Peace in Our Time

We’ve been here before. In 1938 the Sudetenland was carved off Czechoslovakia with the blessing of the so-called grown-ups in the room. The excuse then was that it was full of ethnic Germans who, poor lambs, felt alienated under Prague’s rule. Hitler swore blind that once he had those mountain valleys he’d be satisfied. A year later, tanks were rolling into Poland and the world was ablaze. Appeasement wasn’t just cowardice – it was complicity.

Fast-forward to today. Ukraine stands where Czechoslovakia once did, and the Kremlin has its eye on more than just Donbas or Crimea. The excuse is the same tired playbook: “ethnic Russians,” “historical lands,” “security concerns.” All nonsense, of course – it’s naked expansionism. Just as the Sudetenland was the opening act for Lebensraum, so Ukraine is only the start of Putin’s imperial project.

What do we hear from the apologists in the West? The same old waffle about “understanding Putin’s concerns,” “Ukraine being a buffer,” “maybe a negotiated settlement.” It’s the Munich Agreement all over again, dressed up in modern PR. Peace at any price, they say – except the price is always paid by someone else first. Ukrainians now, Poles and Balts later.

And let’s lance another boil while we’re here: the nuclear bogeyman. Nukes are only used on lands you don’t intend to occupy. That means Ukraine won’t be nuked by Putin – he wants it intact. The Baltics? Same problem – he’d rather absorb them. Poland? Quite possibly on the wish-list. So who’s left as a potential target? The rest of Europe. Us. The irony is grotesque: by tip-toeing around Putin, Western leaders aren’t avoiding nuclear risk – they’re increasing it.

George Santayana nailed it in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And yet here we are, watching Putin smirk as today’s Chamberlains shuffle forward, clutching their papers and muttering about “security guarantees.” We know the script. We know the ending. Still, some would rather replay it, this time with nuclear weapons in the wings.

And then there’s Trump. He bellows that Ukraine mustn’t be admitted to NATO as part of any deal. Why? Because a strong Ukraine inside NATO would slam the door on Putin’s ambitions for good – and that’s the one thing Trump won’t do. Instead, he waves around his party piece about “six wars” he supposedly stopped: Israel–Iran, Congo–Rwanda, Cambodia–Thailand, India–Pakistan, Egypt–Ethiopia, Serbia–Kosovo. A grab-bag of shaky ceasefires and half-forgotten disputes, some of which he barely remembers, having once called the Democratic Republic of Congo the “Republic of Condo.” These are sideshows at best – the geopolitical equivalent of fixing a dripping tap while the house burns down.

The central war of our time is in Ukraine. The survival of European security depends on it. Trump’s refusal to back NATO membership for Kyiv doesn’t make him a peacemaker – it makes him Putin’s most valuable asset. He isn’t Hitler, he isn’t even Mussolini – he’s Joseph Kennedy reborn, the arch-isolationist, cheerfully declaring “peace” while Europe edges towards catastrophe. History has already shown how that script ends: Kennedy thought appeasement would spare America from conflict, but his own son faced the Cuban Missile Crisis a generation later. Isolation always comes full circle.

History has handed us a clear warning – and Trump, strutting like Joseph Kennedy in a red tie, is determined not to read it. Ignore it, and we’ll deserve the disaster that follows.