Winston Churchill, no admirer of the Soviet regime, was a dissenter in Parliament on this whole issue. He correctly judged that Nazi Germany was a far greater threat to England at this time than the Soviets were and advocated cooperation with the Soviets to contain Germany.
Czechoslovakia was in no military position to resist alone. So they allowed the German army to enter their country and seize the territory Britain and France had agreed for them to give up. At this point, the USSR was left facing a Germany with a vastly expanded armaments industry that also had an improved geographical position to attack the USSR.
So Stalin made a deal to carve up Poland, not the first time in history Germany and Russia had done so. That brutal deal gave the USSR badly-needed time to build up its military and prepare for the German attack they knew would eventually come.
No easy or indisputable lessons for the present can be drawn from this. But one thing that strikes me is that the leaders of Britain and Germany let hope and ideology override a practical evaluation of the risks. Among other things, believing that the extreme ideological hostility of the Nazis and the Communists would prevent an alliance, the Western leaders put the USSR in an isolated position where they were at immediate risk of attack and defeat, forcing them into a radical course change in foreign policy.
It's also important to remember that Hitler's invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, the three major events that produced the Second World War, were wars of aggression. Germany attacked them without provocation and seized their countries. That experience very much shapes not only the theoretical thinking of European leaders, but their practical policies and their attitude toward international law.
Some may think that EU countries like France and Germany made the wrong judgment in the case of Iraq. But their understanding of the dangers of "aggressive war", as the crime of unprovoked invasion was called at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, very much shaped their response to Bush's Iraq War. And they continue to influence European concern about the risks - and legality - of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war.
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