Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Role: Economic historian.
Keith Rankin, 9 October 2026 – If one follows the present Eurasian Wars reasonably closely, and with academic detachment – with disinterest (ie neutrality) though definitely not uninterest – it has to be clear that the present ‘Northern Eurasian War’ represents the greatest risk to life on Earth, ever, or at least for a quarter of a billion years. If things go seriously wrong, the destructive potential of the conflict between Russia and The West is an order of magnitude greater than any human event in the historical past.
Yet the causes of the present set of conflicts are so trivial. I call them ‘vanity wars’. Others call them ‘wars of choice’. One of the core problems, I believe, may be called ‘Munich Syndrome’, and it goes back to a skewed reading of World War Two and especially of the events of September 1938 in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.
(The causes of the ‘Southern Eurasian War’ also go back to skewed readings of World War Two; the biggest – but far from only problem here – may be called ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’, reflecting the biggest of the many victim narratives arising from WW2. [Iran has a rather spectacular – though rarely heard – victim narrative, too, from WW2 and its aftermath. Victim narratives, while usually substantially true, are very unevenly told.] WW2 itself was caused by the biggest victim narrative from World War One; the false ‘stab in the back’ narrative about how WW1 was stolen from the German side, in light of the fact that Germany was winning that war from August 1914 until June 1918 and had already defeated its principal opponent, Russia. For the Germans, WW2 was meant as payback for WW1. For the victims of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the ‘Southern Eurasian War’ today represents a protracted pay-forward process, with the descendants of the perpetrators of Auschwitz fully supporting the cultural descendants of their most prominent WW2 victims; escalating a post-WW2 cycle of victimisation in Southwest Asia.)
The ‘theatres’ of the Northern Eurasian War are Ukraine and Russia. For Russia, this is not a proxy-war; Russia is fighting for Russia. On the other side it’s somewhat murky. Clearly, Ukraine is not only fighting for Ukraine but also for the political class of Western Europe; hence the mass unpopularity of Europe’s established political class at present. Further, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada are a vassal ‘states’ of the United States; with that vassalage most clearly expressed through the organisation known as Nato.
The Appeasement Narrative
The simple appeasement story told in the Anglo-West – a zone which includes Aotearoa New Zealand – is that Adolf Hitler and his band of very bad men were emboldened to conquer all of mainland Europe. For a long time there was minimal resistance – indeed there was appeasement – on the part of the British and French political leadership. The particular appeasement event we choose to remember was signed at the Munich Conference of September 1938 – attended by Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Daladier.
The principal ‘transgression’ by Anglo-France was a ‘peace’ treaty to allow Hitler’s Germany to appropriate the former Austrian parts of Czechoslovakia – the German-speaking territories north of the now ‘rump state’ of Austria, which were incorporated (via the 1919 WW1 peace settlement at Versailles) as the Sudetenland into the new buffer state of Czechoslovakia.
The framing of World War Two has been that of a good nation versus a bad man; though, like all ‘good’ nations in history and mythology, the United Kingdom was a flawed ‘good nation’; and the Munich treaty was Britain’s biggest mistake. It must have been; didn’t Winston Churchill say so?
A subtext is the widely accepted story that Adolf Hitler could easily have been assassinated in Munich that month, but that the would-be assassin chickened out. This is important, because WW2 has been largely framed as the United Kingdom versus Hitler; not the Allied Powers (the most important eventually being the Soviet Union) versus the Axis Powers (the most important being Germany.) If only Hitler’s Germany had been decapitated – so the story goes – the basically good men and women of Bavaria and Westphalia etcetera would have risen up (as, as the much more recent story goes, they did in Kyiv in 2014) and replaced the remnant Nazis with a government much like that in the then Czechoslovakia. Mussolini would have crept back to Italy, without the support of his buddy with the Charlie Chaplin moustache, to be dealt with later by someone with more cojones than Chamberlain.
Today’s Munich Syndrome analogy
In present day United Kingdom, and to a slightly lesser extent France, the present war is Ukraine versus Putin; a ‘plucky’ ‘good’ nation – a new nation – standing up to a very bad man. Part of the Munich myth – meaning an embellished story which overwhelms other stories – is the role of Winston Churchill, who condemned Britain’s neutrality on this matter. (But see below for Churchill’s other views on neutrality and appeasement; indeed, in the later parts of WW2, Churchill became a serial appeaser. And we note that Churchill – a man of empire – saw all these matters from a British strategic viewpoint, and also did not say that the Munich treaty made war less likely. Churchill only said that the treaty did not make peace more likely.)
For Germany, I think its anti-Russia motives are somewhat darker than Britain’s. As Glenn Diesen said in Larry Johnson: Europe-Russia War is now “Inevitable”, YouTube, circa 30 September 2026, “Even though Germany is in decline now, it’s still the central gravitational point in Western Europe. And if we’re going to have a war between Europe and Russia it will quite likely be triggered as a German-Russian war, as another German-Russian war, but this one probably will be much more violent than the previous.” Given that the total violence that took place on the territory of the USSR between 1941 and 1945 is substantially greater than that of Auschwitz and Treblinka, “much more violent” is certainly a matter of some concern!
The danger, of course, is that waging a new war – in the present case, a war between nuclear-armed powers – motivated by a grossly simplistic interpretation of a previous war is a terrible (and possibly existential) thing to do.
Even if Putin was worse than Hitler – and any reasonable assessment is that he is not as bad as Hitler was – the stakes are an order of magnitude higher today. Better to allow a Hitler to win a war than to eradicate life in the solar system. It is foolish to adopt a drastic long-term solution (such as suicide, let alone murder-suicide) in order to address a short-term problem; murder-suicide – which happens too often, even in little ole New Zealand, albeit as small-scale events – represents an extremely unbalanced psychological state.
Further, just as Hitler was worse than Putin is (though not worse than Josef Stalin was), Hitler’s Germany was easily worse – in its domestic and foreign policies – than Putin’s Russia is. (Further, if we contrast the ‘bad man’ in today’s Southern Eurasian War with the ‘bad man’ in today’s Northern Eurasian War – and we judge badness by the ratio of civilian casualties to military casualties – then the southern Eurasian bad man is clearly much worse.)
So today, the problem that leads us to war is at least an order of magnitude less severe than that of WW2, but the potential harm is at least an order of magnitude more severe than that of WW2.
Game theory has been applied to nuclear confrontations. Almost every time, the outcome – following a single nuclear strike – has been catastrophic. Nuclear war is the extreme example of a ‘negative-sum game’.
The 1930s’ Appeasement Reality
Munich 1938 was not the only appeasement event undertaken by the British and French in the 1930s. The first important event was in 1936.
While there were other events before 1936, to an extent they were matters of depression pragmatism; matters such as the cessation of reparation payments by Germany, and the depression recovery policies which included re-armament as well as autobahns. These were unenforced breaches of the 1919 Treaty impositions on Germany; and they told the world that, in essence, the provisions of that treaty were unenforceable.
The serious event of 1936 was the Remilitarisation of the Rhineland crisis. This was the opportunity of France and Britain to take action when they had the upper hand; they could have enforced this part of the Versailles treaty, but chose not to. The Third Reich was still militarily weak. The Rhineland is the part of Germany to the west of the Rhine River, has a direct border with France, and has relatively easy access to Britain via Belgium. While action here could have prevented World War Two, it might also have reoriented the course of WW2, giving it a more explicit eastern focus.
The serious geopolitical event of 1936 to 1939 was the complex proxy civil war in Spain, which was a contest between an anarcho-democratic-communist left-wing panoply of forces and the ‘Nationalist’ General Franco (with substantial Catholic Church support, and many Moroccan troops). From the outset, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy got involved in Spain on Franco’s side. On the ‘democratic’ side, there were various international brigades which included many idealist men (such as George Orwell) from the Anglo-West, and also a more ‘official’ presence by the Soviet Union.
From 1918 to 1938, the principal geopolitical adversary of the United Kingdom (and to a lesser extent, France) was the Soviet Union, the USSR; not Germany. In the Spanish Civil War, the British government was formally neutral but sympathetic towards Franco, a bulwark against ‘communism’. France, from 1936 to 1938, was governed by the left-wing Popular Front (formed with a bit of ‘soft-power’ support from Soviet Russia); as such, France – in contrast to Britain – was sentimentally supportive of the democratic forces in Spain.
From a violence perspective, the most egregious event of the Spanish War was the carpet bombing of Guernica, a Basque town in northern Spain, in April 1937, by the German Condor Legion. This was one of the most cynical war crimes ever committed in the history of humanity, and prompted Picasso’s famous painting. Notionally in support of the Nationalist cause, this atrocity was likely more a test run for the future bombings of places like Warsaw, London, and Coventry.
Here was a perfect opportunity – in 1937, and in western Europe – for Britain and France to take steps to suppress the military growth of the Third Reich; to take a stand. But both governments chose to appease Adolf Hitler. According to GoogleAI, “In his World War II memoirs, [Winston] Churchill (who was then a back-bench MP) condemned the raid on the civilian population as an early example of devastating aerial warfare and terror bombing.” At the time though, and we have this from historynet.com: “The Nationalists supported their push to Spain’s northern coast with a blockade of all Basque ports. Although the odd cargo ship managed to sneak through, official British policy adhered to the League of Nations protocol of non-intervention. Conservative statesman and future Prime Minister Winston Churchill mandated “an absolutely rigid neutrality, with the strongest protest against any breach of it”.
If we evaluate people by their deeds and not their subsequent sweet words, Churchill ordered a bombing raid on Mönchengladbach on 11 May 1940, the day after he became Britain’s Prime Minister, killing significant numbers of civilians. Further, “In the 1920s, Winston Churchill and Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris developed the strategy of ‘Aerial Policing’, which involved the deadly bombing of the Arab population in Iraq.”
The next act of appeasement was the Austrian Anschluss of March 1938, when Hitler annexed rump Austria for Germany. (‘Rump Austria’ means what was left of imperial Austria after WW1.) By then, it was too late for Britain or France to invoke a military response. And the event was supposedly consensual (though the first thing Hitler did was to order the Austrians to drive on-the-right rather than the left side of the road; quite heavy handed!).
So by time we got to September 1938, and in relation to Czechoslovakia, there was nothing Britain or France could do. Further, to a large extent the annexation of the Sudetenland was supported by the Sudeten populace; the argument was little different for that pertaining to Austria. This Munich appeasement also reflected the popular will of the democratic United Kingdom. Popular opinion only changed early in 1939, when Hitler went on to annexe the rest of Czechoslovakia. While this was another fait accompli appeasement on the parts of Britain and France, it did create the momentum for a change in British and French foreign policy.
So the leaders of Britain and France did a deal with Poland, causing Hitler to trash his own deal with Poland. Both western countries then sent envoys to Moscow, the Triple Alliance negotiations. Essentially the plan was that the Soviet Union would ally with United Kingdom and France to support Poland from Germany. The real British plan, though, was that Moscow and Berlin would end up going to war over Poland, in Poland; the plan was for both these enemies of Britain to destroy each other.
Stalin immediately saw through the plan, however. The envoys had to reveal to him how much military support Britain and France would give towards Poland, if Germany attacked Poland. The answer turned out to be that France’s support for Poland would be next-to-nothing. And Britain’s support would be much less! So Stalin sent the envoys packing, and eventually shared his knowledge with Hitler. Then Hitler and Stalin did a deal; a non-aggression treaty called the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. This left Britain and France exposed, with a military commitment to Poland that they couldn’t fulfil; and which Hitler knew they wouldn’t fulfil. (And of course, if appeasement had not taken place in Munich in 1938, Britain and France would have been brutally politically exposed for making commitments they couldn’t keep. Chamberlain then thought it better to not reveal his weakness, only to inadvertently let the cat-out-of-the-bag the following year in Moscow.)
Munich 1938 was not the appeasement that mattered. The appeasements which mattered were those of the Rhineland, and Guernica. Anglo-France should most definitely not be putting our world at risk today, by acquiescing to Munich Syndrome; trying to restore their blighted WW2 conscience – paying penance – by waging an existential new war against an opponent presented as Hitler 2.0; though Putin’s Russia is actually quite dissimilar to Hitler’s Germany.
Kaliningrad Flashpoint
World War Two in Europe began with the Danzig question; the Versailles-mandated separation of East Prussia (now Russia’s Kaliningrad) and the rest of Germany. (Danzig is now Gdansk, in Poland.)
Today there is a similar flashpoint; Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg), just along the road from Danzig. Germany has long-coveted Ukraine and the Caucuses further east, for their natural resources and their strategic position as the ‘pivot’ of Eurasia. (We might also note that Ukraine has an abundance of ‘white women’, an attraction for a country – Germany – undergoing a demographic crisis.)
Recently a British military think-tank did an exercise around the possible Nato annexation of Kaliningrad, which is a Russian exclave, but very much – since World War Two – Russian sovereign territory. Russia’s predictable responses were read as threats to invade – or worse – Nato territory.
A week ago I watched Russia warns NATO of a possible nuclear response if Kaliningrad exclave is cut off; DW News. Vladimir Putin is shown as saying in answer to a question: “If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation … referring to Kaliningrad … then of course the question of the Russian Federation deploying all sorts of weapons at its disposal will inevitably and immediately be on the agenda”. He didn’t say ‘nuclear weapons’, so this was not actually a direct threat to use them; rather he did say that the scenario in question would be a substantial violation of Russian sovereignty, and that all possible responses would have to be considered.
Then Konstantin Eggert, “DW [Deutsche Welle] Russian analyst”, said “Nuclear weapons are one of the very few cards Russia can play … Kaliningrad is the weakest and most sensitive links in Russia’ defence chain … the Baltic Sea is essentially a Nato lake … Western spy-planes [recently] encircled Kaliningrad in a show of force … the Chinese will put extreme pressure on Moscow not to resort to nuclear weapons … this is the last resort … Putin and his general staff know that in any kind of nuclear war against Nato, Russia will lose.” That sounds to me like two very concerning claims: first, Nato should discount Russia’s deterrence capability because China will intervene; second, that Nato can win a nuclear war against Russia!?! Essentially, this comes across as an open admission that Nato isplaying chicken with Russia. (Present tense, not future tense.)
Conclusion
Geopolitics – whether ‘kinetic’ or not – should be conducted in its own time and place; and with a rational balancing of risks and consequences. Munich Syndrome – trying to correct for past weakness as a form of present penance – risks converting one overstated past mistake into a much bigger present mistake with existential consequences for the near future.
About the writer:
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.