Charlie Eklund at the The Other Shoe posted a brief note on the 1938 Munich Agreement. He suggests that the recent impasses in the Security Council over Iraq was comparable, and asks if France's Jacques Chirac was comparable to Daladier of that time.
Historical analogies are probably more often misleading than helpful. So I think it's important to try to understand these events on their own terms. Hitler had begun a major rearmament program essentially from his first day in office. In 1934, he backed a coup attempt in Austria by the Austria Nazis. The Austrians resisted, but MussoliniÂ’s Italy also pledged to support Austria in a conflict with Germany. At the time, those things enough threat to induce Hitler to back off. In 1935, he had illegally moved the German army into the Rhineland in violation of his treaty obligations, and the French chose not to resist. In early 1938, he marched into Austria, whose internationally isolated, clerical-fascist regime chose not to resist.
Then Hitler began using his ethnic-German Fifth Column in Czechoslovakia to agitate against the alleged oppressions of the Czechoslovak government (not all of which were inventions of German propaganda). Hitler intended to seize the western area of Czechoslovakia, which among other things would give him a crucial boost in weapons-production capacity. At this point, the combined armies of the later anti-Hitler alliance in Europe were clearly stronger than Germany's. Czechoslovakia was a democracy and the government was ready to resist.
Stalin's Soviet Union offered to defend Czechoslovakia militarily if Britain and France would also agree to do so. Britain and France were not only concerned that the Soviets might have other motives than defending the territorial integrity of the Czechoslovak democracy, and their suspicions were probably well founded. But Chamberlain and Daladier also hoped that Germany and the USSR would balance off each other, or even go to war with each other and thereby weaken the two powers that most threatened to destabilize the established order in Europe.
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