Will 2025 be a Repeat of 1938 for Europe?

A conference at London’s Chatham House in December kept returning to the idea that Europe was reliving a 1938 moment. In one sense, this could be a valid comparison. When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich in September of that year and sold out part of Czechoslovakia in return for ‘peace in our time’, there was a moment when much of Europe believed that it might escape a war with Germany. That delusion only lasted six months. 

Any deal in 2025 between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump is likely to have similar characteristics: land for temporary peace. But Putin’s ambitions will not have changed, although he may need three or more years for his army to recover before he sets off westwards again. 

A lazy consensus seems to have emerged in the West, based more on hope than serious analysis, that Putin will agree to stop his further incursions into Ukraine. In spite of suffering massive casualties and losing vast quantities of equipment (and suffering a reverse in Syria), he may prefer to continue the war. In the past few months, the Russians have been making gradual progress in Donbas, and the extent of Ukraine’s manpower problem has become increasingly apparent. Ukraine needs peace (or even a pause) far more than Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky is under more domestic political pressure than Putin.

In fact, the biggest motive for Putin agreeing to a truce or a pause would be to give Trump a result which he could trumpet at home as a success. After a period of relative peace, Putin might well calculate that Trump would be even more reluctant to get involved once the war starts again (as it surely will). 

Trump has a poor record of peacemaking. His Doha Agreement with the Taliban (behind the back of the Afghan government) was as feckless a piece of diplomacy as any in history, and his negotiations with North Korea came nowhere near a denuclearising deal.

Already an asymmetry has emerged in the negotiating positions for any putative talks with Putin. Even before the talks have begun, NATO countries have been taking demands off the table. So already it is widely accepted that Putin can keep Crimea, de facto if not de jure. It is taken for granted that Ukraine will have to withdraw from the Kursk salient. And it is certain that Ukraine will not be granted NATO membership. Joe Biden has made that clear from the outset, and Trump is likely to take the same view. Hungary and Slovakia (and possibly Austria) would also resist any such idea. 

Speaking privately, UK diplomats accept that Putin is hardly going to agree to war crimes trials or reparations. So, defying the basic tenets of diplomacy, the West will go into the negotiations with minimalist demands. Putin is likely to submit maximalist positions; for example, he will likely demand all four provinces of Donbas in their entirety. He will wish to retain control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. He will demand that NATO countries must not position troops in Ukraine and that Russia’s security concerns be respected.

So, what will Ukraine be left with? After the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Ukraine would be well-advised not to accept any more ‘assurances’ or even ‘guarantees’. It has been suggested that the US might propose the positioning of European troops along the Ukraine–Russia border to act as a tripwire. But the border is over 1,200 miles long and would require huge numbers of troops at a time when the UK finds it hard even to sustain its contingent in Estonia. Moreover, Kyiv could be forgiven for wondering what those European countries would do if Russia crossed the new ceasefire line. Would German, French or British troops really open fire, or would they just keep their heads down like the UN peacekeeping forces in Lebanon?

One big difference to 1938 is that UK is no longer a military power. Under former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, the UK provided a lot of its inventory to Ukraine but failed to reprovision at home. A senior NATO official told me recently that the UK is now regarded as one of the weaker military contributors to NATO. Poland and Finland are now the two most impressive military powers facing Russia, ably supported by the Baltic states and Sweden (the last of which has also made remarkable strides towards domestic resilience). France still retains some serious capabilities, but Germany’s military expansion promised by Chancellor Olaf Scholz has quietly evaporated.

This too bears some comparison to 1938, but with one serious difference. It was in the 1934 budget that Britain decided to double the size of its air force from 42 to 84 squadrons. That decision, known as Scheme A, was then succeeded at regular intervals by new expansion schemes until Scheme M at the end of 1938. It surprises everyone when they discover that the Chancellor of the Exchequer who approved Scheme A was none other than Neville Chamberlain. So, the great political appeaser of 1938 was the same man who contributed to the RAF being ready to defeat the Luftwaffe in 1940. 

Another similarity to 1938 is that the incoming Trump administration does not want to go to war in Europe or for Europe. Indeed, Europe should be satisfied if it manages to keep the US embedded in NATO, and ought already to have sent messages Trump that it will now take over the bulk of the financial burden of the war. 

However, Europe seems genuinely unwilling to make the domestic economic sacrifices to defend Ukraine. This is desperately shortsighted. If Russian troops were either to breach a ceasefire line or just keep advancing towards Odesa, Moldova, Dnipro and Kyiv, what would Europe do then? 

Of course, the better outcome would be a well-negotiated peace deal. Russia has taken huge casualties and would not be deploying North Korean troops unless it was desperate. The West would be able to drive a hard bargain if it were sending tough signals by rearming. Instead, the opposite is happening. John Healey has just reduced the size of the Royal Navy in advance of a Strategic Defence Review which will fall far short of Neville Chamberlain’s Scheme A. 

© Tim Willasey-Wilsey, 2024, published by RUSI with permission of the author

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