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“It is probably not fair to the British prime minister of the late 1930s, Neville Chamberlain, to compare him to President Donald Trump,” writes Aryeh Neier in the NYR Online this week. “When he tried to appease Hitler at Munich in September 1938, Chamberlain had an urgent reason: he was hoping to avert British involvement in a war for which the country was not prepared…. In attempting to appease Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump has no interest of comparable urgency.”

Instead, Neier argues, Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have made preemptive and unnecessary concessions to Putin and humiliated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, without even the suggestion of peace from Russia. “Trump has been far weaker at curbing Putin’s aggression,” Neier notes, “than Chamberlain was at curbing Hitler’s.”

Below, alongside Neier’s essay, are four articles from our archives about Chamberlain and the costs of appeasement.

Aryeh Neier
Our Chamberlain?

Donald Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine has been even more inept and inexplicable than the appeasement of Hitler at Munich.

Christopher R. Browning
Giving In to Hitler

“But there was another decisive quality in Chamberlain’s personality: he stubbornly subordinated the assessment of evidence to the preservation of his own prior convictions. When confronted with an analysis of Hitler’s own writings and statements that made his goal of war perfectly clear, Chamberlain retreated into complete denial: ‘If I accepted the author’s conclusions I should despair, but I don’t and won’t.’”

—September 26, 2019

Tony Judt
The Reason Why

“The passage of time, and the fond illusions fostered by the security of the cold war era and the fall of communism, have returned us to an earlier perspective in which ethics and national self-interest have parted company. We are now taught to think of foreign conflicts, in James Baker’s deathless phrase, as fights in which we have ‘no dog.’”

—May 20, 1999

John Kenneth Galbraith
Hitler: Hard to Resist

In recent times an offensively imaginative revisionism has come to suggest that Hitler was a political and military genius who, in his lofty and statesmanlike way, was only marginally aware of the butchery of the Jews and the Poles. Much of this book consists of the case which German civilians and generals [in the Claus von Stauffenberg conspiracy] made to each other for deleting Hitler. They were not in the slightest doubt as to what his brainless military megalomania was doing to Germany or what he personally was doing to the Eastern peoples and the Jews. Indeed, Professor Hoffmann’s book accumulates into one of the most horrifying pictures of Hitler yet. One shudders as always that such a mad criminal could get loose with such a pack in a civilized country in this century.

—September 15, 1977

David Cannadine
Munich Man

“Chamberlain was variously described as having been ‘a good mayor of Birmingham in a lean year,’ with ‘a retail mind in a wholesale business,’ who looked ‘at affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.’ Nevertheless, he became prime minister in 1937, and in the following year went to see Hitler at Munich, dressed with inadvertent appropriateness like an undertaker.”

—March 28, 1985

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