Our Chamberlain?

It is probably not fair to the British prime minister of the late 1930s, Neville Chamberlain, to compare him to President Donald Trump. When he tried to appease Hitler at Munich in September 1938, Chamberlain had an urgent reason: he was hoping to avert British involvement in a war for which the country was not prepared. By then, in violation of the Versailles Treaty, Germany had gone a long way toward rearming and reestablishing itself as a military power, including by annexing Austria earlier that year. Now Hitler was determined to annex the territory of Czechoslovakia that Germany called the Sudetenland, ostensibly to protect the rights of the ethnic Germans living there. His plan would not only violate the Versailles Treaty—which had formally recognized Czechoslovakia as an independent multiethnic nation and required Germany to cede it additional land—but also give Germany control of much of the country’s mineral resources and substantial manufacturing capacity. As Telford Taylor wrote in his magisterial history, Munich: The Price of Peace, Chamberlain knew that “the small British Army would be modernized but not much enlarged, and would not be intended for continental employment.” The RAF, for its part, “was growing, but the Luftwaffe was growing faster.”¹

In attempting to appease Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump has no interest of comparable urgency. News of his call with Putin on February 12—Putin’s first direct conversation with a US president since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine began three years ago—came as an unnerving surprise. It was, Trump insisted on social media, a “highly productive” ninety minutes: “We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.” Above all they discussed Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, on which Trump promised to “start negotiations immediately.” He does not seem to have called Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in advance, only informing him of the conversation after the fact. To make matters worse, earlier that day Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had asserted publicly that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to seek restoration of its pre-conflict borders, that the United States would rule out Ukraine’s accession to NATO, and that the US would hardly come to Ukraine’s military aid—in effect conceding these crucial negotiating points in advance. 

It was the start, on Trump’s part, of an accelerating turn away from Ukraine. A week later he started escalating his attacks against Zelensky on social media, calling him “a Dictator without elections.” (Actually, Zelensky was elected in 2019 by a landslide, with 73 percent of the vote, and the martial law that went into effect after Russia’s invasion required the suspension of elections. Trump has not been known to mention the means by which Putin has held on to his power.) He claimed that Zelensky had “talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and ‘TRUMP,’ will never be able to settle.” (Actually, since Russia invaded three years ago, the United States has provided Ukraine roughly half the level of support Trump cited.) He claimed that Zelensky had a 4 percent approval rating. (Actually, according to polls in Ukraine and the United States, Zelensky’s approval rating is substantially higher than Trump’s own, and in the past week it has reportedly risen.) It was hard to disagree when, on February 19, Zelensky suggested that Trump had been “caught in a web of disinformation.”

The humiliation culminated on February 28, when Zelensky visited the Oval Office to discuss a planned deal giving the US partial access to revenue from Ukraine’s mineral resources. (Zelensky had earlier rejected Trump’s proposal that Ukraine should reimburse the United States for its support by turning over much of the country’s future mineral extraction revenue.) For his part, Zelensky came prepared to ask the US to offer Ukraine a guarantee of security against a renewed Russian assault should the countries reach a cease-fire agreement. Trump and J.D. Vance, however, used the meeting—which took place in front of the press—to attack Zelensky on camera for being “disrespectful” and insufficiently “thankful.” He had walked into a trap. When he left the White House it seemed as if he was being thrown out.

It is difficult to think of any volte-face in American foreign policy comparable to Trump’s shift away from his predecessor’s support for Ukraine as the victim of Russian aggression. His rationale for this reversal was not entirely clear. Trump has had a fraught relationship with Ukraine since his first impeachment in 2019, which turned on allegations that he had tried to pressure Zelensky into impugning members of the Biden family for their activities in the country. In his first term he also cultivated cordial relationships with such dictators and would-be dictators as Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán. Chamberlain had no grudge against the Czechs or their leaders akin to Trump’s against Zelensky, and he hardly seemed intent on ingratiating himself with Hitler.

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When Chamberlain agreed to meet with Hitler, he initially asked that the country they were to discuss should be present at the meeting. It was Hitler who excluded the Czechs, a decision with which Chamberlain went along. (Also invited were Edouard Daladier, Premier of France, and Benito Mussolini, the Duce of Italy.) Representatives from Czechoslovakia would be allowed to attend but not to take part in the discussion, only to hear the decision. What they learned was that Chamberlain and Daladier had acceded to everything Hitler wanted. German annexation of the Sudetenland would begin right away. Hitler’s troops entered the country on October 1.

There is no evidence, in contrast, that Trump ever offered to include Ukraine at the meeting between Russia and the United States that took place in Riyadh on February 18. In an interview with The Economist conducted hours before reports emerged of Trump and Putin’s call, Zelensky warned that “if Russia is left alone with America, Putin with Trump, or their teams, they will receive manipulative information.” Now that fear seemed to be coming true. In spite of complaints from European leaders, the talks in Riyadh went forward with only Russians, Americans, and, as mediators, Saudis. Afterwards Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press that his conversations with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were only the beginning of a process. Ukraine was not informed of any agreements that may have been reached.

When Chamberlain flew back to London on September 30, a large and enthusiastic crowd greeted him at the airport and praised him for achieving “peace for our time.” From the airport he went to Buckingham Palace, where he celebrated with the king and queen. Then, accompanied by his wife, he joined the royal couple on the palace balcony to accept the applause of a cheering crowd. It was apparently the first time the palace permitted commoners to stand at that spot.

Not everyone in England was enthusiastic. Some of the agreement’s staunchest critics were members of Parliament in the prime minister’s own Conservative Party. Among them were Duff Cooper (who resigned his post as First Lord of the Admiralty), Anthony Eden, Harold MacMillan, and, most notably, Winston Churchill, who told Parliament on October 5 that “we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.”

The dimensions of that defeat soon became apparent. The Germans annexed the Sudetenland quickly and often with considerable violence. The victims included many Jews who belonged to Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking minority. In the months following the annexation, the remainder of the country fell apart. Hungary and Poland seized part of its territory. On March 15, 1939, German troops marched into Prague.

Hitler had assured Chamberlain that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand, but after Germany took over Prague, reports started to emerge that Poland—where some ethnic Germans also lived—would be next. Later that March, Chamberlain issued a public guarantee: “In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all the support in their power.” France, he said, had authorized him to guarantee the same commitment on its behalf. It was a bold gesture, but it came too late to prevent the German invasion of Poland that September, and with it the start of World War II.

Trump has been far weaker at curbing Putin’s aggression than Chamberlain was at curbing Hitler’s. His administration’s preemptive concessions undercut Rubio’s negotiating power at Riyadh. He has made clear, meanwhile, that he wishes to rehabilitate Putin’s status in the West by calling for Russia’s return to the G7 group of industrialized nations, which had been the G8 before Russia seized Crimea in 2014. In the past, when Russia has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the possibility that the United States would retaliate has served as a deterrent. The prospects for such deterrence are much fainter now. Trump, for his part, seems concerned less with the resulting danger to international security than with disparaging Zelensky. “I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you,” Trump told Fox News Radio on February 21. “He makes it very hard to make deals.”