“Is Czechoslovakia worth an escalatory spiral that eventually ends with Moscow, London, Berlin or Washington ?”
asked Chamberlain at Munich in 1938
The correct answer is that there was no real UK interest vital or otherwise east of the Rhine, The British stupidly started the second world war and deatroyed their empire so that Germany could be forever destroyed as a great power. Small, all states are valueless in most cases and certainly not worth fighting for over due to cowardly politicians hiding behind some meaningless abstraction such as ‘defending democracy’ or ‘stopping aggression ‘., or my particular favorite ‘protecting the rights of small nations’. Apparently geographic dwarfism bestows special rights on micro states.