When I was but a lad, it was still quite common for foreign-policy hawks to invoke “Munich” as an all-purpose rebuttal to compromise with (they would say the “appeasement of”) rival states, most notably the Soviet Union. The failure of the 1938 agreement — which handed Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in an effort to avoid a general European war. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously proclaimed that the agreement would produce “peace in our time.”

The effort, of course, failed. A few months later, a weakened Prague ceded additional territory to Poland and Hungary. In March of 1939, a Slovakian puppet government declared independence, and Germany completed its takeover of “Bohemia and Moravia.”

The supposed “lessons” of Munich are straightforward: expansionist powers cannot be “appeased;” concessions will only empower them. The “Munich Analogy” proved an influential force in U.S. foreign policy for decades, although revisionist accounts have painted a rather different picture of Chamberlain. They argue hat he was under few illusions about the true threat posed by Hitler, but did not believe the United Kingdom was prepared for war in 1938. Some credit Chamberlain with giving Britain time to develop key capabilities, including an air force capable of repelling a future Nazi invasion.

Time, distance, and overuse have no doubt blunted the power of the Munich analogy. Yet the question of whether it is a good idea to appease a fascistic regime — particularly one that justifies the annexation of a neighbor’s territory on the grounds of protecting its co-nationals — seems strangely relevant.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump is “going to solve” Russia’s war in Ukraine, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said Friday morning.

“It was an honor to visit President Trump today. We discussed ways to make peace. The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!” Orbán said after a meeting with Trump at the 2024 Republican candidate’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Trump agreed with Orbán. “There must be peace, and quickly. Too many people have died in a war that should have never started!” he said in a post on his platform Truth Social.

As others have pointed out, the peace plan that Trump’s advisors have drawn up looks rather similar to what Paul Manafort was pushing back in 2016. This was, you might recall, around the same time that Trump was publicly signaling to Putin that he would favorably adjust U.S. foreign policy toward Russia in exchange for assistance with winning the election. Trump got the assistance he asked for. Trump failed to deliver for Putin, however, as Russiagate — and the anti-Russian consensus that still dominated the GOP — forced him to approve lethal aid for Ukraine and accede to increases in funding for the U.S. “reassurance” mission in NATO.

If Trump prevails in November, though, he will face few such constraints; even if he cannot compel Ukraine to prematurely capitulate to Russian aggression, Trump can, and almost certainly will, weaken NATO’s ability to contain and deter Russian revanchism.

If the ботинок fits…