In 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich brandishing a signed document from Hitler and declaring a “peace for our time”. Less than a year later, World War II began.
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US President Donald Trump, who has pledged to “end wars” and bring world peace, is at risk of echoing Chamberlain’s experience as he negotiates for peace with Russian President Vladimir Putin. More accurately, we are all at risk, because the consequences will affect everyone.
A forced Ukrainian capitulation, which Trump appears to favour, wouldn’t bring stability. It would breed chaos – mass migration, a surge in illegal weapons and seismic geopolitical aftershocks. The worst-case scenario? A Russian-fuelled civil war in Ukraine. I saw this first-hand in 2014 in Donbas and dread its spread across the country – or beyond.
The 1953 Korean armistice left the peninsula in a state of tension for decades. A forced settlement in Ukraine could lead to a similar outcome.
Putin might seem “more generous than he has to be” to Trump, but he’s still the one who kicked off the war and brutally keeps it going. In the 11 years since seizing Crimea and eastern Ukrainian territory, he has never backed down – not to sanctions, isolation or economic pressure. As US Senator Lindsey Graham warned: “If you give Putin Ukraine, he will not stop.”
If European leaders overlooked Churchill’s warning that an appeaser is one who “hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last”, Trump’s unpredictable actions might have pulled their heads out of the sand.