Russia-Ukraine Crisis: West Swears It Will Avoid Another Munich

The NATO countries met at the annual Munich Security Conference this weekend to pat themselves on the back for rallying against the danger of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But a couple of ghostly figures showed up to remind them they were meeting in the very place where history had judged previous Western leaders harshly for not doing enough to ward off aggression. In 1938, Adolf Hitler used the infamous Munich Conference to intimidate Britain and France into going along with his demands that they approve the surrender of the Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland into his ravenous hands. A new Netflix film, Munich — The Edge of War, based on the thriller by Robert Harris, highlights the tragedy of this appeasement and the fact it led to a wider war less than a year later.

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John Fund

John Fund is National Review’s national-affairs reporter.

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The NATO countries met at the annual Munich Security Conference this weekend to pat themselves on the back for rallying against the danger of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But a couple of ghostly figures showed up to remind them they were meeting in the very place where history had judged previous Western leaders harshly for not doing enough to ward off aggression. In 1938, Adolf Hitler used the infamous Munich Conference to intimidate Britain and France into going along with his demands that they approve the surrender of the Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland into his ravenous hands. A new Netflix film, Munich — The Edge of War, based on the thriller by Robert Harris, highlights the tragedy of this appeasement and the fact it led to a wider war less than a year later.