Munich, Suez, and the Curse of the Easy Analogy.
The curse of the easy analogy is not that it remembers the past. It is that it remembers the past just well enough to stop thinking.
Every few years, foreign policy discovers that it’s 1938. Again.
This is a surprisingly adaptable discovery: it can happen in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, or any television studio where two people have been booked to disagree about a conflict that neither of them can easily explain. Sooner or later, someone says Munich. If things are going badly for a great power, maybe they say Suez instead. If the proposed military action looks open-ended, someone could say Vietnam. If it involves the humiliating limits of modern force, Afghanistan. If the speaker is feeling historically adventurous, they may reach for Gallipoli, the Crimean War, or the Peloponnesian War, at which point one begins to suspect they’ve been waiting a respectable span of time to use it.
The problem isn’t that these analogies are always wrong, per se. That would be much too easy. History does not repeat itself, but neither does it sit politely in the archive, refusing all invitations to the present. Politicians and commentators reach for the past because the present is often hard to see while one is standing in it. Analogy is one of the ways human beings think under pressure. It compresses uncertainty into shape, gives unfamiliar events a recognisable form, and lets us ask whether we’ve seen something like this before.
But the phrase something like this is doing a great deal of work.
The trouble with the easy analogy is not that it compares. It is that it often decides before it compares. It does not ask: what, exactly, is similar here? It asks: which famous historical costume can we dress this argument up in?
Munich is the costume of resolve. Suez is the costume of anti-hubris. The first lets the speaker become the person who saw appeasement for what it was. The second lets the speaker become the person who recognised imperial delusion before the empire did. Both can illuminate. Both can also flatter. And flattery, in foreign policy argument, is rarely harmless.
The uses of 1938
Munich survives because it tells a clean story about moral failure.
In September 1938, Britain and France accepted Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland, the heavily fortified border region of Czechoslovakia, in an agreement reached with Germany and Italy but without Czechoslovakia itself as an equal participant. Hitler received territory and strategic advantage; Chamberlain returned claiming peace; within months, Germany had occupied the rest of the Czech lands. The later moral meaning of the episode seems brutally clear: give an expansionist aggressor what he wants, and he will not be satisfied. He will be encouraged.
That is why Munich is so powerful. It turns the fog of diplomacy into a moral tableau. The aggressor is insatiable. The victim is abandoned. The statesman of peace is exposed as the midwife of catastrophe. The person warning against compromise is vindicated by history before the argument has even begun.
It is not difficult to see why this appeals. There really are aggressors whose ambitions expand when met with weakness. There really are moments when compromise does not buy peace, but merely rearranges the timetable of war. The Munich analogy has force because there are situations in which refusing to confront an aggressor early makes the eventual confrontation more terrible.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is the obvious modern case where the analogy has real bite. Ukraine has repeatedly warned for over a decade against any settlement that rewards aggression or trades its sovereignty for temporary quiet; in December 2025, its foreign minister said Ukraine wanted real peace, not appeasement with Russia. The analogy is not empty. A sovereign state has been invaded. Territory is at stake. External powers debate the cost of continued support just as they debated the cost of sanctions way back during the initial invasion of Crimea in 2014. A peace that leaves the aggressor stronger may not be peace at all, but an interval.
And yet even here, perhaps especially here, Munich is not enough.
Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia in 1938. It has fought for years. Its government has agency of a kind that Edvard Beneš could only have dreamed of. Its armed forces are not being treated simply as a diplomatic inconvenience by others around a table. And yet Russia is a nuclear-armed state; Nazi Germany in 1938 was not. Almost perversely, the Russo-Ukrainian War could be more dangerous than the build-up to the outbreak of WWII. The structure of alliance politics, the economics of sanctions, the role of drones, the informational battlefield, the problem of escalation, and the status of NATO all make the present conflict different in ways that matter enormously. Using the Munich analogy requires treating the shared features as decisive while treating the differences as secondary.
Munich can sharpen the moral stakes of Ukraine. It can remind us that aggressive war cannot be made acceptable by relabelling conquest as compromise. But if it becomes the whole argument, it starts to crowd out the questions that policy actually needs to answer. What guarantees would make a settlement durable? What level of support is sustainable? What risks of escalation are tolerable? What capacities does Europe need if America becomes unreliable? What outcome is being sought beyond the avoidance of shame?
A historical analogy is useful when it helps us ask better questions. It becomes dangerous when it congratulates us for already knowing the answers.
The Taiwan temptation
The Munich analogy also spins its helicopter-blades over Taiwan.
Here again, the attraction is obvious. China claims Taiwan as its own territory; Taiwan rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claim and says only its people can decide their future. Beijing has increased military pressure around Taiwan in recent years, and Reuters reported again in June 2026 on a standoff between Taiwanese and Chinese coast guards near the Pratas Islands. There is a democratic polity under pressure from an authoritarian great power. There is an anxious question about whether distant allies will act. There is a fear that ambiguity, caution, or commercial self-interest could be misread as weakness.
It is therefore unsurprising that commentators draw lessons from Munich for the Taiwan Strait. Some explicitly argue that Munich offers warnings about deterrence, alliance credibility, and the risks of allowing coercive territorial revisionism to succeed.
Again, not nonsense. But also not enough.
Taiwan is not the Sudetenland. China is not Nazi Germany. The United States is not Britain in 1938. Taiwan’s importance is not only moral or ideological; it is also bound up with global semiconductor supply chains, maritime security, Japanese security, American credibility, and the possibility of catastrophic escalation between nuclear powers. The logic of deterrence in the Taiwan Strait is not the same as the logic of appeasement in Central Europe. One can think Beijing is dangerous without needing to pretend Xi Jinping is Hitler. In fact, insisting on that comparison may make it harder to understand what China actually wants, how it calculates risk, and which forms of deterrence might work.
Munich is good at saying: do not abandon a threatened democracy because doing so feels convenient.
It is much less good at saying: how should an allied power combine deterrence, ambiguity, trade, technology controls, diplomacy, domestic resilience, and military readiness in a contested maritime theatre involving nuclear-armed states?
That second question is less satisfying. Unfortunately, it is also the one that matters.
Suez and the pleasure of spotting decline
If Munich is the analogy of moral cowardice, Suez is the analogy of imperial delusion.
In 1956, Britain and France, in collaboration with Israel, invaded Egypt after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Militarily, the operation was a success. Politically, it was a disaster. The United States opposed the intervention; the Soviet Union applied pressure; Britain and France were forced into a humiliating withdrawal. Suez became the shorthand for a country discovering, in public, that its memory of power had outlived the thing itself.
Suez is therefore useful whenever a state mistakes possession of weapons for possession of strategy. It is useful whenever a government thinks a dramatic act will restore authority, only to reveal weakness. It is useful whenever leaders confuse nostalgia with capacity. For Britain, the analogy remains especially painful because it says something we half-know and half-resent: that the performance of world power can become the evidence of its absence.
But Suez, too, flatters the speaker. To invoke it is to stand above the action, coolly noting that the empire has no clothes. This is one reason the phrase Suez moment appears so regularly in commentary about American power. If Munich lets one pose as Churchill, Suez lets one pose as the weary realist in the back of the room, watching the map of the world shrink.
The current US-Iran conflict makes the Suez analogy almost irresistible. There are maritime chokepoints, energy markets, coercive diplomacy, alliance entanglements, regional escalation, and a question about whether military force is producing strategy or merely motion. Reuters has reported in recent days on US action against Iranian-linked shipping, tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, and negotiations intended to extend or stabilise a ceasefire. It is hardly surprising that commentators have asked whether Iran is America’s Suez, or whether some other historical analogy (such as Gallipoli) better captures the mixture of overreach, confusion, and strategic frustration.
There is something to this. Suez was, among other things, a crisis of chokepoints, prestige, misjudgement, and alliance management. A great power discovered that a military move could expose political dependence rather than conceal it. If the United States finds that force in the Gulf cannot deliver political settlement, cannot restore maritime confidence, cannot discipline regional allies, and cannot impose a durable outcome on Iran, then the Suez comparison becomes more than journalistic decoration.
But America is not Britain in 1956. That is not a compliment; it is a distinction. The United States is vastly more powerful than Britain was at Suez, but it is also more deeply entangled in the global system it claims to police. Britain’s humiliation in 1956 lay partly in discovering that it could not defy American financial and diplomatic pressure. The United States is unlikely to experience that precise form of subordination. Its vulnerability lies elsewhere: in overextension, domestic polarisation, alliance mistrust, energy shocks, congressional resistance, and the possibility that coercion produces neither capitulation nor credibility.
A lazy Suez analogy says: America is finished, and here is the proof.
A better Suez analogy asks: what kind of power is being revealed by this failure, and what kind of power was only being performed?
Greenland and the return of the map
Then there is Greenland.
At first glance, Greenland belongs less obviously to Munich or Suez. No one sensible thinks Denmark is Czechoslovakia in 1938. Greenland is not the Suez Canal. Yet the recent American pressure over Greenland belongs in this essay because it reveals the same bad historical habit: treating geography as if it were a board-game asset, then looking around for a grand analogy afterwards.
Donald Trump has repeatedly argued that the United States needs Greenland for security reasons, and in March 2025 said he thought US annexation would happen; Denmark has maintained that Greenland is not for sale. By June 2026, Marco Rubio was describing ongoing discussions with Denmark and Greenland over strategic use and strengthened US military presence, framing the issue in terms of collective defence and Arctic security.
The temptation here is not simply to shout imperialism and be done with it, though the word is not exactly hiding in a cupboard. The more interesting point is that Greenland exposes a style of strategic thinking that old analogies struggle to capture. Is this Suez, because a major power is acting as if strategic geography entitles it to override political consent? Is it a Monroe Doctrine revival, because security is being defined through hemispheric control? Is it an Alaska Purchase fantasy, as if land acquisition were still the natural grammar of statecraft? Is it just great-power competition in the Arctic, dressed up in the language of real estate?
The answer may be: partly, but not quite.
That is precisely why the example is useful. Easy analogy wants every case to become an old story. Greenland resists that. It involves climate change, Arctic shipping, rare earths, missile defence, NATO politics, Danish sovereignty, Greenlandic self-government, Chinese and Russian activity, and the strange return of territorial acquisition as a serious-sounding topic in American politics. The point is not that no analogy helps. The point is that several half-help, and none should be allowed to take command.
The curse of casting
The deepest problem with Munich and Suez is not historical inaccuracy. It is moral casting.
Once the analogy is chosen, the roles follow. Someone is Hitler, Chamberlain, Churchill. Someone is Eden, de Gaulle, Nasser, Eisenhower. The present is no longer a problem to be analysed; it is a play to be cast.
This is comforting because it reduces uncertainty. It tells us who deserves contempt and who deserves vindication. It also lets us inherit the moral authority of hindsight without paying the cost of living before the outcome is known.
But foreign policy is made before the archive has sorted everyone into their proper folders. The people in 1938 did not know they were in the preface to 1939. The people in 1956 did not know they were acting out the definitive parable of post-war British decline. They had fears, assumptions, intelligence, prejudices, domestic pressures, imperial memories, economic constraints, bad incentives, worse advice, and partial knowledge. That does not absolve them. It makes them historical actors rather than cardboard warnings.
This matters because easy analogy often smuggles in policy under the cover of memory. Munich usually says: do more, escalate sooner, refuse compromise, treat negotiation as weakness. Suez usually says: do less, beware theatre, distrust prestige, recognise limits. Vietnam says: avoid the quagmire. Afghanistan says: do not try to remake societies at gunpoint. Iraq says: intelligence can be politicised, victory can be declared long before the consequences arrive.
Each of these lessons can be true. Each can also be disastrously misapplied.
The question is never simply: which historical episode does this resemble?
The better questions are more awkward. What feature of the past is actually being compared? What would have to be true for the analogy to hold? What is different enough to break it? What competing analogy would produce a different conclusion? Is the comparison being used to illuminate the present, or to dignify a position the speaker already held?
That last question is usually the most revealing one.
Remembering badly
There is a strange arrogance in the easy analogy. It seems humble because it looks backward. It claims to learn from history. But often it does the opposite. It raids history for moral props, then congratulates itself on seriousness.
Munich and Suez deserve better than that. Munich was not simply a fable about weakness. It was a crisis shaped by military preparedness, trauma from the First World War, imperial assumptions, public opinion, strategic misjudgement, and the abandonment of a smaller state by powers that had persuaded themselves they were buying peace. Suez was not simply a fable about decline. It was a crisis of oil, finance, deception, alliance politics, decolonisation, personal animus, and the gap between imperial memory and actual leverage.
The simplified versions endure because they are useful. Munich gives us courage without complexity. Suez gives us realism without detail. Both allow commentators to sound historically literate while moving very quickly past history.
This does not mean we should stop using analogy. That would be impossible, and probably undesirable. The past is one of the few resources we have for thinking about situations not yet finished. But we should use it more slowly. We should distrust analogies that arrive bearing only one lesson. We should be especially suspicious of analogies that make us feel brave, wise, or vindicated before we have done any real work.
The curse of the easy analogy is not that it remembers the past.
It is that it remembers the past just well enough to stop thinking.
Further Reading
For the general theory of analogy in foreign policy, Yuen Foong Khong’s Analogies at War is my obvious scholarly anchor; it is specifically about Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and Vietnam in US decision-making. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzxx9b5)