This story appears in the May 5, 2014 issue of Forbes.
As
Mein Kampf makes clear, Hitler sought to unite all the people of German
speech and culture into one state, or Reich, preferably by peaceful
nego tiation, otherwise by war and conquest.
To do this Hitler needed to void the provisions of the Treaty of
Versailles, which Germany had signed after its defeat in the Great War
of 1914-18. First he marched into the Rhineland, which had been
demilitarized under the treaty, stationing regular army divisions and
tanks there. The Allies–Britain and France–did nothing.
Next Hitler marched into German-speaking Austria–an annexation known as the
Anschluss. Having been stripped of their empire and reduced to an
insignificant small state, the Austrians were glad to become part of a mighty Reich. Again, the Allies did nothing.
Hitler’s next claim was the Sudetenland. This was a territory on the
border of Czechoslovakia inhabited by a German-speaking people who were
absorbed into the new state against their will. The Allies allowed this
landgrab to stand in an agreement reached at a Munich summit meeting in
September 1938. This was regarded as a surrender to Hitler, but British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who negotiated the agreement, argued
that Hitler was merely asserting the rights of the Sudeten Germans, who wanted to belong to his Reich.
The falsity of Chamberlain’s position and Hitler’s deceit were proved
within months. The Sudetenland’s annexation had made the Czech frontier
indefensible, and in March 1939 Hitler invaded. The Czechs put up no
resistance, and the rest of the country fell into Hitler’s hands without
a shot being fired.
From left to right (front): Chamberlain,
Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured before signing the
Munich Agreement. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Alarmed, the Allies signed a protective treaty with Poland. But
Hitler also had claims against the Poles, in particular the
German-speaking port of Danzig, which the Versailles Treaty had ceded
to the Poles as their “outlet to the sea.” When Hitler invaded Poland in
September 1939, the Allies reluctantly fought.
Had the Allies stopped Hitler at the beginning, when he was
remilitarizing the Rhineland, he’d have been overthrown and World War II
avoided. But the only one pointing this out was Winston Churchill–and
his was a lonely voice.
Today’s drift toward war with Russia seems like a replay of the past.
Putin is a Russian nationalist, who believes in a strong Stalinist
state. His goal is to reverse the events of 1989–the end of the Soviet
state and dissolution of its enormous empire. He seeks to do this by
using what remains of Russia’s Stalinist heritage: the military, a huge
stockpile of nuclear weapons and immense resources of natural gas and
other forms of energy. These are powerful tools to wield against the
various weak states that were part of the U.S.S.R. None has nuclear
weapons, and most are dependent on the (relatively) cheap energy Russia
supplies. All have ethnic Russian minorities, who speak the language,
boast of their superior Russian culture and claim to have been relegated
to second-class citizenship. Putin can rely on these minorities to
agitate for Russian intervention whenever he wants–most importantly in
the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. His successful
annexation of Crimea is greatly encouraging to his long-term plans, and
it’s clear he’ll use everything in his power, including military force,
to reconstruct his empire.
SHADES OF MUNICH
What’s to stop Putin? The West is led by the modern equivalents of
Chamberlain: President François Hollande of France is a political
nonentity repudiated by his own compatriots; Prime Minister
David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor
Angela Merkel of Germany have both ruled out the use of force to stop Putin from annexing Ukraine; and worst of all, President
Barack Obama–the
one man who has the power to stop Putin in his tracks–does nothing. He
makes Neville Chamberlain seem like a bellicose activist.
The U.S. is the richest country in the world. Thanks to the fracking
revolution, it has the means to meet the energy needs of all the former
Soviet states. Its fleets and armies make Russia’s much reduced military
power seem puny. It could move troops and aircraft into Ukraine within
24 hours, and its fleets could ensure protection to the Baltic states in
a way that Putin would find unanswerable. Yet Obama makes no decisive
moves. What ails the man? Is it cowardice? Indecision? A kind of
executive paralysis he tends to display when firmness is called for?
Clearly there’s something fundamentally wrong with the U.S. President.
Meanwhile, Putin, who runs what is, in essence, a second-rate nation
with a weak and declining demographic structure, behaves as if he rules
the Earth.
Sadly, there is no Churchillian voice to sound the alarm and call the democratic world to action.
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