Europe’s first major war since 1945 has, unsurprisingly, inspired comparisons between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Axis aggression of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, warned that the West must not appease Mr. Putin as Europe’s leaders appeased Hitler in the mid-1930s. To do so, said the senator, would signal to China that it may seize Taiwan, to name one global calamity that would result from failing to confront Russian aggression.
If one meanders long enough through the 1930s, any number of possible parallels with today’s crisis can be identified.
In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia (then Abyssinia), fomenting a crisis that would eviscerate the League of Nations as a toothless body unwilling to muster the strength to defend one of its member’s sovereignty. The European order, such as it was, never recovered.
In 1938, Great Britain struck a deal with Hitler over the Sudetenland, forever staining appeasement as an act of weakness.
But such comparisons are superficial. In this episode of History As It Happens, acclaimed Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw says most comparisons to the 1930s are weak. Today’s Europe bears little similarity to the fractured continent that fell victim to Hitler’s predations. The West is unified under NATO and fully supportive, at least for now, of the severe sanctions imposed on the Russian economy.
If there is a parallel worth careful examination, Mr. Kershaw said, it is the way such crises tend to expose the inherent weaknesses of democracies in standing up to dictatorships.
“By the time we see the full weight of what their aggression comes down to, it is already too late. You can say, why didn’t the West intervene when the Russians annexed Crimea in 2014? But wasn’t that a little bit like the Rhineland in 1936,” said Mr. Kershaw, referring to the German violation of the Treaty of Versailles that provoked no military response from the French.
In his view, the West repeatedly underestimated Mr. Putin’s willingness to make war as well as the ideological motivations underpinning Russian revanchism, which seeks to restore a “Russian empire” in parts of the former Soviet Union.
Listen to my conversation with Sir Ian Kershaw by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
