The real danger

Vladimir Putin isn’t Adolf Hitler and Crimea isn’t Czechoslovakia, but the parallels are still there, not so much because of the nature of the aggressors but what has throughout history encouraged aggression.

There are few conflicts that can be so easily explained as World War II (in sharp contrast to the complex origins of its predecessor), because by saying the name “Hitler” you’ve said most of what needs to be said. After which you have only left to explain how the most civilized nation in Europe could have elevated him to power and why the other nations of Europe (Britain and France in particular) didn’t stop him when they could have.

With respect to the latter question, the last point when it might have been possible without a worldwide conflagration that killed 55 million was in fall 1938, but the appeasement at Munich led to war rather than “peace in our time” because it convinced Der Fuhrer that Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier were jellyfish. He had taken their measure and found them severely wanting.

So he went further, gobbling up the rest of a rump Czechoslovakia, followed by the turning of sights upon Poland. And that is where things became especially tragic, because the British and French, driven into a corner and with their policy of appeasement in tatters, had no choice but to finally issue warnings and threats, which Hitler didn’t take seriously.

He was therefore genuinely shocked when they declared war on him after blitzkrieg was unleashed on the Poles. After all, the former corporal with the Charlie Chaplin mustache plausibly reasoned, if they had been unwilling to fight for more strategically situated Czechoslovakia and its advanced arms industry, why were they now willing to fight for less-strategically significant Poland?

Impressions of weakness motivated by a desire to appease and avoid war led, in other words, to miscalculation and war.

In the present context, we can note that Putin is using some of the same arguments in Crimea that Hitler used in the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland and Poland-that he is just bringing ethnic Russians and historical parts of Russia back into the fold (as Hitler claimed to be doing with ethnic Germans, thereby smartly turning Woodrow Wilson’s dubious principle of ethnic self-determination back against the Western powers).

Putin is also clearly pursuing a long-term goal of reconstructing the Russian empire, of which the Soviet Union was merely a 74-year extension in overalls. That he is seeking to tap Russian nationalism in response to growing internal unrest is equally obvious (thus borrowing a favorite from the dictator’s playbook, the one where you distract by finding external scapegoats).

The scary part, however, is the sheer brazenness of it all-Hitler at least pretended to take Chamberlain and Daladier seriously, to actually tell them pretty little lies that they could take home and wave on paper to cheering crowds relieved that another dreadful war wouldn’t be necessary. Putin just takes Crimea, turns his sights on eastern Ukraine (the inevitable next target, although he need not be in much of a hurry about it) and shrugs off the tepid reaction of NATO.

Why? Because he takes Barack Obama and our allies even less seriously than Hitler took Chamberlain and his, with the greater irony found in the fact that the power disparity between NATO and Russia is vastly more favorable to our side now than was the balance between Britain/France and Nazi Germany/fascist Italy then. Our paralysis, unlike theirs, is entirely self-induced.

This is also where the miscalculation comes into play. Obama is being criticized for conveying the kind of weakness which led Putin to act as he did, without concern for reprisals (because he knows that there won’t be any, or at least any that truly matter … Crimea is already his for the keeping), but at some point he will feel compelled to locate his missing spine, much like Chamberlain eventually did (hence his guarantees to Poland).

Unless he wishes to become even more of a laughingstock, our reluctant commander in chief is going to have to draw some real lines in the sand, unlike the fake ones in Syria, and Putin is going to have to judge whether Obama means it or not, with the hunch being that he will decide in favor of not.

So Putin might act, and then what? War comes from weakness; more precisely, the perception by aggressors of weakness on the part of those who might be expected to resist them, and when that other side then seeks to dispel those impressions through displays of belated resolve which lack credibility.

After Jack Kennedy got cold feet and canceled air and naval support during the Bay of Pigs invasion, acquiesced in the (illegal) construction of the Berlin Wall, and allowed himself to be bullied by Nikita Khrushchev in their encounter at Vienna, the Soviet leader decided that he was simply a feckless playboy whose daddy had bought him the White House. The placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba and the worst crisis of the Cold War followed in train.

As for Crimea, the good news is that Putin isn’t Hitler; the bad news is that he thinks Obama is Neville Chamberlain.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 13 on 03/17/2014

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