Appeasement

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. ...

There is a kind of test in grammar that students of Russian learn early: when you cannot remember how to spell an unstressed vowel, you find a related word in which that vowel falls under stress, and the doubt dissolves. The right answer was always there; you simply needed to put the word into a position where it could no longer hide. I have come to believe that wars have control questions too, and that the war against Ukraine has one so clean, so decisive, that anyone who keeps it in mind can never again be confused about what is happening or about where the pressure must be applied. The control question is this: which side can end the war by itself, today, without asking permission from anyone? Pose it, and the whole fog of “complexity” that diplomats and dealmakers love to summon burns off in an instant. ...

There is a sentence that gets repeated in Western capitals as if it were a law of physics: if we give Ukraine too much, Russia will use nuclear weapons. It is spoken gravely, by serious people, and it is meant to end the conversation. I want to begin by pointing out what that sentence actually commits you to. If “too much aid” triggers annihilation, then somewhere below “too much” there is a safe amount — and you can never know where the line is, because the man drawing it has every incentive to keep moving it toward zero. The only point on that scale that is guaranteed not to provoke the apocalypse is the point where you give nothing at all. Take the premise seriously and it does not counsel caution; it counsels surrender, today and every day after. A senior American official is reported to have warned that excessive support for Ukraine could prompt a Russian nuclear strike. The honest name for a policy built on that fear is not prudence. It is suicide — the slow kind, where you talk yourself out of defending what you believe in because someone has told you the alternative is the end of the world. ...