The Little Nevilles?
Opinion by Ben Everidge for Thomas
Photo Credit: Portrait by Sir William Orpen, 1929
APPEASEMENT’S PRICE …
Historians long ago put the advent of World War II squarely on the shoulders of Britain’s then-Prime Minister and Conservative Party Leader, Neville Chamberlain, for his appeasement of Adolph Hitler as the Führer unencumbered or constrained by his own party applied his Nazi vision to Europe in the final years of the 1930s.
Appeasement is a foreign policy tool that embraces granting political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power like Nazi Germany or Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy to avoid conflict, almost at all costs.
To avoid just such strife, Prime Minister Chamberlain ceded German-speaking territory in Czechoslovakia to Hitler in what was known then as the Munich Agreement of 1938. The reward for this chosen policy was the ultimate invasion of Poland and the advent of World War II.
President Trump, unencumbered by the conservative-controlled United States Senate, is proposing ceding large parts of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s Russia as his reward for invading that sovereign nation three years ago.
The 47th American president has even gone so far as to wrongly label Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a dictator and laughably the party responsible for Russia’s war against that eastern European nation.
Republicans in both houses of Congress have their heads in the political sand when they permit any president to negate their constitutionally applied power of the purse or advise and consent on the quality of agency leaders in Washington, let alone matters of war.
The parallels between then and now are deeply concerning. Are we witnessing Congress members, especially the United States Senate, becoming the little Nevilles of the 21st century?
Is another global war imminent as a perceptively weakened America repeatedly fails to address her very real geopolitical challenges and embraces a 21st-century form of appeasement?
