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Munich’s Lessons Reconsidered Robert 1.Beck As American F-111s were returning to their bases in Great Britain on the evening of April 14, 1986, Ronald Reagan explained his decision to strike Muammar Qadhafi’s Libya: ”Europeans who remember their history understand better than most that there is no security, no safety, in the appeasement of evil.”’ The president was alluding, of course, to the Munich Conference of September 1938, an episode deeply etched in European consciousness.2Reagan’s historical reference was scarcely a novel one. Indeed, in the five decades since Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler, the “lesson of Munich” has been evoked, for advocacy or for comfort, by a succession of prominent decisionmakers including Harry Truman, Anthony Eden, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon J ~ h n s o n . ~ But what precisely is that “lesson”? For many years, there was one widely accepted version of the “Munich” story: Chamberlain, guided by naivete or cowardice, had wrongly appeased The author would like to acknowledge the invaluable support of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Beck, Jr. Robert 1. Beck is Assistant Professor of International Politics at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Government and Foreign Affairs of the University of Virginia. He wrote this article while a University Fellow in the Government Department of Georgetown University. 1. Ronald Reagan, ”Address to the Nation: United States Air Strike Against Libya,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Vol. 22, No. 16 (April 21, 1986),p. 491. 2. The Munich analogy was often used by President Reagan. For example, he told a gathering of the American Legion in Seattle: “Neville Chamberlain thought of peace as a vague policy in the 1930s, and the result brought us closer to World War 11. History teaches us that by being strong and resolute we can keep the peace.” New York Times, August 24, 1983, pp. 1, 7. 3. Memories of “Munich” played a role in Harry Truman’s decision to enter the Korean War. See Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for DecisionMakers (New York: Free Press, 1986),p. 89. In 1956, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was determined that the appeasement he had personally witnessed “should not come again” during the Suez crisis. Anthony Eden, Full Circle: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 578. John F. Kennedy explained his ”quarantine” of Cuba on October 23, 1962: “The nineteen-thirties taught us a clear lesson. Aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” New York Times, October 23, 1962, p. 18. And in 1965, Lyndon Johnson argued that the United States must resolutely oppose communist expansion in Indochina: “This is the clearest lesson of our time. From Munich until today we have learned that to yield to aggression brings only greater threats.” Lyndon Baines Johnson, Public Papers of the Presidents, 1965, VoI. I (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office [U.S. GPO], 1966), p. 449. See also Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976),pp. 252-253. International Security, Fall 1989 (Vol. 14, No. 2) 0 1989by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Inshtute of Technology. 161 International Security 14:2 I 162 the aggressive Adolf Hitler, gaining neither peace nor honor for his concessions . Even today, most Amercian international relations scholars appear to accept this once-conventional account of "M~nich."~ In the last twenty-five years or so, however, the consensus among historians about what happened in September of 1938has unravelled into a variety of different strands, and the student of Munich now confronts a bewildering array of "lessons." What is one to make of this proliferation of historical interpretations? Where did they originate? Why were they first put forth? With so many different accounts of the Munich Conference, can anything be said with confidence about Neville Chamberlain's actions there? This essay will first sketch the five-decade historiography of Munich, demonstrating how and suggesting why one interpretation became many. Next, it will set out four conclusions about Chamberlain's Munich diplomacy that reflect the majority of contemporary...

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