Russia and Ukraine

[Rev. Rye]

To compare Trump to Chamberlain is an insult to Chamberlain, for several reasons:

1. At the time, nobody wanted a repeat of the Great War 20 years prior. “Peace in Our Time” is exactly what most people wanted.
   
2. Hitler actually had control of his own narrative at that point and could at least look fairly reasonable. 
   
3. Chamberlain figured out pretty early on what Hitler wanted, even telling him “If I've understood you correctly then you're determined in any event to proceed against Czechoslovakia. If that is your intention, why have you had me coming to Berchtesgaden at all? Under these circumstances it's best if I leave straight away. Apparently, it's all pointless,”
   
4. Chamberlain seemed to treat it as more of a stop-gap than anything else, even if he ultimately dropped the ball there. And even when he actually declared war in 1939, it went so fucking slowly that people called it The Phony War. 
   
5. Most importantly: Chamberlain seems to have understood that Hitler winning would be a bad thing, unlike Trump.
   

You’ll notice that none of these work for the situation these days, except maybe that #3 is tempered by #5.

I forgot to add another point about the comparison between what happened now and in Munich in 1938:

6. The majority of Germans in the Sudetenland, the part of Czechoslovakia most in question at the Munich peace talks, actually wanted to be part of Germany (due in no small part to Hitler still having control over his own narrative by this point, plus disenfranchisement by the Czech-speaking majority in the wake of the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918). 

If this were true of the people of Ukraine, do you seriously think they would have fought for their country this fucking hard for the past three years?