A lesson from World War II: Appeasement never works 

Will today’s Cold War confrontation end auspiciously, the way the first one did, or will it slide through strategic miscalculations on both sides into a third world war? 

Adolph Hitler’s misjudgments before World War II could be matched by Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s today. At each step in Hitler’s preparations for war against Nazi Germany’s neighbors, the international community wavered, convinced itself that his assurances of peaceful intent were sincere, and simply wished the problem away. Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” proved evanescent. 

Until the last few years, the West made the same mistake regarding the hostile intentions of Russia and China. Even now, after Putin’s third invasion of a neighboring country with the aim of reconstituting the former Soviet Union — Georgia in 2008, Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, Ukraine again in 2022 — some Western leaders still seem to believe they can deal with him as a normal leader in a normal time. 

Commercial factors and profit-seeking constantly skew national security considerations on Russia, just as they did with Nazi Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. On China, America’s most dangerous adversary, business interests in the United States press political leaders to weaken or eliminate punitive measures to counter China’s economic aggression. They seem intent on validating the observation attributed to Lenin that “capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.”  

There are other disturbing parallels between today’s East-West confrontation and the period leading up to World War II. As was also true of the Cold War, the confrontation is not merely about territorial disputes but over something more fundamental and ideological — a political holy war of sorts whose outcome is existential for both sides. The battleground does not simply concern the fate of individual countries’ rulers but the viability of governing systems generally and the international order itself. 

Xi and Putin declared the inevitable conflict in their announcement of a “no-limits strategic partnership” just before Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine: “Certain States’ attempt to impose their own ‘democratic standard’ on other countries … pose serious threats to global and regional peace and stability and undermine the stability of the world order. … It is only up to the people of the country to decide whether their State is a democratic one.”    

Those who decide the Russian state is not democratic, like Alexei Navalny, end up in prison and/or dead.  

The painful lesson the world learned — or should have learned — from its experience with men like Hitler, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Communist China’s Mao Zedong is that rulers who grievously mistreat their people, as China and Russia do, and who become powerful enough to threaten their neighbors and world peace invariably do so.  

The international legal norm that guarantees national sovereignty and noninterference in the internal affairs of other states frequently comes into tension with international humanitarian norms such as the prohibitions against genocide and crimes against humanity.  

More recently, the international community has developed the concept of a “Responsibility to Protect,” which, theoretically at least, establishes the norm that when a regime is incapable or unwilling to address a humanitarian catastrophe within its population, or is itself the perpetrator of it, the international community has a moral obligation and a legal duty to intervene.  

With countries as militarily powerful as China and Russia — or even smaller and poorer states like North Korea that have been allowed to develop nuclear weapons — the intervention as a practical matter cannot be in the military realm, but must rely instead on economic, diplomatic and moral shaming through information warfare. Those nonkinetic approaches contributed to the relatively peaceful end of the apartheid system in South Africa and the downfall of the Soviet Union, the latter of which Putin has called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” 

The mistakes the West has already made cannot be undone, but at least must not be repeated. The lesson of appeasement that led to World War II was forgotten in recent decades with the resurgence of an aggressive Russia and the indulgence of a rising China, which successfully followed Deng Xiaoping’s admonition for Chinese leaders to “hide your capabilities, bide your time.” Xi discarded the coyness. 

What was never hidden — indeed, was constantly exaggerated and flaunted — was the deep sense of grievance at the hands of Western powers. China’s “century of humiliation” served the same purpose and mimicked the language of Hitler’s condemnation of the Treaty of Versailles. “Germany was humiliated. … So long as this Treaty stands there can be no resurrection of the German people.” Implicitly or explicitly, both statements required a forceful redressing of perceived historic injustices.  

The guilt-ridden, fearful and profit-lust motivations of the West manifested in four decades of generous engagement policies that constituted the direct opposite of Beijing’s preemptive charges of “containment” and “holding China down.” The West succumbing to the clever psychological warfare enabled the emergence of the powerful and aggressive Communist China that now menaces the Indo-Pacific and world peace. Fortunately, there is now broad bipartisan consensus on the nature of the threat.  

What is needed is a clear and unambiguous policy statement that any Chinese resort to force against Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan or any other American ally or security partner will be met with a decisive U.S. military response. Today’s Hitlers will pay attention. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on X @BoscoJosephA.