President Donald Trump’s U-turn on the Ukraine war – and his diplomatic embrace of Russia, the country that started it – has left American allies in Europe apprehensive about the future.
Yet they are also haunted by echoes from the past, especially from the world war that devastated their continent only 80 years ago, when leading European powers underestimated Adolf Hitler’s readiness to swallow up neighboring states by force of arms.
Political leaders, diplomats, and commentators across U.S.-allied Europe have been drawing parallels with how World War II began – and how it ended – as they voice their alarm over the abrupt shift in America’s attitude to Ukraine, Russia, and the postwar transatlantic alliance.
Why We Wrote This
U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent rapprochement with Vladimir Putin and his desire to end the war in Ukraine quickly, ignoring both European allies and Ukraine, has stirred memories of Britain’s pre-World War II appeasement of Adolf Hitler.
For the Europeans, this is not just an exercise in historical commentary.
They feel there are important lessons to be learned, chiefly about the danger of abandoning Ukraine to an expansionist Russia, which would pose risks to other neighboring countries and to the long-term security of both Europe and the United States.
They are lessons the Europeans still hope Mr. Trump can be convinced to embrace. But, in any event, they now know they are lessons the European democracies themselves must find the will and the way to apply.
The critical lesson, in European eyes, dates from the years immediately before World War II.
It has become known as the period of “appeasement,” when key European governments believed that diplomatic deals could dissuade Germany’s Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, from unleashing his rearmed military and provoking a wider war.
The main player was Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who felt confident he had secured “peace in our time” by signing a 1938 agreement with Hitler in Munich, abandoning a commitment to protect Czechoslovakia, and handing it to Germany.
Some European commentators, including one broadly sympathetic to parts of Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda, have recalled an even starker example of prewar appeasement.
That was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, in which Soviet Russia signed a nonaggression pact with Germany, agreeing that the two rival powers would divide up control of Eastern Europe.
Crucially, it freed Hitler to pivot his armies westward, subduing France and then, he hoped, opening the way to capture Britain as well.
European leaders are not equating Russian President Vladimir Putin with Hitler. They are aware that there are no exact parallels in history.
But they have little doubt that the central lesson holds.
When U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this month ruled out the idea that Ukraine might recover territory Russia has seized, or that Kyiv might join NATO, the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, clearly had Chamberlain and Molotov on her mind.
“Why are we giving them [the Russians] everything they want even before the negotiations have started?” she asked. “It’s appeasement. It has never worked.”
Still, with little sign so far that Mr. Trump is loosening his embrace of Mr. Putin, some European politicians are also focused on another historical parallel.
This one draws on the summit conference held near the end of the war in Europe, almost exactly eight decades ago, in February 1945. Ironically, it took place in Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula – an area seized and annexed from Ukraine by Mr. Putin in 2014, in what proved to be a dress rehearsal for his full-scale invasion three years ago.
The Yalta summit gathered the leaders of the three major powers that were on the brink of defeating Nazi Germany: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt; Britain’s Winston Churchill, who had replaced Mr. Chamberlain early in the war; and Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who joined the fray after Hitler tore up his nonaggression pact and attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.
Together, they agreed on a new political map of postwar Europe, which ended up giving the Soviet Union power and influence in Eastern Europe, while America and its allies ruled in the west.
Amid warnings from European politicians and diplomats that Mr. Trump risks “appeasement” of Moscow, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb argued that they might be drawing the wrong World War II-era parallel.
“Is this Munich 2.0?” he wondered, alluding to the Chamberlain-Hitler deal. “I don’t think so.”
Instead Yalta, and the prospect of a fresh agreement charting new spheres of influence on the European continent, should preoccupy U.S. allies more, he suggested.
If that came about, the architects this time would be Presidents Trump and Putin – not Yalta-style wartime allies, perhaps, but apparently with a similar, great-power view of the world. Any understanding would very likely be reached over the heads of America’s traditional European allies, and almost certainly without a thought for Ukraine.
Yet on a more hopeful note, President Stubb urged European democracies not only to keep doing all they could to support Ukraine, but also to bear in mind another historic precedent: the pan-European summit held in his own country’s capital, Helsinki, in the Cold War 1970s.
Agreed unanimously by countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the Helsinki Final Act, also signed by the U.S. and Canada, became a touchstone for the West’s commitment to democratic principles, human rights, and fundamental freedoms.
And to geopolitical principles.
Chief among them? Insulating all the 35 signatories’ sovereignty, borders, and territorial integrity from “the threat or use of force.”
