Munich After 50 Years

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Half a century after the Munich conference, that event lives in the public memory as a series of interrelated myths. For most people, Munich represents the abandonment of a small country, Czechoslovakia, to the unjust demands of a bullying and powerful neighbor by those who would have done better to defend it. It is believed that the Allies, by the sacrifice of one country, only whetted the appetite of the bully whom they had to fight anyway, later and under more difficult circumstances. The "lesson" derived from this widely held view is that it makes far more sense to take action to stop aggression at the first opportunity.

This view, not surprisingly, is especially influential with those who personally experienced the events of the late 1930s and who thereafter found themselves and their countries involved in the costliest war in history. Many came to hold a view of the proper conduct of U.S. foreign policy, the so-called domino theory, which asserted that if drastic action were not taken to halt aggression at its earliest occurrence, the countries in the path of an encroaching power would fall like dominoes, with the fall of each only hastening that of the next. Once prominently put forward as a justification for American intervention in Vietnam, this thesis was temporarily discredited by second thoughts about U.S. policy there. More recently, however, it has been revived in connection with Nicaragua. Some believe that a Sandinista regime, once fully consolidated, will surely topple the adjacent "dominoes," this time in Central America.