Milan Kundera once defined a small nation as "one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it."
The United States is not a small nation. Neither is Japan. Or France. These nations may suffer defeats. They may even be occupied. But they cannot disappear. Kundera's Czechoslovakia could—and once did. Prewar Czechoslovakia is the paradigmatic small nation: a liberal democracy created in the ashes of war by a world determined to let little nations live free; threatened by the covetousness and sheer mass of a rising neighbor; compromised fatally by a West grown weary "of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing"; left truncated and defenseless, succumbing finally to conquest. When Hitler entered Prague in March 1939, he declared, "Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist."
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