Munich 1938 Versus Munich 2025

Munich 1938 Versus Munich 2025?

How do you un-do a century-old mistake? Let’s revisit Churchill

Steven F. Hayward, Stevenhayward.Substack 

If we look beyond the drama of last Friday’s Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, we should make out that President Trump is upending more than just Ukraine policy and our NATO commitment. Just as he is seeking to undo the Wilsonian legacy of the administrative state at home, he is also seeking to undo the legacy of Wilsonian internationalism, which has been the default position of both political parties ever since World War II, when Republicans abandoned their skepticism of internationalism and signed up for the Wilsonian vision. That disposition was central to winning the Cold War, but it has been all downhill ever since.

The key questions to ask are whether our Wilsonian internationalism should be regarded as historically contingent (chiefly to the Cold War); to what extent America’s dominant role in world affairs contributed to the enfeeblement of Europe; and whether the Ukraine War can become a turning point to rebalancing responsibility and capacity for Western civilization to survive the century.

Trump’s critics across the political spectrum are charging that his seeming deference to Putin and pressure on Ukraine amounts to the worst Western betrayal or moral failure since the infamous Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler without the Czechs being at the table. The lesson from Munich was simple: never again embrace appeasement. The specter of Munich loomed over Western statesmen ever since. Lyndon Johnson, for example, openly told his advisers that if he failed to stand firm in Vietnam it would be “another Munich.” George H.W. Bush thought much the same thing in 1991 in pursuing the first Iraq War.

One person who offers a dissent of sorts from the conventional lesson is Winston Churchill. Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons debate on October 5 blasting the Munich agreement is well known, and rightly celebrated as perhaps his greatest speech ever. It ended with the memorable peroration:

“We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat. . . [W]e have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; [the people] should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance, and found wanting.’ And do not suppose this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year, unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

Perhaps something like this will yet be said of Trump’s startling about-face in American policy toward Ukraine and Russia. Already Churchill’s famous remark that “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else” is making the rounds.

And yet Churchill strikes a different note when he evaluated the Munich disaster in his World War II memoir, The Gathering Storm. As Churchill often did in his grand narratives, he paused to offer extended reflections on the wider meaning and applicability of the spectacle:

“It may be well here to set down some principles of morals and action which may be a guide in the future. No case of this kind can be judged apart from its circumstances. The facts may be unknown at the time, and estimates of them must be largely guesswork, coloured by the general feelings and aims of whoever is trying to pronounce. Those who are prone by temperament and character to seek sharp and clear-cut solutions of difficult and obscure problems, who are ready to fight whenever some challenges come from a foreign Power, have not always been right. On the other hand, those whose inclination is to bow their heads, to seek patiently and faithfully for peaceful compromise, are not always wrong. On the contrary, in the majority of instances they may be right, not only morally but from a practical standpoint. How many wars have been averted by patience and persisting good will! Religion and virtue alike lend their sanctions to meekness and humility, not only between men but between nations. How many wars have been precipitated by firebrands! How many misunderstandings which led to wars could have been removed by temporizing! . . . Final judgment upon [the choice for war or peace] can only be recorded by history in relation to the facts of the case as known to the parties at the time, and also as subsequently proved.”

Churchill goes on from here to argue that in the face of uncertainties, the decisive factor that should have tipped Britain and France against appeasement was not fear of weakness or rewarding threats of aggression, but honor; Britain and France should have honored their treaty commitments to Czechoslovakia: “Here, however, the moment came when Honour pointed the path of Duty, and when also the right judgment of the facts at the time would have reinforced its dictates.”

And here, we must say, America’s foreign policy leaders have not held up America’s honor as a factor in foreign policy decisions for decades. How honorable was it for America to encourage the Hungarians to revolt against Soviet rule in 1956, and then not lift a finger to help? Of course, President Eisenhower rightly feared any tangible assistance to the Hungarian rebels risked a nuclear confrontation with the USSR—just as President Trump says that further warfare in Ukraine steadily raises the risk of World War III today.

Needless to say, the word honor doesn’t belong in the same continent with President Biden’s disgraceful exit from Afghanistan in 2021—a dishonorable display that surely played a role in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine fully in 2022. For that matter, the United States pledged to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in 1995 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arms, but it wasn’t a formal treaty, and neither the George W. Bush nor Obama administrations felt duty bound to honor that agreement once Russia started gobbling up bits of Ukraine. (Trump rightly notes that Putin stood still during Trump’s first term.) The United States already had its Munich and Yalta moment with Ukraine, and somehow this is now Trump’s fault?

It was one thing for America to take the pre-eminent role in defending the West in the aftermath of World War II, when the American economy accounted for nearly 50 percent of the world’s total output, against a dangerous foe on the doorstep of prostrate Europe. But by degrees American presumptuousness and hubris abetted the enfeeblement of Europe, both by bigfooting independent European interests and cross-subsidizing their welfare states. When President Eisenhower compelled England, France, and Israel to abandon the assertion of their rights under international law over access to the Suez Canal (which compulsion included a direct U.S. Treasury attack on the British Pound), Europe got the message about who was boss, and the diminution of Britain and France was on. (Paul Johnson argued that Eisenhower’s anger at Britain, France, and Israel was mostly because they acted just weeks ahead of the American presidential election. And yes—note well that Britain and France were once comfortable with a direct alliance with Israel, in stark contrast with today, when the Israeli prime minister who is doing more to defend the West against barbarism than anyone since Churchill faces arrest and extradition to the loathsome International Criminal Court if he steps foot in Britain or France.) From the Suez humiliation at our hands it was a straight line to the 1990s, when Europe was powerless to stop a war in the Balkans, requiring American bombers to come to the rescue.

The grandiosity of America’s foreign policy pretensions have only grown with every passing year. The apotheosis of our foreign elite’s detachment from reality was the $700 million embassy we built in Kabul (the new Baghdad embassy compound cost over $1 billion), a clear indication that the State Department never intended to leave Afghanistan, or believed that a stable regime could take hold without its direct and close supervision. Exactly what long-term interest does America have in Afghanistan that justifies such an extravagant presence—one fecklessly abandoned at that?

It would be one thing if American foreign policy from Wilson to today had America’s honor, not to mention America’s self-interest, as its principal purpose. That view has long been stigmatized at “America First.” The best guide on this through line is the late Angelo Codevilla’s posthumously published final work, America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams. Don’t be fooled by the subtitle; although Codevilla takes his bearings from Adams (most famous for saying that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy; she is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all; she is the champion and vindicator only of her own”), the book is a wide-ranging survey of American foreign policy from the founding right up to the present day.

Codevilla reminds us that “Wilson said and believed that America exists for no other purpose than to serve mankind. . . Wilson had wanted to take America into the Great War for reasons that the American people did not share.” It is a straight line from Wilson’s utopian progressivism to George W. Bush’s declaration in his second inaugural address in 2005 that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” This is as unconservative an idea as is possible to contrive. It is how you get $700 million embassy compounds in Kabul, while America’s infrastructure lags.

The point is: for a century—or at least since World War II—it hasn’t been enough for America’s foreign policy architects to build robust alliances against armed foes like the Soviet Union, or China today. Instead we have sought to meddle in the affairs of other nations, “because,” Codevilla notes, “it gave them no small professional satisfaction and personal gain.”

Trump’s abrupt repudiation of the whole scene, with all of its defects and hazards, has accomplished overnight what decades of cajoling and ordinary diplomacy has failed to do: force Europeans to get serious about their own defense, and step up with their own plans to end the Ukraine War, rather that give grand speeches while implicitly saying, “Let America do it.”

You know who might approve of Trump’s wrenching reorientation of America foreign policy? Churchill. A little-known statement from Churchill, made to William Griffen, editor of the New York Enquirer in 1936, is one of the best repudiations of Wilson and his appalling legacy that one can imagine:

“America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.”*

Walter McDougall asks in a forthcoming book (Gems of American History), “What if the subsequent calamities [of the 20th century] really trace back to 1917 and the foolish American decision to enter the Great War?” McDougall goes on to say that “I predict the Trump phenomenon will be ephemeral because he will prove no more able than Barack Obama to break the spell cast by Woodrow Wilson one hundred years ago.”

Pehaps. But maybe getting out of the Ukraine War with some kind of deal that would be on par with the outcomes of both World Wars (both of which involved unwelcome border adjustments and movements of populations) is the cornerstone for a new era of European stability.

Trump is the anti-Wilson, in every way possible. He’s not into Hegelian historicism or Burkean prudence like Wilson. He is not a conservative; he is a radical. But we have perhaps come to the point where only a radical can deliver the necessary hammer blows to our corrupt and anti-constitutional administrative state as well as our corrupt and counter-productive foreign policy establishment.

This moment is not Munich all over again. It might be the Congress of Vienna, though—if we keep a light hand.

Crisis of the New Order

James Madison and the Crisis of the New Order

Richard Samuelson, Law Liberty 

In his history of the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the events that precipitated the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the creation of the New Deal “The Crisis of the Old Order.” Building on the ideas of the earlier Progressive Movement, (FDR ‘s “Commonwealth Club Address” outlining the agenda for his presidency is officially a “Campaign Address On Progressive Government”), Roosevelt led a realignment, and helped to create a new political order under our Constitution. The reelection of Donald Trump signals that we are experiencing the Crisis of Roosevelt’s New Order.

The New Deal marked a turning point in the way our federal government operated. It was, to use Jefferson’s phrase, “a little revolution” in our constitutional order. The Constitution makes the legislature Article I for a reason. From the perspective of the Founding, the essential power of government is legislating, writing the laws under which we all live after we the people, collectively, via our representatives, have discussed and debated what our laws shall be. Given our diversity, we can only be well-represented in such a body. An elected president cannot reflect the diversity of opinions and ways of life in the American republic.

Presidents have always had disproportionate influence in our system. What changed in the last century is that their role in lawmaking has expanded exponentially, or perhaps I should say that lawmaking in the executive branch has expanded exponentially. Nowadays, the vast majority of the legal code under which we live has not been approved by Congress. Obamacare, for example, is roughly 1,000 pages of legislation, followed by many, many more pages of legal code made in the executive branch. A central part of our crisis is that fewer and fewer Americans subscribe to the myths that are necessary to justify that practice.

What Madison Knew

To understand our crisis, it helps to go back to the founding, and then consider how the progressives responded to James Madison’s emphasis on the diffusion of power in our system. Across history, republics tended not to succeed. They also tended to be small regimes, covering not all that much territory. The res-publica was a regime with a thick common culture. Madison found that a large republic, covering an extensive territory, would tend to minimize the danger of majority tyranny by making it less likely that there would be a national majority bent on tyranny or self-dealing. As he put it in Federalist #10, “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.” Hence, he concluded, “in the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”

There’s a second element that we often forget in Madison’s thinking. Such an extended republic would be a federal republic. Recall that for Madison, “a reliance on the people” is the primary check on bad government. By contrast, checks and balances inside the system were, to him, merely “auxiliary precautions.” Popular control was consistent with the federal aspect of the system. In Federalist #51, he noted that we have “a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will controul each other; at the same time that each will be controuled by itself.” Classically, republics were small, and they governed life intimately. By contrast, the extended republic governed with a much lighter hand. Such a republic did not assume all Americans would share a common way of life in the robust way that is often the case in small communities. Recall that Madison is the author of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, protesting overreach by the federal government. In other words, Madison believed that our system only works when the legislative powers of Congress are “few and defined,” as he put it in Federalist #45.

The implication of these elements of Madison’s thought for our situation comes through quite clearly in his “Report of 1800,” his summary report on the political fights of the 1790s. Should federal power increase in a significant way, “one consequence must be, to enlarge the sphere of discretion allotted to the executive magistrate.” Note the echo of his famous language in Federalist #10 in the phrase “enlarge the sphere of executive discretion.” That would, Madison believed, entail the substitution of monarchy for republican government:

This disproportionate increase of prerogative and patronage must, evidently, either enable the chief magistrate of the union, by quiet means, to secure his re-election from time to time, and finally, to regulate the succession as he might please; or, by giving so transcendent an importance to the office, would render the elections to it so violent and corrupt, that the public voice itself might call for an hereditary, in place of an elective succession.

In other words, Madison feared that if we become a national republic rather than a federal or compound republic, the consequence would point toward rule by executive discretion, the antithesis of republican government. The essence of republican government is the active participation of free and equal citizens in managing our own affairs, both as private citizens, and through participation in and management of our government. Across the country, we take on that role primarily through participation in the legislative process at all levels of government via elections.

The Progressive Alternative

The Progressives posited that there was an option unknown to Madison. Thanks to modern social science (the social science PhD was created in the nineteenth century, and brought to the United States largely from Germany after the Civil War), there seemed to be another way to do things. We the people, via our legislature, can remain important, but the real work of writing and enforcing our legal code will be done apolitically, by disinterested, impartial, neutral experts, with tenured civil service jobs.

Experts, not self-interested, amateurish politicians, would decide what health and safety rules to impose, how workers should relate to each other, and how they relate to management, how many guns, or tanks, or ships we need, or how many colleges to have, how to manage federal lands, what the school curriculum should be, how our healthcare system should operate, what departments they ought to have, etc. etc. That would take matters away from the corrupt and corrupting rough and tumble of democratic politics. It would instead be given to apolitical experts who just want to serve the common good. They would have tenured jobs in the government so that they can be free from political control and bias as they go about their job. And, per the Progressives, their job was not political.

Assuming the federal government is too big for the original Madison scheme to manage, we must find new ways to republicanize big government.

The democratic branches would set general goals, and the neutral, scientifically trained experts would merely be filling in the details of policy, details that were nothing by common sense, backed by science. As Woodrow Wilson put it, “Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions.” And because the work of the administrative state was not political, in the progressives’ view at least, our technocrats would not truly be answerable to the president, for if they were, then one would have precisely the problem that Madison outlined. When the social science PhD was new, as it was in Wilson’s day, this did not seem outlandish to lots of people, and thus was created the administrative state, squaring the circle of democracy and administration by experts.

From the start, some feared that we were constructing an arbitrary government. In the late 1920s, Charles Warren, one of our greatest legal historians, worried about this turn. Warren had worked in the Wilson administration; he was no reactionary standing athwart History. In a 1927 essay he published in the Massachusetts Law Quarterly:

If the bureaucrats are truly disinterested and apolitical and not prone to the kinds of temptations that usually beset men in power, then there is little to worry about when unelected people write our legal code and when the same department enforces that very code. On that “if,” the entire problem turns. And today, outside of people with a strong interest in the old myth of a neutral technocratic class, few believe our civil service is politically neutral or that such a thing is even a practical possibility in many areas of our expanding government. Some of the cognitive dissonance we see in discourse on the center-left is from the effort both to embrace the critique of the myth of neutral expertise, and yet retain the status of technocracy. Recall that “woke” originally meant that one had been awakened to the bias inhering in facially neutral institutions and laws.

The Trump coalition might, in fact, demonstrate that the supposedly “neutral” beliefs of the technocrats are, in fact, the very ones we are fighting about in our democratic politics. Their self-image is probably one of the reasons why the tensions are running so high just now. It is also worth noting that the fewer things technocrats do, the more likely it is that they can stay in areas where their work seems relatively neutral politically. As the scope of government has increased, civil service is more likely to venture into highly contested areas of our public life, and, hence, into areas in which all decisions are recognized as political, even if the bureaucrats are extremely reluctant to recognize that reality. And that is our problem today.

Our Crisis

If we no longer take seriously the proposition that our upper-level bureaucrats can be neutral, apolitical experts because they, in fact, have to make political judgments on a regular basis, then the administrative state is in a crisis of legitimacy. And that is what the re-election of Donald Trump represents. The American people don’t elect him in 2016 and again in 2024 if they believe that our institutions have been behaving in a reasonable and apolitical way.

Progressives react with horror at the possibility of a president truly in charge of today’s massive executive branch. Can one really blame them? One need not be a Progressive ideologue or a member of the technocracy with a strong self-interest in the matter to see why the prospect of a president, even an elected one, with all that power at his discretion is legitimately terrifying. Does anyone really want to give a president all that power? The Founders did expect the president to be in charge of the executive branch, but they did not expect the executive branch to have the kind of power it does today. Yet, is it reasonable to expect that we can reduce that power significantly?

And who else should be in charge once we recognize that there is no such thing as apolitical law writing and policy making? In the Obama era, progressives mocked the citizen who said, “Get your government hands off my Medicare.” Today we see the equivalent on the other side—get the elected president’s hands off my democratic administrative state. How can the president be violating separation of powers when he asserts control over his own branch? How can it be undemocratic for the person we elected to be the person in charge of the bureaucracy? Nowadays, many Americans seem to have concluded that the only thing worse than giving one man, even one we elect, so much power in so many areas of our lives might be to have that power in a class of unelected bureaucrats who cannot be fired, and who are accountable only to themselves. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project seems to be exposing how the bureaucratic class has gamed the system to help entrench its policy preferences.

One of the policies that triggered the colonists in the years leading up to the American Revolution was the British government’s talk of creating a “civil list,” the eighteenth-century version of elite civil service, in the colonies. From the perspective of the king and the aristocrats and gentlemen who governed Britain, the colonies were much too democratic, with the colonial legislatures, among other local institutions, exercising too much power. They were using their power to push around the royal governors. Moreover, the American colonies were, from the perspective of London, lacking in gentlemen who were worthy of political power. Hence came the desire to foster a larger governing class, paid by the King, to help rule the colonies. The colonists, forced to think about it, decided that they liked self-rule. Perhaps our old DNA is kicking in, and we are in the process of rejecting rule by the modern version of the civil list. Our elite bureaucracy is involved in way too many areas of public policy to accept the pretense that they are acting as neutral technicians. That being the case, we the people ought to have a much larger role.

But assuming the federal government is too big for the Madison scheme to manage, we must find new ways to republicanize big government. The progressive politicians who designed the administrative state did not do this then because they subscribed to the myth of scientific expertise; now, though, we recognize that the administrative state is engaged in political, not scientific work.

Reconciling technocracy with republican government is perhaps the greatest challenge faced by our republic. But in order to meet that challenge we must first recognize what it is and introduce what John Adams called “the checks and balances of republican governments” into the administrative state. Is there a way to reconcile checks and balances with technocracy? That is, I suspect, the $64 trillion dollar question. It will not be easy, but we likely have no good alternative if we wish to preserve the republic as a republic for another 250 years. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.