As British state-controlled news opened its lunchtime broadcast on Valentine’s Day, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, Lyse Doucet, reported that the Munich Security Conference was facing its ‘biggest crisis’ in its sixty one years.
It pains me to admit it as a former senior British diplomat and pro-European, but I fear these arguments ring true.
In one fell swoop, Trump has changed the rules of engagement, and the Eurocrats are clinging to each other, trembling and wishing everything had stayed just the same. Like drug addicts, who know deep down they'll feel better if they quit, but keep shooting up nonetheless. Depressing.
I think it’s more nefarious than that. The grift is too deep and too rich for them to give it up.
Also, if there were any pride left in heart the European male, there would be the blood of the EU dilettantes running in the streets. It’s guillotine time and the EU theatre kids know it and are terrified.
Thank you. I like to think 'that we are grabbing sanity from the jaws of madness', but that may simply be our own hysteria. :-) And I I think the Europeans are doing a good enough job by, themselves, in destroying the hard-won peace the European project built by keeping things simple and focusing on the economic, social and cultural.
A tremendous portion of unadulterated truth, which should be compulsory reading - both for the bewildered and the ‘I told you so’s.
Nothing can bring back the numberless dead; but the truth of what happened, why it happened, and who bears ultimate moral responsibility, needs to be told, for all their sakes.
And for the sake of the living. How many generations must learn too late that war is waged for the advantage and profit of a few, at the cost of the humanity of all?
What do you make of some people's claims that Europe (and the UK) have become, largely as a result of (or brought into focus by) the Ukrainian war, geopolitically irrelevant? The words of Trump, Vance and Hegseth seemed to herald that change in status, which might be a big deal even beyond the elites who are desperately clinging to the war. But this is not to disagree with anything you said here, of course.
"Europe" meaning the US-controlled absurd collective state entity once sold as an innocent common market, including the falsely exited Britain, has been geopolitically irrelevant precisely from the day it became this multinational US-puppet state.
Haha, I’d agree most likely, but they had their pretensions, and those pretensions were handled pretty roughly a few days ago. As Alexander Mercouris put it in a recent podcast, the leaders in their “emergency meeting” have been exposed not as emperors without clothes, but as naughty children without them. That kind of chill is sort of an emergency in its own right.
"Europe", as currently structured, has been a US project since 1945. It (its local political class) was always irrelevant.
What's changed is that Washington is no longer pretending any different. Trump is not willing to subsidise these tendentious idiots for the poor privilege of being lectured by them about issues they have absolutely no power to influence.
I agree with all your proffered thought's. Time to name and shame the Western silencers of Freedom of Speech. The fear of retribution is the only language they understand. From Cross Party MPs to the likes of the BBC, GB News and media outlets such as the Daily Mail. We are bereft of any platforms for logical debate by folk who believe in the upholding of all International laws.
I feel we will spend years if not decades trying to understand how we in Europe ended up in this deplorable predicament. Back in the early 00s, we still had political leaders in France and Germany who refused to participate in Bush and Blair's 2003 invasion of Iraq. How did we end up with the current crop of weak and feckless ciphers? What system of influence and process of selection produced this outcome? Whatever. The current generation of leaders in Western Europe is so clearly headed for the dustbin of history.
Contrary to how they are generally portrayed, Russians are remarkably patient and not impetuous and try and deal methodically and diplomatically wherever they can, but even they have their limits.
Ukraine was never a political cause; it was purely another endless war gambit by the war party, for personal profit. It's part of the propaganda you're critiquing that it is/was a political cause, that it was about freedom, or security, or some such ludicrous blather. But these political sloganeers simply abuse the naive trust of a large proportion of voters to manufacture these causes. None of them are real.
Meanwhile the following unusually revealing, detailed, positive and confirmatory reporting of the 2022 Feb-April Turkey peace deal - crucially with rare first-hand up-close and as-it-happened quotes from the key Ukrainian and Russian negotiators - remains rarely if ever similarly spelled out even by all "alternative" media sources/voices of note. And this extract is from..."NPR Illinois"! (link below)
Quote/Extract:
"Alexander Chaly, another key Ukrainian negotiator and former First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, said by April, peace was all but certain.
ALEXANDER CHALY: We negotiate with Russian delegation practically two months, in March and April the possible peaceful settlement agreement … between Ukraine and Russia. And we, as you remember, concluded so called Istanbul communique. And we were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement. For some reasons it was postponed."
Yeah - "For some reasons", right Boris, Biden et al?
Our anti-peacemonger, pro-slaughter, US-serving political + media mis-leaders and dinner-party-chatterati classes are soaked in blood - "NPR Illinois"(!) slightly less so:
Addendum: Peacemonger par Excellence Prof Jeffrey Sachs was actually present in Ankara - as he explained during his known-to-Trump appearance at the Cambridge University Union in late November last year - watch the Ukraine-Russia peace-deal segment here - jump to 1hr 13min 15secs or watch the whole thing - hopefully not for the first time:
And here is Sachs in Cambridge(my alma mater is/was St.John's College..) summarizing the long history of US NATO's Ukraine war provocations, broken promises etc:
I am going to be in the UK early March to write a piece about the UK and the war, if you're interesting in talking, might you shoot me an email, jamescarden09@gmail.com ? Thanks much.
Ian - I came here as per Alexander Mercouris' recommendation. Your article is indeed excellent. Under his latest video some wag has written "The Fall of the House of Ursula!"
You remind me of Craig Murray and his stance out in Uzbekistan where he was pilloried by the Foreign Office back in the day. his writing is excellent.
I respect your Embassy operation in Moscow. I came to need it in 2000 when I missed my connecting flight to Ulan Bataar and was stuck in Sheremetyevo Airport. The immigration in the airport took my passport and herded me off to a Novotel where I was locked in a floor of that hotel for 3 days until my connection. One of your Embassy staff came to fetch me, but was turned away. I was afterwards taken by a van onto the runway of the airport, to a back entrance and to a waiting staff member of your Embassy and he poured Guinness down me in the Irish Bar in the airport!
I found out on the web that I am not the only one to have been given the Russian "Alan Partridge" treatment! :)
Hear, hear! Well put, Mr. Proud. Yet the West hasn't even summarily investigated its accounts so far. How are we to maintain a political order which apparently is based on no responsibility over decisions made whatsoever, no matter how many people end up dying and suffering as a consequence? Our thought-leaders, thought-police, paid its lip service for democracy with a forked tongue. Oh, and their double standard. Those who had the most power sacrificed the least for their pompous charades. I simply have no words, otherwise I'd probably say something which could be considered as incitement.
For a concerned citizen, what passed as a public sphere of Overton window was a collection of liturgical credos devoid of any truth or thinking over these years. War is peace, they told us, we need more weapons for war to have a peace negotiation. Say, personally as a EU citizen, I have nothing but bitter contempt, hatred, left for our leadership. I will never forgive them. In some sense I wish Europe fell apart entirely, I wish a curse was bestowed upon these petty, treacherous people and their dishonest, self-serving errands. I wish they lost more, because they'd deserve to lose everything as far as I am concerned. Make no mistake, I'm definitely a minority here, a Finn bitter over his countrymen, someone who feels our people have been brainwashed with systematic lying and ruthless abuse of history. I remember the petty, joyful glee in 2022, how many people were privately talking how they were that close volunteering for the Ukrainian cause. Where did all these exemplary people disappear so fast? Part of me hopes we lost, and that we lost good, that these people were made to pay for what they have enabled.
This war will leave down a bitter, dishonest and poisonous legacy.
Controlled fury. That's what it looks like when it's written down.
Deserves a round of applause. A real one. Not an orchestrated one like wot Zelensky gets.
I hope that was as cathartic as it reads.
I'm expecting the European choreographed wailing and gnashing of teeth to go on for a while yet, as the European 'leaders', each wearing exactly the same suit, gather to have their photo taken stepping out of a limousine. Things must be bad. All these people wearing the same suit, stepping out of limousines. What could be going down?
Europe. That's what's going down. It seems to be Trump's number one target. Break the EU. There was a time when I thought that nothing would be worse – politically – than the USA attempting to break up the EU. I don't like the Americans meddling in our affairs, bossing us about, coercing us to do what they want. However, when I see von der Leyen at a choreographed fireworks event to celebrate electricity bills quadrupling in the Baltic states, to celebrate the citizens of those three states' 'freedom' from cheap Russian electricity ("Oh no! Not cheap Russian electricity! Save us! Save us!"), I almost feel like handing Vance the keys to a bulldozer and paying his Brussels or Strasbourg hotel bills while he smashes the sorry edifice.
All Clint Starmer and Lammy van Cleef and Healey Wallach can do now is narrow their eyes and hard stare at Putin. They've got nothing. The barrel turns and ... click. They're out of ammo.
All they can do is claim to be supporting Ukraine, claim at the tops of their voices, because the last thing they want to hear is the dreaded word "appeasement". And it's coming. You know it's outside the front door, waiting. The dreaded knock of "appeasement". The Tories, they won't care about the fact they failed to put UK boots on the ground, they're just waiting to pounce.
And for the British military that could be fatal, literally. There's a possibility they could get pointlessly sacrificed just so that our politicians can avoid being accused of appeasement.
It's almost a sort of psychological disorder in Britain. We must not get accused of appeasement, whatever the cost. But 'whatever the cost' is a very dangerous mantra. It is fundamentalism.
What I want to see now is cool heads and loud mouths. Shout as loud as you like, Starmer. Protest too much. Nobody wants to be accused of appeasement. In Britain, it's a fate worse than death. I'll see loud public recriminations and Trumpblaming as a good thing; a sign that we're not sending troops in, that we've quietly accepted it's all over, but have to put on a show for the UK public. The louder they shout, the more likely it is that they're going to do nothing.
But what if I'm wrong? What if we try to seize madness from the jaws of sanity? What if the UK backs some sort of post-war insurgency, which given Ukraine's history of the last few years will no doubt involve acts of terrorism; assassinations of civilians like Daria Dugina. What then?
I have been irritated for a long time by the "appeasement meme" which seeks to portray Chamberlain as a lily-livered wimp who simply rolled over to have his tummy tickled by an insignificant little jumped-up, former WWI corporal from the Kaiser's defeated Imperial German Army.
The truth of the matter is that Chamberlain led a nation which was still reeling from the unprecedented horrors of the Great War ("the war to end all wars") and there was no appetite in the British public to repeat that traumatic experience in their lifetimes. Furthermore, the first world war had effectively bankrupted the British Empire even before the Great Depression made matters even worse. A high level of military spending and preparation for more war was definitely not a popular option.
When Mr Chamberlain went to Munich in 1938, he was facing a man who had been building up a powerful, world-class military for years while Britain's military capability had been reduced to a minimum and was mostly obsolete. Britain was in no credible position to threaten Hitler over the Sudetenland or anywhere else and both leaders knew this. The best Chamberlain could hope for was to buy some time and, to his credit, he succeeded in doing that, even at the subsequent cost of his historical reputation.
What is not generally recognised is that it was Chamberlain's government which had already accelerated the research and development of several crucial millitary projects including, but by no means limited to, the production of hundreds of Hawker Hurricanes, Bristol Beaufighters, and Supermarine Spitfires, all of which proved to be indispensible assets in the successful defence of the UK during the Battle of Britain.
By the time that existential battle commenced in earnest, RAF Fighter Command still only had a mere 69 squadrons of front-line fighters (fewer than a thousand aircraft) and several of those squadrons comprised outdated designs (such as the Gloster Gladiator biplane) which were no match for the German Messerschmidt Bf109 monoplanes. Nevertheless, dozens of squadrons of modern, state-of-the-art, world-class fighter aircraft was a vast improvement in comparison to the pitiful state of readiness in which the RAF found itself over a year earlier at the time of the Munich Conference. Had the Battle of Britain been fought a year earlier, it is unquestionable that the Luftwaffe would have triumphed.
As I mentioned earlier, Chamberlain bought time to prepare for the inevitable. He used that time very well. By the time he finally had no choice but to declare war on Germany on September the 3rd, 1939, Britain had at least acquired the capability of being able to (only just) defend itself against the threat of Nazi invasion, even though it was still powerless to prevent the Nazi occupation of other countries on the European continent.
Chamberlain had no illusions about the reality of the Nazi threat. He abhorred Hitler and all he stood for. Nevertheless, he had to play the cards which he had been dealt. Knowing that he had a weak hand, he made the best of a bad job. He "folded" to give Britain a chance of winning the next time.
A great American philosopher (or what passes for a great philosopher in American culture) once wrote, "You gotta known when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and know when to run."
The unfairly maligned Neville Chamberlain knew that there'd be time enough for counting when the deal is done, not while you're sitting at the table.
Thanks Jack,
It pains me to admit it as a former senior British diplomat and pro-European, but I fear these arguments ring true.
In one fell swoop, Trump has changed the rules of engagement, and the Eurocrats are clinging to each other, trembling and wishing everything had stayed just the same. Like drug addicts, who know deep down they'll feel better if they quit, but keep shooting up nonetheless. Depressing.
I think it’s more nefarious than that. The grift is too deep and too rich for them to give it up.
Also, if there were any pride left in heart the European male, there would be the blood of the EU dilettantes running in the streets. It’s guillotine time and the EU theatre kids know it and are terrified.
Rise, lads and throw off your oppressors!!!!
Thank you. I like to think 'that we are grabbing sanity from the jaws of madness', but that may simply be our own hysteria. :-) And I I think the Europeans are doing a good enough job by, themselves, in destroying the hard-won peace the European project built by keeping things simple and focusing on the economic, social and cultural.
A tremendous portion of unadulterated truth, which should be compulsory reading - both for the bewildered and the ‘I told you so’s.
Nothing can bring back the numberless dead; but the truth of what happened, why it happened, and who bears ultimate moral responsibility, needs to be told, for all their sakes.
And for the sake of the living. How many generations must learn too late that war is waged for the advantage and profit of a few, at the cost of the humanity of all?
Thanks very much, and also for picking up the typo (now corrected).
The truth must be told and the responsible brought to justice.
What do you make of some people's claims that Europe (and the UK) have become, largely as a result of (or brought into focus by) the Ukrainian war, geopolitically irrelevant? The words of Trump, Vance and Hegseth seemed to herald that change in status, which might be a big deal even beyond the elites who are desperately clinging to the war. But this is not to disagree with anything you said here, of course.
"Europe" meaning the US-controlled absurd collective state entity once sold as an innocent common market, including the falsely exited Britain, has been geopolitically irrelevant precisely from the day it became this multinational US-puppet state.
Haha, I’d agree most likely, but they had their pretensions, and those pretensions were handled pretty roughly a few days ago. As Alexander Mercouris put it in a recent podcast, the leaders in their “emergency meeting” have been exposed not as emperors without clothes, but as naughty children without them. That kind of chill is sort of an emergency in its own right.
"Europe", as currently structured, has been a US project since 1945. It (its local political class) was always irrelevant.
What's changed is that Washington is no longer pretending any different. Trump is not willing to subsidise these tendentious idiots for the poor privilege of being lectured by them about issues they have absolutely no power to influence.
I agree with all your proffered thought's. Time to name and shame the Western silencers of Freedom of Speech. The fear of retribution is the only language they understand. From Cross Party MPs to the likes of the BBC, GB News and media outlets such as the Daily Mail. We are bereft of any platforms for logical debate by folk who believe in the upholding of all International laws.
I feel we will spend years if not decades trying to understand how we in Europe ended up in this deplorable predicament. Back in the early 00s, we still had political leaders in France and Germany who refused to participate in Bush and Blair's 2003 invasion of Iraq. How did we end up with the current crop of weak and feckless ciphers? What system of influence and process of selection produced this outcome? Whatever. The current generation of leaders in Western Europe is so clearly headed for the dustbin of history.
Good questions. And I agree on your final.
Cookie cutter leaders all tend to come from the same stables to pursue similar global agendas
Thank you Ian. What took Russia so long to invaded Ukraine? The West has lied, chastised & provoked Russia since circa 1992.
Contrary to how they are generally portrayed, Russians are remarkably patient and not impetuous and try and deal methodically and diplomatically wherever they can, but even they have their limits.
Ukraine was never a political cause; it was purely another endless war gambit by the war party, for personal profit. It's part of the propaganda you're critiquing that it is/was a political cause, that it was about freedom, or security, or some such ludicrous blather. But these political sloganeers simply abuse the naive trust of a large proportion of voters to manufacture these causes. None of them are real.
Meanwhile the following unusually revealing, detailed, positive and confirmatory reporting of the 2022 Feb-April Turkey peace deal - crucially with rare first-hand up-close and as-it-happened quotes from the key Ukrainian and Russian negotiators - remains rarely if ever similarly spelled out even by all "alternative" media sources/voices of note. And this extract is from..."NPR Illinois"! (link below)
Quote/Extract:
"Alexander Chaly, another key Ukrainian negotiator and former First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, said by April, peace was all but certain.
ALEXANDER CHALY: We negotiate with Russian delegation practically two months, in March and April the possible peaceful settlement agreement … between Ukraine and Russia. And we, as you remember, concluded so called Istanbul communique. And we were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement. For some reasons it was postponed."
Yeah - "For some reasons", right Boris, Biden et al?
Our anti-peacemonger, pro-slaughter, US-serving political + media mis-leaders and dinner-party-chatterati classes are soaked in blood - "NPR Illinois"(!) slightly less so:
https://www.nprillinois.org/2024-05-06/the-story-behind-2022s-secret-ukraine-russia-peace-negotiations.
Addendum: Peacemonger par Excellence Prof Jeffrey Sachs was actually present in Ankara - as he explained during his known-to-Trump appearance at the Cambridge University Union in late November last year - watch the Ukraine-Russia peace-deal segment here - jump to 1hr 13min 15secs or watch the whole thing - hopefully not for the first time:
https://youtu.be/0Bl6_MAhg_4?si=vR7mNWFRwhMu7m9o
And here is Sachs in Cambridge(my alma mater is/was St.John's College..) summarizing the long history of US NATO's Ukraine war provocations, broken promises etc:
https://youtu.be/dYi5S81fKxI?si=E0oM39eS7kalDSnc
(Paul G)
Ian,
I am going to be in the UK early March to write a piece about the UK and the war, if you're interesting in talking, might you shoot me an email, jamescarden09@gmail.com ? Thanks much.
I can almost hear Lyse Doucet, on her deathbed, crying out "the horror, the horror."
All those lives saved, and mine about to end. It's almost Shakespearean.... :-)
Outstanding piece
Thank you so much.
Ian - I came here as per Alexander Mercouris' recommendation. Your article is indeed excellent. Under his latest video some wag has written "The Fall of the House of Ursula!"
You remind me of Craig Murray and his stance out in Uzbekistan where he was pilloried by the Foreign Office back in the day. his writing is excellent.
I respect your Embassy operation in Moscow. I came to need it in 2000 when I missed my connecting flight to Ulan Bataar and was stuck in Sheremetyevo Airport. The immigration in the airport took my passport and herded me off to a Novotel where I was locked in a floor of that hotel for 3 days until my connection. One of your Embassy staff came to fetch me, but was turned away. I was afterwards taken by a van onto the runway of the airport, to a back entrance and to a waiting staff member of your Embassy and he poured Guinness down me in the Irish Bar in the airport!
I found out on the web that I am not the only one to have been given the Russian "Alan Partridge" treatment! :)
Consular support at its very best!
Perfectly succinct.
Hear, hear! Well put, Mr. Proud. Yet the West hasn't even summarily investigated its accounts so far. How are we to maintain a political order which apparently is based on no responsibility over decisions made whatsoever, no matter how many people end up dying and suffering as a consequence? Our thought-leaders, thought-police, paid its lip service for democracy with a forked tongue. Oh, and their double standard. Those who had the most power sacrificed the least for their pompous charades. I simply have no words, otherwise I'd probably say something which could be considered as incitement.
For a concerned citizen, what passed as a public sphere of Overton window was a collection of liturgical credos devoid of any truth or thinking over these years. War is peace, they told us, we need more weapons for war to have a peace negotiation. Say, personally as a EU citizen, I have nothing but bitter contempt, hatred, left for our leadership. I will never forgive them. In some sense I wish Europe fell apart entirely, I wish a curse was bestowed upon these petty, treacherous people and their dishonest, self-serving errands. I wish they lost more, because they'd deserve to lose everything as far as I am concerned. Make no mistake, I'm definitely a minority here, a Finn bitter over his countrymen, someone who feels our people have been brainwashed with systematic lying and ruthless abuse of history. I remember the petty, joyful glee in 2022, how many people were privately talking how they were that close volunteering for the Ukrainian cause. Where did all these exemplary people disappear so fast? Part of me hopes we lost, and that we lost good, that these people were made to pay for what they have enabled.
This war will leave down a bitter, dishonest and poisonous legacy.
Great piece that, Ian.
Controlled fury. That's what it looks like when it's written down.
Deserves a round of applause. A real one. Not an orchestrated one like wot Zelensky gets.
I hope that was as cathartic as it reads.
I'm expecting the European choreographed wailing and gnashing of teeth to go on for a while yet, as the European 'leaders', each wearing exactly the same suit, gather to have their photo taken stepping out of a limousine. Things must be bad. All these people wearing the same suit, stepping out of limousines. What could be going down?
Europe. That's what's going down. It seems to be Trump's number one target. Break the EU. There was a time when I thought that nothing would be worse – politically – than the USA attempting to break up the EU. I don't like the Americans meddling in our affairs, bossing us about, coercing us to do what they want. However, when I see von der Leyen at a choreographed fireworks event to celebrate electricity bills quadrupling in the Baltic states, to celebrate the citizens of those three states' 'freedom' from cheap Russian electricity ("Oh no! Not cheap Russian electricity! Save us! Save us!"), I almost feel like handing Vance the keys to a bulldozer and paying his Brussels or Strasbourg hotel bills while he smashes the sorry edifice.
All Clint Starmer and Lammy van Cleef and Healey Wallach can do now is narrow their eyes and hard stare at Putin. They've got nothing. The barrel turns and ... click. They're out of ammo.
All they can do is claim to be supporting Ukraine, claim at the tops of their voices, because the last thing they want to hear is the dreaded word "appeasement". And it's coming. You know it's outside the front door, waiting. The dreaded knock of "appeasement". The Tories, they won't care about the fact they failed to put UK boots on the ground, they're just waiting to pounce.
And for the British military that could be fatal, literally. There's a possibility they could get pointlessly sacrificed just so that our politicians can avoid being accused of appeasement.
It's almost a sort of psychological disorder in Britain. We must not get accused of appeasement, whatever the cost. But 'whatever the cost' is a very dangerous mantra. It is fundamentalism.
What I want to see now is cool heads and loud mouths. Shout as loud as you like, Starmer. Protest too much. Nobody wants to be accused of appeasement. In Britain, it's a fate worse than death. I'll see loud public recriminations and Trumpblaming as a good thing; a sign that we're not sending troops in, that we've quietly accepted it's all over, but have to put on a show for the UK public. The louder they shout, the more likely it is that they're going to do nothing.
But what if I'm wrong? What if we try to seize madness from the jaws of sanity? What if the UK backs some sort of post-war insurgency, which given Ukraine's history of the last few years will no doubt involve acts of terrorism; assassinations of civilians like Daria Dugina. What then?
Good comment.
I have been irritated for a long time by the "appeasement meme" which seeks to portray Chamberlain as a lily-livered wimp who simply rolled over to have his tummy tickled by an insignificant little jumped-up, former WWI corporal from the Kaiser's defeated Imperial German Army.
The truth of the matter is that Chamberlain led a nation which was still reeling from the unprecedented horrors of the Great War ("the war to end all wars") and there was no appetite in the British public to repeat that traumatic experience in their lifetimes. Furthermore, the first world war had effectively bankrupted the British Empire even before the Great Depression made matters even worse. A high level of military spending and preparation for more war was definitely not a popular option.
When Mr Chamberlain went to Munich in 1938, he was facing a man who had been building up a powerful, world-class military for years while Britain's military capability had been reduced to a minimum and was mostly obsolete. Britain was in no credible position to threaten Hitler over the Sudetenland or anywhere else and both leaders knew this. The best Chamberlain could hope for was to buy some time and, to his credit, he succeeded in doing that, even at the subsequent cost of his historical reputation.
What is not generally recognised is that it was Chamberlain's government which had already accelerated the research and development of several crucial millitary projects including, but by no means limited to, the production of hundreds of Hawker Hurricanes, Bristol Beaufighters, and Supermarine Spitfires, all of which proved to be indispensible assets in the successful defence of the UK during the Battle of Britain.
By the time that existential battle commenced in earnest, RAF Fighter Command still only had a mere 69 squadrons of front-line fighters (fewer than a thousand aircraft) and several of those squadrons comprised outdated designs (such as the Gloster Gladiator biplane) which were no match for the German Messerschmidt Bf109 monoplanes. Nevertheless, dozens of squadrons of modern, state-of-the-art, world-class fighter aircraft was a vast improvement in comparison to the pitiful state of readiness in which the RAF found itself over a year earlier at the time of the Munich Conference. Had the Battle of Britain been fought a year earlier, it is unquestionable that the Luftwaffe would have triumphed.
As I mentioned earlier, Chamberlain bought time to prepare for the inevitable. He used that time very well. By the time he finally had no choice but to declare war on Germany on September the 3rd, 1939, Britain had at least acquired the capability of being able to (only just) defend itself against the threat of Nazi invasion, even though it was still powerless to prevent the Nazi occupation of other countries on the European continent.
Chamberlain had no illusions about the reality of the Nazi threat. He abhorred Hitler and all he stood for. Nevertheless, he had to play the cards which he had been dealt. Knowing that he had a weak hand, he made the best of a bad job. He "folded" to give Britain a chance of winning the next time.
A great American philosopher (or what passes for a great philosopher in American culture) once wrote, "You gotta known when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and know when to run."
The unfairly maligned Neville Chamberlain knew that there'd be time enough for counting when the deal is done, not while you're sitting at the table.