Is The Witkoff Plan Really Munich?

It has been a while since Western politicos began reaching for Munich whenever the word ‘diplomacy’ is uttered in international politics. You could set your clock by it: the moment someone suggests that diplomacy might serve us better than maximalist war aims or endless, useless, deadly conflict, a chorus of self-styled Churchills promptly materialises to warn of ‘appeasement.’ It is as if history itself were a script whose lines we were condemned to recite—or, worse still, as if nothing else happened in world history, there are no other examples to draw lessons from, and all complexity, all uniqueness, all context and every rule of geopolitics can be easily buried under a layer of banal moralistic slop. And so it was that Boris Johnson—patron saint of performative defiance—came to proclaim that Steve Witkoff’s 28-point proposal is nothing but a replay of 1938, a capitulation dressed in diplomatic prose and a “castration of Ukraine”. 

But the invocation of Munich is not an argument. It is, increasingly, a reflex—an incantation meant to deprive us of common sense. ‘Munichmania’ is what one might call it: the persistent, unthinking habit of comparing every territorial disagreement to the Sudetenland, every unfriendly leader to Adolf Hitler, every possible diplomatic settlement of intrastate conflict to 1938. It is an obsession so deeply ingrained in the Western imagination that it has long ceased to illuminate and instead functions as a bludgeon—an instrument to end debate before it begins, to shame reasonable proposals back into the shadows.

The trouble, of course, is that history has a refined sense of humour. Munich, in its canonical retelling, is a morality tale of weakness rewarded by further aggression, of democratic naiveté exploited by a monster bent on continental domination. The archetype only works if the adversary is indeed a Hitler, and if the disputed territory is merely the first slice of a voracious imperial appetite. But to mistake contemporary Russia for Nazi Germany is to substitute analysis with infantility, and reason with bravado. 

Today’s Russia is a fundamentally realist power; it is not a revolutionary empire marching under an ideology of racial annihilation and global conquest. Vladimir Putin—whatever his faults and however harsh his methods—does not dream of building a fascist imperium from Lisbon to Vladivostok. He is neither an adventurist seeking to conquer the world, nor a fantasist desiring the impossible. As Henry Kissinger once put it, “Putin is a serious strategist, acting on the premises of Russian history.” He is essentially a prudent, rational actor committed to retaining influence over regions no Russian leader—liberal, tsarist, or communist—ever regarded as negotiable. One may abhor this reality. One may despise the invasion. But denying Russia’s most basic strategic concerns serves no one, least of all the Ukrainians.

And this is precisely why the ritual invocation of Munich is so dangerously misleading. If Hitler sought the subjugation of Europe, then compromise with him was indeed folly. But if Putin is a realist with circumscribed, historically rooted goals, then diplomacy is not appeasement; it is the only terrain on which a durable settlement can be fashioned. Particularly so if one is to consider that, at the end of the day, Russia is a great power with the world’s largest nuclear stockpile, an economy that is just too big to isolate or crush and, whether one likes it or not, a polity with the ability to dictate outcomes and the balance of power throughout Eurasia, notably vis-a-vis a rising China. Either Europe talks to Russia or goes to war with Russia. Given that the second scenario would lead to cataclysmic destruction in the continent, the sole realistic path for us to take is that of diplomacy. There is no other.

Ironically, Johnson’s instinctive Munich-shouting obscures a fact he might have noticed had he bothered to read the Witkoff proposal rather than denounce it by reflex: if anything, the plan is generous to Kyiv—so profoundly committed to Ukrainian interests, in fact, that it seems fantastical to imagine Moscow accepting its terms.

This is what one will conclude from looking at the text. Its main feature would be a freeze of the current frontlines, with Ukraine withdrawing from parts of Donetsk it is already on the verge of losing. Though Kyiv and its European sponsors seem wholly uninterested in realising the severity of Ukraine’s predicament, the truth is that these negotiations are happening at a time Ukraine’s military is facing a number of bitter setbacks, with Russian forces approaching the important city of Zaporizhzhia from the east and besieging a large Ukrainian garrison near Pokrovsk. Rampant desertion from the army has crippled Ukrainian units. Indeed, U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has told European ambassadors in Kyiv that “the honest US military assessment is that Ukraine is in a very bad position and that now is the time for peace.” Similarly, President Zelensky’s former spokeswoman Iuliia Mendel wrote on November 22nd that “Every subsequent deal for Ukraine will only be worse—because we are losing. We are losing people, territory, and the economy. … Many who reflexively oppose every peace proposal believe they are defending Ukraine. With all respect, that is the clearest proof they have no idea what is actually happening on the front lines and inside the country right now.”

When one looks at Johnson’s supposed “Munich” in this light, things do look a tad different. Under the Witkoff plan, Ukraine would be allowed to retain a 600,000-strong army, a force larger than that of nearly every European NATO member, three times bigger than that of the EU’s most militarily significant country, France, and 13 times bigger than the cap the Ukrainians themselves agreed to during the 2022 Istanbul peace talks. For a country as battered, depopulated, and economically dependent on foreign funding as Ukraine, this isn’t particularly punitive. The plan also makes no mention of any limits on long-range missiles for Kyiv, a likely Russian priority in peace talks. The Witkoff proposal would, if the Russians ever agreed to it, be a surprising concession directly contradicting Moscow’s stated objective of Ukrainian ‘demilitarisation.’

It is this that raises the question: if the plan wouldn’t betray Ukraine but save it, why the hysteria? Because Munichmania is not about policy. It is about posture. It is a way of declaring oneself brave without taking the risks that actual bravery entails. It is easier to scream ‘appeasement!’ than to accept the sobering arithmetic of a war whose front lines have moved in only one direction for two years. It is easier to conjure up a faux Hitler than to confront the far more tedious task of negotiating with a Russia that, however distasteful one finds its leadership, is not about to vanish from the map. Above all, it is politically more expedient to condemn Ukraine to hundreds of thousands more deaths and—in a context of battlefield losses, corruption scandals and rising public discontent—to the increasingly relevant possibility of state collapse, than it is to admit that our amateurish politicians deindustrialised Europe and spent hundreds of billions of tax payers’ money over a chimerical Russian defeat that failed to materialise. To do so would invite a reckoning that the Establishment is desperate to postpone for as long as it can. 

To reject diplomacy out of fear of reenacting Munich is to learn precisely the wrong lesson from history. The danger of 1938 was not too much realism—it was too little. It was the failure to understand the adversary’s nature, intentions, and capabilities. And that is what we risk repeating today, not by negotiating, but by refusing to do so.

If the Witkoff plan resembles Munich at all, it is in the fevered imagination of those who see Hitler in every silhouette and 1938 in every calendar. But history does not repeat itself merely because we shout it loudly enough. Sometimes, the moment demands something far more unfashionable than Churchillian theatrics: an honest recognition of reality and the courage to act accordingly.