“The stench of appeasement hung over the Munich Security Conference this past weekend, leaving more than a few European leaders making comparisons to September 1938. That was when a very different Munich meeting placated a murderous dictator — with disastrous consequences.” 

So wrote Frederick Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council earlier this year. Kempe is not alone in making such a pronouncement. We frequently hear allegations that not being tough enough with Putin or Xi is tantamount to Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler, or that a failure to defend Ukraine or Taiwan or some other hot spot will herald the downfall of Western civilization. It is no surprise that policymakers and pundits would use historical analogies — they can inflame passions and make emotional appeals — but are they useful for a sober analysis of foreign policy options?

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Americans have been bombarded with breathless declarations that the West must defend Ukraine at all costs, lest Western civilization collapse. If we don’t defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian, Putin will come for NATO next. Dictators are on the move, we are told. Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China are the new Axis, and any Western leader would be a fool to play the role of Neville Chamberlain in the twenty-first century. First Ukraine, then Taiwan. It is not 2024, you see, it is 1938 all over again, and we must do whatever it takes to prevent dictators from rolling across the plains of Europe or dominating East Asia.

We do ourselves no favors in misusing and abusing historical analogies, especially when it comes to inflating the threats facing the United States and the world. Russia is indeed a potentially existential threat to Ukraine, at least prior to its invasion in 2022 when the sorry state of the Russian military was revealed. But a Russia that cannot seize and hold Ukraine is certainly no threat to a much larger and stronger NATO. Not directly intervening to defend Ukraine cannot be likened to failing to stop Hitler from invading Nazi Germany’s neighbors because the threat posed by Russia in 2024 is nowhere near the threat posed by the Nazis in World War II.

Likewise, China is an economic competitor to the United States — a significant one — and a potential threat to the independence of Taiwan. But core U.S. interests would not be threatened if China attacked Taiwan and forcibly unified with it. That would be deeply unfortunate for the people of Taiwan, and China would likely come to dominate the advanced semiconductor manufacturing industry until competitors could arise, but that is not the same as the Nazis seizing the heart of Eurasia. Just as with the invasion of Ukraine, an attack on Taiwan would be a tragedy, and we should work to help Taiwan build its defenses to deter such an attack, but neither the United States nor the foundations of Western liberal democracy would be gravely wounded by an invasion of Taiwan.

Dictators should be deterred from acting on their worst impulses, wherever practical and in the nation’s best interest. But we should not bankrupt ourselves or risk existential conflicts with nuclear-armed adversaries to defend every nation on earth. That is most certainly not in the national interest.

Some pundits suggest that we have just a brief remaining window of time before we are forced to embark on a new world war with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and whomever else we place in this new Axis of Evil. But if we act as though it were 1938 all over again, we run the risk of making such a terrible outcome likelier. It does not benefit us to inflate the threats that the United States faces, nor should we pretend that all of our potential enemies are ten feet tall.

The United States is remarkably secure, and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future. We are surrounded by weak and/or friendly neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, as well as two oceans that separate us from all other great powers. As international relations theorist John Mearsheimer has reminded us (PDF), “the stopping power of water” protects island nations like Great Britain — even a small body of water like the English Channel has been enough to secure it against amphibious invasion since the days of William the Conqueror — as well as the United States, far away from any nation that would seek to do it harm.

The United States remains the preeminent military power; China’s military is growing more capable, but no American general or admiral would volunteer to swap militaries with China. In addition to our vast conventional military capabilities, our nuclear deterrent and assured second-strike capability means that not even nuclear powers would dare attack the United States, lest they be destroyed by our nuclear response. In short, the United States is secure and likely to remain that way. This should form the foundation of our thinking about any future foreign policy crises that arise.

We do not, of course, want a rival power to swallow up all of Eurasia, or even a substantial part of the most economically productive parts of Europe or East Asia, as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan once threatened. But China and Russia are not in a position to do anything like that today or for the foreseeable future, and we should not allow ourselves to be talked into believing they can.

So be wary when pundits employ historical analogies, most especially 1938, Munich, appeasement, or a “new Cold War” with China. These are usually lazy intellectual shortcuts that are designed to inflate threats or make emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. They appear to offer comfort and continuity in uncertain times, a clear path forward when the present seems ambiguous. But seeking assurance from history can be playing to a cognitive bias, or at best, lazy thinking that bypasses nuance, complexity, and differences between the present and the past. This is not to suggest that the study of history has no utility; having spent six years of my life earning a PhD in history, it would be the height of hypocrisy or absurdity for me to suggest that history is worthless. But historical happenings were all contingent on a host of factors and were products of particular places and times. Those contexts matter deeply. History is much more useful in explaining how we arrived at the present than it is in predicting the future. Deploying an example from history, or even using a historical analogy, is not a magic trick, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat: “Russia or China is interested in a neighbor’s territory. We know what happened in 1938 when Chamberlain didn’t go to war with Nazi Germany. Presto! We must now do the opposite of Chamberlain in Ukraine or Taiwan….”

The sad truth of the matter is that sometimes “appeasing” a dictator by not going to war with them is simply the best course of action. Ukraine matters a great deal more to the Ukrainians and to a lesser extent to Putin’s Russia than it does to the United States or even the rest of Europe (for example, Germany has halted any more aid to Ukraine). Nonintervention is probably in the United States’ best interest. By following the 1938 logic, we might find ourselves drawn into a conflict that we don’t want, or need, to fight.

Let us agree to abandon the specter of 1938, Munich, and the notion of appeasement once and for all.