A tale of two buildings: Munich and Vietnam at war in Ukraine

Last week, I took a long, strange trip through the two metaphors that define the Western approach to conflict.

It began in Munich, standing outside the Führerbau, the building where Britain, France, Germany and Italy signed the 1938 Munich agreement that ceded the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany to avoid a broader war. The building now, somewhat implausibly, houses a prestigious performing arts university, the University of Music and Theatre Munich. My trip ended in Hanoi, inside the Hoa Lo prison, better known as the “Hanoi Hilton”, a site that in the early 1970s held American pilots as prisoners of war, including future senator John McCain. It now functions as a museum celebrating Vietnamese victories over both the French and the Americans.

Two buildings at opposite ends of the world. Two stories that run through the Western imagination. They still shape how the West reacts to the fear of war, to negotiation and to the possibility—and sometimes the threat—of peace. Even this very day, they shape European reactions to US president Donald Trump’s putative peace plan for Ukraine.

Munich: The danger of doing too little

The boring Führerbau doesn’t look like a place that helped define the Western soul, but the metaphor that was born here is very much alive. For many in Europe and in America, it is always 1938. Every crisis is the beginning of a larger conflict. Every pause is appeasement. Every diplomatic proposal carries the scent of betrayal.

This instinct now shapes the transatlantic response to Trump’s 28-point plan for Ukraine. Many European officials read the proposal not as a peace plan to be assessed but as a possible replay of Munich. “The bottom line,” Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha told his EU counterparts at a private meeting, “is that any peace plan is not doable if it is based on appeasement of the aggressor.” With the frame set to the lessons of Munich, the conclusion writes itself: you do not negotiate with aggression; you do not test diplomatic openings; you do not risk peace, because peace might fail.

Munich offers moral clarity, but it is also a counsel of fear and of escalation. Russia, in its own way, is trapped inside the same narrative. The Kremlin behaves as if any concession is existential. Two adversaries locked in one metaphor, each convinced that compromise is death.

Vietnam: The danger of doing too much

The lessons of the Führerbau deeply informed the US approach to Vietnam. American policymakers in the 1960s, determined not to repeat the errors of 1938, marched straight into a war whose local dynamics they never fully understood. Vietnam’s war of national liberation became a test of US resolve to stand up to Soviet communism. The Munich analogy—the fear of not doing enough—helped produce the quagmire of Vietnam.

Touring the Hanoi Hilton’s torture cells today, one sees this history through the lens of the victors. The displays celebrate Vietnamese perseverance, ingenuity and victory. The French and the Americans are cast as great powers undone by their own illusions about those they were trying to dominate. The museum is less about memory than triumph: a reminder that violence is unpredictable, strength does not guarantee victory, and that wars begun to prove credibility often end by draining it.

Vietnam is the metaphor of doing too much, of confusing power with strategy, of committing to conflicts with no end in sight, of discovering—too late—that public patience is not infinite.

The Western reluctance to escalate in Ukraine, the quiet fear of widening conflict, of miscalculation, of drifting into commitments larger than intended, comes from this place. This is the fear informing American policy towards Russia and Ukraine now. If Munich warns that hesitation is fatal, Vietnam warns that valour can be, too.

Suspended between two ghosts

The war in Ukraine sits squarely between these two anxieties.

Both metaphors contain truths. Both can mislead. And crucially, we rarely know which one applies while we are living through it. History becomes clear only after the decisions are made.

Yet it is the Munich metaphor that dominates European thinking today, maybe because Europeans, unlike Americans, managed to avoid Vietnam. The obscure Führerbau seems the childhood home of European reactions to Trump’s peace initiative in Ukraine: if you entertain the proposal, you risk becoming Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who declared that the Munich agreement had brought “peace for our time” just one year before the second world war broke out.

Hoa Lo prison is far away, but Europeans need to visit it at least once in a while. Perhaps it would help them recognise what the narrative of 1938 obscures: the West—wealthy, secure and structurally stronger than Russia—can afford the risk of a Ukraine peace; the fear that such a peace may invite future war. The West has the economic depth and military strength to absorb uncertainty, to take calculated risks for diplomacy and to walk away from the emotional traps that history sets.

Perpetuating a forever war in Ukraine now to avoid a war later is a bitter bargain, especially for a West that retains overwhelming strategic advantages.

Perpetuating a forever war in Ukraine now to avoid a war later is a bitter bargain, especially for a West that retains overwhelming strategic advantages. The task is not to deny history, but to escape its tyranny. It makes little sense to draw exclusively on the lessons of the Führerbau and to seek ways to undermine Trump’s peace plan, say, by seizing sovereign Russian assets in Europe that are central to it. An approach informed by the Hanoi Hilton would be to try to shape and improve Trump’s proposals. In facing Trump’s clumsy pursuit of a settlement in Ukraine, Europeans have the power to choose peace without panic, strength without escalation and strategy without fear.