The spirit of Neville Chamberlain is haunting establishment foreign policy circles. Senior Trump administration officials have begun meeting with Russian counterparts and floating possible scenarios for a negotiated peace deal.
Some American media commentators – including on the right – have accused Trump of “selling out” and “betraying” Ukraine in the same way that Chamberlain and his French and Italian counterparts “sold out” and “betrayed” Czechoslovakia in 1938. History, as Mark Twain reputedly said, does not repeat itself but it can often rhyme.
Indeed there are some parallels. Then as now, a pro-Western and partly democratic country that emerged from the wreckage of a fallen empire is menaced by a much more powerful neighbor whose authoritarian ruler has invoked militant nationalism to advance territorial claims. Then as now, the West is unwilling to use direct military intervention to resist that aggressor’s demands for fear of touching off a larger war. Then as now, critics argue that a peace deal may play into the hands of the aggressor, who could then be emboldened to continue pursuing a belligerent and expansionist foreign policy.
Beyond these surface similarities, however, 2025 is not 1938. Hitler, for all his belligerence, did not have nuclear weapons. Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, commands the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and likely wields significant supplies of other weapons of mass destruction. When Western countries considered defending Czechoslovakia in 1938, they knew their only risk was a conventional war with Germany, a risk they were willing to take less than a year later when they declared war on Germany after Hitler invaded Poland.
Western countries confronting Russia today have much more at stake. Putin has periodically threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine and in response to escalations in Western support for Ukraine. He may be bluffing, but we have no reliable way to know that. Russia inherited its nuclear arsenal from the USSR, which had a doctrine of tactical uses of nuclear weapons.
There is a second important contrast: security guarantees. In 1938, Czechoslovakia enjoyed what appeared to be solid security guarantees from defensive alliances signed with France in 1925 and the Soviet Union in 1935. In 1936, those guarantees were connected when France and the Soviet Union signed their own defensive alliance treaty. Neither country, however, moved to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid when Hitler threatened it in 1938. Nor did Britain, which had resumed its traditional aversion to Continental alliances after World War I and favored appeasement over confrontation. After winning at Munich, Hitler proceeded on the assumption that Anglo-French security guarantees to Poland were equally worthless and he invaded that country, touching off World War II.
Despite all the support Ukraine has received, it has no defensive security guarantees of any kind. Its prospective NATO membership was long put off by multiple NATO member states, which must unanimously approve new members. Any country’s eligibility for NATO membership requires democratic governance, free market economics, an ability to participate in NATO missions, and, crucially, an absence of territorial disputes. President Volodymyr Zelensky is now in the sixth year of a five-year term, has suspended elections under martial law, outlawed eleven opposition political parties, cracked down on civil society institutions beyond his control, and consolidated almost all national media in one state company. Ukraine’s economy remains a corrupt post-Soviet kleptocracy.
Kyiv’s only claim to international security protection derives from the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances of 1994 which, despite its title, was crafted specifically to omit any defensive security guarantee. Ironically, this was done for fear of offending Russia. The Budapest Memorandum merely provides that the signatory countries – the US, the UK, and Russia – not attack Ukraine except in self-defense. Russia’s repeated violation of this term in 2014 and 2022 was dastardly, but does not trigger any legal obligation to defend Ukraine.
A third contrast: The West gave up on Czechoslovakia in 1938 without a fight. Not a shot was fired in Czechoslovakia’s defense, including by the Czechs themselves despite boasting modern armed forces and major fortifications in the defensible mountains of the Sudetenland region, which was surrendered to Germany. Once the Munich agreement was signed, the Germans simply marched in, took over the Sudetenland, and six months later bloodlessly occupied the rest of the Czech part of the country, while Slovakia broke off as an independent state under German influence.
Eighty-seven years later, the situation is quite different. Ukraine has been doggedly battling against Putin’s 2022 invasion for three bloody years. Fatality estimates on both sides have risen to one million dead. The war has made Russia an international pariah, heavily sanctioned, subject to braindrain, and increasingly dependent on unsavory allies in Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang. Ukraine has heroically thwarted Putin’s original objective to destroy that country. Three years later, however, it is severely depleted, with the average Ukrainian infantryman in his mid-forties and no evidence that additional billions of dollars in Western aid would make a meaningful difference on the battlefield. The result has been a prolonged stalemate and war of attrition over which Russia’s numerical superiority and willingness to sustain high casualties could ultimately prevail.
In these circumstances, a negotiated peace is hardly a “sell-out”– even if it involves an armistice along the current front line (which wouldn’t require Ukraine to formally cede territory). Rather, a negotiated peace would recognize that neither side can prevail and that ending the war is in the interest of all parties. Indeed, given the current stalemate, a negotiated peace will likely give Ukraine precisely what Putin does not want – an independent future outside of Russian control protected by some form of Western security guarantee, one that might be strengthened by a substantial US economic presence.
A middle-aged Hitler could celebrate his bloodless victory in 1938. But it is far from certain that an elderly Putin, who has suffered massive casualties and international ostracism, would resume war any time soon. Still less could he realistically move on to additional wars of conquest. A negotiated peace may not be a perfect solution or pleasing to everyone. But in the imperfect game of great power politics, it is the best and likeliest one.
