Trump must not let himself become Neville Chamberlain to Putin

In September 1938, United Kingdom Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed his legacy as history’s exemplar of appeasement and the dangers it engenders.  Adolf Hitler had massed hundreds of thousands of troops on the border of Czechoslovakia to reinforce a low-intensity war designed to force Prague to cede the Sudetanland. In an effort to preclude great power war, Chamberlain, in collusion with France and Italy, forced Prague to sign the Munich Agreement which provided for Hitler’s annexation of that territory. 

Chamberlain returned to London declaring the achievement of “peace for our time.” The reality was that instead Munich catalyzed the dynamics that unleashed World War II. Today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and President Donald Trump’s approach to ending that unjustified attack echoes eerily and dangerously the period leading to that World War and Chamberlain’s mistaken response to violent aggression. 

Russia now occupies nearly a fifth of Ukraine, and its offensive continues unbated. President Trump asserts that if reelected he will end the war “in one day.” While Trump remains vague as to how he would do that, he is steadfast in refusing to say he wants Ukraine to win this war. He asserts that promising Ukraine NATO membership had been a “mistake” and was “really why this war started.” 

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), his vice presidential nominee, and others associated with President Trump have proposed a solution in which Russia would retain the land it has seized and Ukraine would abandon its effort to join the NATO alliance, accepting the imposition of permanent neutrality,the latter a long-standing demand of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Like Hitler in 1938, Putin presents Russia as a country unfairly treated by history and, like Hitler, he is determined to reconstitute its great power status through territorial expansion. The central focus of this imperial campaign is Ukraine, which he falsely asserts is “not a real country” but rather an off-shoot of Russian culture and history. Hitler likewise asserted to Chamberlain that Czechoslovakia was not a real nation and should be dissolved. Both Hitler and Putin conducted aggressive campaigns of subterfuge and violence to weaken their target countries. Each accused Prague and Kyiv, respectively, of extremist actions against German and Russian minorities, respectively.   

Trump and his advisors are urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do what Chamberlain pressured Czech President Eduard Benes to do, accept Russian dominion over a significant portion of his nation. In addition, by pressing Ukraine to accept neutrality, especially when a vast majority of Ukrainians want their nation to join NATO, Trump is in effect demanding that Ukraine accept Russian imposed limits on its sovereignty.   

While the former U.S. president asserts he just wants to “stop the killing” and to avoid World War III with a nuclear power — the latter being the appeasement of Putin’s nuclear threats — he forgets that Chamberlain’s concessions only whetted Hitler’s imperial ambitions. They convinced the Fuhrer that France, the United Kingdom and for that matter other potential adversaries including the United States, lacked the fortitude necessary to defeat his ambitions. 

Nearly a year later, in August of 1939 as Hitler finalized plans to invade Poland, he told his generals: “Our enemies are men below average, not men of action, not masters. They are little worms. I saw them at Munich.”  

Were Trump to force Ukraine to effectively cede territory to Russia, what would Putin then be telling his generals about the United States and NATO? Ceding Crimea and other occupied territories to Putin will only reinforce his confidence in his ability to seize the rest of Ukraine, if not the Baltics and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe — just as Hitler later moved to seize Prague in early 1939 and then Poland in September of that year.

And, what would other adversaries of the U.S. conclude?  When the Munich Agreement was signed, the Soviet Union was formally allied with France, an agreement rooted in a previous pro-Western shift in Moscow’s foreign policy. But the weakness of London and Paris in the face of Hitler’s aggression contributed to Moscow’s realignment toward Hitler and the eventual and infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to divvy up Europe between Stalin’s and Hitler’s control. The Munich agreement also animated Nazi Germany’s alliance with Japan, which saw it as a reflection of Berlin’s growing power and a validation of its own ambitions in the Pacific. 

A territorial victory for Russia in Ukraine risks further unleashing a similar dynamic already at play in today’s world. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is no longer a regional event. It is now actively supported by China, Iran and North Korea. This “axis of upheaval” is not only stoking the high intensity war in Europe, it is driving the violence across the Middle East and buttressing China’s increasingly aggressive provocations across the Indo-Pacific. It should be no surprise that each of these crises are steadily escalating, each in effect ratcheting up the others.

The top national security priority of the next U.S. administration will be to prevent these crises from escalating into global conflagration whose potential destruction far exceeds that of World War II. That will require first and foremost, not appeasement to Russia, but the decisive defeat of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the most intense and destructive of today’s escalating conflicts, and Ukraine’s integration into the alliance to secure that victory and ensure military stability in its aftermath. 

Such a defeat is the most effective way to neutralize Putin’s imperial ambitions. It would demonstrate with clarity to Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang  that the United States and its democratic allies retain the resoluteness, resolve and political will necessary to forcefully defend their shared interests and values — that the axis of upheaval faces inevitable defeat. 

The tragedies that flowed from the Munich agreement should warn us against strategies of concession in response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Forcing Kyiv to cede territory and accept imposed neutrality and the enduring vulnerability that it would entail, all in the hope of placating Putin’s revanchist ambitions — is a proven recipe for continued, if not escalated hostility from Russia and its allies.

If Trump is elected and exercises this course of action, he will find himself seated alongside Chamberlain in the pantheon of appeasement. And we will all pay the price.  

Ian J. Brzezinski is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Europe and NATO Policy.