11. The cost of appeasement
- Author:
- Larry P. Goodson
- Publication Date:
- 12-2022
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Security and Defence Quarterly
- Institution:
- War Studies University
- Abstract:
- The 1938 Munich Agreement (Akehurst, 1972) by which the Allies allowed Adolf Hitler’s Germany to take the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia is also known as the Munich Betrayal or, to English speakers, as appeasement by Neville Chamberlain (Valladares, 2020). This historical moment reminds me very much of how the West has dealt with Russia since Vladimir Putin rose to power. Like Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin has been sending aggressive signals to his neighbours and Western nations (Putin, 2007) since his 2005 speech arguing that the collapse of the Soviet empire ‘was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century’” (Putin, 2005). Note that he did not mention the Bloodlands that Timothy Snyder described, i.e. the killing of 14 million people in Central and Eastern Europe (Snyder, 2010), or World War II (Halloran, 2015) as the greatest catastrophe.
- Topic:
- War, International Security, Vladimir Putin, Appeasement, and Russia-Ukraine War
- Political Geography:
- Europe