The historical analogies that spook easy concessions to Russia: Warning to East Asian Summit — Phar Kim Beng

Malay Mail

a day ago

AUGUST 21 — The prospect of peace in Ukraine has been dangled repeatedly before the international community, yet each proposal collapses under the weight of historical memory.
The idea of making concessions to Russia — by ceding territory or granting Moscow a 'sphere of influence' — is haunted by analogies that policymakers cannot ignore.
The spectre of Munich in 1938 remains the sharpest warning.
When European leaders surrendered Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Hitler in exchange for promises of peace, they emboldened rather than constrained Nazi aggression. The result was not stability but a total war that consumed the continent.
This analogy looms large because Ukraine today embodies the same danger of appeasement.
To reward Russia's invasion with territorial gain risks legitimising the very behaviour international law was designed to prevent. Vladimir Putin's insistence on annexing swathes of Ukrainian land is not simply a dispute over borders — it is a direct challenge to the rules-based order that emerged after 1945. Once borders can be redrawn by force, no smaller state is safe.
That is why NATO capitals, especially Warsaw, Riga and Vilnius, recoil from any hint of compromise: they have lived through occupation, and they know that aggressors rarely stop at one victory.
Beyond Munich, there are other analogies that shape Western thinking.
The Yalta Conference of 1945, in which the United States and Britain allowed the Soviet Union to dominate Eastern Europe in exchange for Soviet cooperation against Japan, produced decades of division and repression behind the Iron Curtain.
For Central and Eastern Europeans, any talk of 'buffer zones' or 'neutral corridors' in Ukraine carries the bitter taste of abandonment. They fear becoming pawns once again in a grand bargain between great powers, stripped of agency and sacrificed in the name of stability.
Women visit a makeshift memorial to fallen Ukrainian defenders, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, at the Independence Square in Kyiv, Ukraine August 20, 2025. — Reuters pic
The Korean War provides yet another analogy. There, a hasty division at the 38th parallel created a frozen conflict that persists more than seven decades later, condemning millions to life under dictatorship in the North.
For Ukrainians, the prospect of being forced into a partition that locks them indefinitely into insecurity is intolerable.
They do not want to be the next Korea — an unfinished war institutionalised into perpetual tension.
These analogies weigh heavily on the Biden administration and America's European allies, even as Donald Trump presses a very different line.
Trump has hinted that peace could be reached quickly if Ukraine simply agrees to territorial concessions.
Yet history whispers otherwise. Easy peace is often deceptive peace, and concession in the face of aggression tends to prolong instability rather than resolve it.
Trump's transactional instincts — focused on speed rather than justice — mirror the very logic that Munich taught the world to resist.
In this context, Ukraine's resistance becomes not just a national struggle but a test of principle.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly asserted that no part of Ukraine can be traded away, because each concession risks legitimising Russia's strategy of coercion.
This is why Kyiv insists that any settlement must be grounded in sovereignty and territorial integrity. Anything less would mark a systemic failure, signalling to autocrats everywhere that force pays.
The East Asian Summit, when convened later this year, should not be insulated from these lessons.
Asia has its own territorial disputes — the East and South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula — that could one day tempt aggressors to redraw boundaries by force.
If Europe succumbs to concessions that normalise aggression, it will embolden those who wish to test the will of Asian states.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, as Chair, will be keenly aware that the Summit's credibility rests on upholding the rules-based order, not undermining it through selective silence.
The global order today is fragile not because dialogue has ended but because the historical analogies that haunt concessions are fresh in the minds of leaders.
Munich, Yalta and Korea each remind us that peace purchased cheaply usually costs more in the long run.
That is why Ukraine's tragedy resonates far beyond Europe. It defines the boundaries of what is acceptable diplomacy in the twenty-first century.
Asia cannot afford to repeat these mistakes. The East Asian Summit must embody the lesson that rules matter, that sovereignty cannot be traded away, and that easy concessions to aggression only sow the seeds of future wars.
* Phar Kim Beng is a professor of Asean Studies and Director of the Institute of Internationalization and Asean Studies at the International Islamic University of Malaysia.
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.