By his account, Donald Trump has been repeatedly denied the Nobel Peace Prize he was due. Like the 1980s standup comedian Rodney Dangerfield, he complains: “I don’t get no respect.”
This time, Trump is determined by hook or crook or shady diplomacy to get a Nobel. He’s proposed a peace plan to end Russia’s bloody war in Ukraine.
In effect, it would make his buddy Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine in 2022, a winner. Trump’s original 28-point plan is undergoing revisions, but he has pushed for Russia to get all the territory it has captured and for Ukraine to reduce its military and agree not to apply for membership in NATO. To sell their questionable package, Trump and the “Make America Great” Republicans insist that absent Trump’s peace plan, the fighting in Eastern Europe could escalate into a third World War.
Generally, historical predictions can’t be tested beforehand. But as Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
So there is a precedent with which Trump’s peace proposal can be compared.
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany by arguing that his nation had been unfairly assessed financial reparations and territorial losses after World War I. His corollary was that Germany was thereby entitled to compensate itself with territory in Eastern Europe.
First, he annexed Austria, another German-speaking country, then he set his eyes on Czechoslovakia. A small country with a mixed population — Slavs and Germans — it was formerly part of the Habsburg Empire.
As the empire disintegrated during WWI, the Czechoslovak Republic was conceived — in Chicago, of all places.
In the early 1900s, Tomas Masaryk came to the University of Chicago as a visiting lecturer. Impressed with the democratic principles in the Constitution, he promoted similar ideas for the Czechoslovak constitution. He was elected its first president in November 1918.
In 1938, England, France and Italy met with Germany at a conference in Munich to resolve the Czechoslovakian crisis. Representatives of the Czechs and Slovaks were not invited.
Similarly, Donald Trump didn’t consult the Ukrainians before proposing his peace plan. Instead, he had special envoy Steve Witkoff slip working documents to the Russians so that Putin’s people could formulate an approach to convincing the Russian leader to get on board with Trump’s peace plan.
In the 1930s, an anti-war movement prevented Europe from rationally assessing the danger posed by Hitler.
On Feb. 9, 1933, the Oxford Union Society debated a motion, “that this House will under no circumstances fight for the King and country.” The Oxford Pledge, as it became known, passed by a vote of 275 for and 153 against.
That followed a similar-minded motion at Cambridge University. In 1927, its student union debated whether “lasting peace can only be secured by the people of England adopting an uncompromising attitude of pacifism.” The motion passed 213-138.
Accordingly, England’s rearmament lagged dangerously behind that of Hitler’s Germany. So when the Czechoslovakian crisis began, an international conference belatedly attempted to solve the problem.
England was represented by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He said: How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
Hitler wasn’t deterred. He immediately annexed the Sudetenland region — a German-speaking ring around the northwestern part of Czechoslovakia.
“This is the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe,” Hitler announced.
Desperate to take Hitler at his word, England, France and Italy acquiesced to the German dictator’s annexation. Hitler and his forces invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939.
When the United States entered WWII and Hitler declared war in return in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the Western Allies lacked military preparedness to fight back.
It was three years later that American and British navies landed troops in Normandy from which to begin the liberation of Europe.
The Soviet Union was equally naïve. Earlier, the Soviets and Hitler had denounced each other as the devil incarnate. Western leaders warned Josef Stalin that when the time was right, Hitler would attack the Soviet Union — to no avail.
Eighty years later, Trump naively wants to hand Ukraine to Russia on a silver platter, believing that it will mark the last of Putin’s demands in Europe.
Mark my words. If Trump sacrifices Ukraine, he will mimic Chamberlain’s 1938 proclamation on his return from the Munich Conference: “I believe it is peace for our time.”
Ron Grossman is a former reporter and columnist for the Tribune. Before turning to journalism, Grossman was a history professor. He is the author of “Guide to Chicago Neighborhoods.”
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