Revisionists are making case that Neville Chamberlain has taken a bum rap for his attempt to appease Hitler at Munich in 1938. Geoffrey Wheatcroft takes this task upon himself in the Washington Post today. The underlying argument is that appeasement isn’t really such a bad strategy either.

Usually, the key talking point is that in 1938, Britain was not prepared to go to war with Germany so Chamberlain had little choice. That ignores the fact that from 1933 to 1938, Churchill and a band of “Troublesome Young Men” had been arguing that the revival of Britain’s “martial vigour” needed to be a national priority.

Wheatcroft contends instead that “Chamberlain was far from alone in thinking he was addressing a real grievance” at Munich – the German-speaking minority in the Sudetenland did not want to be ruled by Czechoslovakia.

He cites as another “inconvenient truth” that the Versailles Treaty had been “unjust.”

What this misses: Statesmen understand that sometimes grievances can be addressed and sometimes grievances are manipulated to camouflage other ambitions and ulterior motives. Churchill clearly understood that Hitler’s appetite would be whet, not satisfied, once he had consumed the Sudetenland. As he put it:

“We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat…you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude…”

By the same token, it should be clear—but is not to many in the Foreign Policy Establishment — that it will be impossible to appease the Islamist regime in Tehran and the Islamist leadership in Gaza and the West Bank. Iranians and Palestinians may have “legitimate grievances” (let’s debate that another day). But the more salient fact is that they will see appeasement as weakness, and they will find weakness provocative. If there are any well-established laws in international relations, this is among them – despite attempts by revisionists to repeal it.