The smoke has cleared from President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Anchorage. Trump’s claim that the two made “great progress” falls short, given the onslaught of Russian aggression following the meeting in Alaska.
Every leader has motivations. Some genuinely just care about peace; ideology motivates others. Others seek acclaim or, in Trump’s case, a Nobel Peace Prize. Historians, however, might note the motivation but care more about the result.
Trump is not alone in believing he is great, and similar to almost every president of the last century, he has no shortage of sycophants who will affirm his spin. But just as ribbon-cuttings do not complete buildings, signing ceremonies do not substitute for structure and substance in peace agreements.
When historians consider Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy, how might they process it?
Many commentators jump right to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who believed he had averted World War II with a last-minute appeal to German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. On Sept. 30, 1938, Chamberlain returned to London from Munich theatrically waving a paper for spectators.
“Here is a paper which bears his [Hitler’s] name,” Chamberlain declared, reading its statement, “We regard the agreement signed last night… as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.” Returning to 10 Downing Street, he declared his achievement, “Peace for our time.” All that peace required was the cessation of the Sudetenland to Germany. Czechoslovakia, which London and Berlin agreed would lose its territory, was not at the table.
Within a year, however, Hitler’s hunger returned. And while historians like Yale University’s Paul Kennedy inject new respectability into Chamberlain’s choice, given Britain’s war-weary public and its general lack of preparation for renewed war, none of this should exculpate those who discounted Hitler’s ideology. If such an analogy is to hold, with Putin reprising the role of territory-hungry Hitler and Trump as the hapless Chamberlain, then Crimea and the portion of eastern Ukraine Trump offered Putin are merely an appetizer rather than the main course.
Perhaps a more generous read is that the Alaska Summit was the Yalta Conference version 2.0. In February 1945, the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom met in the Crimea, ironically, to discuss the post-war order. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill bargained away the freedom of much of Eastern Europe in exchange for quiet. Again, naiveté came into play: Roosevelt and Churchill accepted Stalin’s insincere promise of free elections. Yalta achieved quiet if not peace, but the cost was the liberty of more than one hundred million people in Europe.
A third analogy could be the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, whose 86th anniversary just passed. In this pact, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed to divide much of Eastern Europe between them. The Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states, while Germany would receive Western Poland. The pact was an agreement between aggressors, not an attempt at peace, and just over a week later, Germany invaded Poland, setting off World War II. The Soviet Union invaded Poland two weeks later.
While Trump seeks peace, he may not understand that to a European audience more aware of history, the Alaska Summit coming so soon after extorting a mineral deal with Ukraine strikes Europeans uncomfortably reminiscent of the 1939 Moscow-Berlin agreement. An added irony, of course, would be Germany’s subsequent betrayal as, in 1941, it used its newly acquired Polish territory as a forward operating base to attack its former partner.
REVOKE CHINESE STUDENT VISAS, DON’T DOUBLE THEM
Perhaps a much better analogy, however, Chase Untermeyer, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, notes, is the Soviet-Finnish War. In 1939, the Red Army invaded Finland, expecting an easy romp, but finding itself in a quagmire. Eventually, after years of on-again, off-again fighting, the Finns settled, ceding some territory and leasing more. After three more years of fighting ended in 1944, the two sides drew a new border, and the Soviets expelled the Finns and settled Russians in their stead. Even though Helsinki and Moscow agreed to the inviolability of their borders in 1975, the Finns have never forgotten.
Ukrainians now find themselves in the same position. The real question should not be whether they face Sudetenland, Yalta, Molotov-Ribbentrop, or Finland, but whether Ukraine and Finland will reclaim their territory once substance and liberty triumph over superficial pacts and cynical compromise.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
