A powerful country, trying to restore its former glory a few decades after losing a major global conflict, starts testing the international community, violating agreements, and eventually gobbling up a couple of small territories in Eastern Europe. Met with Western weakness, it is eventually emboldened to launch a full-scale invasion of one of its neighbors. Such is the story not only of recent events in Ukraine, but also of Adolf Hitler’s assault first on Czechoslovakia and then on Poland. In the recent Netflix film Munich: The Edge of War, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s famous capitulation in the titular city in 1938 is made out to be an act of strategic wisdom. Meir Soloveichik writes in his review:

The film . . . portrays a canny prime minister who seeks to buy time before a war that seems likely to come. In the movie, following the conference at Munich, the English aide glumly goes home and tells his wife that Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler was “just a delay.” He goes on: “The PM’s given us a chance of winning the damn thing when it happens. It’s quite some service when you think about it.” The film further concludes by informing the audience that Chamberlain’s agreement allowed time for Britain to arm, as if preparation for war had been the prime minster’s intention all along.

The only problem with this assertion is that it is preposterously false, and we know this because of what the film deliberately omits: . . . when Chamberlain stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace clutching his agreement in hand and compared himself to Benjamin Disraeli, who had returned from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 where he truly had achieved a peaceable solution to a raging territorial conflict in Europe: “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”

If Chamberlain had not truly believed at the moment that he had made peace with Hitler—as the aide’s remark at the end of the movie suggests—would he have ever said such a thing? If . . . the film truly believes what it asserts about Chamberlain, why would it cut the most famous moment in the Munich story?

Jews therefore have a special stake in seeing that the depiction of Munich and its aftermath are true and correct. This does not mean that a statesman must always prefer war to the alternative; Churchill himself famously opined that “it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.” But one central lesson of Munich—the conference, not the movie—is that it is essential to recognize when evil exists, and it is precisely in this area that Chamberlain failed so profoundly.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.