The Return Of Danegeld
Why Europeans will soon be paying vast annual sums to Russia, and more
Students of history will recall that the word Danegeld refers to the practice of preyed-upon people paying huge sums of money to bloodthirsty adversaries in order to obtain a brief respite from slaughter and looting. Unfortunately, while the short-term gain seemed beguiling, the longer-term consequence was to ensure that the adversary’s capacity to inflict harm increased because much of the payment could be used to acquire more weapons and build more raiding ships.
This is essentially the same problem as arises with protection rackets: the store owner buys a temporary reprieve from violence but the money they hand over enables the mobsters to buy more guns and hire more goons.
On a larger scale the same dynamic pertains. The appeal of appeasement in the 1930s was that it provided the illusion of peace while in reality enabling aggressor nations to continue to build up their military and economic capacity for waging war so that the inevitable conflict was far, far worse than if the so-called “Great Powers” had acted decisively earlier on.
Unfortunately, the limitations of human cognition and our hardwired patterns of behavior ensure we reliably fall into the same trap over and over again. Fearful self-absorbed…
