Rarely have the lessons of History seemed more pertinent than now, as Europe and the West, with deadlock in Ukraine, face an existential threat to their political, social and cultural civilisation, and very identity.

History provides a long list of opportunities to prevent tragedy that were wasted due to indolence and fudge. The most familiar example is in the lead-up to the Second World War. Hitler’s failed attempt in 1934, only a year after seizing power, to bully Austria into joining his German Reich, should have set alarm bells ringing. Yet only a tinkle was heard by the few people awake to the dangers posed by his explicitly declared ambitions. The clank of arms caused in March 1936 by Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland, which had been turned into a demilitarised buffer by the Treaty of Versailles, could not fail to wake more people, but most rolled over and went back to sleep. The Führer’s policy of rearmament, and the expansion of his army and navy, raised eyebrows and anxiety in military circles, but the lack of any effort to match it was justified by arguments about Germany’s right to defend itself and the need to deal with economic problems at home.

Hitler’s second, successful, bid to incorporate Austria into the German Reich, the Anschluss of March 1938, did wake people up. But his preparation for this move, by establishing an economic union first, and his well-managed window-dressing – the plebiscite in which 99 per cent of Austrians voted for the incorporation, as well as films showing joyful crowds greeting the invading German troops – provided British and French politicians with the excuse to accept something they felt they could do nothing about.

Winston Churchill’s was the only British voice loud enough to be heard protesting, pointing out that Germany had increased its population by seven million and its army by 100,000. It had gained access to a formidable range of resources, and, most importantly, transformed Germany into the dominant power in the Balkans, extended its influence over Hungary and Rumania, and encircled Czechoslovakia. Within a few months, Hitler went on to annex the Sudetenland and, in March 1939, to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia, adding further resources and a powerful armaments industry to his potential for war.

It could all have been prevented if more of those in power had heeded Churchill. ‘At that moment [the occupation of the Rhineland] I risked a great deal’, Hitler admitted to the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg in February 1938, only a month before the Anschluss. ‘If France had marched, we should have been forced to withdraw… But for France it is now too late.’ All Britain and France could do at that stage was to accept the fait accompli, sign the fatal Munich Agreement and, after failing to safeguard Czechoslovakia, issue a toothless guarantee to Poland.

An earlier lesson, more apposite to Europe’s current situation, is found in the 18th century. In 1772, Russia and Prussia, with the less than willing participation of Austria, carved up a Poland weakened by civil war and devoid of allies. It was a bad outcome for Austria, as it strengthened her rivals more than herself; the growing power of Prussia challenged her influence in Germany, while Russia’s aggressive interest in the Balkans threatened to outflank her. It was also disastrous for France; it had clashed unsuccessfully with Prussia over influence in Germany, having traditionally relied on alliances with Sweden, Poland and Turkey as a check on both Prussia and Austria. But French foreign policy was in a muddle, and the action of the three powers took France by surprise. France’s new foreign minister, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, considered a vigorous response to reverse it, but was defeated by a lack of appetite for confrontation and a general fatalism similar to that which Churchill would encounter 150 years later.

There was much outrage in England at the assault on Poland’s sovereignty by three powers with whom she was at peace, but there was no will to do anything about it. There was a feeling, too, that this would not be the end of the matter. The English diplomat Nathaniel Wraxall, who arrived in Poland in 1778, reflected that ‘there is strong reason to believe that the final dissolution of Poland cannot be very remote’. The French philosopher the Abbé de Mably, who described the partition of the country by her three neighbours as a profoundly ‘sinister event’, was also convinced that it was just the first step in the total destruction of the country. ‘Why, I ask you’, he wrote, ‘should Europe, in an effort to prevent a second partition of Poland, do what she did not do to prevent the first?’ Writing a decade and a half later, Edmund Burke expressed the view that, if Britain had been prepared to back France over the issue, they could have prevented the first partition of 1772. Yet he was forced to admit that there had been no political will to do so, only ‘a languor with regard to so remote an interest’.

In 1794, Russia and Prussia took advantage of Britain being distracted by war with a France weakened by revolution to perform a second carve-up. They were again unopposed. Burke spoke to a House of Commons in uproar at this ‘most flagrant instance of profligate perfidy that ever disgraced the annals of mankind’. The opposition accused the government of ‘spreading the gloom of tyranny over the Continent’ by permitting it to take place. A staunch supporter of the Polish cause, Burke was forced to admit that, as far as Britain’s reason of state was concerned, Poland was of so little importance that it ‘might be, in fact, considered as a country in the moon’ – a reflection to be echoed by Neville Chamberlain as he contemplated Germany’s conquest of Czechoslovakia, ‘a faraway country…of which we know nothing’.

Back in 1774, Burke had warned: ‘Poland was but a breakfast… where will they dine?’. Four decades after he wrote those words, in 1814, Tsar Alexander was dining in Paris. While one should not begrudge him the delights of tasting the artistry of Prince Talleyrand’s renowned chef Carême, the fact remains that, within 50 years of the first partition of Poland, Russia’s western frontier had moved more than 600 kilometres westward, and in 1815 by more than another 150 – not much further from where President Putin would like to see it again.

With hindsight, we know that Russia’s 18th-century creep into the heart of Europe could have been prevented, as could Hitler’s a century and a half later. The only thing lacking, as both Burke and Churchill pointed out, was the will to act, and there is plenty of that same ‘languor’ today. That is why Putin is frantically trying, by every means the internet can provide, to undermine western unity in support of Ukraine by nurturing this languor, realising that it is the only weapon he has left in his outdated and depleted armoury. If Putin is allowed to breakfast in Kyiv, one can only wonder about where he will dine.