Was Chamberlain Actually More Strategic than Churchill, Roosevelt, and Biden?

“Prime Minister Chamberlain’s premature death in 1940 and his transformation into a cautionary tale has meant that he was not available to remind his successors that appeasement was just one-facet of a multi-dimensional diplomatic strategy.”

The strategic lessons of the September, 1938 Munich Agreement (the sacrifice of democratic Czechoslovakia as part of Great Britain’s appeasement diplomacy toward Nazi geopolitics) are that deterrence, rather than deference, is required to stop autocrats, even at the cost of the sacred principle of self-determination. Even in the terrifying age of nuclear threats, standing firm will produce greater security than “peace at any cost,” a mantra that persists among the dying breed of church basement activist-pacifists. The naive and popular representation of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s political motives was that he came from a business class for which peace was necessary in order to reach the next quarter of corporate profits. More sympathetic accounts are that he was buying time to build up the United Kingdom’s Fighter Command, without which Germany would have won the Battle of Britain and effected an amphibious landing and conquest of England. This would have freed Berlin to drive on Moscow and consolidate control over all of Europe and then build nuclear weapons (which, according to John Toland, Adolf Hitler was fully aware of). However, even under the limitations of a weak Anglo-French air force, an early intervention against Germany in conjunction with Czech resistance would always have been more favorable than waiting for the destruction of Poland. None of these caricatures do Prime Minister Chamberlain justice, and the real Prime Minister Chamberlain has left us important lessons.

Where Prime Minister Winston Churchill was correct to see both Russian Communism and German fascism as threats to commercial democracies, he also wasted much of his political capital vilifying Mohandas Gandhi and the rising tide of indifference to the British Empire on the part of the British people. Just nine years after the Munich agreement, the British people voted in a government that gave India its independence. Prime Minister Churchill had also been the principal political advocate for the failed and obviously inadvisable British military intervention in 1918 against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war. What Prime Minister Churchill could not do, which is why he was not to be elected as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom until 1951, was know how to navigate British public opinion to create a unified strategy to maintain the balance of power in Europe.

Although initially controversial, A. J. P. Taylor’s 1961 The Origins of the Second World War, is now widely accepted as the most influential account of the sequence of events leading to the outbreak of war. It is both the basis for much of the discussion hereafter, as well as a defining text that should be read by active policymakers. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s long-term plan was almost identical to George F. Kennan’s containment strategy, which ultimately succeeded in defeating and then fragmenting the Soviet Union, winning the Cold War for capitalist democracies. Britain’s leading economist, John Maynard Keynes, who was on the punitive German reparations committee after the First World War but rejected it as counter-productive, believed that peace could only be achieved by using trade to create a wealthy middle class in Germany. (This group, he believed, would advocate for a pacific foreign policy.) The idea that trade would bring foreign policy moderation is founded on the liberal notion that trade is cheaper than either mercantile autarky or war, the latter of which is won less than half of the time by initiators and most often ends in expensive stalemates rather than victory.