Is Trump's "Munich" coming Up?
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, Aug. 2018)
"How do you spell ICE in German? GESTAPO." (S. Jonas, 2025)
“First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.
“Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
“Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.” Pastor Martin Niemoller (c. 1946)
As is very well known, Pres. Trump will be meeting with Pres. Putin in Alaska, of all places, to discuss some kind of settlement of the Russia-Ukraine War. (As it happens, that war was started when Russia invaded the Eastern territories of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Much earlier, Russia had annexed the Ukrainian Autonomous Republic of Crimea, in February, 2014. That action had a specific purpose, to protect the Soviet naval port at Sevastopol at the southern tip of Crimea, on the Black Sea. Sevastopol is Russia’s only warm-water port and at the time Russia held it only on a 30-year lease. There was a change of government in Kyiv, and given its nature, Russia did not want to take any chances on the possible cancellation of that lease.) As is well-known, the current, full-scale war has been largely stalemated at its front for several years now, although significant damage to civilian targets has occurred in Ukraine, also (less-so) in Russia (via drone-warfare).
As is also well-known Trump has never had a favorable view of the current Ukrainian government, under President Volodymyr Zelensky. The public dressing-down he gave to Pres. Zelensky in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, 2025 has been well-recorded --- and widely noticed. But of course, during the 2024 Presidential campaign Trump had promised to bring the Russia-Ukraine War to an end on his first day in office. Ooops! So, Trump is obviously getting somewhat desperate here. And off he goes to Alaska.
(I am hardly the only observer to note the irony of such a meeting taking place in Alaska, which territory was purchased from the Russian Empire in 1867, under the leadership of then-Secretary of State William Seward. That purchase was long referred to as Sewards Folly, a phrase with which I was familiar as a child in the 1940s. Obviously, Sec. Seward had a long view. Hardly a folly now.)
Exactly what Trump expects to accomplish there is largely unknown (at least to the public). He did have a teleconference with the major European leaders and Pres. Zelensky on Wednesday, August 13 (2025). According to early reports, the European leaders, at least, made it clear that no territory was to be turned over to Russia as part of a settlement (presumably unless agreed to by Ukraine).
Nevertheless, might there be a positive outcome, especially for the people of Ukraine? Hopeful? Yes, on paper. But I keep thinking about the negotiation in Europe in 1938 that in summary is referred to as Munich. Several U.S. observers, like Chris Matthews on MSNBCs Morning Joe on Aug. 13, 2025, and Bret Stephens in The New York Times of the same date, have used that term as well. (Mr. Stephens, with whom I often disagree had a great title for his column: A Half-Baked Alaska Summit.) A stronger position on "Trump/Putin/Alaska," also including a reference to "Munich," was taken by The New York Times' Nicholas Christof on Aug. 14, 2025. And so, to what are observers referring to when they reference "Munich?"
In sum, it was a negotiation in which the two principal Western European powers of the time, the United Kingdom and France, gave way to the Nazi German demands which were the subject of the meeting, and, over the heads of the its government, gave the Western Half of the nation of Czechoslovakia, known in German as the Sudetenland and in Czech as Bohemia and Moravia. Hitler’s claim was that the German minority in that territory was being mis-treated and that Nazi Germany had to occupy it in order to protect them. That, a) proved historically to have been way overstated and b) could have been accomplished through negotiation, which the Czech government was only too happy to engage in. But Hitler wanted something else. And so, I will return to a portion of a column that I published on this very subject back in 2010.
Munich, 1938
As is well-known, once Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took over Germany in 1933, very early on they began to re-arm(which had been forbidden by the Versailles Treaty). But the Western Powers did nothing to deal with that development (a policy called "Appeasement"). Nazi Germany's first overtly military operation was to "Remilitarize the Rhineland" (1936), a German province on its Western border which under the Treaty of Versailles was to have remained arms-free. Again, the Western Powers did nothing.
Then, in 1938 came the Munich Agreement, which [as noted above] gave a goodly chunk of Western Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, to be incorporated into the German Reich, without a fight. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, famously advertised the Agreement as "Peace in our Time." But, as is well known, it was quickly proven to be nothing of the sort. Just a few months later, in March 1939, Nazi Germany occupied eastern Czechoslovakia without a fight. Then came the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and so on and so forth. But returning to Munich, what Chamberlain was really trying to achieve there had nothing to do with the particulars of western Czechoslovakia and its Sudeten-German minority. As revealed in a 1995 book by Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel entitled In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (New York: Monthly Review Press), it was something else entirely. Based both on official sources that became available under The (British) Official Secrets Act, and other correspondence and dispatches, the authors revealed what was really going on between the British and German governments of the time.
It turned out that what Chamberlain was really trying to achieve at Munich had nothing to do with "appeasement" of Hitler and dealing with the Sudeten (western-Czechoslovakian) German-Problem. It had everything to do with: A) trying to keep Hitler focused on his already much-touted "Drang Nach Osten" ("Drive to the East"), designed (at that time in general terms) to achieve the destruction of the Soviet Union, and B) preventing the Red Army of that nation from taking up a prominent place in Central Europe (see the map).
For the Soviet Union had pledged to the Czechs, who had a well-equipped and trained army of their own ready to fight the Wehrmacht, full ground and air military support. As the Sept. 30th deadline for the threatened German invasion approached, the Red Air Force had many planes warming up on airfields just over the Czech-USSR border, ready to attack the Nazis. But, under enormous pressure from the British and French governments, the final "go" which would have been required never came from the Czech government to the Soviets. The Red Air Force stayed on its runways, and the Czechs were left to the tender mercies of the Nazis. Bohemia/Moravia was the first non-German territory seized by them in the run-up to World War II. (The first foreign territory seized by the Nazis, in March, 1938, was Austria, in an operation called the "Anschluss.")
Chamberlain thought that he had a long-term deal. Why Hitler thought he could push Chamberlain in giving away a major part of a nation that wasn’t his, is (to my knowledge) not known. Had German intelligence determined that, while the Red Army was ready to come into battle to defend Czechoslovakia, that was the last thing that Chamberlain would want to happen? Chamberlain was an arch-enemy of the Soviet Union, from the early days of the Intervention by several major Western powers (including the United States) on the side of the Czarist Whites against the Reds of the Russian Revolution. Whether Hitler knew in advance what Chamberlains true goals were, it not known. But Chamberlain did have them, and what happened post-Munich did happen.
Will Anchorage, Alaska Become an Historical synonym for Munich?
It is well-known that Pres. Theodore Roosevelt's favorite saying concerning foreign affairs was to "Speak softly, and carry a big stick." Trump's of course is the exactly the opposite, as he loudly proclaimed the day before the meeting: Moscow will face severe consequences if Russian President Vladimir Putin continues his war in Ukraine past their face-to-face meeting this week, as Europe braces for the results of their talks. BUT, and it’s a big but. What exactly are those consequences? How would Trump propose to carry them out, especially without, apparently, having involved either the Ukrainian government or the Europeans in discussion of any details?
As for a second big BUT, remember that at Munich Chamberlain had an ulterior motive to give a significant chunk of a nation that was not his to Hitler: not allowing the Soviet Union to take up a major presence in Central Europe. So what motivation might Trump have to give away the store (or try to, in the absence of Ukraine and the European Powers)? Well it comes down to Putin's List, previously discussed. For a variety of reasons, ranging from foreign policy, to domestic policy, to Trumps image around the world (generally quite bad, but which can only get worse), to potential legal issues (despite the where-did-that-come-from-immunity clause), the last thing that Trump wants to happen is that in one way or another Putin releases or act upon all or part of it. Putin’s List at "Alaska" is the equivalent of Chamberlains No-Soviet-Union-in-Central-Europe at "Munich."
Here is a partial list of what Putin has (or quite likely has, through Russian intelligence) on Trump:
*There is Trump's very long, very secretive relationship with Deutsch Bank, which ended abruptly, and his personal banker there was fired by the Bank. There were many public suspicions of, shall we say, impropriety, but apparently no full investigation of what Trump undertook over the years with the Bank has ever been done (at least not one that was made public. It should be noted that the relationship came to an end when the German government shut it down and fired the private banker who had been running it for Trump). But again, one can be sure that if there were "Improprieties," Putin has evidence of them.
*Then of course, there is the matter of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, details of which are spelled out in the "Mueller Report." Although the Mueller team was never able to get to Trump, they did get to numbers of his election-campaign-associates, some of whom went to prison for various offenses. Those materials are in the U.S. records, but surely Putin has copies (to say nothing of the fact that since Putin certainly authorized them, he does have some knowledge of their details).
*Next there is what happened, or not, at the famous 2018 "Helsinki meeting." Trump made no bones about having the notes of the interpreter for him at that meeting destroyed. But surely Putin had his own interpreter-made notes too, and he has those. (That's the meeting where, in answer to a question by MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire, Trump said that he trusted Russian Intelligence more than US.)
*Then there are Julian Assange, Roger Stone and the "DNC tapes" (which purported to show how the DNC at least attempted to rig the primaries in favor of Hillary Clinton). These were very conveniently released within a few hours of the release of the Hollywood Access tapes.
Could Putin be planning his own Munich for Trump, using materials like this, and others as well? We might know as soon as tomorrow, or it might take some time to see how it --- the very possible U.S. betrayal of Ukraine --- plays out. If I am right here (and for the record, I am surely not always right), then Alaska (or Anchorage) will join Munich in the lexicon of historical betrayals.