Western betrayal

Based on Wikipedia: Western betrayal

In August 1944, as the people of Warsaw rose up against their Nazi occupiers, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent an urgent telegram to American President Franklin Roosevelt. Soviet forces sat just across the Vistava River, close enough to help. Joseph Stalin had refused to let Allied planes use nearby Soviet airfields to resupply the Polish fighters. Churchill proposed defying Stalin anyway—sending the planes and seeing what happened.

Roosevelt said no.

Over the next two months, roughly 200,000 Polish civilians died. The Germans systematically demolished Warsaw block by block. Soviet troops watched from the opposite bank of the river. When the uprising finally collapsed, Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, who had commanded British supply drops to the doomed city, wrote: "How, after the fall of Warsaw, any responsible statesman could trust the Russian Communist further than he could kick him, passes the comprehension of ordinary men."

This moment captures the essence of what Central and Eastern Europeans call "Western betrayal"—the conviction that Britain, France, and the United States repeatedly abandoned them to totalitarian powers when it mattered most. It's a wound that shaped the politics of an entire region for generations, and one that echoes uncomfortably in present-day debates about Western commitments to countries like Ukraine.

The Birth of a Phrase

The term itself was coined in Czech—zrada Západu—after the Munich Conference of September 1938. That conference remains one of history's most infamous examples of appeasement, the policy of giving aggressors what they want in hopes they'll stop wanting more.

Here's what happened. Adolf Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia surrender the Sudetenland, a border region populated largely by ethnic Germans. The Sudetenland wasn't just territory—it contained Czechoslovakia's entire system of border fortifications, the physical infrastructure that would make any German invasion costly. Losing it meant losing the ability to defend the rest of the country.

Czechoslovakia had a mutual defense treaty with France. If Germany attacked, France was legally obligated to fight. Britain had its own commitments to France. The Czechoslovak government expected their allies to stand firm.

Instead, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich. He met with Hitler, along with the French and Italian leaders. The Czechoslovak representatives were not invited to the table where their country's fate was decided. They waited in an adjoining room like anxious patients while doctors discussed whether to amputate.

The answer was yes. Britain and France agreed to let Germany take the Sudetenland. Chamberlain returned to London waving a signed agreement, proclaiming he had secured "peace for our time."

He was wrong by exactly eleven months.

Winston Churchill, then a backbench Member of Parliament, delivered the verdict that would define how history remembered Munich: "Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war."

The Dominoes Fall

The aftermath of Munich unfolded with grim predictability. Within weeks, Poland seized a slice of Czechoslovak territory called Trans-Olza. Hungary took another bite through the First Vienna Award, an arbitration imposed by Germany and Italy that transferred southern Slovakia and parts of Ruthenia to Hungarian control.

By March 1939, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. Slovakia declared independence as a German client state. Hungary grabbed what remained of Ruthenia. German troops marched into Prague, and Hitler proclaimed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—bureaucratic language for annexation.

The Czech vocabulary for betrayal expanded. Mnichov—Munich itself, now a synonym for cowardice. Mnichovská zrada—the Munich betrayal. Mnichovský diktát—the Munich Dictate. Zrada spojenců—betrayal of the allies. The poet František Halas published verses about the "ringing bell of betrayal."

These weren't just rhetorical flourishes. They became the framework through which an entire nation understood its place in the world. When you've been sold out once, you develop a certain watchfulness about your allies' promises.

Poland's Turn

After Munich demonstrated that France and Britain would not fight for their allies, both nations scrambled to reassure Poland, the obvious next target of German expansion. In the spring of 1939, they signed formal alliance agreements with Warsaw.

The Franco-Polish alliance contained a specific commitment: in the event of war, France would launch a ground offensive within two weeks. The Anglo-Polish alliance was somewhat vaguer, promising "all the support and assistance in its power." British General William Edmund Ironside visited Warsaw in July 1939 and made additional promises—an attack from the direction of the Black Sea, a British aircraft carrier in the Baltic.

These were fantasies. Britain had neither the forces nor the logistics to project power into the Baltic or the Black Sea. The entire British Expeditionary Force earmarked for the continent consisted of four divisions, and they wouldn't be ready for weeks after any war began.

Poland, meanwhile, was desperately trying to buy time and weapons. The government placed orders for 160 French fighters and 111 British aircraft, including Hurricanes and Spitfires. They asked Britain for a loan of 60 million pounds. Britain agreed to lend 8 million—a fraction of what Poland needed to modernize its defenses against the German war machine.

Some of the ordered aircraft shipped before the war started.

None of them saw combat.

September 1939

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France issued an ultimatum, then declared war on September 3. This, at least, was real—unlike after Munich, the Western powers followed through on their commitment to respond to aggression.

But declaring war and fighting a war are different things.

German forces reached Warsaw within a week. The Polish army, outmatched in tanks and aircraft, fought with extraordinary courage but could not stop the advance. Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły ordered a retreat toward the Romanian border on September 14, hoping to establish a defensive position while Allied help arrived.

On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, executing the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that Hitler and Stalin had signed just weeks earlier. Poland now faced two enemies simultaneously. The Anglo-Polish alliance, as it happened, only covered invasion from Germany. Britain and France took no significant action against the Soviets.

What about that promised French offensive?

France did attack, after a fashion. On September 7, French forces launched the Saar Offensive, pushing into German border territory with 40 divisions. But the advance was tentative, slowed by outdated tactics and minefields. French commanders lacked mine detectors. When their troops reached artillery range of the Siegfried Line—Germany's western fortifications—they discovered their shells couldn't penetrate the defenses.

The French decided to regroup and attack again on September 20. Then the Soviets invaded Poland on the 17th. The offensive was cancelled.

Around September 13, the Polish military envoy to France received a message from French General Maurice Gamelin, the supreme commander. The envoy sent an urgent warning to Marshal Śmigły: "Please don't believe a single word in the dispatch."

After the war, General Edmund Ironside, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, wrote in his diary with blunt honesty: "The French had lied to the Poles in saying they are going to attack. There is no idea of it."

The View from London and Paris

This raises an uncomfortable question: were the British and French actually lying, or were they simply incapable of helping?

The evidence suggests elements of both.

By late October 1939, the British Expeditionary Force in France totaled four divisions. Germany had 25 divisions in the west alone. Any British invasion of Germany would have been a suicide mission. The French, still traumatized by the slaughter of World War One, were psychologically unprepared for offensive warfare. Their entire military doctrine had become defensive, built around the Maginot Line—a chain of fortifications along the Franco-German border that, notably, did not extend along the Belgian frontier.

But the Poles hadn't asked for an invasion of Germany. They'd asked for genuine pressure, for something that would force Hitler to divert forces westward. What they got instead was a declaration of war followed by months of the "Phony War"—the drôle de guerre, as the French called it—during which the Western Allies essentially sat and waited while Germany digested Poland.

The British contribution during those first weeks? Dropping propaganda leaflets over Germany. Reconnaissance flights. A naval blockade that would take years to bite.

Whether this constituted "betrayal" depends on how you define the word. The Western powers had made promises they either couldn't or wouldn't keep. Poles who died believing help was coming might reasonably call that betrayal. Historians with the benefit of hindsight might call it tragic incompetence, or the natural result of democracies being unready for war against totalitarian states that had spent years preparing.

The distinction matters less to the dead.

Yalta and the Division of Europe

The phrase "Western betrayal" might have faded into historical footnote if not for what happened at the end of the war. In February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta in Soviet-occupied Crimea. The end of the war was in sight. Germany would fall within months. The question was what would come after.

By this point, the Red Army occupied most of Eastern Europe. Soviet troops had liberated Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria—and "liberated" increasingly meant "occupied." Stalin held the cards. Roosevelt was dying, though he didn't know it. Churchill understood what was happening but lacked the leverage to stop it.

At Yalta, the Big Three agreed that Poland's borders would shift westward. The eastern territories Poland had held before 1939—the Kresy, comprising roughly 48 percent of Poland's prewar land—would become Soviet territory. In compensation, Poland would receive German land to the west, up to the Oder-Neisse line.

The Polish government-in-exile, based in London, was not consulted. They learned of decisions about their country's borders after the fact.

To be fair, the concept of shifting Poland westward wasn't Stalin's invention. General Władysław Sikorski, the Prime Minister of the London-based Polish government until his death in a 1943 plane crash, had himself proposed something similar as part of a potential Polish-Soviet reconciliation. His advisor Józef Retinger later wrote that the arrangement "seemed like a fair bargain."

But Sikorski had envisioned a genuinely independent Poland making this trade. What actually emerged was a Poland under Soviet control, its borders redrawn by outside powers, its prewar eastern cities—Lwów, Wilno—now part of the Soviet Union. Millions of Poles found themselves in the wrong country overnight.

The word "Yalta" became, in American politics especially, shorthand for appeasement of Communism, for the abandonment of captive nations behind the Iron Curtain. Conservative critics accused Roosevelt of selling out Eastern Europe to buy Soviet cooperation. Defenders argued he had no choice—the Red Army was already there, and fighting Stalin would have meant another war with an exhausted public.

Prague, May 1945

One last scene from the war's end captures the complexity of Western choices.

On May 5, 1945, with Germany collapsing, the citizens of Prague rose against their Nazi occupiers. They knew American forces under General George Patton were nearby. The U.S. Third Army had entered western Czechoslovakia. Liberation seemed hours away.

Patton requested permission to advance to the Vltava River—to Prague itself. He could reach the city quickly. Czech partisans were dying in the streets.

General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, said no. He didn't want American casualties for territory that would end up in the Soviet sphere anyway. He didn't want to risk a confrontation with the Red Army.

Prague was liberated on May 9 by Soviet forces. The delay was only four days. But those four days mattered enormously. A British diplomat later identified this moment as when "Czechoslovakia was now definitely lost to the West." The Communist Party's prestige soared as liberators; the Americans who had stopped short were remembered as something less.

The Cold War Echoes

The pattern repeated throughout the Cold War, each repetition reinforcing the sense that Western powers would not fight for Eastern Europe.

In 1953, workers in East Germany rose against the Communist government. The Eisenhower administration had talked about "rolling back" Communism, about liberating captive nations. When the uprising came, American forces stayed in their barracks. Soviet tanks crushed the rebellion.

In 1956, Hungarians took to the streets demanding democracy and independence from the Soviet bloc. Radio Free Europe, funded by the American government, had been broadcasting promises of support for years. Again, when the moment arrived, no Western help came. Soviet forces killed thousands. The uprising's leader, Imre Nagy, was executed.

In 1968, Czechoslovakia experienced the Prague Spring—a period of liberalization under Alexander Dubček, who tried to create "socialism with a human face." Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague. The West condemned the invasion in speeches at the United Nations.

Speeches were all the West offered.

A Psychological Wound

Scholars who study Central and Eastern European politics often note how deeply the concept of Western betrayal has shaped regional psychology. Grigory Yavlinsky, a Russian liberal politician, has described the damage left by Yalta and Munich as a "psychological event" or even a "psychiatric issue" that influenced debates over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion in the 1990s.

Ilya Prizel, a professor of international relations, argues that Central and Eastern Europeans developed a "preoccupation with their historical sense of 'damaged self'" that fueled resentment toward the West generally and reinforced the betrayal narrative specifically.

This isn't merely historical grievance-nursing. It has practical political consequences. When Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and other former Eastern Bloc nations sought to join NATO and the European Union (EU) in the 1990s and 2000s, their leaders frequently invoked the Western betrayal narrative. The argument was straightforward: you abandoned us before, you owe us now, and the only way to make amends is to bring us inside your security architecture permanently.

It worked. NATO expanded eastward in waves—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999; the Baltic states and others in 2004. The EU similarly absorbed the former Eastern Bloc. These decisions were driven by many factors, but the moral weight of historical obligation was always in the room.

The Case Against "Betrayal"

Not everyone accepts the betrayal framework. Critics argue that it's political scapegoating, a way for Central and Eastern European nations to blame outsiders for their own vulnerabilities.

Colin Powell, the American Secretary of State, specifically rejected the word "betrayal" when discussing the Warsaw Uprising. The retired diplomat Charles G. Stefan argued that Churchill and Roosevelt had no realistic option but to accommodate Stalin at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam. The Soviet Union had done the bulk of the fighting and dying against Nazi Germany. Its armies occupied the disputed territories. Short of starting World War Three against an ally who had just helped win World War Two, Western leaders had limited leverage.

Historian Athan Theoharis has documented how "betrayal myths" were weaponized in American domestic politics, particularly by opponents of U.S. membership in the United Nations. The accusation that Roosevelt "gave away" Eastern Europe became a partisan bludgeon, often wielded by those with their own agendas.

There's also the matter of secret agreements. Critics of the Western betrayal narrative point out that in some cases, the supposed duplicity was known or knowable at the time. Churchill, for instance, privately agreed with Stalin that the Atlantic Charter—the declaration of war aims that promised self-determination for all peoples—would not apply to the Baltic states. This was cynical, but it wasn't exactly hidden from anyone paying attention to power realities.

Living Memory

What makes the Western betrayal concept more than historical curiosity is its continued relevance.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, echoes of 1938 and 1939 were everywhere. Ukraine had given up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States, and Britain—the Budapest Memorandum. Those guarantees proved worthless against Russian aggression. Ukrainians, watching Western debate over how much aid to provide, have lived their own version of Polish desperation in September 1939.

The question of whether to trust Western security commitments haunts every country on Russia's periphery. NATO's Article 5—the provision that an attack on one member is an attack on all—is either an ironclad guarantee or another piece of paper, depending on how much faith you place in Western willingness to fight.

Poland, having learned the lesson of 1939, has become one of NATO's most assertive members on defense spending. The Baltic states treat Russian threats with a seriousness that sometimes seems alarmist to Western Europeans who've never been occupied. Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, has drawn different conclusions—perhaps if the West won't protect you, you're better off accommodating the regional power.

These are not abstract debates. They're arguments about how much Western promises mean, informed by decades of evidence about when those promises were and weren't kept.

The View from East and West

Professors Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler have characterized Western betrayal as a reference to "a sense of historical and moral responsibility for the West's abandonment of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War."

That's the view from the East: you left us to Stalin, and we suffered for four decades under Communist rule as a consequence.

The view from the West is more complicated. Yes, we made promises we couldn't keep. Yes, we prioritized other objectives—winning the war, avoiding nuclear conflict, maintaining alliance unity—over the liberation of Eastern Europe. But we were not omnipotent. Geography and military reality constrained what was possible. We did eventually win the Cold War, and Eastern Europe did eventually get free.

Both views contain truth. Both are incomplete.

What's undeniable is that the concept of Western betrayal remains a living force in international politics—a reminder that alliances are only as strong as the willingness to honor them, and that small nations at the edge of empires have long memories about the moments when they were left alone.