The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler

Military Review, March-April, 2008 by John T. Kuehn

THE SPECTER OF MUNICH: RECONSIDERING THE LESSONS OF APPEASING HITLER, Jeffrey Record, Potomac Books, Inc., Dulles, VA, 2007, 176 pages, $17.95

In The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler, Jeffrey Record goes back to the appeasement of Munich--the "how could this have happened" of an earlier time--in order to address the United States' current "how could this have happened"--what Record characterizes as our "enervating" involvement in Iraq.

Record is a respected and erudite scholar whose work includes one of the great critical examinations of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, The Wrong War. In this new study he identities how the appeasement of Hitler at Munich was critical in shaping leaders' attitudes after World War II. It is often argued that subsequent catastrophes--World War II and the Holocaust--were caused by not standing up to Hitler earlier than 1939. Record astutely argues that this claim ignores the historical context the British and French appeasers faced. He argues that they did not have the political support to stop Hitler even if they had correctly estimated that Hitler was "unappeasable" and "undeterrable." Record argues that by divorcing decision-making from context, post-war observers and policy-makers took the wrong lessons from Munich. The lessons they should have learned had to do with "threat miscalculation," the importance of public opinion, the imbalance between "foreign policy aims and military force posture," the dangers of strategic overextension, the proper maintenance of "offensive-defensive balance" in U.S. strategy, and the "virtue of consistency in threatening and using force." Record applies all of these lessons scathingly to the Bush administration's War on Terror, involvement in Iraq, and measures for Homeland Defense.

However, in his critique of the Bush administration, Record is guilty of making the same errors that his predecessors made in criticizing the pre-World War II appeasers. This mistake has been called "creeping historical determinism" by Malcolm Gladwell. In an article for The New Yorker in 2003, Gladwell explained how hindsight informs the way human being criticize the "failures" of those in the past. The hindsight critic claims that the dots were obvious and easy to connect, and it was only criminal stupidity or negligence that contributed to catastrophe. Gladwell argued that this attitude is a logical fallacy that often ignores the larger contexts surrounding decision-making, especially decision-making based on intelligence--which was, is, and will always be incomplete.

By book's end, Record has used everything from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina as vehicles to indict the current administration for strategic negligence: the cautions of his Munich analysis seem almost forgotten. Just as the neoconservatives in Bush's administration ignored the historical context of the Munich appeasement in justifying a "pre-eruptive" war against Saddam Hussein, so Record ignores the historical contest prior to the Iraq war. He overlooks systemic failures that were beyond the executive branch's control in mounting his too-broad criticism of current U.S. strategy and foreign policy. Simply put, Record overplays his hand.

Despite its flaws, I highly recommend this little book to a broad audience. Record's timely re-analysis of the experience at Munich continues to influence U.S. strategic thinking. Readers are, however, advised to retain their skepticism, especially for the later chapters, which border on rant.

CDR John T. Kuehn, USN, Retired, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas