"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

Hey, remember the Russian honeypot who got in with the NRA and the Trump campaign?

HuffPo doesn't. Not a single fucking mention in this report, but I recognised her immediately. She's now a member of the Russian Duma. This is the sort of person the American Right were keen to get in bed with (and, in fact, might have):

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/en...e-russia-hospital_uk_6228cea4e4b07e948aee248d

That’s unexpected. Wonder if it’s legit. They’re awfully well-armed for dissidents.

Maternity and children's hospital in ruins, attacked during a ceasefire. How much lower can they go?

Grozny would like a word about whether they've even reached its depths yet.

So every statement in defense of your thesis was wrong, but that supports your thesis? Neat trick that.

The US never took on that mantle - we clearly were in isolationist mode. Britain and France were to be the guarantors of Versailles. They failed to act when they clearly had the advantage in the mid 30s. By the late 30s the Nazi's power had grown too much. But that was due to appeasement, not in spite of it.

Britain slowly rearmed - Germany was considerably more aggressive in the late 30s. Appeasement started under McDonald, a pacifist, and continued under Baldwin.

% of GDP:
1935 (Reunification of the Saar with Germany) Nazis 8%, UK 2%
1936 (Seizure of the Rhineland) Nazis 13% UK 5%
1937 (Condor Legion sent to fight for the facsists in Spain) Nazis 13%, UK 7%
1938 (Anschluss, annexation of the Sudetenland) Nazis 17%, UK 8%
Start of WWII, 1939, is the first time near parity was reached.
https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazi-germany/nazi-germany-military-expenditure/

And, of course, holding back when you had the advantage in the early 30s is ultimately what cost Europe. Because actions in 35 weren't taken when the Germans renounced Versailles, or in 36 when the Germans left the League of Nations, all of continental Europe would eventually fall to the Reich.

Chamberlain wasn't a fool, but he also wasn't a decisive leader. If he had survived he no doubt would have acquitted himself well as an administrator during WWII, and perhaps that would have mitigated his legacy. But he already was playing a bad hand due to Mcdonald and Baldwin putting the country behind. And yes, that was appeasement as well.

Internal pressures of course were also prominent. Labour opposed every single expansion of rearmament until the war itself was declared. And many Tories weren't willing to consider the Nazis the enemy because they hoped they would act as a deterrent to Stalin.

You questioned whether or not that victory would have been possible without the policy of appeasement. Not only was it possible, but it could also have ended with a far better outcome than was eventually realized, with far less loss of life.

And Aleppo is rocking itself silently in the corner.

That seems awfully suspicious. I had my sound turned off. Was he saying something along the lines of "we stand by our Ukrainian Nazi bad guys bretheren"?

That Templar looking patch that the camera man was making sure we noticed sure seems like a red flag.

You think its there? Its not. It never was. Its made up Russian crap.

This seems to me to pretty much sum up the state of the world today...

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us...sion-give-it-fighter-jets-ukraine-2022-03-08/

Chernobyl's power is offline. https://www.axios.com/ukraine-chern...sia-f47aff98-0e23-4b2a-8119-4bf025afb105.html

Nothing bad has ever happened at Chernobyl when the power went offline.

Fukushima, on the other hand....

This is fine.

Not exactly POMCUS, but there are four smaller sites in theater (with another building in Poland) and one armored brigade drew their gear last week.

That was the point....

Neat trick but honest and valid. The reasons for our early losses are a subject in and of themselves but no matter whose read you accept they were not due to Chamberlain's appeasement.

On the contrary they were variously economic, doctrinal, technological.

None of those factors were the result of Munich.

Yes in hindsight there were better decisions which could be made at any given instance but it can't be overstated that no-one claimed the decisions made were optimal, merely that they led to victory.

What would have happened otherwise is open to a fascinating degree of speculation, but none of it addresses the central point that appeasement can be an effective delaying tactic.

Appeasement existed before Chamberlain. I get the fact you are supporting Chamberlain, but he wasn't the only one involved. But he too didn't rearm swiftly enough. Churchill was right, and he was calling for massive rearmament by 34. And Chamberlain is the one who is rightfully castigated for his claim of 'Peace in Our Time' a mere year before the largest war mankind has ever seen. He clearly was willing to take the political capital if it turned out he was right.

Appeasement almost certainly led to a more difficult war than necessary.

And yes, it's appropriate historians look at the war through that lens to see if there were better ways to proceed. The vast majority concur there was. One of the foremost points of emphasis in the 20th century was learning from the mistakes that led to WWII.

Ramsay McDonald is probably the one who should bear the worst of the brunt. He was both an overt pacifist and started to deteriorate rapidly in '34, to the point he should have been removed as PM. In '35, when the Wehrmacht was a shadow of what it would become, Britain had the worst possible person in charge. Not that he wasn't a good man or meant well, he was and he did. But he was very much wrong in his reaction to Hitler. Baldwin was better, but still looked at Hitler as a possible firestop against the Soviets. Hell, Churchill did too at first - but Churchill saw that either way war was coming and that it was necessary to rearm with alacrity, now.

And when talking about appeasement, it's necessary to also include the French reaction, which you will note was my primary thesis. They weren't willing to engage the Germans without the UK's support, so went along with appeasement. They intended to fight only a defensive war, and because of that ignored the change in doctrine that was coming. This too was due to their lack of desire to enforce Versailles, and therefore by definition allow Germany to grow in power.

There is absolutely no doubt Germany expanded their war making capabilities dramatically more quickly, in scope and ability, during the appeasement time frame of 1935-1939. They not only spent more of their GDP, they grew at a faster rate as well as they included the newly absorbed territories into their economy. They were considerably more powerful by 1939 than in WWI as they absorbed almost all of Czechloslovakia and Austria, either overtly or through puppet governments.

Appeasement caused this, without doubt.

China is refusing to sell airplane parts to the Russians.

Russian armored column 'bravely ran away' NE of Kyiv.

Yes I'm focusing on Chamberlain circa 1938. What had or had not happened earlier set the scene for the decisions he made. The original proposition was that appeasement never works. I'm arguing that given the circumstances at the time he made a decision to delay our involvement.

I know that's contrary to received wisdom but history is too frequently filled with a cast of cardboard cut outs, walking talking pantomime players without nuance.

To me Chamberlain is one of those cardboard cut outs, he's painted as the weak, cowardly and ineffectual fop to be triumphantly replaced by Churchill's hero.

Munich occurred in September 1938.

The following budget put defence spending at 48% of GDP despite the assurances of "peace in our time".

We then stayed largely on our own extremely defensible shores until counter offensive was feasible.

How clear a picture can possibly be painted of someone buying time whilst calming public fears?

So you cede the point - b/c he was the 3rd PM to use appeasement. The question is can appeasement work. Not was Chamberlain maligned. The balance of evidence on that is that appeasement is generally a bad option, and specifically in the case of France and Britain allowed themselves to be outcompeted by a resurgent Nazi Germany who could have been stopped at far less cost earlier in the process. Germany grew in strength far more quickly than the two Western allies.

22% actually. But yes, he increased defense spending more than anyone else prior. Unfortunatley that isn't a great distinction, considering the dereliction of duty to that point. Churchill is the one who brought it up to 48% when he took over.

As to Churchill, he got it largely right on this regard, though like every major figure made plenty of his own mistakes. But in this he was right as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1919 to start drawing down UK military spending, which was unsustainable. Every country in the world did. He was also right in 1932 as the Nazis took power to argue time for those cuts were past, they probably went too far (again, 1/9th the military budget), and that they needed to rearm rapidly, now.

Again, he could have acted sooner, as they all could have. Military spending was half of that of the Reich his first two years in office. He waved around the 'peace in our time' document at the end of his 2nd year in office.

So I'll certainly give him credit for finally backing full rearmament in '39, he was yet another of the PMs who refused to do so seriously prior to that.

More than one thing can be true. Chamberlain both was the first PM to engage in serious rearmament, and he did so far, far too late in his tenure, when war was practically on them.

Does he get an unfair take in history? Guilty Men is the primary source of that, and it's not a very well sourced or reasoned book, it just came out first. So I'd concur in your take that Chamberlain gets far too much of the blame.

But he definitely deserves some of the blame.

And the argument wasn't 'Was Chamberlain wrongfully scorned' (and my take on that is 'partly'), but whether or not appeasement worked.

And your questioning if it was possible to succeed in any other way - your words - was woefully wrong, and that's not a lack of nuance. It's the well reasoned analysis of multiple generations of historians at this point.

The US shares some of the blame as well, though IMO less than Britain and France. If we weren't so resoundingly isolationist in the late 30s we could have aided France and the UK in an endeavor to stop Hitler stillborn in the crib.

We were the only country seriously dealing with Japan and its attack on China. Of course, our policies there were why we ended up in the war.

I hadn’t seen/heard Zelensky’s speech before parliament. It is definitely worth it.

Unfortunately for him, Chamberlain is defined by the video of him waving a piece of paper and proclaiming he had achieved "Peace in our time." Sorry old boy, quite wrong on that one. However, it should be noted that he was head of the UK government during the Great Depression when resources had to be hoarded and hard choices made as to how to deal them out. It was on his watch that the Chain Home system of radar stations was set up. Radar, along with the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters which were also developed on his watch held off Germany in the Battle of Britain. Basically, Chamberlain followed the ancient British tradition of "muddling through." He did what he thought he could with limited resources. Whilst it is true that he misjudged Hitler's character, whether because of wishful think or naivete, his decisions are at least understandable. France had a superbly equipped military that was poorly led by politicians and generals who (wrongly) believed that the Great War was indeed the War to End All Wars. The idea that Chamberlain's appeasement was part of some overall strategy aimed at buying time strikes me as retconning. He was right about some things and without some of the moves he made the Battle of Britain would have gone the other way. On the other hand he was wrong on the big question. Misjudging Hitler was a massive error. Even though it's an oversimplification to blame Chamberlain, there's a certain amount of truth to it, just as there is a certain amount of truth in the assertion that Chamberlain deserves a better shake from history. Would it have gone down differently if Churchill had been in charge? That question amounts to little more than an exercise in mental IMHO.