As things are developing we say yes. — Ed.
“This is a far, far away country about which we know very little,” said Neville Chamberlain in 1938 as he declined to take his country to war over Adolf Hitler’s claim to the Sudetenland.
Indeed, Chamberlain knew almost nothing of Czechoslovakia, inside whose borders, set at the Paris peace conference of 1919, dwelled 7 million Czechs, dominant over 3.25 million Germans, 2.5 million Slovaks, 800,000 Hungarians, 500,000 Ruthenians and 150,000 Poles, all of whom had been consigned to Prague without their consent.
Czechoslovakia was an artificial nation, its borders drawn up by Allied mapmakers to compensate the Czechs who had risen up against the Habsburg Empire and helped to defeat the Kaiser.
The world today is like Czechoslovakia 1938, only infinitely more so.
In this young century, America has gone to war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Pakistan. Belatedly, in all four, we discovered that, before we plunged in, we knew nothing of the complexity of these countries.