A Short History of the Munich Analogy in American Political Rhetoric and Decisionmaking
Part 1: The Munich Analogy and the Cold War
In October 1938, representatives of France, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy met at Munich in Bavaria to address German demands. Hitler had signaled his expansionist intent by re-arming Germany, by occupying the demilitarized Rhineland, and by engineering the Anschluss of Germany and Austria in March. Gripped by fear of military confrontation and politically inhibited by their pacifist populaces, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and France’s premier Daladier accepted Hitler's assurances that the Sudetenland was Germany's "last territorial demand in Europe," and signed away Czechoslovakia’s western defenses.
Chamberlain’s "Peace with honor, peace for our time" was a delusion. An appeased Hitler proceeded to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia, and then invaded Poland, plunging all Europe into war within a year.
The Munich Conference has become a byword and a symbol, not only of a fatal miscalculation, but of national weakness, of spineless "appeasement" of an implacable, expansionist enemy. The "lesson of Munich" is that the military price of stopping aggression was cheaper in 1938 than in 1939 or 1941, and that the strongest possible confrontation therefore is called for in analogous cases. Failure to intervene to protect some target of aggression is to choose, in Churchill’s words, "both dishonor and war."
During the Cold War, the Munich analogy informed the thinking of American presidents and their advisers to the degree that it became incorporated into an ideological world-view which shaped U.S. foreign policy decisions. President Truman applied the lessons of Munich to the Near East crisis of 1947. The Truman Doctrine emerged from the parallel the president and his advisers drew between the implacable expansionism of Nazi Germany and threat of expansionist Soviet communism in Greece and Turkey. Truman offered this public rationale for the Korean intervention in 1950: "The free nations have learned the fateful lesson of the 1930’s. That lesson is that aggression must be met firmly. Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war."[1]
The use of the Munich analogy by American leaders of the early Cold War era made fascist aggression and Communist aggression essentially the same, with the same aims. The "domino theory" explicated by Eisenhower in 1954 took the Munich conference and and its aftermath as a model of the inevitable outcome of appeased aggression: if one communist target state fell, others would surely follow. The domino theory became American leaders’ guiding assumption during most of the Cold War era and sealed the trope of Munich, translated into post-fascist terms, into the dominant American ideology of the Cold War.
For American politicians, the Munich analogy with its simplistic equation became both a decision-making paradigm and a bludgeon to attack political opponents. The long history of "Muniching"[2] in American political rhetoric began as early as 1940. In that year, President Roosevelt implicitly referred to Munich when he warned Congress that Republican isolationism partook of "defeatism or appeasement."[3] Republicans attacked Truman in 1949 and 1950 for having "appeased" communism in Asia, leading to the "loss" of China to Communists and North Korea's invasion of the south.[4]
During the 1952 presidential campaign, Dwight D. Eisenhower reiterated that the Truman administration’s "appalling failure" to learn the lessons of the 1930s had led to the loss of China and the Korean War. Eisenhower himself fell victim to the Munich trope in 1956 during the Suez Crisis. Eisenhower's non-interventionist stance drew accusations of appeasement and comparisons to Neville Chamberlain from angry Conservatives in the British Parliament and Prime Minister Anthony Eden. [5]
The 1960s found the Munich analogy still vibrant and in heavy demand among politicians of both parties. Ronald Reagan had incorporated Munich into his rhetoric and his worldview as an anti-Communist speechmaker for the General Electric corporation in the 1950s. Campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964, the up-and-coming conservative spokesman warned of "the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation [with the Soviet Union] is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender."[6]
President Lyndon B. Johnson, who sought the guidance of history as earnestly as Truman but applied its lessons even more dogmatically, understood that "the central lesson of our time is that the appetite of the aggressor is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next."[7]
When Johnson decided in 1965 to Americanize the war in Vietnam, he based the decision on his understanding of Munich: "...everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression...and so would begin World War III."[8]
In the election year of 1972, Nixon's vice president Spiro Agnew used the image of Munich to criticize the "pro-appeasement" stance of the Democratic presidential candidate, saying, "Even Neville Chamberlain did not carry a beggar’s cup to Munich—as George McGovern proposes to carry to Hanoi."[9]
The specter of Neville Chamberlain faded from American politics for a brief period after the Vietnam War ended. But by the late 1970s, the Munich analogy was back in fashion. Ronald Reagan’s brand of conservatism demanded a more confrontational Soviet policy and a stronger defense posture. During his 1980 campaign for the presidency, Ronald Reagan characterized President Carter’s arms control policy as appeasement in the memorable pronouncement, "We're seeing the same kind of atmosphere that we saw when Mr. Chamberlain was tapping his cane on the cobblestones of Munich."[10]
Reagan wove warnings of a new Munich skillfully into his 1980 campaign rhetoric, and continued to invoke Munich against political opponents during his first term. In Reagan’s 1983 address before the National Association of Evangelicals (the "evil empire" speech), the President warned that if history "teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly." [11] Reagan was also wont to liken the advocates of nuclear disarmament to Neville Chamberlain.[12]
During Ronald Reagan’s second term, after the revelations of the Iran-Contra affair and during his unprecedented rapprochement with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan invoked Munich much less often than he had done between 1980 and 1984. However, he revived the old Chamberlain refrain while campaigning for George H. W. Bush in 1988, citing the "naive appeasement" that had led to World War II: "The sad lesson is that to be weak is to invite war, and George Bush and I will not rest until freedom is restored to all the peoples of Eastern Europe." [13]
The Munich analogy was hardly Ronald Reagan’s private property during these years. All hard-line anticommunists and defense hawks invoked Munich upon occasion. In 1985, for instance, the College Republicans distributed Neville Chamberlain-style black umbrellas to eight Republican senators who voted against the MX missile. [14]
The foregoing examples must suffice for now. A comprehensive list of instances of political "Muniching" in American political speech during the Cold War would run to hundreds (perhaps thousands) of pages.[15]
(After the fall of Soviet Union and the discrediting of soviet-style communism, the Munich analogy did not vanish from American political discourse. Far from it. A new threat had been building up during the seventies and eighties, and Munich had found a new application and a new resonance before the Berlin Wall was down. The rhetoric surrounding America's involvement in the first Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991 was saturated with Munich, appeasement, and allusions to Chamberlain. I will address this transformation in Part III - "The Munich Analogy and the Persian Gulf War.)
During the Cold War era, by no means all Cold War situations involving aggression against a weaker country prompted American presidents and their opponents to invoke the specter of Munich. Far from it. The Korean and Vietnam wars were wars that American presidents chose to wage. In sending American troops to Inchon and Danang, Presidents Truman and Johnson perceived little risk of bringing about a world war or nuclear engagement as a result of intervention. At they same time, these leaders also perceived that non-intervention in these crises exposed them to serious political risks at home. In these cases, the Munich analogy figured heavily in their decisions to intervene and in their public rationales for war.
In other foreign-policy crises, U.S. leaders perceived a greater risk of war with the Soviets or Red China, for example, Dwight Eisenhower during the Hungarian uprising or the Suez crisis. In these cases Eisenhower and other presidents avoided invoking the specter of Munich. Once invoked, Munich analogy is an imperative to military confrontation, and where U.S. leaders saw no benefit in military confrontation, the situation generally failed to inform their public statements with any reference to Munich in 1938.
Thus, not all cases involving aggression against a weaker third party raised the specter of Munich in U.S. presidents’ public rationales for their response to these events. Thus the question arises as to whether the Munich analogy was invoked in some cases but not others because it legitimized interventions presidents wanted to make, rather than because the historical parallels between the cases were so very compelling.
U.S. leaders have often drawn false parallels and misapplied historical analogies. A number of historians and political scientists have studied the role of historical analogies in U.S. foreign policy decisions and argued various things about the use of the Munich analogy - that it has been an after-the-fact rationale applied to cases in which intervention was already determined by other factors, and even that the invocation of Munich has become more a of "ritual" than a rationale, substituting emotionally-charged cues for reasoned comparisons, and so forth.[16]
I wrote the original paper on which this diary is based in order to argue, among other things, that although various scholars [named in note 12 below] have made a number of good arguments about the use of the Munich analogy by American political leaders, none address adequately the depth to which presidential decisions to employ military force are always mired in a domestic politics in which presidents and other decision-makers are vulnerable to attack by opponents who wield the Munich analogy as a weapon. Plausibly, the Munich analogy came initially into the minds of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon et al. as a framework for understanding the communist enemy they faced. At the same time, Munich also hung over their heads like a sword of Damocles. Munich was a rhetorical bludgeon that they knew would be used against them by political opponents if they decided against the use of force in particular cases. If they did not invoke Munich and assume the mantle of Churchill, their opponents might well invoke Munich and hand them Chamberlain's umbrella.
Without suggesting that U.S. leaders’ use of the Munich analogy was ever entirely a post-hoc rationale for justifying decisions arrived at by different calculations, one can nonetheless discern that leaders who invoked Munich in one situation, as Eisenhower did to denigrate Truman’s China policy in 1950, adopted courses in other situations, which constituted ‘appeasement" by their own standards, e.g. the decision not to support the Hungarian uprising in 1956.
Moreover, foreign policy decisions from the time of Truman on have been made in the full knowledge of the grievous political costs of inheriting the Chamberlain mantle. Discussion of the Munich analogy or any historical analogy’s influence on a leader’s decisions is hardly separable from a discussion of the use of historical memory and analogy to construct political legitimacy and frame partisan policy debates in terms advantageous to the analogist.
Its years of Cold War service as a master narrative and a political bludgeon have embedded the Munich analogy in American culture. The idea of Munich has become a tenet, or dogma, of the American civil religion, or at least a tenet of the Wilsonian interventionist denomination which has been shared at various times by both American liberals and conservatives. As a moral syllogism applied to "parallel" foreign policy crises, it postulates a predetermined outcome, and dictates an imperative course of action.
The Munich analogy today is a more than a historical analogy. It has become a cultural resource charged with moral significance but for some users, including the historically illiterate radio host Kevin James, it is clearly a political buzzword that is practically devoid of real historical content or context.
In American political discourse, Munich 1938 is not so much a historical reference as it is a moral syllogism that expresses absolute values. Because of the absoluteness of the values it embodies, it has come to figure in political discussion as a preemptive argument—a knockout punch that puts an end to, rather than invites, further debate.
(If there is some interest, I will publish Part 2 of this as a diary in a day or so.)
Notes:
- Harry S Truman, "Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Korea, July 19, 1950" Truman Library [online source] available at: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/...
- I invented this word. Please use it until it becomes a buzzword. This neologism may tip off the ill-informed pinheads in the MSM that behind the political invocation of Munich 1938 there is a lengthy history, which unfortunately is laden with examples of bad decision-making by blinkered ideologues, and seething with partisan posturing of the most self-serving and reckless kind. Kudos to Chris Matthews for "getting" it. If he can get it, there's hope.
- Peter McGrath, "The Lessons of Munich" Newsweek (3 October 1988): 37.
- Göran Rystad, Prisoners of the Past: The Munich Syndrome and Makers of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War Era. (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1982), 41.
- "Lessons of Suez" Boston Globe(September 17, 2006) [online source] available at: http://www.boston.com/...
- Ronald Reagan, "A Time for Choosing; Address on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater, October 27, 1964" Reagan Library [online source] http://www.reaganlibrary.com/...
- Rystad, 49, 59.
- Quoted in Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 264.
- McGrath, 37.
- "Surprise Harvest In Iowa" Time (Feb. 4, 1980) [online source] available at: http://www.time.com/...
- McGrath, 37.
- "Legionnaires Hear Reagan Attack Peace Movement" Christian Science Monitor (24 August 1983): 2.
- Merrill Hartson, "Reagan Seeks Midwest Support for Bush." Associated Press (30 September 1988).
- Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), one might add, regularly invoked Munich and appeasement over every proposed arms-control treaty for at least two decades. Helen Dewar, "Senators Repel MX Censure from College Republicans" Washington Post (23 March 1985): A6.
- See Göran Rystad’s Prisoners of the Past for a wealth of further examples.
- Ernest L. May argued in 1973 that framers of foreign policy are often influenced by what history teaches, but that they are likely to misapply its lessons. See Ernest R. May, "Lessons" of the Past; The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York, Oxford University, 1973), ix. In 1982, Göran Rystad postulated a "Munich Syndrome" — a paradigmatic master narrative that organized all the world’s conflicts into a rigid schema of bipolar confrontation. American cold war leaders, Rystad suggests, were virtually trapped by this syndrome, and the very narrow set of policy options it prescribed. See Göran Rystad, Prisoners of the Past: The Munich Syndrome and Makers of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War Era. (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1982). Yuen Foong Khong wrote a 1992 study, in which he contested the revisionist idea that historical analogies were merely post-hoc justifications for leaders’ predetermined policy choices. Khong argued that analogies did influence such choices and their content, while conceding that the invocation of the 1938 Munich Conference in political rhetoric had a "ritualistic" aspect. See Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University,1992). Andrew J. Taylor and John T. Rourke, in a 1995 study of the role of historical analogies in Congressional foreign policy choices, found that ideology and partisanship determined such decisions, and that historical analogies were indeed mainly utilized as after-the-fact rationales. See Andrew J. Taylor and John T. Rourke, "Historical Analogies in the Congressional Foreign Policy Process" Journal of Politics 57, 2 (May 1995): 460-68. Most recently, Jeffrey Record has argued that Munich and Vietnam, the two most-employed historical analogies of recent years, were polar counterparts that pulled policymakers in opposite directions. Examining the role of analogies in decision-making, and the deployment of analogies as public rationales, Record found that U.S. leaders have often drawn false parallels and misapplied both analogies. See Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002).