On May 16, 1940, the British newspaper Daily Mirror published this cartoon, dedicating it to those who were calling for negotiations with Hitler. In the image, a man holds two posters reading: “Peace by negotiation” and “Make a deal with Hitler now!Many years have passed, but nothing has changed. Some people remain delusional, still believing that appeasing aggressors will somehow stop the aggression.
The point is equally accurate in 2025. Many westerners do not understand the way leadership functions in autocratic regimes. Western democracies operate through compromise and consensus building. Many decisions are based on the model of looking to construct a win-win for both sides, or at least try to avoid humiliating the other side by making a deal acceptable to all.
Autocratic regimes never function that way. They are dominated by strong leaders, and approach all negotiations on a win-lose basis: I win, you lose. Their model of leadership is zero-sum. I get my way. If you disagree with me, I don't care. I will bulldoze you out of the way to get my way. I am not interested in looking to find a compromise. I am interested only in winning.
Those in the leadership who dare to even question them get kicked out, or as with Stalin, Hitler, Putin and others, killed. Ernst Röhm, the head of the Sturmabteilung (SA), had been one of Hitler's oldest and closest personal friends. Yet he agreed to have Röhm shot.
Many of the leading Bolsheviks that took power in 1917 were ultimately eliminated by Stalin. Putin routinely has his enemies 'windowed' - thrown out of the windows of their office or home. Officially it was spun as a tragic accident, but neighbours recounted different stories, of violent scuffles and figures being physically forced out of windows and flung to their death on Putin's orders.
Staff, oligarchs, rivals, critics, troublesome journalists, etc were all murdered. Strong potential rivals who could have beaten Putin in elections were debarred from election, then arrested on trumped up charges before mysteriously dying in prisons from poisoning, 'accidental' falls down flights of stairs, in one case one of those prisoners was 'accidentally' locked out of the prison in a sealed courtyard where he died of hypothermia.
Putin poisoned enemies in numerous countries. Despite the Bucharest Memorandum making it clear that Russia permanently accepted Ukraine's independence, and guaranteeing never to interfere in Ukraine, Putin systematically broke it. In the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, Putin had the leading candidate he opposed, Viktor Yushchenko, poisoned. Against the odds he survived, but with irreversible physical damage. Putin then directly rigged the election with mass ballot box-stuffing, the destruction of ballot boxes in areas supportive of Yushchenko. The outcome of the election was a 'victory' for the most pro-Putin candidate, Viktor Yanukovych.
Courts rarely overturn election results on principle, unless the evidence that it was stolen is overwhelming as the people are sovereign. They only overturn elections if there is cast-iron evidence that the election does not represent the will of the people, but has been unambiguously stolen.
The evidence of that in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election was overwhelming. In one district 127% of voters turned out - a mathematical impossibility. Vast numbers of new names appeared on the electoral register at the last minute. Voters travelled to vote only to find someone had already voted in their name. Areas had a supposed 100% turn out rate before the first voter turned out to vote, with ballot boxes so stuffed they could not even get their vote into the ballot box.
International observers from international verification bodies described the election as one of the most corrupt and compromised they had ever seen. Putin even congratulated Yanukovych on his 'win' before the votes had been counted.
The Ukrainian Supreme Court declared the second round vote null and void because of the proven scale of falsification of results. It ordered a re-run, this time under time strict monitoring and verification of the identities of all voters, and with all ballot boxes checked and made sure to be empty and not stuffed. In the re-run, this time strictly verified, Viktor Yushchenko won comfortably with 52.77% to Viktor Yanukovych's 44.85%.
Peace activists often make the fundamental mistake of thinking people can negotiate with autocratic rulers to find a 'win-win' compromise that satisfies all. That is not however how autocracies make decision. They play a zero-sum game: I win, you lose.
It was why appeasement entirely failed in the 1930s. Well-meaning figures like British prime ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, haunted by memories of World War I, sought desperately to avoid a new war by endless compromises - thinking compromises, something they were used to in British politics and which they thought would build trust. They allowed Hitler break the Treaty of Versailles in the invasion of the Rhineland, the increase in the size of the German Army, the recreation of the Luftwaffe.
What they did not understand was that Hitler did not see their willingness to compromise and allow Versailles be broken as good faith and bridge-building, but as evidence that Britain and France were weak, indecisive and easy to manipulate.
By the end of 1938 Chamberlain, having signed the Munich Agreement allowing Germany to take the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, was beginning to distrust Hitler and doubt his bone-fides. In March 1939, six months after signing the Munich Agreement that promises "peace in our time", Hitler broke it and invaded Czechoslovakia.
Chamberlain finally realised that he and his predecessors had been naive, and failed to understand the fundamental difference in how autocracies work. They do not see compromise as bridge-building and trust-building, but as evidence of weakness - a weakness Hitler then exploited over and over. Hitler's deals were all about exploiting the weakness of appeasers. His leadership was all about zero-sum, not compromise. The more you compromised, the weaker your hand and he more saw you as weak.
As one historian put it, Chamberlain and Deladier in their negotiations with Hitler in Munich thought they were playing draughts, with one set of rules, while Hitler was playing chess, and by the time they realised they were playing different games with different rules, he had checkmated them.
As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Chamberlain had slashed British defence spending. He realised belatedly to his horror that he had made a monumental mistake, and that Hitler had the intention of invading more and more countries, including Britain. He belatedly as prime minister reversed the defence cuts.
He correctly judged that the most important element of the armed forces, one that could be properly built up quickly, was the RAF. It was Chamberlain's realisation of that, in the nick of time, that enabled Britain to win the Battle of Britain and that led to the postponement of his planned invasion of Britain, Operation Sea Lion, as he lacked crucial air superiority.
That also prevented Hitler's plan to invade Ireland, Operation Green, in late 1940, as Hitler guessed correctly (or via a spy somewhere) that Ireland and Britain were likely in a secret defence pact, and the RAF would severely disrupt his planned invasion through Waterford.
Even if the Nazi soldiers eventually got to land, in the delay, British soldiers, as part of the deal with Ireland, would have been brought from Northern Ireland by train down to attack German troops. (The British support for the Irish army's defence of Ireland was to be funded by £50,000 deposited by the Irish government in banks in Drogheda and Navan which the British military could access as their trains passed through both towns.)
The well-meaning naivety of the appeasers failed because the democracies failed to grasp that decision-making by autocrats is not based on compromises and looking for a win-win, but based on a zero-sum 'I win. You lose'.
We see exactly the same with Putin today in his supposed peace deal on Ukraine. It is a classic zero-sum: Ukraine cannot join NATO, cannot have European troops as peacekeepers, must slash the size of its armed forces, and lose critical strategic locations - leaving it, like Czechoslovakia after the loss of the Sudetenland, impossible to defend.
Trump, with his usual cluelessness, and Witkoff with his incompetence, doesn't get the tactics between Russia's demands, but Ukraine does, as do European leaders, and know it would be suicidal, and so could never accept a deal that left it wide open to a third Russian invasion. It would be as fatal as the Munich Agreement was for Czechoslovakia as it stripped it of its defensible border lands, which were in the Sudetenland.
Negotiating with an autocratic regime like Putin's is pointless if one imagines one is looking for compromises and a middle ground that is a win-win. Autocrats don't do compromises. Their world is about a zero-sum: they must win, you must lose. Any deal agreed is only, to borrow Albert Reynolds' famous phrase, a 'temporary little arrangement' they will break having tricked you into making potentially fatal compromises. In Munich, giving Germany the Sudetenland left Czechoslovakia fatally weakened as it was the Sudetenland was critical to Czechoslovakia's defence.
In a series of interviews after his resignation, Richard Nixon was asked about doing deals with the then Soviet Union. He said deals only worked if the effects of breaking a deal would prove catastrophic for the Soviet Union, meaning it was in their interests to honour it. If there was no self-interest in honouring it, Russia, like other autocracies who lived by zero-sum, would break it whenever it suited them. That was his experience in Congress, as Vice-President under Eisenhower, and as President. It was simply how autocracies operate. They must in effect be trapped in a deal they dare not break without devastating consequences. In effect, the deal must be based on compromise, but with a zero-sum behind it: if they break it, they lose.
⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.
