When the pro-Ukraine leaders of Europe heard that President Trump had decided to have last Friday’s Ukraine-specific face-to-face meeting with the invader Vladimir Putin, those European allies must have shot out of their chairs in alarm. Knowing that Putin exercises a kind of cordyceps hold on Trump’s mind, they would rightly have worried about what might result from the American president’s inability to show to Putin the toughness required as the Russian works to dismember Ukraine.
Trump has repeatedly said that Ukraine should not expect to recover territory within its borders that Russia has seized. That means Trump expects President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people simply to turn their backs on the approximately 20 percent of Ukraine that Russia significantly controls: all of the Crimean Peninsula and, generally, the eastern region of Ukraine known as Donbas, and some additional provinces.
A significant displacement of Ukrainians began in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea after a pro-European revolution occurred in Kyiv, and the displacement accelerated with the arrival of Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Some 3 million Ukrainians now live under Russian authority on their own Ukrainian soil. In an ideal world, most Ukrainians would not agree to cede even an inch of their country’s territory to the Russian aggressor, but war might so exhaust and terrify them that they clamor to fold and walk away. Putin is counting on that. And Putin is counting on Trump to bring Zelenskyy to that acceptance.
Thus we have the spectacle of Trump, the president of the United States, running interference for the butcher Putin.
Our European allies have taken note.
When, after the Alaska meeting, it was announced that Zelenskyy and Trump would meet at the White House on Monday (yesterday), the European allies must have been even more alarmed. They and Zelenskyy would have recalled the disgraceful berating of the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office in February by Trump and Vice President JD Vance. That White House meeting was an ambush against Zelenskyy.
This time around, Zelenskyy came with a posse of the willing: NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen; Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni; Finnish President Alexander Stubb; German Chancellor Friedrich Merz; French President Emmanuel Macron; and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. They would not allow Zelenskyy to be ambushed by Trump a second time. And TACO Trump behaved himself.
While speaking on Fox by phone this morning (on the day after the meeting), Trump was asked by an interviewer how he had managed to bring so many European leaders to the Oval Office together so quickly. Well, Trump said, America is respected again. A year ago, he said, such a thing would not have happened.
He was wrong on the first point and right on the second. A year ago, such a gathering would not have occurred because it would not have been necessary. This country’s allies in Europe had respected this country enough that they fully expected that it would do right by Ukraine. On Monday, they came here to Washington, and quickly, to ensure that Trump did not abuse Zelenskyy and bully him into caving to Putin’s demands.
What happened at the White House on Monday was not a display of responsible American leadership, as the White House has been spinning it. What happened there was an intervention. Those leaders who visited knew that Trump just cannot quit Putin and that there was a risk of a second disgraceful Oval Office performance by Trump if Zelenskyy stepped into the snake pit by himself.
It has to be said that even as a doddering president with a foggy mind, Joe Biden had a mostly properly functioning moral compass. His doddering steps were nearly always pointing him in the right direction, and unerringly in the matter of Ukraine.
Not so with Trump. His inflated ego is the magnetic north that guides his moral compass. When he met with Putin on Friday, that was an exercise in self-gratification (he is desperate for a Nobel Peace Prize), and also appeasement.
The European leaders who visited us on Monday grasp the relevant history in a way that is far superior to Trump’s awareness of it. They remember Europe’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler as first he rearmed Germany in violation of post-World War I treaty limits, then remilitarized the Rhineland, then executed the annexation of Austria via the Anschluss, then purloined the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and then invaded Czechoslovakia outright.
Next came Hitler’s triggering of the pivotal Danzig crisis, which ran through the summer of 1939 and was the last great spasm before that maniac launched what would become World War II. He wanted to retake control of Danzig, a largely ethnically German city over which Germany lost control with its defeat in WWI. But Danzig was now, by international treaty, a free city, the property of no particular nation, although it was connected administratively with its direct neighbor Poland. Germany, too, was a direct neighbor.
When Hitler signed a surprise nonaggression pact with Russia in late August 1939, providing himself security on his eastern front, France and Britain really began to panic. Britain was led by Neville Chamberlain, who in 1938 had appeasingly signed on the dotted line when Germany took the Sudentenland and Hitler gave an assurance that he had no further territorial ambitions. “Peace in our time,” Chamberlain said on his return from the now-infamous Munich Conference. How the British and the French cheered! How Hitler chortled!
A year later, the appeaser was recognizing his mistake and also stiffening his spine. But because he had earlier appeased Hitler, the tyrant did not think that his British adversary really would stand up if Germany invaded Poland. And if Britain did not stand up, neither would France, must have been Hitler’s calculation.
On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany and Russia attacked Poland. The rest is history.
It is a history that Europe remembers well. In Trump, Europe sees a new Chamberlain. The European leaders know that Ukraine is a modern Sudentenland, and they know that if Putin, a modern Hitler, is not stopped in Ukraine, Europe will end up fighting him in a wider war because he will not have been satisfied with forcing down the unpleasant meal that Ukraine has proved itself to be. Putin “hungers for sweeter meats,” to quote from “The Lord of the Rings.”
That is what Monday at the White House was really about. It was not an example of American leadership. It was an example of European leadership by intervention to head off a world-engulfing catastrophe. Thank God above that the Europeans are beginning to figure out how to handle Donald J. Chamberlain.
Democracy Warrior 