Like Chamberlain in the 1930s, he sees Ukraine as a faraway quarrel to avoid. This won’t bring peace or stop Putin.
WSJ Opinion
With Donald Trump now heavily favored to be the Republican nominee for president, his policy ideas are in the limelight. But his proposed solution for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—the greatest security threat to Europe and the West in decades—has drawn little scrutiny or pushback. It can be summarized in one word: appeasement.
The word is a charged one, and I don’t use it lightly. It points directly to failed policies, especially those of past Democratic presidents, and implies that Mr. Trump’s proposed solution to the war in Ukraine is similarly doomed.
Last year he suggested letting Russia “take over” parts of Ukraine, and a few months ago claimed he would “resolve the war within 24 hours.” The only way to do that is to give Vladimir Putin what he wants, including recognition of Moscow’s proclaimed annexations in eastern and southern Ukraine.
The stalemate in Ukraine is frustrating, as is Washington’s dithering over unlocking funds to buck up Ukrainian forces. But Mr. Trump’s proposals are far worse, for all the reasons the West supposedly learned years ago.
The perils of appeasement—of thinking that granting concessions to an autocrat on the offensive will sate him—are legion. It is also a gross misreading of lessons learned, particularly in the lead-up to World War II, when Western leaders rolled over in the face of a genocidal maniac attempting to conquer Europe.
Neville Chamberlain, the figure most closely associated with appeasement, framed the Nazis’ ambition to shatter Czechoslovakia as a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” Limited to Adolf Hitler’s designs on Sudetenland, Chamberlain’s view might have seemed reasonable. But his policy in Munich stoked Hitler’s ambitions further, leading to the near-destruction of European civilization.
The reasons for Chamberlain’s failures are simple. He misunderstood Hitler’s ultimate designs and convinced the German tyrant that he could barrel through Western warnings without consequence. Over and again, the West proved Hitler right, until it was too late to prevent a world war. With such a policy in Ukraine, Mr. Trump risks the same.
Mr. Trump wouldn’t be the first American president to push appeasement. The Obama administration’s Iran policy involved turning a blind eye to Tehran’s support for proxy militias around the Middle East, so long as Iran gave up its nuclear program. That merely fueled the regime’s ambitions. So, too, did Barack Obama’s shortsighted “Russian reset” policy, as did the Biden administration’s initial belief that it could “park” Russia.
This kind of appeasement has a bipartisan legacy. But in Ukraine we now risk a horrific and destabilizing outcome.
As Joseph Goebbels wrote after the Munich agreements, Hitler’s “determination to obliterate the Czechs is unbroken.” So, too, is Mr. Putin’s determination to shatter Ukraine, especially if a policy of appeasement is pursued.
The scale of Hitler’s atrocities may make the comparison seem overwrought, but history increasingly rhymes despite Moscow’s lack of death camps and spiraling invasions elsewhere. Hitler and Putin both rose to power on the backs of conspiracy theories and notions of restoring great-power status to their countries. Both entrenched dictatorship on a platform of revanchist rhetoric and neoimperialist ambitions. And both, as scholars like Timothy Snyder have detailed, viewed Ukrainians as subalterns and Ukraine as the launchpad to European dominance.
Thinking that appeasement will satisfy Mr. Putin’s ambitions is as foolhardy as Chamberlain’s belief that such a policy could halt Hitler—not least because it elides Mr. Putin’s broader goals in Europe. While Mr. Putin supposedly aims at “de-Nazifying” Kyiv, the Kremlin is pushing for broader and more unsettling goals. As Russia scholar Fiona Hill wrote in early 2022, “Putin hopes he can strike a new security deal with NATO and Europe to avoid an open-ended conflict, and then it will be America’s turn to leave, taking its troops and missiles with it.” Thinking the war is solely about territory in eastern Ukraine is as myopic as thinking that Hitler wanted reunification with Sudeten Germans and nothing more.
Contra Chamberlain, the war in Ukraine is hardly a faraway quarrel. Those pushing appeasement appear to know nothing of Mr. Putin or the Kremlin’s ultimate designs. The idea that appeasing him will bring peace in our time should be dismissed out of hand—and has no place in the White House.
Mr. Michel is author of the forthcoming book “Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World.”
