I think we are in danger of applying the wrong lesson from history.

People today say you cannot be a "Putin apologizer", or that looking for reasons for Putin's behavior was a form of "appeasement".

People who say these things believe they have learned from history. They look back at Hitler in 1938. Czechoslovakia. Austria. And, finally, Poland. They look back at England and France, who, not wanting to risk war, sought ways to "appease" Hitler. And by doing that, they lost valuable time and allowed Hitler to grow stronger, making the situation much worse for the world.

Now, people are drawing the conclusion: "You should never try to appease a dictator!"

But I'd argue that this is the wrong conclusion.

What backfired back then is not that England and France tried to appease Hitler. What backfired was that the leaders of England and France grotesquely misread Hitler and his goals.

Their mistake was not that they tried to understand Hitler's motives. Rather, their mistake was precisely that they failed to accurately understand his motives.

This is why the English public finally turned to Churchill. Because Churchill actually "got" Hitler. He had formed an accurate mental model of Hitler's motives.

Did that make Churchill into a "Hitler apologist"? Not at all. Instead, it allowed him to accurately predict Hitler's next moves. It allowed him to predict that making territorial concessions to this man would never help to guarantee peace long-term.

Churchill was actually one of the few European leaders who had troubled to read "Mein Kampf". He also read the books written by Sebastian Haffner, a German who had chronicled his life under Hitler from inside Germany.

When I see people today saying they cannot stand Putin, and therefore they don't want to hear what he says, because it's all lies and propaganda anyway, it worries me. Because even if Putin was a Hitler 2.0 (which is very doubtful, since History rarely repeats itself and reasoning by analogy often leads to spectacular failures) it would mean that we should pay even more careful attention to his motives, and not less. We should pay even more careful attention on the outside contingencies and the mental frameworks that drive Putin's actions, and not less.

Nietzsche has said, "If you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you."

And it almost seems that people are afraid of precisely that. They almost think that by not acknowledging a thing they don't like, it will go away. Those who have been warning about a war in Ukraine have correctly pointed out that this strategy will not only not work, but that it will backfire.

So the true lesson from 1938 is not that one should "never negotiate with dictators". The true lesson is that you have to make an effort to face the other party's viewpoint. To make an effort to understand the true motives, without any fear of what you might find.

That includes the fear of finding out that your own behavior might have contributed to the status quo. You need to let go of your comforting beliefs -- that things will "sort themselves out", that it's "just the other party's fault", that there's "nothing to learn or understand" because you already know exactly what the other party is really after, etc..

What made Churchill great, in my view, is that he was able to overcome all of those comforting beliefs. People respected him because he would tell them not what they would have liked to hear, but what they needed to know.

I think this is very, very different from what we're seeing today from our own leaders. They are posturing. They claim that the inconvenient truth is that "Putin is worse than we thought", and that the necessary sanctions will require "sacrifices from all of us". They try to sound like a Churchill. But they make no effort to be one. They imitate the outside posture, but they totally miss the inner essence.

Scholz said it best. He said to Putin during that recent press conference (and I'm paraphrasing), "What do you care about Ukraine and NATO? It's not going to happen anytime during our terms of office anyway".

That isn't Churchill. That's Chamberlain.