Some Perspective On “Worse Than Munich”

The conservative reaction to the U.S.-backed six-country deal with Iran to temporarily curb that country’s nuclear program has been predictably hyperbolic. Right-leaning commentators are falling over themselves to call deal the worst foreign policy debacle since the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Allied powers ceded portions of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler to avoid war. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal (who won a Pulitzer for commentary earlier this year) took it a step further, calling the deal “worse than Munich” in a November 26 column.

The implied comparison of 2013 Iran to the Nazi war machine is, to put it gently, stupid. Reason’s Matt Welch already took it apart (“2013 Iran is to 1938 Germany what a flea is to a Tyrannosaurus Rex”) and Foreign Policy’s Daniel Drezner observes that spittle-flecked, sky-is-falling commentary of this sort is a too common feature of foreign policy punditry.

Regardless of whether you think the Munich Agreement was a naïve attempt at peace-through-appeasement or the only option available to the Allies, it nonetheless precipitated a massive human rights calamity before the ink on the signatures had a chance to dry.

The major powers signed the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938. German troops crossed into Czechoslovakia the following day. Historian Richard Evans described what happened next in his book The Third Reich In Power — thousands of political prisoners sent to concentration camps, tens of thousands of refugees, and violent anti-Semitic pogroms:

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