But most victories carry the seeds of their own undoing: 1945 left America more prone to seek military solutions than the chastened and war-exhausted Europeans. And, of course, the victory was partial. No one could claim that Hungary, Poland, or Czechoslovakia was liberated by the conflict, though as “captive nations” they were able to breathe and eventually played noble roles in the decomposition of communism. Today they have become part of a Western world in which human rights are enshrined and no one fears the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

This accomplishment should never be taken for granted. One needs to remember how the world appeared in the prewar ’30s, and indeed in the early postwar years, when the most plausible political trendline in the West pointed to a forced march toward some variant of Orwell’s dystopia.

Indeed, these deeper social and political trends, barely discussed in Pat Buchanan’s book, formed the psychological backdrop for the flawed diplomacy that preceded the war. By the late 1930s, the Western democracies were gripped by lassitude. While Britain and France had stumbled though the Depression, few believed their democracies were the wave of the future. The energy belonged to the totalitarian alternatives. Probably most intellectuals were Marxists, the lion’s share of them committed Stalinists—acolytes and propagandists for a murderous dictatorship that had starved millions of its own citizens though forced collectivization. This regime of the “necessary murder” was what many of the West’s bien pensants aspired to. For the rest, the virile alternative was fascism: order, modernism, trains on time, a vigorous and—to its admirers—poetic mass politics for anti-Marxists. By contrast, the bourgeois and social-democratic parties seemed exhausted. It is no surprise that occupied France saw the cream of its young writers dive into open collaboration.

Yet the politicians of the old, still ruling parties could not shirk their duty to make choices. Was Stalin the more dangerous enemy or was Hitler? To what extent was Hitler, as Buchanan and before him A.J.P. Taylor have argued, simply pursuing traditional German statecraft, seeking escape from the terms of Versailles and an ingathering of German peoples? To argue this, it helps to overlook not only Hitler’s writings—about which there was nothing traditional—but also the dynamics of his regime. It is true that the commitment to carry out the Holocaust was not made until 1942. But the Nazi regime virtually from its inception meant concentration camps, the end of political freedom, mass arrests, and a free pass for Nazi street thugs. German foreign policy was eventually seen as an extension of that brutality so that after 1938, even those inclined to appease Hitler no longer believed it possible. There was some time lag before these perceptions became set in more distant America.

But that would change as well: the America First position, decidedly popular in 1939, was beginning to lose the battle for public opinion by the spring of 1940. The instinctive healthy reflex of steering clear of Europe’s affairs was overtaken by recognition that a Nazi-dominated Europe would change America. To maintain its independence in such a world, Washington faced the prospect of becoming a garrison state with a large standing army—something Americans had always resisted. The success of Hitlerism threatened, if not directly America, the American way of life.

The questions we ask today about Chamberlain, Churchill, and Munich may be too specific. Should Britain have fought Hitler in 1938 or waited a year or two until its crash program of fighter-plane production was well underway? This is not easy even for the specialist to answer. Nevertheless, the Munich deferral of war has become a potent symbol. In the 1960s, the American foreign-policy elite was in deep thrall to its lessons—and consequently tried to demonstrate how well they had learned them in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. Today Munich is more an invented lesson—nearer to what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “boob bait for the bubbas”—used as propaganda for the Iraq War and for starting a fresh war with Iran.

The current Iraq morass is in part an outgrowth of the strategy the United States adopted without discussion at the end of the Cold War—that of seeking unilateral global hegemony. Making the United States stronger militarily in every part of the world than any regional power was deemed vital to American security. The neoconservatives were explicit in advocating this, but mainstream liberals hardly objected. Virtually the entire bipartisan Washington establishment now considers it normal that the United States spends as much militarily as the rest of the world combined.

In America’s own pursuit of world hegemony, historical analogies suggest themselves—but not Munich, when Britain and the United States were woefully under-armed compared to Germany. Look instead to German conduct in the prelude to the First World War, when the Reich, the most powerful state in the world, felt itself encircled, while its military and diplomatic leaders grotesquely exaggerated the threats they faced. If Germany didn’t confront tsarist Russia then, the opportunity would be lost: preventive war was the much discussed option. Learned men in the thrall of worst-case thinking were blind to the ways Germany’s outward thrusts of power were perceived by others.

Future historians will ponder the attitudes of the contemporary American establishment, leading a country armed to the gills, desperate to convince itself that it faces existential threats from minor powers, its spirit at once fearful and bullying. We might pray that analogies to Wilhelmine Germany never fit too well.