In light of actual progress toward a peace proposal in the Russo-Ukrainian War, warmongers scrambled to hurl their favorite smear at the Trump administration. According to them, anything less than a total crushing victory over Russia is no different than British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany in 1938 and paves the way for further Russian aggression.
We’ve heard this accusation thrown around time after time from neocons, Democrat politicians, the propaganda press, and really anybody who is personally offended when America stays out of a foreign conflict for more than two seconds. Continuing in that vapid tradition, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a piece titled “Trump’s Neville Chamberlain Prize.”
The piece was based on initial reports of a proposed 28-point peace plan offered by the White House. That plan would cap Ukraine’s military strength at 600,000 troops (which would still make it among the largest militaries in the world), prohibit NATO troops from being stationed in Ukraine, and give Russia all of the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, the majority of which are already under Russian control. The White House announced Sunday that talks with Ukrainian officials about the peace plan had yielded a “updated and refined peace framework” but did not give details.
Given the current state of the war, these seem like reasonable terms. Russia gains a modest amount of Russian-speaking territory — ostensibly one of its main reasons for launching the war in the first place — from Ukraine, and it receives a de facto guarantee that Ukraine won’t join NATO.
But to Friedman, this is giving in to Hitler all over again. “If you force [the peace plan] upon Ukraine as it is, every one of your names will live in infamy alongside that of Chamberlain.”
[Chamberlain] was the British prime minister who advocated the policy of appeasement, which aimed to avoid war with Adolf Hitler’s Germany by giving in to his demands. This was concretized in the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Chamberlain, along with others in Europe, allowed Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain boasted it would secure “peace for our time.” A year later, Poland was invaded, starting World War II and leading to Chamberlain’s resignation — and his everlasting shame.
In his most outlandish sentence in the whole piece, Friedman predicts doom and subjugation for all of Europe as a result of this deal: “By rewarding Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine based on his obsession with making it part of Mother Russia, the U.S. will be putting the whole European Union under Putin’s thumb. Trump’s message to our allies will be clear: Don’t provoke Putin, because as long as I am commander in chief, the United States will pay no price and we will bear no burden in the defense of your freedom.”
First off, the United States has certainly “paid the price” for Ukraine’s defense, quite literally to the tune of nearly $200 billion, including under President Trump, and our military-industrial complex has certainly carried the burden, dealing with munitions shortages that have left us vulnerable to other threats like China.
Second, if anything, this war should help Putin realize that his forces would have absolutely zero chance against the full might of NATO, decreasing the chances of future aggression. Russia has suffered more than a million casualties and lost untold billions of dollars in military equipment it can ill afford to lose. If that’s the price it had to pay for two small provinces in eastern Ukraine, the price was far too steep.
The Ukrainians have held on for nearly four years, through generous U.S. and E.U. aid, with a population of around 35 million and a GDP of around $190 billion. NATO (which, mind you, includes the awesome military power of the United States) contains nearly a billion people in its 32 member nations, and its combined GDP is estimated to be between $50 and $60 trillion. By contrast, Russia has a population of 140 million and a GDP of $2.1 trillion.
As to the historical analogy to Chamberlain’s appeasement policy: It’s so tiresome and lazy. I could go into lengthy detail about why this analogy makes no sense and why appeasement was actually a shrewd policy by the Western Allies at the time.
Long story short for the uninitiated: The Allies engaged in appeasement to give themselves time to rearm. They knew time was on their side when it came to military production, and the longer they could delay a war, the more advantages they’d have against the Germans. Hitler and his generals were very aware of this fact, and it contributed heavily to their decision to go to war in 1939.
But I’ve done a couple of these now, and the lesson doesn’t seem to stick.
We could chalk this up to a lack of imagination or a lack of critical thinking skills on the part of the warmongers. But the real answer is far more cynical. They simply don’t care about presenting history accurately or correctly using historical events to connect to modern problems, and they never have. They’ll twist facts, distort context, and just flat-out lie to get what they want: more pointless, costly wars for the U.S. to drain its strength in.
And, in truth, it doesn’t matter what the Ukraine peace plan ends up including. Their pathological hatred for Russia as an entity and for the man trying to broker peace means no peace deal could ever be good enough for them. Ukraine could get a million square miles of new territory and Moscow out of the peace deal, and the warmongers would still compare Trump to Chamberlain.
Most wars throughout history have ended in a negotiated settlement. Wars of annihilation are a relatively new development and always cause far more destruction. Terrible historical analogies to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement only make peace harder to reach and show that the war hawks hold a total disregard for historical truth.
Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at The Daily Wire and as deputy editor/opinion editor at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel
