Appeasement: the worst possible way to handle Trump
He has never hidden who he is. And if anyone needs reminding what can happen when dictators are appeased, all they have to do is turn back the clock.
Ninety-two years ago today, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. At his first Cabinet meeting, according to the historian Timothy W. Ryback, writing in The Atlantic, he outlined his immediate goals: among them to withdraw from international treaty obligations, purge the country of foreigners who he claimed were ‘poisoning’ the blood of the nation, and exact revenge on his political opponents.
In March, Hitler issued a decree amnestying all Nazis who had been convicted of crimes, including murder, which were deemed to have been committed ‘in the battle for national renewal’. The same day, he opened Germany’s first concentration camp at Oranienburg.
He also announced plans for the mass deportation of 100,000 Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, including those who had acquired German citizenship. And he pushed through a so-called ‘enabling law’, which in the words of the then US ambassador meant that ‘the Hitler Cabinet can reconstruct the entire system of government as it eliminates practically all constitutional restraints.’
Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels gloated, not without justification: ‘The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.’
As Timothy Ryback points out, it took Hitler less than two months to first disable and then dismantle Germany’s entire democratic structure.
Do I need to draw the obvious parallel? Withdrawal from international treaties, expulsion of immigrants, the amnestying of supporters convicted of crimes, revenge against political opponents — who does it remind you of?
It is easy to sound hysterical when comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, yet in just ten days — never mind less than two months — Trump has already issued an avalanche of Presidential decrees that would have had Hitler purring with approval.
So how have the Western democracies reacted? Have they warned Trump that any action against, for example, Greenland or Panama would be resisted? Or have they echoed Neville Chamberlain in 1938: ‘However much we may sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve [ourselves] in a war simply on her account.’
I am not so daft as to argue that NATO’s European members should be threatening war against the US. But there is a deeply worrying question to which they need to find an answer: if Trump orders his military to seize control of Greenland, which as a Danish territory is part of NATO, what will they do about it?
There is a similarly worrying question that the US’s military commanders need to consider: if Trump were to issue such an order, would they be legally justified in refusing to comply, on the grounds that under the terms of the NATO Charter, to which the US is a signatory, the US is obliged ‘to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means … and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force.’
Remember what his former chief of staff General John Kelly said about him before the election last November. He ‘has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law ... he falls into the general definition of fascist.’
Yet so far, despite all the warnings, despite all the alarm bells ringing deafeningly since before Trump was re-elected, the response from the US’s NATO allies has been to clamp their hands over their ears, shut their eyes tight and pretend none of it is happening.
But it is happening. It wasn’t just pre-election bluster. He meant it. And now he is carrying out his threats. Trying to ignore him, or even worse, pandering to his outsize ego, is as big a mistake as was Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938.
As for Peter Mandelson, shortly to take up his new job as the UK’s ambassador in Washington, what on earth was he thinking when he came up with this, speaking on Fox News of all places?
‘I think people have been impressed not just by the extraordinary second mandate that he has received from the American people, but the dynamism and energy with which he approached not just the campaign but government as well. I think that he has won fresh respect. He certainly has from me.’
Yes, I know the old definition of an ambassador as an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country. But even by Mandelson’s standards, this was gruesome stuff.
Bullies like Trump never respect boot-lickers. They despise them. What was it Hitler said of Chamberlain? ‘Our enemies are little worms. I saw them at Munich.’
I suggested in my last Substack essay that the right way to handle Trump was by treating him as if he was a Mafia boss. Days later, he proved my point for me by telling Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine or take the consequences.
In words taken straight from the script of The Sopranos, he said: ‘We can do it the easy way, or the hard way — and the easy way is always better.’
Trump has never hidden who or what he is. No one can complain that they weren’t warned. And if anyone needs reminding what can happen when dictators are appeased, all they have to do is turn back the clock ninety-two years.