There is a word that historians reach for whenever a great power decides it would rather feed an aggressor than fight one, and the word is Munich. In 1938 the leaders of Britain and France handed a slice of a sovereign country to a dictator in exchange for a promise of peace that was worthless before the ink had dried, and they came home waving paper and calling it triumph. We learned, supposedly, what that paper cost. And yet I find myself watching the present moment and reaching for the same word, with one unsettling difference. What is happening to Ukraine is not a single conference, not one signature on one afternoon. It is a betrayal in slow motion. It arrives not as an event but as a fact, accumulating quietly while everyone insists that nothing of the kind is taking place. This is a creeping Munich, and the most important thing to understand about it is that it cannot be finished.
Let me be precise about what I mean by betrayal, because the West will tell you it has not abandoned Ukraine at all. There are weapons. There are sanctions packages, some of them genuinely severe on paper, with senators competing to attach the harshest tariffs. There are summits and declarations and grave statements of solidarity. None of this is fiction. But look at what arrives where it is needed and when. Cities are struck by hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles in a single night, across more than a dozen regions, and the question that hangs over the rubble is always the same: where is the air defense, where are the long-range missiles, where are the aircraft, where is all the support that was promised? It exists, yes, but at a level that visibly does not protect the country it is meant to protect. Europe is preparing, but gradually, never urgently. America’s posture drifts. That gap between the language of support and the reality of support is the betrayal. It does not announce itself. It simply lets the missiles through.
The Misjudgment of Munich, Repeated
The original Munich rested on a misjudgment of a man. Those who flew to meet Hitler believed they were dealing with an ordinary statesman who had grievances that could be satisfied, a hard bargainer with whom one could split the difference and shake hands. They did not grasp that they were facing a being of an entirely different nature, one for whom each concession was not a settlement but an appetizer. That same failure of perception is on display again, and it explains a question I am asked constantly: why do they all keep going to him? Why does one leader after another fly to sit across from him, searching for the reasonable interlocutor, the man with whom a deal can be struck? The answer is that they cannot bring themselves to see what he is. They are looking for a human being where there is only a skin stretched over something else, a figure of fascist nature heading a state in which fascism has, in fact, triumphed. To plead with such a man to stop the killing is like demanding that a serial murderer cease murdering on the count of three. The plea is not merely useless; it is a confession of impotence dressed up as diplomacy.
You can hear the misjudgment in the very tone of the rebukes. When a senior American figure posts that the strikes on civilians are shameful and demands an immediate ceasefire, it has the cadence of a protest chant, the kind of thing crowds shout in the street knowing the man they are shouting at will not so much as turn his head. And when the American president expresses surprise, professes not to know what on earth has gotten into a man he has known so long and always got along with, that is something stranger still. It is comradely criticism. It is the disappointment of a friend, not the judgment of an opponent. The same official who is baffled and wounded by the aggressor reserves his real hostility for the victim, blaming the leader of the country being bombed for causing problems, for not helping his own nation, even floating the grotesque inversion that the war would never have begun if only different men had been in charge. When the surprise flows toward the aggressor and the contempt flows toward the defender, you are no longer watching neutrality. You are watching whose side a man is on.
Why Concession Is Capitulation, Not Peace
At the center of this creeping betrayal sits a single demand: that Ukraine recognize the loss of Crimea, and perhaps more, as the price of quiet. It is dressed in soothing language. No one, they say, is forcing Ukraine to call Crimea Russian; these are simply realities, lines on a map that were drawn years ago by force and cannot now be redrawn. But consider what such recognition actually is. It is the formal rewarding of an aggressor for his aggression. It is the announcement that you may seize your neighbor’s land with tanks and, if you simply hold it long enough, the world will eventually bless the theft. And the logic does not stop where the current front line stops. If a stolen province becomes Russian because he controls it, then why not the next one, and the one after that? Follow that road and you arrive, inevitably, at the Baltics. When he moves on Latvia or Estonia or Lithuania, will we shrug and say that he holds the ground now, so let us recognize that too? This is precisely the mechanism by which appeasement does not buy peace but manufactures the next war. It worked exactly this way once before, and the result is carved into our collective memory.
There is a deeper reason the bargain is poison, and it has to do with what surrender does to those who must fight. A country does not hold a front line on weapons alone; it holds it on the conviction that the sacrifice means something. Ask the soldier why he stands in the trench, and the answer is not chiefly about prosperity or geopolitics. It is the refusal to be a second-class person in his own land, the insistence on living in his own country under his own culture and answering for his own choices. To accept the aggressor’s territorial demands is to tell that soldier that the ground he bled for is now a chip to be traded away. It shatters morale at the root. And it purchases nothing, because the man making the demands has no intention of stopping at the regions conceded. He has written four whole provinces into his constitution and calls the Ukrainian-held parts of them territory under occupation by their rightful owners. A declared readiness to withdraw, to hand over even nominal control, would not produce peace; it would simply demonstrate a willingness to capitulate while the war continued anyway. That is not the end of bloodshed. It is the policy of appeasement, and appeasement has discredited itself too many times in human history for us to pretend we do not know where it leads.
The Briar Patch and the Slow Slide Toward Legitimacy
Watch, too, how even the threats are confused. We are told that the aggressor is being pressured by the warning that America might walk away from the talks, abandon the whole exhausting process and turn to other matters. But this is no threat at all. It is a gift. There is an old folk tale in which the trapped rabbit, cornered by the fox, begs above all else not to be thrown into the briar patch, because the briar patch is exactly where he longs to be, the place from which he escapes laughing. To menace this aggressor with an American withdrawal is to throw the rabbit into the brambles. Nothing would please him more than for the most powerful Western state to distance itself from Ukraine, depriving it of a crucial ally and leaving the field clearer for him. A threat that delights its target is not pressure. It is collusion misunderstanding itself.
And so the slide continues, one concession bleeding into the next, until you reach statements that should be impossible. When the figure widely considered the most sympathetic to Ukraine on the American side pronounces that Russia’s concerns about NATO’s expansion are legitimate, something monstrous has happened, even if it passes almost unnoticed. To call those concerns legitimate is to grant the aggressor a recognized right to forbid his neighbors their own choices, to keep the former Soviet space inside his sphere by force. What business is it of his whether Moldova or Georgia seeks an alliance? And from there it is the thinnest, almost invisible line to legitimizing the invasion itself. If his anxieties were valid, then perhaps the war to enforce them was not entirely without cause. That is the abyss at the bottom of this slope. Every soft word, every “realistic” concession, every legitimate-sounding grievance edges us closer to the day when the world quietly agrees that the aggression made a kind of sense. The truth, by contrast, is brutally simple. You cannot take by force what does not belong to you. Internationally recognized borders are inviolable. Under international law Crimea is Ukrainian, and any attempt to call it Russian, Turkish, American, or even neutral is a violation of the order built so painfully after the last great war.
Why This Munich Cannot Be Finished
Here, finally, is the difference that changes everything. In 1938 the betrayed country had a government that sat quietly, nodded, and signed the documents that dissolved its own sovereignty. Czechoslovakia was made an object, something done to, and so the betrayal was completed in a single stroke. That is what made Munich, Munich. The decisive fact of the present is that Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia, and its president is not the man who capitulated in Prague. I am convinced that if Ukraine took the posture of that earlier government, the agreement would simply replicate itself, the betrayal would be consummated, and we would be living an almost exact historical rhyme. But Ukraine refuses. It has not lost the war and it will not destroy itself. It remains a sovereign subject rather than a passive object, and that single quality of resistance jams the entire machine. A full Munich requires a victim willing to be sacrificed, and this victim declines the role.
So the betrayal proceeds and yet cannot arrive. It unfolds as a fact, in the missiles permitted through and the support withheld, in the comradely criticism of the killer and the cold blame heaped on the killed. But it never reaches its consummation, because the country it is being committed against will not sign. That is the strange, suspended condition we inhabit: a Munich in motion that can never become Munich complete. And it points, I think, to the only honest conclusion. The man holding the keys to this war keeps them in his own pocket; he alone can end it by simply ceasing to shoot, and no pressure on the defender will move him because he is not the one to be pressured. Talk does not stop him. Illusions of negotiation only let him out of his isolation and dress him up as someone you can do business with. What ends a war like this is not appeasement and not paper but the exhaustion of the aggressor’s capacity to wage it, which is to say it is weapons, delivered in time and in quantity, to the one party that has refused to be betrayed. The lesson of the original Munich was that you cannot buy peace from such a man at someone else’s expense. The mercy of this one is that the someone else will not let you.