{"id":347442,"date":"2025-08-15T20:50:20","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T20:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/347442\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T20:50:20","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T20:50:20","slug":"why-donald-trump-should-heed-the-lessons-of-munich-1938-when-he-meets-putin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/347442\/","title":{"rendered":"why Donald Trump should heed the lessons of Munich 1938 when he meets Putin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump meets Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15 for their first summit<\/a> of Trump\u2019s second term. Their topic of discussion will be the war in Ukraine. The pair may decide the fate of the country which Putin began to illegally occupy in 2014 and which Russian forces invaded in an outright war of aggression in February 2022. <\/p>\n

Trump has hinted that he could agree, in a two-way summit without the involvement of the Ukrainian president<\/a> Volodymyr Zelensky, to the handing over of Ukrainian territory to Russia. If he does, this would bear close resemblance to an act of betrayal which took place in Munich on September 30 1938<\/a> and, ominously, is now understood as a key step on the road to the second world war. <\/p>\n

The deal struck by the then British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and his French counterpart, \u00c9douard Daladier, with the German leader Adolf Hitler handed Hitler territory in Germany\u2019s neighbour Czechoslovakia in return for what Chamberlain erroneously boasted would be \u201cpeace in our time\u201d. Within months Nazi Germany would take control of much of the rest of Czechoslovakia and in less than a year the whole of Europe would be at war.<\/p>\n

Similar to the Trump-Putin summit\u2019s exclusion of Zelensky, the Czech leader Edvard Bene\u0161<\/a> was not included in the Munich summit. There had already been ample indication of Hitler\u2019s bad faith in the spring and summer of 1938. Hitler had begun issue increasingly strident complaints about alleged Czech mistreatment<\/a> of the German-speaking minority in Sudetenland, territory which had been handed to the newly formed state of Czecholoslovakia after the first world war, but which contained 3 million ethnic Germans. <\/p>\n

By May Hitler was openly talking about destroying Czechoslovakia and on September 12 he made a speech<\/a> vowing to \u201csolve the question\u201d once and for all. In response Chamberlain flew to see Hitler at Bad Godesberg, where they agreed<\/a> that Germany would take control of all areas of the Sudetenland with a greater than 50% concentration of Germans. <\/p>\n

The British prime minister persuaded the Czech president Edvard Bene\u0161 to accede to this demand, but within days Hitler had reneged, saying he would have the whole territory by October 1. This prompted Britain and France to accelerate their rearmament efforts. Chamberlain ordered the British fleet to put out to sea and on September 25 France ordered its army to mobilise.<\/p>\n

The next step was choreographed with the help of Italy\u2019s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who \u2013 in the knowledge that Italy was not ready for a European war at that stage \u2013 set up another conference for September 29-30 in Munich. Britain and France agreed to travel to meet Hitler, who at that stage was aware that there was little appetite for war either among the German people or his own generals.<\/p>\n

Bene\u0161, meanwhile, was preparing his people to resist the German threat. Troops were sent to the borders between Sudetenland and Germany where Czechoslovakia had built considerable fortifications. <\/p>\n

Chamberlain and Daladier duly met Hitler in Munich where over two days an agreement for the occupation of Sudetenland was thrashed out and a four page document<\/a> signed by the three leaders and Mussolini. No Czech official was involved in either the negotiations or the signing of the agreement.<\/p>\n

\"Map<\/a><\/p>\n

Czechoslovakia in 1938 with Sudetenland.
\n Weiner Holocaust Library<\/p>\n

On hearing of the deal, Bene\u0161 said<\/a>: \u201cMunich is a betrayal that will be its own punishment,\u201d adding: \u201cBritain and France think they will save themselves from war and revolution at our expense, but they are wrong.\u201d He stepped down a few days later.<\/p>\n

Relief \u2013 but a disastrous outcome<\/p>\n

At the time, the British press cheered Chamberlain as a hero<\/a> and the agreement as a diplomatic triumph. It\u2019s important to remember that at that stage, just 20 years after the catastrophic Great War had finished, there was very little appetite for another major conflict in Europe. <\/p>\n

As The Times, which was in lockstep with the government on this issue, explained in an editorial \u201cfeelings were running so high\u201d that the separation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia \u201cwithout a plebiscite seemed the only solution\u201d. The newspapers editor at the time, Geoffrey Dawson<\/a>, was a convinced supporter of Chamberlain so closely connected to the British Government that he has been described as \u201can ex officio member of the Cabinet\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hitler\u2019s gamble had paid off. His troops occupied the Sudetenland on October 1<\/a> 1938, securing for Germany the extensive border fortifications Czechoslovakia had prepared for its own defence. Within a matter of months Germany was ready to execute the second part of Hitler\u2019s plan for Czechoslovakia. <\/p>\n

On March 15, having used the same strategy of reporting the mistreatment of ethnic Germans in Bohemia and Moravia, Hitler summoned Emil H\u00e1cha, a quietly spoken lawyer who had been drafted in to replace Bene\u0161 after Munich.<\/p>\n

Informing the new Czech leader that the order had already been given to the Luftwaffe to launch bombing raids over Prague and other big cities, the German leader forced H\u00e1cha to agree to accept an agreement whereby his country would become a German protectorate. <\/p>\n

Chamberlain\u2019s efforts to appease Hitler may have secured time for Britain to rearm and prepare for war. However, this had not been Chamberlain\u2019s objective. He believed that by offering the Nazi regime what it wanted, he could secure an enduring peace. In fact, his concessions encouraged Hitler\u2019s belief that threats of force could secure territorial gains. <\/p>\n

The concern now must be that if Donald Trump accedes too readily to Putin\u2019s territorial demands, Ukraine may suffer the same fate. Trump has already talked of \u201cland swaps\u201d<\/a>. <\/p>\n

If he agrees to allow Russia to annex what is left of the Donbas, it will mean that a vital area of territory<\/a> where Ukraine\u2019s armed forces have been holding Russia at bay since 2014 will be handed to Russia. This would leave the way clear for a resumption of hostilities at a later date, this time without the barriers of Ukraine\u2019s fortified defensive line. <\/p>\n

Ukraine \u2013 and Europe \u2013 will be hoping that Trump can hold his nerve when he meets Putin in Alaska on Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump meets Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15 for their first summit of Trump\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[332],"class_list":{"0":"post-347442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-russia"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115034759423790976","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}