“is our peer competitor enemy from the war less than a generation ago gearing up for another run or just resuming normal sovereign operations?” as in 1936 or indeed even “are the border adjustments they want similar to those we have taken ourselves in the past and have given our allies in recent years?” as in 1936.

They are more like the equivalent of endless British or French colonial wars. Now that’s all fine and arguably a wholly legitimate use for professional, regular military forces, but it’s not what the GOP or Democrats have been selling the past generation.

It is not a perpetual 1938 [or 1936, or even 1947].

I’m not likely to be convinced that Chamberlain was wrong at Munich anymore, tolerably convinced that Britain gained more by 2 more years than Germany did.

But Rhineland. Maybe. Germany was pretty damned weak in 1936.

But it still offers problems, though. Rhineland was German soil and although it was supposed to stay demilitarized it was still Germany. 18 years after the war ever fewer people in Britain or France seemed to buy the case that French security entitled them to dictate the location of German forces on German soil.

A matter of nuance, perhaps. If the Germans started stationing huge forces, building scores of airfields, and so on, then it’d look different. The sort of arguments we’d have today over CFE issues.