That pesky ghost of Neville Chamberlain won’t vacate the Oval Office. President Trump now has a 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine that basically rewards Russia for aggression.
To me, the most interesting — and revealing — part of the whole proposal is the Trump team’s ceding of the Donbas Region of Ukraine to Putin by declaring it “de facto Russian.’ This smacks of Neville Chamberlain’s ceding the Sudetenland, the German-speaking half of Czechoslovakia, to Adolph Hitler in 1938.
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To put matters in perspective here, Russian troops haven’t even occupied the entirety of the Donbas region.
Using another analytical perspective, if we subtract 1938 from 2025, we arrive at 87. In other words, it’s taken history less than a century to repeat the folly of trying to buy off a dictator in the name of “peace for our time,” to quote Mr. Chamberlain when he returned to London with his Munich Agreement.
Poor ol’ corrupt Volodymyr Zelenskyy, beaten halfway into submission by Trump, seems almost on the edge of accepting the deal. Fortunately, the European Union has announced it must agree to any peace deal and is drafting its own plan.
If Ukraine holds elections, which the agreement calls for within 100 days of the ceasefire, it’s no doubt bye-bye Volodymyr, hello Switzerland and the Ukrainian leader’s numbered bank account.
The Trump plan also addresses the economic redevelopment of Ukraine postwar, with Trump becoming “Peace Chief” à la his vision for eternal peace in Gaza and the Middle East.
As for setting up a bulwark against any Putin scheme to reinvade what remains of Ukraine after the agreement, the U.S. is ready to, well, do what it’s doing now — provide some semblance of moral support, along with vague promises of weaponry and intelligence gathering. No American troops.
Meanwhile, Trump will welcome Russia into the Group of 8 (currently 7 after Russia’s expulsion) and return any frozen funds, along with a vision of joint American and Russian trade and economic development.
Even if Trump can pull off a version of this plan, the Nobel Prize Committee, being European, might have a different view of it entirely than does the president in his eternal quest for the Nobel Peace Prize.
[PICTURED: Neville Chamberlain, left, Adolph Hitler, center, in Munich for a peace greement that led to World War II]
