Thread by @dromanber

Lots of people claiming that Putin-Ukraine reminds them of the 1938 Hitler crisis miss the point of their own analogy: a British-French war against Germany at that point would have been a disaster for them. Chamberlain knew it, that's why he conceded the Sudetenland

Chamberlain, the British PM, knew that public opinion wouldn't be supportive of another great European war to stop ethnic Sudetenland Germans from joining Germany, two decades after the Austria empire was dismembered in the name of ethnic self-determination

France wasn't even enthusiastic about war in 1940, and would have remained safely behind the Maginot Line. A 1938 war would have meant a quick German victory against Czechoslovakia, and a massive humiliation for democratic powers unable to do anything about it

Waiting until 1939 gave democratic powers a perfect casus belli to sell the war to their domestic audiences and (very importantly) to the US. Sudetenland was complicated. Everyone understood that Hitler attacking Poland was gangster politics pure and simple

To quote a very intelligent political observer: 'To be great one's actions must be able to be understood by simple people,' this is what Clementine Churchill wrote to her husband on April 6, 1916.

In the end, this played out worse. In the 1938 analogy, NATO would have accepted a Finlandization of Ukraine as a buffer state, as Putin requested. They made their Tough Chamberlain fantasies come true, and now we'll see how that works out for everyone involved

Afghanistan was a disaster, but the Biden admin is playing the Ukrainian crisis pretty well. They split Russia from the EU for ever & have euro govts begging for WW3, so the White House comes across as responsible moderates while fighting Putin to the last Ukrainian #respect

Biden's approach is getting applause from the Reaganite right, which is only asking him to be a bit less strident, so the Europeans do all the hard work of killing & bombing each other for America powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/…

Zelensky's regime really is going the extra mile for NATO thegrayzone.com/2022/04/17/tra…

This @FT pic is actually great, displaying how the West's strategy consists of shoveling Ukrainian bodies under the Russian tank, hoping that it will stall over so many crushed dead; it's just not a strategy I would boast about ft.com/content/5d4153…

A pretty good @WSJ story on a growing split in NATO/EU between Eastern neighbors of Russia, who want to believe in an Ukrainian victory, and the German-French stance against escalation wsj.com/articles/crack…

@WSJ This essay comparing WWI with the Ukrainian crisis is very enlightening: in both cases, idiot politicians & their media cheerleaders led everyone else to a very avoidable, bloody conflict, with decades worth of negative consequences pjmedia.com/spengler/2022/…

I agree with Curtis Yarvin that we've never been closer to WW3 in my lifetime, or at least since the worst days of the 1980s graymirror.substack.com/p/gory-to-ukra…