relevant today?

We need to go back to the 1990s to understand the answer. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US-led NATO was now in sight of dominance over the whole of Europe. Russia was struggling with the economic dislocation caused by the transition to a market economy and the former Warsaw Pact nations sought new security arrangements, with NATO providing the lead. In order to ensure Moscow did not play spoiler, the United States assured a collapsing Soviet Union – through its secretary of state at the time, James Baker – that NATO would not expand one more inch beyond Germany and that Russia’s security interests would be addressed. 

That assurance was not adhered to, and by the time Vladimir Putin and the security establishment of erstwhile Soviet Russia assumed office in 2000, Moscow began to push back against the idea of NATO expansion, especially in Ukraine – which Putin regarded as central to Russian security.

As early as 2008, the then US ambassador to Russia, William Burns, wrote to headquarters, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

But this and subsequent warnings were not heeded by the US establishment, which let it be known that Ukraine’s entry in NATO was possible, and desirable. 

Washington’s folly does not, of course, absolve the Russians of their acts of omission and commission, starting with the annexation of Crimea, and then the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Munich II

If the US shares some of the blame for the onset of a war in which Kyiv became a pawn in the geopolitical conflict between Moscow and Washington, the manner in which the Donald Trump administration is trying to end the war is once again negating the interests of Ukraine. This is where the parallels with Munich are striking.

The opening scenes of Munich II were enacted earlier this month in Saudi Arabia. The fate of Ukraine and its territory is now the subject of a high-level negotiation between the United States and Russia. Neither Ukraine nor the rest of Washington’s NATO allies have a seat at the table. 

This arrangement is ushering in a tectonic shift in the western alliance that was once the cornerstone of postwar Europe. For the first time, the US is ignoring its NATO allies and their security concerns, especially Germany, France, and Poland as well as the UK. The US president has also, through his secretary of defence, outlined a possible solution to ending the war in Ukraine. This solution Ukraine forsaking its 2014 borders (i.e. accepting a fait accompli on Crimea), and ruling out membership in NATO. Whatever the merits of these points, they represent a complete negation of the position taken by NATO as well as the European Union.

In an ironic throwback to 1938, where the unjust German claim on Sudetenland was legitimised by the UK and France even as the Czechs (and Russians) were denied a seat at the high table, this time, the annexation of territory of a sovereign country (Ukraine) by Russia is being legitimised by the US. In the process, Ukraine as well as the UK, France and Germany – the fulcrum of the Western alliance in Europe – are being denied a seat at the high table. 

The contours of a possible new security framework can be sensed from some of the other announcements that have emanated from the Oval Office. The Trump administration appears to be moving away from the so-called ‘rules based system’ – which it used to justify first the containment of  the erstwhile Soviet Union and then, over the past two decades, a rising China – towards a new arrangement that grants the US greater leeway across the world.

The US under President Trump is focused on domination in areas deemed critical for establishing new supply chains, accessing rare earths and other natural  resources. Hence the calls for annexing Greenland, Gaza and even Canada. With the US now seeking to become a territorially expansionist power, it perhaps recognises the need to reach some sort of understanding with other expansionist powers like Russia and even China – provided there is an agreement on spheres of influence. 

Apart from Munich, one is also reminded of the world after the Congress of Vienna following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. At stake is the carving up of earth and space for the future. Such a Congress has not yet happened but the curtain on the same perhaps has gone up in Riyadh.  

So what does the world look like with this troika of Putin, Xi and Trump in command? Munich I resulted in war and Munich II is likely to have a similar outcome.

Ajay Vishwas Dandekar teaches as Shiv Nadar University. Views expressed by the author are his own.